Copyright by Anne Catherine Reitz The Dissertation Committee for Anne Catherine Reitz certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Reforming the State by Re-forming the Family: Imagining the Romantic Mother in Pedagogy and Letters, 1790-1813 Committee: ______________________________ Katherine Arens, Supervisor Kirsten Belgum Peter Hess Carol MacKay ______________________________ Lynn Wilkinson Reforming the State by Re-forming the Family: Imagining the Romantic Mother in Pedagogy and Letters, 1790-1813 by Anne Catherine Reitz, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2004 Acknowledgments I will always be grateful to the Germanic Studies faculty of the University of Texas, for without their support I could not have completed this dissertation. They acknowledged and encouraged my research in portrayals of motherhood, an area that was still somewhat outside of the realm of much literary research. Since choosing my topic, more has been written on the subject, affirming their trust in the scholarly potential of my investigation. All of the faculty members I worked with challenged and encouraged me, leading me to transform personal curiosity into academic inquiry. I must especially thank my advisor, Katherine Arens, for her generosity and unfailing patience. She inspired and guided me, offering advice and editorial direction with gentleness and optimism. Her approach expresses the nurturing, future-oriented attitude that animates the works this dissertation studies. The graduate school of the University of Texas supported my work with a fellowship and travel awards to help me present and complete chapters of this dissertation. The Department of Modern and Classical Languages, at the University of Houston, especially Hildegard Glass, has carefully scheduled my teaching responsibilities so as not to overwhelm the time needed for writing. She has been an especially caring employer and a mentor. iv I have been fortunate to benefit from the care and assistance of a number of friends and family. Therese Huri and Rhoda K. Ferris were trusted readers who provided valuable remarks and constant encouragement. Patricia Geldenbott has been a source of moral support throughout my candidacy. My mother, Cecilia Goelz Reitz, not only offered moral support, but also cared for my children during especially difficult times, so that I could continue my studies and teaching. My father, David Reitz, has offered unwavering support for my studies since I began as a college freshman. Without their faith and practical help I could not have succeeded with my doctorate. Finally, I dedicate my work to my dear husband, Erik Shannon, and to my children, Anneka, Claire and Paul. Their love inspired me to begin, and their sacrifices allowed me to finish this project. v Reforming the State by Re-forming the Family: Imagining the Romantic Mother in Pedagogy and Letters, 1790-1813 Publication No. __________ Anne Catherine Reitz, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Autsin, 2004 Supervisor: Katherine Arens This dissertation examines ideological and political elements of portrayals of the family, especially the mother, in early romantic German literature. It claims that Proto- Romantic writers used conservative, traditional images of mothers to conceal much more radical political agendas of egalitarian relations or republicanism. The first chapter offers an overview of motherhood in the historical German context. It investigates two pedagogy treatises, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801) and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Levana, oder Erziehlehre (1806), before moving to the letters of Caroline and Dorothea Schlegel. Both treatises depict mothers as central to the family and creators of socio-political change, vi who, in schooling children, shape nations. They instill social consciousness and foster national self-identities in their children, thereby changing social power structures. Early- childhood education tracts thus produce an ideology that elevates mothers as contributors to free nations in a peaceful Europe. The correspondences of two Romantic mothers, Dorothea Schlegel and Caroline Schlegel Schelling, demonstrate how mothers themselves used conventional rhetoric about maternal dedication to negotiate social expectations, veiling unacceptable choices a traditional rhetoric of mother-love. The notions that mothers are central to their children’s lives and dedicated to their welfare expand, in these mothers’ letters, an older social order into an emerging Romantic public sphere. This dissertation thus reconsiders scholarly debate about the ideological weight of the feminine and the maternal in Romantic thought. These mothers, like their contemporaneous treatises, made daily maternal practices into a facet of the Romantic agenda for rethinking social structures. They married the tasks of maintaining a communal, multi-generational artists’ household with an ideal of friendship and the responsibilities of motherhood, and integrated writing, editing, and personal correspondence with Romantic theories of education. The result questions canonical generic and epochal divisions in German literature by interpreting new possibilities for the images and ideology of traditional maternity. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Images of Mothers in the Romantic Era 1 Dissertation Chapter Outline 6 Chapter One: Historical and Scholarly Background to German Mothers 12 1.1 Rhetoric, Politics, and Mothers: From Ideas to Ideology 24 1.2 Rousseau’s Influence and Rhetoric 33 1.3 Mothers and Families in Historical Trends 42 1.4 The Nuclear Family as Social Norm 45 1.5 The Mother as Hausmutter 48 1.6 From Hausmutter to Housewife 54 1.7 Materialist Approaches to Maternity 57 Chapter Two: Pestalozzi’s Prescriptions: Mother-Love and Learning 69 2.1 Pestalozzi the Patriot and Pedagogue 69 2.2 The Mother as Anchor of the State 72 2.3 Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt: A Domestic Educator 77 2.4 Educating Mothers: the Intellect, Nature, and the Heart 85 2.5 Mother Nature and the Divine Mother 93 2.6 Service and Social Transformation 101 2.7 Pestalozzi’s Ideas Interpreted Through Time 106 viii Chapter Three: A New Germany in the Next Generation: Nation and 122 Pedagogy in Jean Paul’s Levana oder Erziehlehre 3.1 Jean Paul’s Style and Structure 125 3.2 Time and Space, Zeitgeist and National Identity 129 3.3 Overcoming Limits with Print and Play 139 3.4 A New Governance for a New Person 147 3.5 Individual Mothers and Ideal Maternity: The Maternal Character and 158 Demands on Mothers in the Modern Nation 3.6 Women as Partners and Provocation: Modern Marriage and Child Rearing 173 3.7 Equality and Conflict, at Home and Away 180 Chapter Four: Caroline and Dorothea Schlegel as Romantic Mothers 184 4.1 Old Tropes for Modern Mothers: Empowerment but not Power 191 4.2 Brendel Veit and Caroline Böhmer: Dependent Wives but Independent 198 Mothers 4.3 Marriage, Motherhood, and Loss 207 4.4 Impermanent Maternal Desire and Civic Identity 218 4.5 Maternal Love and Love for Others: An Unspoken Tension 226 Conclusion: Constructing A Romantic Maternal Identity 233 5.1 Mothers, Authors, and Eras 236 Works Consulted 248 Vita 256 ix Introduction: Images of Mothers in the Romantic Era This study investigates images of mothers and of the family in German Romantic works of pedagogy and personal correspondence in order to understand the way these images were used to envision a more humane, tender and democratic society in the wake of the French Revolution and the conquests of Napoleon. During this era of profound socio-cultural change, an ideal of motherhood developed, hand-in-hand with Romantic redefinitions of the human being, man, woman, or child. German-speaking authors wishing to differentiate themselves, especially from the French, posited a distinctly German and Swiss notion of family that included idealized representations of mothers. In creating these images of mothers and the home, concerned authors reassessed the place and value of individuals within the family and of families within society. They then presented their readers an image of the mother-child relationship as the cradle of human morality and consciousness and showed German mothers to be the agents fostering those qualities for the benefit of wider society. These maternal images and representations of family, which I will examine as they appeared in two works of pedagogy of the period, thus presented a new vision of family hierarchies, of mothers’ 1 roles, and of effective, mother-directed childhood education. Familial images provoked the readers’ self-awareness as members of a community greater than their own family, village or province, and led to a conception of themselves as specifically German or Swiss fathers and mothers, raising their children in a manner consistent with those values and cultures. This endeavor connected their work with the nation-building ambitions so central to the Romantic program. In proposing idealized maternal and domestic images, Romantic and proto- Romantic authors provide a literary alternative to the Bildungsroman, in which the hero must leave his home and family to achieve adulthood, the works I investigate present the home, especially the mother, as crucial to an individual’s development. The authors I specifically investigate in this context, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi,