Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
sign in the 1770s and 1780s, which was followed by drastic reversals of fortune in the following two decades.
It is a pleasure to thank the many institutions that contributed to the completion of this project. Progress was facilitated by periods of research leave in 2002 from the University of Southampton and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K. (AHRC), and from King’s College London in 2010. Purchase of microfilms was funded in part by a small grant from the AHRC in 2001. The staff of many libraries helped reduce my carbon footprint by providing reproductions of rare materials, and I am particularly grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin (Mecklenburg), the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek (Weimar), the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Öffentliche Bücherhallen, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the library of the Universität der Künste (Berlin), the New York Public Library, Yale University Library, the British Library, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Conservatoire Royale in Brussels held many essential sources, some of which were made available to me in legible reproductions.
This book was a long time in the writing, and in the course of its preparation I received assistance from many individuals. Ellen Rosand and Jane Stevens provided sympathetic reading as I transformed materials excised from my dissertation into my first article in Journal of Musicology. In those early days Susan McClary, Philip Brett, and Judith Butler provided me with not just inspiring models but conversation and moral support. Graduate seminars at Yale with Wayne Koestenbaum and Lawrence Kramer offered safe and stimulating environments for my fledgling efforts to link cultural theory and music. Lawrence Kramer continued to offer incisive feedback over the next decade. At Southampton University, Jeanice Brooks provided encouragement, commented on draft material, and opened up conference opportunities. Sterling E. Murray, John Rice, Ric Graebner, Lars Franke, and Hugo Shirley helped me with translations of eighteenth-century German handwriting when my time, and expertise, failed. Over the photocopier, Robynn J. Stilwell told me about her work on film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, piquing my curiosity about representations of the period and reminding me that the eighteenth century is ongoing. Marian Gilbart Read was an inspiration, with her amazing knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and her exquisite feeling for the manners and mores of the period. Through her brilliant example, and the occasional nudge, Julie Brown helped me to focus on ideas, raised the intellectual bar, and was always kind and candid. Toward the end of my time at Southampton, a colleague in English literature, Emma Clery, brought my understanding of the female sign and early capitalism up to speed. Similarly, on arriving at King’s College London in 2007, I drew inspiration from the writings of, and exhibitions curated by another literary colleague, Elizabeth Eger. Two outstanding students, now holding doctorates from King’s College London, provided research assistance: Carlo Cenciarelli undertook the translations of Eximeno at short notice when Italian music theory got the better of me, and Hugo Shirley lent skills in technology and editorial patience to the task of converting earlier publications into editable text. A generous and incisive reader, Suzanne Aspden strengthened my arguments in several chapters and corrected some schoolboy errors concerning Elizabeth Sheridan. At University of California Press, Mary Francis was my expert guide through the trials of proposal, peer review, and revision, while Juliane Brand provided brilliant bilingual copyediting and Jacqueline Volin shepherded my manuscript through production. Ultimately, though, the book owes its existence (though not its faults) to Roger Parker, who gently insisted that it was time to gather my thoughts into a monograph. Without his belief that I could do this I would never have attempted it. In the last three years he has provided constant, sometimes ’round-the-clock support, read and commented on everything, and offered a perspective, at once pragmatic and intellectual, that helped me to finish.
Introduction
Fictions of Female Ascendance
Beautiful, rich, and orphaned, Lady Sophia Sternheim, the eponymous musical heroine of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary novel of 1771, was destined to be hunted by libertines and suffer the torments of stolen reputation. Packed off to court by her ambitious guardians, Count and Countess Löbau, who hope to make her a royal mistress, her pristine virtue is prematurely desecrated by a sham marriage to Lord Derby, a rake. Undone, fleeing her seducer, her conscience embraces death, and she hovers between heaven and earth. Unlike many of her type, however, she does not die: she struggles against the temptations of the grave and, didactically renouncing even that morbid luxury, discovers an enduring moral heroism and social conscience. Exalted by her disgrace, she resolves to dedicate her life to acts of benevolence, the appreciation of nature, the education of girls, the cultivation of friendship, and the solace of music.
With this heroine, who sings and accompanies herself on the lute, improvises, and plays extensively from memory, La Roche struck a resounding chord in the culture of sensibility. On the basis of Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim she emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors of her age.1 For a year or two the future of German literature seemed to lie partly in her hands. Critics discerned a moral and emotional authenticity linking author and heroine, one that, for a brief historical moment, they desired above all other artistic values. That the author was female contributed to the critics’ sense that the prose bypassed the mediation of learning and artifice. La Roche’s fiction, as the product of (or some ideal of) female nature, was felt to offer glimpses of her heroine’s invisible interiority, and of the operations of her heart and mind. The young Goethe, whose Werther of 1774 was directly inspired by and soon eclipsed Sternheim, published a review in 1772 that discovered in the novel “a portrait of the human soul.” His friend and future Weimar colleague Johann Herder used similar language, speaking of “glimpses of the inner workings of the soul.”
These reviews came in response to prompts from La Roche’s editor, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), the foremost German-language novelist of his day. Wieland provided an ostensibly apologetic preface and footnotes for the work of his female acquaintance, who (as the conceit went) knew nothing about the publication of her manuscript. Wieland’s interventions acted as insurance for La Roche’s modesty, as well as offering the endorsement of a literary authority. Perhaps even more important, they provided cues to the work’s aesthetic context. Wieland attributed to the novelist an intuitive knowledge of human nature, acquired through experience and superior to the more prestigious and almost exclusively male “dry philosophy” of those, such as himself, engaged in the “long study of humanity”; the same point is made in the novel when Sophia Sternheim asserts that “women’s feelings are frequently more accurate than the reasonings of men.”2 The author, like her heroine, emerges in Wieland’s preface as an exquisitely sensitive and unclouded instrument of moral insight. In a fantasy of art springing unmediated from nature, La Roche is said by Wieland to write without “authorial art” (8). In acknowledging that stern or misguided critics might censure the work for ungrammatical or naive stylistic aspects, by overstating the presence of certain “faults” and announcing them to be evidence of superior merit, Wieland effectively silenced such criticism. Prefiguring the terms in which Herder would idealize traditional and popular poetry in his Volkslieder (1779), and echoing contemporary discourse about “the noble savage,” Wieland praised the “originality of image and expression . . . [and] felicitous energy and aptness. . . . [F]or each original thought she immediately invents a singular expression, whose vigorous strength and truth are perfectly adequate to the intuitive ideas which are the well-spring of her reflections” (8).
From the comments of Wieland, Goethe, and Herder about Sternheim it appears that a novel by and about a woman helped to trigger a fantasy that literature could overcome problems endemic to writing and the aesthetic principle of mimesis. As a mediation of thought, writing was felt to jeopardize truthful self-representation; it was, as Derrida observed in his famous commentary on Rousseau, the trace of a voice, always secondhand and at one step removed from speech. (In the courtroom one does not write, one speaks the truth.) A clue that La Roche’s epistolary novel of female virtue and seduction came to stand for a new literary authenticity is found in Goethe’s description of the writing as a “portrait,” for at that time the visual arts were enjoying the enviable status of (purportedly) representing nature through its own natural signs of light, line, and shape. The fantasy that La Roche’s writing was natural and unmediated is of course difficult to reconcile with the text itself, and