My PhD consisted of 110,000 words and 260 pages, 23 of which are bibliography. But don’t panic; I have condensed it to 6,700 words and 19 pages without a bibliography.
During an era of women's marginalisation and when expressing dissent in the authoritarian Prussian state was perilous, a group of courageous women writers emerged. They defied societal norms and dared to voice their social criticism. Their popularity allowed them to disseminate their ideas, thereby influencing social attitudes. These authors were pioneers, addressing issues that would only be recognised by Western society’s legal systems in the late 20th century.
In 1871, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) united the numerous divided 300 German states, comprising kingdoms, fiefdoms, dukedoms, and free Hanseatic cities, into the German Empire. The demographics of this fragmented German confederation, from the early to mid-19th century, consisted of nobility (including the clergy) and middle classes. The emerging bourgeoisie consisted of upper-class professionals, the economic bourgeoisie, and the lower middle classes. The others consisted of the peasantry and unspecified groups, like servants, miners, day labourers, journeymen, actors, beggars and, lastly—women (since the latter were dependent on either father or husband). This male-empowered political and religious governance upheld the historical marginalisation of women.
Attempts to gain better conditions for women resulted in activism that influenced a feminine writing tradition that sought to break out of established masculine writing modes. This is evident in the endeavour of those women writers who expressed forms of social criticism in their fiction before and during the Vormärz (pre-March). The Vormärz movement refers to the radical politics in the years leading up to the [March] 1848 Revolution. Several women’s associations were founded during this period, and women partook in extraordinary public involvement.
However, printed ideas perceived to be inflammatory were subject not only to ridicule but also to a regime that confiscated and banned these books and imprisoned or exiled their authors. This climate of ideological policing continued after the failure of the 1848 Revolution. During this censorship of public expression, the existing social and political ferment motivated some women writers to engage either through literature or by deed in social, political, and emancipatory activism. 1848 marked the beginning of the women’s movement, which was to motivate Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895) in 1865 to form the first women’s association in Leipzig.
My focus on Vormärz women and narratives is inspired by the emergence of their authors’ “pronounced feminist consciousness”. I define feminism as activities against a widespread social pattern across cultures and history that distributes power asymmetrically to favour men over women; in other words, “it’s about power”. The narratives of the “feminists in the Vormärz” share a concern for women’s rights and, thus, for some power. These “feminist” authors sought in their writing “to address social injustice, to question and reinterpret women’s roles, and to break directly into the public sphere”.
Since the Middle Ages, women have been underprivileged and have been in a rather fragile position when they were the focus of persecution and annihilation. They co-existed with men in a subjugated manner.
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The three “K’s”: “Kirche, Küche, Kinder” (“church, kitchen, children”), signified the domain to which women were designated. In this environment, men were “active, creative, powerful, superior public people”, and women were “passive, imitative, submissive, inferior, domestic creatures” destined to ‘women’s work’ that did not make allowance for education. This doctrine is epitomised whereby, in 1789, a lady from the upper classes claimed that education was a threat to marriage, “especially in its utility for a critique on religion”. After all, the adage of the time for girls was: “You must be pious and chaste”.
Despite a historical climate of repression, supportive voices for the feminist German cause had already surfaced. In 1792, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796) published On Improving the Civil Status of Women, advocating equal rights. Hippel suggests, “Even the best man is envious of his wife’s great qualities, which could threaten him," highlighting women’s supreme qualities. However, referred to as “the only feminist German man of his time”, Hippel published this work anonymously.
New influences from abroad also reached Germany. In 1793, the German translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" appeared. It has been suggested that the works of Hippel and Wollstonecraft complement each other and comprise “the first truly complete manifesto of feminism”.
Hippel, like Hahn-Hahn, Simone de Beauvoir, and others later, blamed women’s inferior position on social conditioning, which is based on: “lifestyle, customs and conventions”. By questioning whether “the oppression of women is the cause of all the rest of the oppression in the world”, Hippel appeals to the insight of educated men to improve the situation of women—by contrast, Wollstonecraft petitions women to gather in solidarity. Yet only a minority would have been aware of both these works; one contributing factor being that those writings seen as “inflammatory or seditious” were banned by local censors.
In quoting Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805-1871), the “father” of literary-historical writing, literary history is an inseparable part of general, that is, national-political history. Thus, literature is not only a reflection but also entrenched in history. Since 1839, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s adage has somewhat optimistically coined its power: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
From approximately 1830, German women's oppressed self-image and self-perception changed due to the influence of the early French socialist call for freedom, equality, and fraternity. During the Vormärz, many women developed political and social awareness. The 1840s focussed on the lack of female education, political engagement, and marriage.
Many novels express opposition to the marriage of convenience. It can be assumed that the many discussions about women’s emancipation created a newly established female “us-consciousness”. Women questioned their secondary position in a society in which “patriarchy as an institution is a social constant deeply entrenched”.
Mid-19th-century industrialisation and the growth of bourgeois society paved the way for women's liberation. The diverse political and emotional involvement of the Vormärz women resulted in euphoria:
“The Revolution was combined with a flood of emotions and a euphoric kind of relationship between the sexes. Political liberation and national unity were anticipated with the liberation of the emotions”.
The police coined women’s political participation “democratic intrigues”.
In this policed climate, the press and book restrictions that were implemented in 1819 continued, and the persecution of female and male dissenters and censorship of outspoken publications prevailed.
For example, in 1835, Theodor Mundt (1808-1861), the future husband of Mühlbach, had his controversial novel "Madonna" banned in May. In July, his “postdoctoral lecturing qualification” was denied at Berlin University due to the religious criticism in this narrative. Mundt’s persecution continued for years.
In 1835, Karl Gutzkow (1811-1878) was imprisoned for writing and publishing the “most exciting emancipatory” novel "Wally, the Sceptic".
In 1846, Louise Aston was expelled from Berlin. She remained in the chief of Berlin police's active “secret files” because of her radical attitude towards bourgeois morality and her personal stance on love outside the confines of marriage.
The works of the exiled writer and poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) had also been prohibited. In 1841, Karl Marx lost his prospects of an academic career in philosophy in Berlin because of his involvement with the Young Hegelians. 
The Young Hegelians drew on George Wilhelm Hegel’s (1770-1831) veneration of Reason and Freedom (as the guiding forces of history) and his idea that the ‘Spirit’ overcame all that opposed reason and freedom.
The Young Hegelians wanted to overcome the religious dogma and political authoritarianism in Germany and mounted radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. Contact with the Young Hegelians was scrutinised by police as they were considered to be extreme “literary figures” and as “critical outsiders, were classified as criminals”.
Mundt, Gutzkow and Heine were members of the Junges Deutschland (Young German) movement, a group of writers who sought to implement liberal ideas in politics, religion, and morality by beginning “to speak out against aristocratic abuses of power, to question the authority of the Church, and to express concern for the plight of the poor”. Their philosophies were built on the Enlightenment, the catchwords “liberty, equality, fraternity” of the 1789 French Revolution, and the Young Hegelians’ ideology. A frequent theme in their writing was the emancipation of women.
Even though diplomat and statesman Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) and the powerful Prussian political authorities rebuked the Young Germans’ endeavour for change, citing fears that their writing would undermine the status quo and agitate for revolutionary activism, the Young Germans remained active for a while.
In a broad sense, the Young Germans can be credited for providing “the springboard for Karl Marx”. Through her husband’s association with the Young German movement, Mühlbach “made the socioeconomic situation of women a topic worthy of literary representation”. Moreover, her familiarity with Marx’s radical social ideology is, to a notable extent, reflected in the politics of "Aphra Behn".
Against the historical background of economic industrialisation, the growth of bourgeois society, ideological repression and political restriction, the activism of Vormärz women gained momentum. The awakening of the women of the ‘48 Revolution was part of a 19th-century movement, which can be accommodated under the concept of a ‘social movement’. This initially socially motivated involvement became politically oriented when women, as part of a democratic movement, established their own newspapers and wrote novels to be heard as socially conscious women in a society that denies them equality.
Since the spread of French revolutionary ideas throughout Europe, a significant shift occurred in women’s thinking. This is testified by the Vormärz women’s writing. The level of activism and the increase of socially critical novels during that period were to leave a legacy that would continue into the 21st century.
Around 1848, the women’s journal was the most important document and mouthpiece of a political movement for women. Yet, publishing by women had already begun in the 18th century, when in the early 1780s, Sophie La Roche (1730-1807) and Marianne Ehrhard (1755-1795) illustrated in journals the attempts by women to search for their new role in society. 
The politically active Vormärz women used mass communication to integrate politics with female agency. They communicated in their own newspapers with other women’s organisations, expressed their opinions about the Revolution, and sought donations for their charitable organisations. While they generally criticised the machinations of the church and the opportunism of the liberals, they offered a sharp analysis of attempts to change parliamentary democracy in their writing.
Therese Huber (1764-1829) belongs to the pre-romantic pragmatists who examined issues concerning education.
Rahel Varnhagen (1772-1833), “the first great, modern woman of the German culture,” formulated the first document by a woman in which she articulated the “untenability of her social restrictions.”
Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) published “The Woman in Conflict with the Social Conditions” in 1847, defending Aston against her banishment from Berlin. The press coined her “Kommunistenmutter.” In 1848, she published the "Frauen-Zeitung", which could only be published twice and whose third publication was confiscated.
In contrast to the unambiguous radicalism of Louise Aston, the more subtle Anneke wrote religious books and regional literature as well as writing as a journalist. She also protested against the marriage of convenience and campaigned for the education of sons and fathers to abolish women’s slavery. Her second husband was jailed in 1848 because of his political activities. In 1849, the Annekes fled to America, where she continued her work as a professional publisher, journalist, writer, and women’s activist.
Louise Aston (1814-1871) was an early feminist who, perhaps most daringly, defended the notion of equality and women’s emancipation, which touched a raw nerve in patriarchal society. Aston’s unconventional life, publications, and motto in Wilde Rosen, “Free-living, free-loving, I have always remained true to”, brought her to the attention of the public and police. Becoming an object of persecution, she was eventually banished from Berlin because of her “subversive views” and “immoral way of life”. She criticised the institution of marriage:
“I condemn marriage because it makes a possession of that which can never be a possession: the free personality; because it gives a right to love for which no right can be given; in this marriage makes a brutal wrong out of every right”.
In her signed police statement of 1846, Aston declared:
"I don’t believe in God, and I smoke cigars, that’s perhaps why I’m an abomination for many ladies. I intend to emancipate women, even if it should cost me my heart’s blood; I consider marriage to be the most immoral institution since I don’t consider lasting love to be possible within it. If a man gets married, he must be an imbecile. Belief in God and the institution of marriage must cease if we are to be happy."
Aston, like Rahel Varnhagen and Karoline Schlegel some years earlier, advocated an education that encouraged the “enhanced life of thought,” for which they considered women equally equipped and entitled.
Not much is known about Louise Dittmar (1807-1884). Her first four publications (1845-47) were satire, political essays, and critiques of religion, in which she drew attention to women and their oppression. Dittmar was among the few women who attempted to develop a comprehensive analysis and critique of patriarchy. In 1845, she wrote in "Sketches and Letters", which probably reflected her life:
“We want freedom, but the wings are too weak, and the feet are glued too tightly”.
In 1849, she printed "Social Reform". 
Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895) fought for women’s rights. She was a writer and publisher who, in 1843, published her first novel, "Ludwig the Waiter". Otto worked as a journalist for journals, where she depicted social injustices and the weavers’ revolt. Moved by the poverty and exploitation of the lower working classes, she published in 1846 "Castle and Factory", which the authorities confiscated. While Otto was a Christian and a “courageous, patriotic German girl”, she was subject to persecution until 1858.
She published the "Frauen-Zeitung" (1849) as the first collecting vessel of women’s interests and voice of the women’s movement. Despite persecution and a press ban, she circulated this for an unusually long period of 4 years. This paper's motto was: “For the realm of freedom, I enlist female citizens.” Otto staked a political claim with her democratic endeavours not to forget women, the other half of humanity. She argued for a system of equal educational opportunities for women that incorporated domestic duties.
While Aston and Dittmar demanded equal rights for men and women, Otto-Peters based her demands on “true female emancipation”. According to her, women’s prime responsibilities were family and education. “Feminists” like Otto, Dittmar, Aston, Anneke and Mühlbach “argued for women’s economic, legal, educational, and political emancipation”. Otto demanded a vote for women, and Dittmar analysed political and social backgrounds.
Aston expressed her activism in journalism and meetings as a “political agitator” and criticised the prevailing position of women: “She [the woman] is Nothing, he [the man] is Everything”.
Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859) enjoyed enormous success with her epistolary writing, "Goethe’s Exchange of Letters with a Child" (1835). In 1843, Arnim voiced her sympathy for the disadvantaged in society. Her confidence in the King's intervention in social inequities motivated her to publish "This Book Belongs to the King". 
Scholars discuss the “Infantilising” of women and the traces of fairy-story attributes in Fanny Lewald's writings (1811-1889). Yet, her novel "On Red Earth" (1850) is set against the events of the Revolution and the hope for democracy.
Other writers of the time include Friederike Wolfhagen (1819-1878), who had already published numerous novels in the 1840s. Like Aston, Glümer, Lewald, Otto-Peters, and Mühlbach, Wolfhagen describes class differences, a critical assessment of the aristocracy, the problems of bourgeois artists’ existence, sentimental family histories, and the lives and loves of different women.
In 1851, Claire von Glümer (1825-1906) wrote "Fata Morgana. A Novel of the Year 1848". The heroine criticises the exclusion of women from political life. Glümer depicts, like its title, that the hopes for changes through parliamentary democracy and political reform prove to be a mirage.
The power of persuasion has been recognised throughout the ages. In particular, the Catholic Church recognised the influence of books on society. They knew about their ‘potential danger’ and discouraged reading by oneself.
For this reason, the Church fostered in the mid-19th century the notion of reading aloud “good books” to an audience, be it the family circle, the convent schools, or in the salons of the aristocratic country castles. The female readership, who left school usually aged 13, generally lacked a “middle-class intellectual” interest. Some Vormärz authors realised this and purposely developed strategies to educate receptive women readers, as for example, Louise Otto-Peters:
"It is my and many others’ endeavour to use novels to interest those who may only require a stimulus to participate intellectually in the questions of our times. This stimulus is welcomed by many thousands when it comes accidentally cloaked in poetry with the promise to provide entertainment and diversion―but only hundreds will search for it."
It would seem plausible that if authors' works are widely read, their meaning will be absorbed by some readers, generate debate, challenge public attitudes, and foreshadow social changes and law-making.
After the failure of the Revolution, politically active women were left frustrated, chastised, cynical and ridiculed. In 1849, Otto-Peters laments that:
“history of all times, and the present in particular, teaches that those who forgot to think of themselves were also forgotten”.
She emphasises that the Vormärz women had to act to change their demeaning conditions, that only they could end their degraded existence. Hahn-Hahn’s contention in 1839, before 20th-century Beauvoir and others, held women responsible for allowing men's domination.
The radical democrat Katharina Authenriet commented 1849 in an open letter about the conservative triumph after the failure of the Revolution:
“What is not granted to us, our children and grandchildren will victoriously continue. It is sufficient that we have scattered the seed, the future may pick the fruits.”
Astute women recognised that the family is an instrument for political education. They knew their good work and efforts would have to bear long-term results. Those still alive were to witness that the 1848 defeat of girls' improved educational opportunities was not to last. The seed that had been planted with the establishment of the private “schools for daughters” in the early 19th century came into fruition in 1870 with the establishment of the public higher education system.
The effect that the first women’s movement organisations and the women’s journals had on the various German states and the fear engendered by it is evident in the diverse reactions. The “emancipated woman,” the “wild Amazon”, and the “horror image” of the woman who demanded political equality were now the subject of ridicule in caricatures.
More drastic was the prohibition after 1850 that women were prohibited from working as editors. The journals and newspapers' original content and intent were replaced with cooking recipes, knitting patterns and stories about marriage and family. Women “were not even allowed to gather in public”, nor were they permitted to participate in associations that discussed “political subjects”. This law remained in force in Prussia until 1908.
In this male-dominated environment, Ida von Hahn-Hahn and Luise Mühlbach addressed social injustices by reproducing realities and forms of liberation from them in their novels "Gräfin Faustine" (1841) and "Aphra Behn" (1849).
This is evident in their criticism of and their liberation from the concept of everlasting love and the institution of marriage. Hahn-Hahn criticised systems of education and regimentation, and Mühlbach targeted the governing institutions of clergy and monarchy and the apathy of the majority of the populace. The protagonists show how women cope with their social position and how they aspire to the “utopia of [. . .] liberated” equal opportunity. Faustine leaves her first husband and lives freely with Andlau. Aphra buys her freedom from marriage and becomes a writer who lives by her pen.
Gräfin Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805-1880) was born of an old noble family in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Ida enjoyed the privileged upbringing of the German aristocracy but received the “most rudimentary” education, yet it is reported that “she excelled” in the little tuition she did receive. Her father indulged in thespian enterprises, and his staging of plays and construction of a state-of-the-art theatre soon diminished the family fortune.
Following her mother’s wishes, Ida married 1826 her one-year-older wealthy cousin, Graf Hahn, for this reason, adding the hyphenated second Hahn. The couple's incompatibility soon became evident, and her husband divorced her after three years.
From then on, Ida lived with Baron Adolf von Bystram (1798-1848) in an unconventional arrangement for the time. With his encouragement, she established herself as a popular writer.
In 1836, Ida met and fell in love with Heinrich Simon, a democrat of the same age (1805-1860). The story of their love is the subject of chapters in journals and a book, and the ache of their renunciation is evident in some of her works. Her association with these two men runs like a leitmotif through "Gräfin Faustine".
Hahn-Hahn travelled with Bystram throughout Europe and the Orient; an experience recorded in her successful travelogues. Aristocratic Hahn-Hahn felt that culture and beauty were threatened after the 1848 Revolution. Bystram's death in June of that year deepened her depression. After adopting her new Catholic faith in 1850, Hahn-Hahn founded and lived until she died at the convent Women of the Good Shepherd without taking the order’s vows.
From 1839 to 1851, Ida was the most widely read and known female writer in Germany, with works translated into English, French and Russian. Some of her novels had a print run of 4,000, a large number in the mid-19th century when the average was between 600 and 1,000. Hahn-Hahn published 48 novels, books of poetry and travelogues, of which 21 predate her conversion to Catholicism. According to various scholars, between 1835 and 1850, 100 to 150 reviews of Hahn-Hahn’s writing appeared in German newspapers and magazines.
Luise Mühlbach (1814-1873), pseudonym for Clara Mundt, nee Müller, was also born in Mecklenburg. The daughter of the Neubrandenburg lord mayor, Luise, was “carefully educated”. She was shaped by discussions about literature and music that regularly took place in her parents’ salon, the cultural centre within the “Chinese wall” surrounding Mecklenburg and separating her from the rest of the world. During one of these gatherings, 13-year-old Luise met 22-year-old Hahn-Hahn, and both pledged to become writers: “No one in the world will be able to keep us back”.
Luise sent her first literary manuscripts to Theodor Mundt, the Young German author whose liberal works were banned during a particularly severe government censorship stage. After a lengthy correspondence, the two met and married in 1839, an arrangement not parentally contrived and widely deemed happy.
In Berlin, Mühlbach was “politically engaged”. “Liberal writers and critics” frequented her literary salon, this “meeting place of outstanding intellect”. In her salon, “links had been established between the Romantic and the later representatives of the bourgeois realism in literature. One could encounter all literary trends here.” Female writers such as Bettina von Arnim, Luise Aston, Ida von Hahn-Hahn, and Fanny Lewald visited. Mühlbach had social intercourse with the “highest circles”.
With Mundt’s encouragement, Mühlbach became “a successful and prolific author of social and historical novels and travelogues” with emancipatory tendencies. Her novels contained “socially critical approaches, addressed problems such as free love, the emancipation of women and the ill-treatment of wives”. She “spotted a market for historical novels and successfully targeted her bourgeois readership”. Mühlbach’s historical fiction reached a “height of popularity” from the mid-19th century until 1875. After the death of her husband in 1861, Mühlbach supported their two daughters entirely with her writing.
Mühlbach’s pro-democratic leanings were evident when she welcomed the 1848 Revolution and defended it against Hahn-Hahn, who considered revolutionary aspirations to be “crime and worthlessness”. Mühlbach did not agree with Hahn-Hahn’s attitude that the common people were “stupid and rough plebeians”. Indeed, after their political disagreement in 1849, when Hahn-Hahn condemned Mühlbach and her circle of friends for “following treacherous ideas”, their once cordial friendship dissolved, and the two writers did not see each other for many years.
Their different political ideas about the ethos of democracy are shown in "Gräfin Faustine" and "Aphra Behn". Hahn-Hahn was a staunch aristocrat in contrast to the democratic stance taken by Mühlbach. While both writers enjoyed immense popularity throughout German-speaking countries, their work fell into obscurity towards the fin de siècle.
Factual Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn a living by writing, she broke cultural barriers and was a literary role model for later generations of women authors. 
Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in the debtors’ prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines, such as John Wilmot and Lord Rochester.
During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her into legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, Behn declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king, William III. She died shortly after.
Her best-known works are the plays "The Rover" and "Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave", which is sometimes described as an early novel. Oroonoko is a work of prose fiction, published in 1688 by William Canning and reissued with two other works of fiction later that year. It was also adapted into a play. The novel's success was jump-started by a popular 1695 theatrical adaptation by Thomas Southerne, which ran regularly on the British stage throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
The eponymous hero is an African prince from Cormantien (modern-day Ghana) who is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Surinam, where he meets the narrator. The novel is a first-person account of Oroonoko's life, love, rebellion, and execution.
Published less than a year before her death, "Oroonoko" is sometimes described as one of the first novels in English. Interest in it has increased since the 1970s, with critics arguing that Aphra Behn is the foremother of British female writers and that it is a crucial text in the history of novels.
Fictional characters like Hahn-Hahn’s Faustine and Mühlbach’s Aphra articulate a female right to self-determination. This is another example of fiction depicting problematic issues that reality ignores and/or denies. In their publications, committed women called upon other women to participate in writing to create a society where the ideas of freedom and equality are justly realised for men and women. Already in the 18th century, the popularity of the Frauenroman was perceived as a threat by males who were concerned that women might neglect their domestic domain or, worse, might aspire to a life outside the bounds of marriage.
These works reflected their times and contributed to shaping social attitudes. Between 1839 and 1875, both writers enjoyed immense popularity, and some of their ideas, such as forms of liberalisation and more equality in society, were bound to captivate their readership. Scholars comment on the relationship between how historical reality is expressed in literary fiction. Literature reflects and engages with a wider social and moral context of its time.
Mühlbach saw her task as a writer of historical fiction:
“To give an agreeable and popular form to our national history, which may attract the attention and affection of our people, which may open their understandings to the tendencies of political movements and connect the facts of history with the events of actual life”.
In 1848, Mühlbach wanted to bring 19th-century inequities to the people's attention, and her strategy in "Aphra Behn" involved depicting 17th-century Stuart England as a mode of disguise.
The novel "Aphra Behn"
Mühlbach’s fictional Aphra Behn is a fiercely rebelling heroine. Her “utopian” emancipatory attempt is to free herself from the shackles of being married to Captain Behn. Behn epitomises the oppressive male attitude that enabled a husband to tyrannise his wife:
"You are a woman, and as such, your independence is annihilated, and your freedom buried! The law protects my rights, and because of the power of these laws, you must succumb to my will and submit to my authority!"
Aphra reacts to Behn’s imposed power by leaving the house, even though Behn’s orders are not to. Furthermore, she ingeniously plots her divorce, where this option is denied to women. She turns adversity to advantage; that is, she acquires the knowledge to extricate herself from the institutional power of a marriage contract, as represented in Behn.
Aphra’s positive activism contrasts with the common people’s indifference, who, with their inactivity, enable the monarchy and clergy to determine their fate and to subjugate them. Most of the population, unlike Aphra, do not resist, but due to their passivity, contribute to the power structure. Mühlbach’s Aphra Behn suggests an analogy between men and women, the governing monarchy, and the oppressed population. Mühlbach’s direct exposure through her husband to the political criticism of the Young Germans enabled her to use the character of Aphra to express her perception of emerging social concepts.
Hahn-Hahn and Mühlbach deplore the custom of enforced conjugal rights by reproducing their heroines’ agony. By addressing this topic in mid-19th century Germany, they were at the forefront of social and legal change.
To Aphra’s outcry that during marital rape, she feels like throttling her husband, Behn responds:
"I knew this very well, my angel," said her husband, laughing, "and if I may say so, this knowledge perhaps heightened my happiness and lent it a new appeal! It is very piquant and romantic to kiss a beautiful woman who is teeth-grindingly lying in our arms and who curses us while she makes us happy."
Behn knows that his wife cannot retaliate, despite her teeth-gnashing, and that she despises him. This shows Behn’s sadism to its fullest extent. The adjective “piquant” shows his pleasure in inflicting pain and exerting physical power. Aphra replies appropriately, “You are a monster”.
Significantly, the emotions during the act of rape are presented from both the oppressive male and the oppressed female points of view. Depicting a topic not generally elaborated on using emotions, sadism, and disgust represents a new development in literary writing. Mühlbach’s emerging modern approach, like Hahn-Hahn’s (who also voiced her criticism of marital rape), is significantly more for its dual gender presentation.
The Novel "Gräfin Faustine"
After an unsuccessful marriage, beautiful Gräfin Faustine, lives in a free arrangement, a wild marriage, with Baron Andlau in Dresden. Against the norms of society, she manages, due to her magnetism, charm, intelligence, and artistry as a talented painter, to claim rights and aim for personal fulfilment.
Both, Hahn-Hahn and Mühlbach, express the analogy of cattle trading with that of marriage. Faustine feels degraded and shamed and is an object of negotiation in her marriage to Count Obernau. Aphra’s husband, Captain Behn, threatens to sell her at the market with a noose around her neck. Indeed, Aphra eventually tricks Behn into selling her to Oronooko.
The two novels specifically target conjugal rights. This situation attributes the amendments to existing laws to literature: “Literature can take as its theme problematic circumstances from the point of view of the victims, long before changes will occur in social and legal perception and practice”.
In present times, a “unique” situation can place women in violent situations in which “human rights violations against women [ . . . ] often take place in the non-public, intimate, private sphere of the family, where they are tolerated and go unpunished, and thus are not subject to public law or protection by the state”. In 1841, this ongoing issue is also illustrated in Gräfin Faustine:
In this novel [Gräfin Faustine], forced marital sexual intercourse is taken as a theme, and with this, the elements of an offence that in the middle of the 19th century did by no means infringe valid law. One must deal with this novel if only, here, for the first time, with the example of a literary reality, it becomes clear how forced marital sexual intercourse is experienced by the woman as being also an act of rape. It is depicted as not being a crime in the sense of the then-valid laws.
The authors condemn the prevailing social practice of enforced conjugal rights. The foresight of the two writers to recognise the relevance and present for debate the ‘social reality’ of this violent but taboo issue, which was conceded by the law, is remarkable and courageous.
While a heroine, such as Faustine, voices her consternation in the private sphere, she refrains from emancipatory activism. She is a conservative feminist. Faustine expresses a different kind of rebellion against the traditional portrayal of women through the male gaze that denies her due credit for her vital contribution to the history of humankind. She conveys historiographic masculine bias, implying that the fragmented historical depiction omits the important role that women perform in society. Faustine points out that men distort history by neglecting to give credit to women who stand beside them:
"By the way―since men write history, and since, on the whole, history is concerned more with the depiction of facts than with the development of motives―nobody can know whether a dozen men who gesticulate and play tragic roles on life’s stage, are not taking their cues from a woman in the prompter’s box."
[Catherine] "Men invented the law; they are taught to interpret and apply it; it involuntarily works for their benefit. Naturally, men are allowed to do Everything, know Everything, learn Everything. They sit in judgment and decide, just like God himself, over souls and life and death. They stand on the pulpit among the multitude, at the cradle and the grave of the individual, and they dispense heaven and hell. They defend the fatherland; they circumnavigate the world and we . . . we stand by as onlookers! Oh, I hate them!"
Hahn-Hahn ironically acknowledges and accusingly condemns male-instituted governance in this passage without challenging the status quo. Importantly, she blames women for allowing men to rule and to allow this subordination to happen. This sentiment is sympathetically echoed by de Beauvoir: “[I]f woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she fails herself to bring about this change”. Beauvoir emphasises that “there can be no liberation until women themselves cease to reproduce the power mechanisms that confine them to their place”.
Hahn-Hahn tenders an unusual proposal when the protagonist, Catherine, suggests a gender role reversal for three generations. Catherine does not want to remain an outsider, an “onlooker.” She is roused out of her resigned state when Herr von Ohlen responds with sarcasm to her sigh that women stand by as “onlookers”:
[Ohlen] “Because they [men] are doing things which are impossible to be accomplished by women? How unfair!”
[Catherine] “Impossible?―send girls to universities and boys to needlework courses and into the kitchen: three generations later, you will know if it is impossible and what it means to be suppressed.”[Ohlen] “Well, if I could admit that such a transformation of nature is possible by way of upbringing and education, would you admit that women would misuse their supremacy?”[Catherine] “Most certainly, Herr von Ohlen! They possess all the capabilities of men.”
Catherine propounds a sustained gender-role reversal to prove her premise that women are the product of institutional conditioning.
Contemporary and scholarly testimonies about Hahn-Hahn reveal her literature's influence on society; at times, it was even perceived as a threat. Amongst her contemporaries, Hahn-Hahn’s literary rival Fanny Lewald remarked that Ida’s books influenced the women’s movement. Felicitas von Hohenhausen provides evidence that Hahn-Hahn influenced women’s emotions and caused more abductions and divorces with her pre-conversion novels than George Sand in France. Hahn-Hahn’s early books “had partially an almost revolutionary effect on society”. In 1847, readers were publicly cautioned about her writing:
"One step, [. . .] which we strenuously recommend, is for all husbands and fathers in Germany, to commit to the flames the writings of the Gräfin Ida Hahn Hahn, whenever they find them in the hands of their wives or daughters." (North British 582)
By declaring Hahn-Hahn’s writings to be a threat to the establishment, the author of this inciting review confirms the influence on, and the engagement with, social order that popular writing can have on readers. Her emancipatory novels influenced the public. It can be summarised: “Today her [Hahn-Hahn] books and she herself are almost forgotten, [but] her influence continues”. Indeed Hahn-Hahn’s writing is significant in the shaping of present and future generations’ thinking, which was recognised by the clergy:
The wise bishop of Mainz knew that the women, Catholic and Protestant alike, who were the mothers and teachers of future generations, did read in their frugal leisure hours the long novels of Gräfin Hahn-Hahn. Did he know too, what and which words of the Gräfin they were to impart to their sons and grandsons?
It seems that Hahn-Hahn’s persuasion of public opinion was far-reaching. The wise bishop may have taken his prompt from the Vormärz women who had channelled their frustrated energies after the failed 1848 Revolution into educating the next generations towards democratic ideas. In all feasibility, Hahn-Hahn’s writing was just as, or even more, influential, particularly since she was then at the peak of her popularity.
It was in this milieu of women expressing their social concerns publicly that Hahn-Hahn and Mühlbach created heroines in Faustine and Aphra, who are neither obedient daughters nor wives nor “Superfrau” types; instead, they are free-spirited and courageous women.
Due to both authors’ great popularity, each heroine’s responsive social reaction to injustices seems to have influenced an interested readership. Both writers defied the establishment in a social and legal milieu that may appear foreign today, but that was the reality of Hahn-Hahn’s and Mühlbach’s environments.
The writers voiced their outrage through their heroines long before the situation that denied women equality and sexual self-determination was addressed legally and became a topic of current public debate.
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Ida von Hahn-Hahn |
Der Rechte |
HH DR |
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Gräfin Faustine |
HH GF |
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Luise Mühlbach |
Aphra Behn, volume 1 |
LM AB 1: |
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Aphra Behn, volume 2 |
LM AB 2: |
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Aphra Behn, volume 3 |
LM AB 3: |
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Aphra Behn |
Oroonoko |
AB O |
Picture Reproduction
Heinrich Heine: Buch der Liebe
Heine Haus Hamburg, Jahresbericht 2016. Rückblicke 2016. Ausblicke 2017.
Erich M. Simon (1892-1927), Geselligkeit bei Rahel Varnhagen, Radierung,
koloriert o.J. copyright bpk
Bibliography
Refer to my PhD for a comprehensive Bibliography or Academia.edu
