By Wendy Arons
In functionality and Femininity, Arons examines a sequence of texts by way of eighteenth-century German ladies in an effort to remove darkness from how girls writers of the time used theater and function either to enquire girl subjectivity and to interfere within the dominant cultural discourse of femininity. Arons's examine specializes in works that includes heroines who, for the main part--like their authors--lead lives with public dimensions, basically by way of operating as actresses. The texts she chooses all name cognizance to the problems that the eighteenth-century belief of the self as honest and antitheatrical awarded for women. by means of highlighting the truth that the social viewers that determines a woman's recognition is sort of constantly a fickle and untrustworthy "reader" of lady subjectivity, those works reveal the untenable place into which the discourse of sincerity put ladies, ironically requiring them to accomplish the very naivet? that was once, by way of definition, no longer imagined to be performable. Arons's unique argument takes an interdisciplinary procedure, drawing from the fields of literary feedback, cultural reviews, theatre background, and function experiences, and divulges how those girls writers uncovered perfect femininity as an most unlikely act, whilst they tried to breed that act of their writing and of their lives.
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Extra info for Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)
Example text
The discursive burden of fully embodying naiveté was instead laid on the shoulders of “Sophie,” who was imagined as ideally so transparently “naive” that she was oblivious not only of its presence in herself but even that it could be observed in her by others. She was expected to embody the kind of sincere naiveté invoked by the poet 22 Performance and Femininity and moralist Christian Furchtegott Gellert who, in his Moral Lectures (Moralische Vorlesungen) of 1770, imagined no more heavenly sight than a beautiful woman on her knees in the hour of prayer, believing herself unobserved, upon whose brow are united the modesty and innocence of a pious soul.
For bourgeois theorists interested in promoting the notion that moral people should simply “be” honestly, sincerely, and authentically themselves at all times, it was important to understand how someone might dissimulate their thoughts and emotions and, perhaps even more crucially, how such dissimulation could be detected in another. Many studies of the art of acting found reassuring evidence that sincerity could not, in fact, be successfully feigned, particularly in their investigation of the difficult problem (for the actor, at least) of manifesting, as a readable sign on the body, those physical reactions to emotion that are not under a person’s voluntary control—reactions like blushing in shame, having one’s hair stand on end from fear, or paling in horror.
Lessing thus paradoxically uses a theory of acting both to support and complicate a theory of being: the actor who can successfully induce the signs by which, as he notes in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, “we believe we can dependably infer a person’s inner feelings” becomes both a model for authentic subjectivity and a reminder that such authenticity may always already be dissembled (Hamburgische Dramaturgie 15–16). 38 Performance and Femininity Although I have focused on the ways in which one play, Miss Sara Sampson, foregrounds the problem of decoding Verstellung and distinguishing the real from the feigned in human behavior, even the most cursory glance at eighteenth-century literature reveals that this was a common and recurrent theme in fictional writing of the era.
