Representations of armed women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German literature

This dissertation examines the means by which the German literary community appropriated images of armed women during a period of more than two decades encompassing the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic invasion of German territories. The German public's response to the increasing visibility of armed women in the public sphere of the French Revolution was one of fascination and aversion. The German press often depicted women's participation in martial actions and their presence in the political realm as "unnatural" and a threat to social order. The frequently violent nature of these women's actions resulted in them being labeled as Furies, Amazons, or viragos. While the press demonized the image of women bearing weapons, some literary authors adopted the figure of the armed woman to promote patriotism in defense of German territories against the French enemy. Other authors employed the images of independent women to create a new model of femininity challenging eighteenth and nineteenth-century gender myths asserting that women were inherently passive, physically and mentally inferior, and emotional. The author analyzes and draws parallels between images of armed women in the German press's coverage of the French Revolution and figures of armed women in the literary works of four eighteenth and nineteenth-century German authors: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Die Aufgeregten and Herrmann and Dorothea, Friedrich Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans and selected poems, Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, and Therese Huber's Die Famille Seldorf. The ambiguous images of armed women shaped the eighteenth and nineteenth-century German reading public's attitudes about the French Revolution, about the spread of revolutionary ideas across the borders to German territories, and about the destabilization of gender norms and political order.