Reading as women, reading as patriots: Nationalism, popular literature, and girls' education in Wilhelminian Germany (Queen Luise, consort of Frederick William III, King of Prussia, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Brigitte Augusti)

In this dissertation, I examine selected historical novels and popular biographies written for young women at the end of the nineteenth century in the context of historical and literary instruction provided in girls' schools. I provide close readings of pedagogical interpretations of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell and Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, in which I analyze how teaching girls to read also taught them to internalize the national significance of their domestic role. Figures such as Dorothea or Stauffacher's wife model the German feminine ideal for girls by exemplifying an emotional nationalism that equates their activity in the domestic sphere with important Kulturarbeit. I demonstrate that canonical as well as popular literature approved for young women taught girls to see themselves as objects of male instruction, as mothers and caretakers, and symbolically essential to the continued progress of German civilization.; The work of Silvia Bovenschen, Ute Frevert, and Renate Möhrmann in German history and literature has pointed to the discrepancy between the lives of real women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how women were written about by male authors and historians in those eras. I apply their insights on socialization and identity-formation to my analysis of girls' engagement with literature that foregrounded fictional and historical German women. Brigitte Augusti's popular fiction, the subject of the last half of my dissertation, frequently thematizes “female” activities such as reading, distributing charity, and tending to the sick. I explore the ways in which these pursuits can be read, or even experienced, by young women as possible paths to individual agency, always in dialog and conflict with prevailing patriarchal expectations and stereotypes.; In the last chapter of the dissertation, I demonstrate how popular biographies of Queen Luise of Prussia suggested her as the ideal German woman, and paid particular attention to how the late Queen's own reading and writing activity constituted her exemplarity. Reading appropriate literature in an approved fashion, girls learned, could constitute a national act in and of itself by demonstrating that the reader acknowledged her feminine role and had developed the appropriate gendered and national aesthetic sensibilities.