The choice of epistolary autobiographies written by German speaking women in the second half of the 18th century as research topic for this doctoral thesis lies in the convergence of different facts in this time. On the one hand, the 18th century was a decisive period for the establishment of autobiography as a literary genre. Towards the end of the century, it had a splendour period, consolidated as a genre and got its name. On the other hand, the epistolary genre also lived in the second half of the 18th century an apogee, mainly thanks to Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s works on epistolary theory from the years 1742 and 1751. Women personify Gellert’s unnormative concept about writing letters. His feminity construct plays a decisive role in the development of letters in German and in the process of its literarization in the 18th century. The combination of these two aspects gives origin to the concept of epistolary autobiography. As both reading and writing a letter have a temporal limitation and can be interrupted and resumed at any time, letters seem to be the most adequate way to have a socially and intellectually active life without contradicting the expected role as housewife, wife and mother. The starting point of this research is the thesis that those women wishing to write their autobiography adopt the epistolary form to transmit the content they want without endangering the appearance of humbleness and of restriction to the private sphere. The first chapter includes a detailed description of the theories of the autobiography and of the epistolary genre as well as the criteria to be applied to the selected works and a new definition of the autobiographical genre. The second and third chapter serve as a contextualization for the texts in the corpus. The second chapter deals with the autobiographies by other German-speaking women, with the origin of the interest of literary theory for autobiographies written by women in the German speaking area, with the preceding forms of German autobiography by women and with its characteristics in the second half of the 18th century. The third chapter shows the situation of women in the sociocultural context in this same period of time. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapter include the detailed analyses of the three texts which constitute the corpus. These are the four autobiographical letters written by Anna Louisa Karsch (1722-1791) to Johann Georg Sulzer, Herzensgeschichten einer baltischen Edelfrau by Elisa von der Recke (1754-1833) and Elisabeth von Stägemann’s (1761-1835) Erinnerungen für edle Frauen. The seventh chapter includes the conclusions of this doctoral thesis, in which the previously developed criteria are applied to these three works. The criteria are related to the following aspects: (1) the position of the autobiographer inside the narration, (2) the conscience of these female authors as specifically feminine subjects, (3) the reader’s role, (4) the sealing of an autobiographical contract according to Philippe Lejeune’s term, (5) the moment and the motivation for remembering, (6) references to the sociohistorical context and (7) the text structure. After a detailed analysis of the selected texts, as absolute conclusion can be confirmed that the thesis at the beginning of this research is true: in the second half of the 18th century, epistolary autobiography in German is a specifically feminine genre.
2015-11-05
