The Eye of the Beholder

Abstract

In this chapter I turn my attention to two works that foreground the role of the social audience in the construction and reception of female identity. The two texts I consider here—Elise Bürger’s story “Aglaja,” which appeared in a book entitled Labyrinths of the Female Heart (Irrgaenge des Weiblichen Herzens, 1799), and Friederike Helene Unger’s Melanie, the Foundling (Melanie, das Findelkind, 1804)—are very different in both style and content from the works considered in previous chapters. Formally, both reject aesthetic transparency in favor of a theatricality that mitigates against the reader’s hallucinatory absorption into the narrative’s scene. Both texts offer a series of often disconnected—or, at best, loosely connected—events that do not “add up” to a conventional narrative, much less a neat moral ending. In place of deep interiority, these texts offer female characters who enjoy great geographic and social mobility and survive a variety of adventures, partly, if not largely, by dint of their ability to perform and masquerade femininity.