The Male Muses of Romanticism: The Poetics of Gender in Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorf1

In German Romantic discourse woman generally functions as the inspiration, source, and ground of poesy.2 This figuration appears to be metaphysical in nature: woman and the feminine are troped as the originary condition of possibility of Romantic self-definition and Romantic artistic production, and feminine descriptors shape Romantic conceptions of subjectivity and creativity. In scattered statements in Friedrich Schlegel's philosophical and aesthetic theory, for example, "Der Geist ist d[as] ursprungl[ich] Weibliche" (KA XVIII: 193, #796; emphasis in original), the subject or "I" (das Ich) is feminine (KA XVIII: 334, #137), and woman's very essence is poesy (KA II: 269, #127); and in his autobiographical novel Lucinde the title figure, who is both lover and mother to the painter Julius, inspires his artistic creation. Similarly, in Novalis's Fichte-Studien the self-positing ego defines itself in opposition to the "Muttersfare" from whence it originated (Schriften II: 105, #1); the subject or "I" is feminine (Schriften II: 261, #519); and in the first of the two dedicatory sonnets prefacing Heinrich von Ofterdingen the dead beloved, "das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen," excites the poet's metaphysical drive, functions as his muse, and safeguards his poetic production (Schriften I: 193). Analyzing this female poetic ground from numerous theoretical perspectives, contemporary critics come to similar conclusions about the primacy of the feminine in Romantic poetic production: woman is the idealized, unattainable "other" against which the male poet defines himself in a gesture of wish fulfillment, the priestess and source of enlightenment for the male poet (Becker-Cantarino); woman and woman's voice are the essence of Romantic poesy (Schlaffer, Kuzniar, Muller-Sievers); Romantic discourse is informed by a theory of the feminine (Menninghaus, Roetzel); Romanticism itself is "the discursive production of the Mother as the source of discursive production" (Wellbery on Kittler, "Foreword" xxiii). Clearly the feminine forms an integral component of Romantic discourse, yet the Romantics themselves programmatically question the gender of their own poetic ground. To quote Friedrich Schlegel: "Die Frauen werden in der Poesie ebenso ungerecht behandelt, wie im Leben. Die weiblichen sind nicht idealisch, und die idealischen sind nicht weiblich" (KA II: 172, #49), and his racy novel Lucinde is animated by a dizzying gender play in which a coded homoerotic aesthetic subtly debunks the feminine ideal.3 Similarly, in the fairy tale from Novalis's fragmentary novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, Hyacinth leaves his love Rosenblutchen and journeys to Sais on a quest for self-definition, and when he lifts the veil of the statue of the goddess Isis, "die Mutter der Dinge" (Schriften I: 93), Rosenblutchen sinks into his arms. But in a famous distich to the novel an apprentice lifts the goddess's veil and sees that "the mother of all things" is not his beloved, but-wonder of wonders-himself (Schriften II: 584). In this instance, at least, the metaphysical ground of the Romantic project-presumed to be the maternal, eternal feminine embodied in the form of the beloved-proves to be the self-positing male subject.4 This essay examines the figure of the male muse in three canonical Romantic narratives that despite outward appearances likewise do not conform to a gynocentric paradigm and broaches a broad methodological question: Are contemporary theoretical approaches to Romanticism and gender studies shaping our readings of Romantic texts, predetermining woman's primacy and inflating woman's currency in Romantic poetics, and occluding important aspects of the discourse on gender articulated by the Romantics themselves? Motivating this open question is the following observation: the scholars cited above who argue for the centrality of the feminine to Romantic poetic production all, in effect, concentrate on "woman" in constructing their textual analyses, and then conclude that "woman" grounds Romantic poesy. …