The Clothes Make the Man: Cross-Dressing, Gender Performance, and Female Desire in Johann Elias Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten Frauen

Johann Elias Schlegel's comedy Der Triumph der guten Frauen (1748) uses female cross-dressing to construct gender roles and to promote a sentimental conception of marriage based on love, mutual compatibility, and free choice of partners. Schlegel's text highlights the culturally constructed aspects of gender by placing the performance of gender roles at the center of the play. By staging a successful performance of male gender, the female character Hilaria reintegrates two wayward husbands into the sentimental marriage. Disguised as Philinte, Hilaria gains access to Nikander, the husband who left her ten years earlier and has become a philanderer attempting to seduce Juliane, the wife of the tyrannical Agenor, as well as various other women in the town. As she competes with Nikander for Juliane, Hilaria hopes to regain her husband's love and to reeducate Juliane's husband Agenor. The text uses Hilaria's disguise and her reformatory efforts to explore the following four themes: how the control of information establishes power relationships; how cross-dressing is used to reinscribe traditional gender roles; how mutual respect and friendship are put forward as a strong basis for marriage; and finally, how sexual desire is construed as a purely male phenomenon, thereby ironizing the very possibility of female desire in general and female same-sex desire in particular. The author of this play reshaped German and Danish theater on both practical and theoretical levels. Born in Meisen on 17 January 1719, Schlegel attended the Furstenschule at Schulpforta and studied law, philosophy, and history in Leipzig. From 1743 on, he lived in Denmark, where he worked in diplomatic services in Copenhagen and then later taught at the Ritterakademie at Sor0, where he died on 13 August 1749, aged thirty. ' Schlegel's literary output was substantial; he composed numerous comedies, tragedies, dramatic fragments, translations, and theoretical works on aesthetics and dramaturgy. Schlegel helped found the Danish national theater in Copenhagen in 1747, and his efforts inspired proponents of a national theater in Germany. Schlegel's later tragedies depicted national motifs, an innovative step at the time. Herrmann deals with the Germanic military leader who defeated the Romans in AD 9, and Canut and Gothrika, written in Denmark, treat Danish subjects. Schlegel also published a moral weekly, Der Fremde, written from the perspective of a German expatriate in Denmark. Der Triumph der guten Frauen was well-received by Schlegel's literary peers. Lessing, for one, praised it as one of the best original German comedies (Lessing 6: 438-40, 442). In Schlegel's day, the play was a theatrical success. Between 1751 and 1780, it was performed by the foremost theater companies in many cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, and Munich. Schlegel's comedy was also published frequently. Probably written in 1747, it was published in 1748 in Bey trage zum Danischen Theater (see Schlegel 2: 325; Schubert 613) and reissued in 1762 in Schlegel's collected works. The play's contemporary popularity is demonstrated by the fact that it was published in anthologies in Breslau in 1762 and in Berlin in 1767, and in 1763, Colonel Chevalier de Champigny translated it into French. As late as 1783, the play was adapted by Johann Karl Lotich as Sehne Treue! oder debt's viel solche Weiber? Lustspiel in funf Aufzugen nach Schlegel. The adaptation remained largely faithful to the original, the major changes being new names for the characters (and for most, as a result, a new social status) and an altered ending. Schlegel's dramas and his dramaturgical and aesthetic writings have been the focus of scholarly attention for many years.2 Scholars of Schlegel have been most interested in his historical dramas, Herrmann and Canut, and their relation to themes of nationalism and internationalism.3 Nonetheless, several authors have dedicated articles or book chapters to Der Triumph der guten Frauen. …