Abstract
This thesis interrogates the ways in which female German-language writers of the nineteenth century wrote transcultural fairy tales to address social, political, and gender issues. Using methods of historical inquiry integrated alongside literary analysis, it will examine the texts and contexts of three women and their works: Karoline von Woltmann’s Volkssagen der Böhmen (1815), Carmen Sylva’s Pelesch-Märchen (1883) and Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen (1870). In so doing, the thesis spans the nineteenth century from the pre-Vormärz 1810s to the post-Unification 1880s and explores a network of diverse geographic locations – Bohemia, Romania, and Sicily – which all have transnational connections to the German-speaking countries. By focusing particularly on women writers who collected or wrote tales in countries that were not their places of origin, the case studies presented here highlight how the tales’ authors used gendered writing strategies to form new approaches towards transcultural discourses. The key questions posed in this thesis are: what literary strategies did the authors under examination employ from within gendered societal structures to make their voices heard? What were these authors’ approaches toward the fairy tale genre, and how did their respective approaches help them voice their opinions and concerns? What use did these women make of the transcultural nature of their fairy tales to convey their political and social agendas?The Introduction shines a light on women’s ascribed role as mere “quoters” from an amorphous Volksgeist within the fairy tale discourse of the nineteenth century – an ideology which was predominantly shaped by the Brothers Grimm and their male contemporaries before challenging this portrayal of female storytellers. This chapter questions paradigms within research regarding women’s presence in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and women’s engagement with political discourse, suggesting that women writers could expect to be read, and thusly, for their political and social agendas to be received through their tales. By exploring the history of women’s fairy-tale writing, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Introduction illuminates women’s stylistically hybrid, culturally diverse fairy tale tradition, which provides a lens through which to examine the following three case studies.
Chapter One explores how Karoline von Woltmann used her Volkssagen der Böhmen as a platform from which to promote bourgeois values as transcultural values, whilst at the same time suggesting that the bourgeois ideal belongs to the German cultural sphere. As one of the chapter’s core findings, I lay out how the aspects of nature, marriage, and religion are used by Woltmann to shape a version of Bohemia that is aligned with bourgeois values for the German reading public. In this section, I highlight in particular the author’s use of what I term “dark” narrative elements to create tension between the German bourgeois and the Bohemian wilderness. This chapter thus explores how women writers used fairy tales to communicate their views on how society should be constructed, rendering also the Volkssagen der Böhmen an important piece within the German-Bohemian identity discourse of the time.
Chapter Two critically assesses how Carmen Sylva, the first Queen of Romania, stylised herself as a powerful queen and the provider of a new Romanian mythology in her Pelesch-Märchen and the international press. As an elected queen of German descent, Sylva had to shape her role in justifying her dynasty’s rule in Romania; this chapter shows how specifically the fairy tale, including fairy tale tropes such as transformation, enabled her to do so, thus opening up lines of inquiry about the potential of women writers’ fairy tales to shape their authors’ public-facing image. By creating a “fairy tale map” of Romania in her tales which provided new myths of origin, Sylva based her right to rule on claiming concrete knowledge of the Romanian landscape and history, as well as her own rootedness in nature as an all-pervading, pre-historical space that transcends national borders. At the same time, I will argue, Sylva used her tales to reflect on relations of power and dependency between nature, queens, and their subjects. The analyses in this chapter will show how in the process of doing so, Sylva expanded her modes of self-fashioning in ways that position her queenly figures in a positive light, whilst also reflecting on how the power relations she describes can be addressed.
Chapter Three investigates how Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen challenged gender norms and patriarchal power structures by focusing on female sources and characters, while at the same time suspending pre-established, gendered dynamics of power within the text through the use of carnivalesque narrative strategies. This chapter expands the discourse around the subversive power of female collector- and intermediaryship, as Gonzenbach was recording the tales at the behest of the well-known fairy tale scholar Otto Hartwig. The Sicilianische Märchen, as I argue, either challenge or upend male superiority by female acts of wandering, cross-dressing, violence and healing, or cleverness – acts which, through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin, I read as carnivalesque spectacles.
Finally, the Conclusion distils the findings of this thesis in three sections. First, I will show how my thesis makes a case for women’s fairy tales being written for broad audiences, and how the authors under examination voiced their opinions from within patriarchal power structures without necessarily subverting them entirely. Second, I will argue that the authors strategically mixed genres in their fairy tales to convey their social and political agendas; this suggests, I contend, that we reassess what defines fairy tales as a genre. To close, I show that the authors’ transcultural approaches to fairy tales served them as another important means of communicating their socio-political agendas, which were partially, but not exclusively, focused on issues within the cultural contact zones in which they lived. Cultural tropes, such as the pastoral Golden Age, for example, served the authors in reaching different audiences and addressing larger issues such as patriarchal power, modes of queenly rulership, and the values according to which society should be constructed.
Date of Award | 1 Mar 2024 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Ben Schofield (Supervisor) & Catherine Smale (Supervisor) |