Judin, Juive, Jewess: Nineteenth-century Jewish women, representations and self-presentations

Through an analysis of literary texts and personal correspondence from 1800-1850 in Germany, England and France, my dissertation examines the conventions and influence of literary representation of Jewish female characters. In response to the nascent visibility of the Jewish woman, I ask, to what degree does a direct knowledge of historical Jewish women contribute to the creation of modernized literary representations and, in turn, to what degree do literary stereotypes influence Jewish women's self-perception and public presentation? While some remarkable Jewish women, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen or Dorothea Mendelssohn Schlegel, exerted influence on the conventions of literary depiction of "the Jewess" by their Jewish and Christian contemporaries alike, I argue that these women felt constrained in their self-conception and public personae by conventions of Jewish fictional types already in circulation. Throughout the study, paradoxical conceptions of the Jewess character come to the fore: an inassimilable other who is both marked and unmarked on the body; a dangerous threat and an inescapable attraction; a vulnerably hopeful object of conversionist fervor and an unalterably tainted, unrecuperable figure of stalwart devotion and wrongheaded loyalty. Balzac's Juives, Esther and Coralie, convert and die; Scott's Jewess Rebecca remains faithful and is banished; and the Judinnen of Germany present a spectrum of unsatisfactory possibilities: the "baptized Jewess" as threatening social climber; the unassimilable foreigner; the intellectual gender-transgressor. How does each of these characters serve to destabilize or reinforce each author's narrative? I trace a history of literary influence essential to an argument about transgression and reinscription, both in fiction and in life, of a "Jewess type," while pointing out the substantial differences in the characteristics of this type as it is employed in the literature of three national cultures.This dissertation analyzes the following texts: Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens fur ihre Freunde, Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, Dorothea Schlegel, Florentin, Karl Gutzkow, Wally die Zweiflerin, Ludwig Robert Die Tochter Jephthas , Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris and Hermann und Dorothea, Shakespeare, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, Balzac, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes .Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2002.School code: 0181