Only occasionally was the “ascendance” of women in composition and performance framed as a battle of the sexes or Amazonian challenge to male prerogatives. More often associated with personal cultivation and the progress of national culture than with untrammelled agency, female participation was rarely discussed as a threat to the social order. Undoubtedly there was a concern, in publication of female-authored music, to maintain notions of modesty and virtue, usually achieved through a male editorial chaperone. Such framing devices, dramatizing the entry of woman into print, can strike us as constraining; in this context, though, they tended to render the publication more enticing and meaningful, not least as a glimpse of the private, intimate realm of family, home, and the female heart.
The terms through which the female sign was eclipsed at the beginning of the German-speaking nineteenth century are familiar. The rise of aesthetic autonomy, associated particularly (though not exclusively) with large-scale, publicly performed works of instrumental music, downgraded the aesthetic status, if not the social significance, of private, domestic, and vocal music; sexual polarization reached a new intensity of essentialism and, with it, something approaching a conceptual scandal between “serious” composition and “female” identity. The feminine now achieved significance more readily as a component of male creative genius (creative androgyny) or as a stimulating object of romantic desire within artistic fiction—a stylized musical topos (loving, heavenly song). Woman continued as a cherished sign, but signs themselves lost ground, becoming objects of nostalgia in a philosophical and aesthetic culture that ultimately valued the unsignifiable, the invisible, the otherworldly, the sublime.
FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NOTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT
My emphasis on the positive status both of women and of the feminine in a particular moment of German cultural history goes against the grain of much of the current thinking about gender in this period. My position is not, though, as contrary as it might appear: women were not, in any straightforward sense, empowered by feminocentric aesthetic frameworks, nor did they enjoy anything like full agency in musical culture. Female idealization and aestheticization were and are powerful modes of control. Nonetheless, in highlighting a discourse—an ideology—of female sovereignty in polite culture and the fine arts one could argue that (some) women achieved symbolic power, and cultural capital, both of which are overlooked if one doggedly persists with assumptions about female subordination. Put another way, older patterns of criticism that seek to uncover in artistic practices the same inequality that characterized women’s contemporary legal status potentially underestimate female cultural power.
That power came with strings attached. It followed elevated social position and represented class interests more than a form of individual female empowerment. For aristocracy, female sovereignty was a favorite image for noncoercive, “Enlightened” despotism, a way of imagining absolute power in a gentle frame. For the middling strata, facts and fictions of literary and musical women were bound up with emerging capitalist markets, educational values, and social self-conceptions, not least those concerning leisure, virtue, and refinement. These class interests, both aristocratic and bourgeois, help to explain why “woman” was not presented solely, or even often, as an abject or inferior term.
This line of argument does not contradict, although it does complicate, prevailing understanding of both gender politics in general and musical culture of the late eighteenth century in particular. With regard to gender politics, an emphasis on female sovereignty complicates the now conventional critique of the Enlightenment as having hypocritically denied women the equality it preached as a universal right. In an excellent scholarly primer Dorinda Outram explains that critique, as well as suggesting some of the limitations of it. She uses “enlightenment thinking about gender” as an example of fundamental tensions and contradictions at the heart of a project that often styled itself as libratory and progressive. On the one hand, ideas of “universal human nature” and “a single universal human form of rationality” empowered critiques of inequalities of social class and institutions. On the other, “gender, like the exotic, was an area of difference,” one that “challenged” universality and was often invoked to justify the exclusion of women and other Others from the vision of equality. The contradiction, Outram argues, was not ultimately resolvable but managed discursively through quasi-positivist appeals to the “evidence” of anatomy, nature, and history. With prejudice and superstition out of fashion, traditional misogynist motifs were replaced with quasi-scientific “facts”: “images powerful in former times of women as shrews, harlots or Amazons retreated, and were replaced by numerous medical and scientific attempts to define social and cultural differences between men and women [and existing social inequalities] as ‘natural’ and therefore right and inevitable.”12
This notion of the later eighteenth century as a time when talk of the freedom and autonomy of the (white, male, educated, politically enfranchised) subject was coupled with new techniques of subjugation and exclusion of Others is a widespread critical orthodoxy. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century writers seeking to explain the moral paradoxes of modernity—the origin of totalitarianism and fascism, the social and intellectual rationales for discrimination and exploitation, the basis for inequalities in human value, and so on—turned to the Enlightenment for answers. Indeed, the very idea of “Enlightenment” as a project is now generally approached through such critiques: students are likely to know of the sexual double standard, rise of empire, racism of anthropology, fetishizing of the primitive, internalization of discipline and surveillance, degradation of knowledge into a commodity, irrational deployment of rationality, and disenchantment of the world before they have read texts whose utopianism made them vulnerable to critique. The idea that this period developed new ways of disciplining the human subject to justify and maintain oppression of the many by the few is as much an orthodoxy of current understanding as was the earlier emphasis on mottos of progress, freedom, and ideals of shared humanity.13
Depending on one’s political position, the contradiction will be more or less contained within specific contexts. Outram, for example, represents a middle point that is characteristic (loosely speaking) of liberal, humanistic scholarship. She passes over any Marxist-inspired critique of emerging capitalism as a source of inequality, or as representing the interests of specific social levels; differences attaching to class, social position, and wealth are noted but not accorded separate treatment or structural status in this vision of Enlightenment and its discontents. However, she affirms the feminist critique of sexual inequality in a chapter of its own. Singling women and ethnic minorities out as the “losers” (in chapters 6 and 7, respectively), Outram leaves one with the impression that white men were the “winners.” It is notable that she does not address Foucault’s critique of the disciplining of the human subject through the internalization and self-administration of intrinsically oppressive norms of “the human”: to do so would have jeopardized her overall plot.14 Arguably, then, even Outram’s penetrating critique of the Enlightenment does not proceed far enough, leaving intact the illusion that, for the chosen few, freedom was real.
With regard to the subordination of women, Outram’s emphasis on the insidiously constraining role of medical views of the female body is perhaps overstated, at least from the perspective of my particular German context. The assertion that Enlightenment medicine and science insidiously naturalized female inequality by pointing to the “evidence” of female mental and physical weakness makes for easy reading today because it is