From hermaphrodite to Amazon: The transformation of gender paradigms in Lessing, Goethe and Kleist.

Abstract

My dissertation explores the complex relations of works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist to the paradigms of gender available in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in light of late twentieth-century theories of gender. Using the ideas of critics like Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur as models, I explore instances of gender ambiguity in works by these authors. Laqueur uses historical paradigms to develop his idea that a shift in paradigms of gender occurred in the eighteenth century. The purpose of this dissertation is not to defend the historical accuracy of this claim. Rather, I use Laqueur's terms, his notion of a two-sex and a one-sex model to explore the conflicting models of gender presented in literary works. While Laqueur posits that one model replaced the other, my readings of these texts suggest a more complex interaction between various models. By emphasizing the intertextual dimension of literary works, I show that, in literature, two or more models of gender can coexist and sometimes conflict, as the intertext exists in uneasy relationship to the text. My first chapter, on Lessing's two dramas, Miss Sara Sampson and Minna von Barnhelm, argues that they present two different models of gender identity. The theatrical, one-sex model allows for the crossing of gender boundaries and the establishment of multiple identifications, particularly with female characters of classical dramas, such as the Medea plays of Euripides and Seneca. The two-sex, novelistic model posits a legible, usually female body. The second chapter, on Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, examines the novel's many gender-ambiguous figures. The Amazon embodies the conflicts of the transition from a one-sex to a two-sex model of gender, but nonetheless also represents the harmonious complementarity that supposedly characterizes the two-sex model. The hermaphrodite, on the other hand, poses a greater threat to gender norms because it resists assimilation to either gender category. My third chapter, on Kleist's, Penthesilea, focuses on the exchanges of role between the protagonists, Achilles and Penthesilea, in light of their identification with Achilles and Hector of Homer's Iliad.