Composing the Musicking Woman: Gender and Nation in the Works of Johanna Kinkel

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the still overwhelmingly understudied category of women composers and reinserts women’s voices—through both music and literature—into discourses on nineteenth-century German cultural and national identity. By exploring the long overlooked musical contributions of nineteenth-century women, my dissertation seeks to expand existing scholarship on German nation-building through music. To this end, I introduce the concept of the musicking woman, who features as the central figure of study in my dissertation. Drawing on Christopher Small’s concept of musicking, which reconceptualizes music as an action or event rather than an object, I understand the musicking woman as an active agent in the process of music through composition and/or performance. She is, therefore, not determined by the reception of her work, but rather by her own intention to contribute to a serious musical culture, often as a career. As such, the musicking woman cannot be disentangled from categories of gender, class, race, and citizenship. As its central case study, my dissertation focuses on the musical and literary works of musicking woman, Johanna Kinkel.

By grounding my study in the musical and literary works of Johanna Kinkel (1810-1858), I examine how she negotiated expectations of femininity and challenged women’s role in nineteenth-century bourgeois German society through composition, fictional and non-fictional writing, and music pedagogy. Kinkel’s extensive and diverse body of literature and music offers a uniquely well-suited case study to begin bringing women’s contributions to musical culture into scholarly discourses on developing notions of German national identity. Chapter 1 provides historical background as well as a theoretical and methodological framework for the dissertation. Chapter 2 examines Kinkel’s critique of the Berlin salon, in her novella, Musikalische Orthodoxie (1846/49) and Memoiren (1861), arguing that it was not a productive site for women’s participation in serious musical culture. In Chapters 3 and 4, I explore the relationship between music and women’s political and intellectual agency. First, A Lied, an essay, and the novel, Hans Ibeles in London (1858/61) provide three different perspectives of Kinkel’s experience of the 1848/49 revolutions. Then, Kinkel’s pedagogical work comes into conversation with contemporaries Robert Schumann and Carl Czerny to interrogate the role of music education in girls’ and women’s lives. In Chapter 5, I examine the tensions between nineteenth-century theories of women’s emancipation and Kinkel’s lived experiences. This chapter presents analyses of Kinkel’s unpublished essays from London, Fanny Lewald’s Meine Lebensgeschichte (1861-62), and Malwida von Meysenbug’s Memoiren einer Idealistin (1875). In a coda, I revisit two characters from Kinkel’s novella and novel.

With stakes in the fields of women and gender studies, literary studies, history, and musicology, my project aims to redefine the cultural reach of nineteenth-century women by examining the aestheticization of Germanness fostered by the close cultural relationship between music and literature. Reading music, literature, and autobiography together, I consider a new methodology for determining and understanding women’s stakes in defining their own cultural identity. By bringing feminist discourses from musicology and literary studies into conversation with foundational scholarship on German national identity and musical culture, I reexamine the social and cultural agency of nineteenth-century German women. I explore how women perceived of and expressed themselves in terms of music, how literature symbolically constructed the musicking woman, how class informed women’s musical activity, and how women wrote themselves into national and social narratives through music.