Authorship, Gender, Remembrance: Woman and the Problem of Suicide from Lucinde to Wally

In this paper the theme of women and death is treated in the framework of gender theory as elaborated by Weigel, Butler, Bronfen and others. Suicide, traditionally regarded in occidental tradition as a transgressive and taboo act, is argued in this context also to be capable of an (in a sense) positive construction, as the expression of agency, indeed authorship – both of self and oeuvre. It is argued that the celebrated women suicides of the era, from Günderrode to Charlotte von Stieglitz, are best understood not through the lens of the mainstream Judeo-Christian western tradition but that of Romantic theory as set out in Lucinde and fragments by F. Schlegel and Hardenberg. That innovative and unique theory suggests that suicide under certain conditions is a paradoxical act of creative self-destruction, fulfilment of life, monument to and triumph of love over death. It also however appears to be an exclusively female privilege. Thus Günderrode’s death can at one level be seen as morbidly Wertherian and in fact sub-Romantic. At another, it can be seen as appropriating the received Romantic model, exposing its relation to patriarchal discourse (Pygmalion and Galatea) and re-writing it, inscribing it anew onto her body with the dagger as writing instrument. The same, at least in Mundt’s literary monument to her (1835), cannot be said of Stieglitz’s willed self-sacrifice on behalf of her husband’s poetic career. Gützkow’s Wally is thus a savage feminist deconstruction thereof.