The Case for Pichler in the Revised Canon

CAROLINE PICHLER IS THE AUTHOR of Frauenwürde (The Dignity of Women), the 1818 novel in this final case study. She was a prolific author. Her collected works are so substantial that their forty volumes outsize most of her peers, including La Roche, filling a scope similar to authors Goethe or Jean Paul. She published and reprinted her oeuvre, thanks in part to a family run press, and many research libraries still have her writing available in older editions. Among her oeuvre are multiple candidates for re-inclusion in the literary canon, which makes her absence all the more disappointing. The reasons are not simple but rather multifactorial. First, her reputation has been subjected to the same systemic trivialization as the five female novelists of the preceding chapters. In addition, the fact that she was born in Vienna leads to her work being narrowly categorized as Austrian, thus erecting a national divide between her and the other writers of this study. However, grouping the novelists of the preceding chapters together as “German” belies the fractured historical borders of middle European nations around 1800: we are rarely reminded that La Roche lived in a Swabian Free Imperial City (among other places), Unger in Prussia, and Wolzogen in Thuringia, and so on. Moreover, there is mutual intelligibility between the German as written by the Austrian Pichler and the German language as written by the Thuringian Wolzogen or the Swabian Sophie von La Roche. These novelists inherited basically the same written language and thus contributed to shaping the same modern German language. While the specific cultural personality of the city of Berlin plays an important role in Unger's novel, Pichler does not name the city in which she sets her novel. She contrasts the court with the countryside, much as La Roche and Wolzogen do, but she leaves open the precise location.