IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY, unlike in today's parlance, domesticity (Häuslichkeit)—also referred to as domestic bliss (häusliche Glückseligkeit)—had overwhelmingly positive connotations. As an integral part of the complex discourse on the pursuit of happiness, it captured one of the most intimate longings of the time. Without its former religious connotations of beatitude or the blind Baroque fortuna as an (undeserved) coincidental good luck or serendipity, around 1800 the concept of happiness relied on the self-discipline of an examined life well lived (eudaimonia). The active quest for well-being and bliss was thus the topic of moral philosophy, pedagogy, and the new psychological science of Erfahrungsseelenkunde and the popular holistic dietetic-macrobiotic treatise, Makrobiotik, oder die Kunst das Leben zu verlängern (Macrobiotics or the Art to Extend Life, 1796) by the physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762–1836), who connected medical knowledge with psychological, moral, and spiritual arguments to describe his central concept of Lebenskraft (life force). A well-managed lifestyle that enhances this life force, according to Hufeland, contributes to happiness because it intensifies all experiences and pleasures. Interven in their nature, these disciplines all focused on the holistic vision that humans can enhance their lives by enriching their social, material, and cultural environment. A main site for this enrichment was the feel of home and women's role in its creation.

One finds in the fiction and non-fiction of the period in question numerous thick descriptions, in Clifford Geertz's sense, of domesticity: visions and fantasies of home life that cast it as highly desirable. Such descriptions shaped the understanding of the social and cultural world and contributed to values and dispositions.6 I argue that domesticity—real or imagined—was a high-stakes discursive formation that was still essentially unsettled, unstable, and under vigorous discussion in the German States around 1800. For the men and women of the bourgeoisie who were the drivers of sociocultural reforms, an orderly and well-managed domestic sphere and the emotional climate it engendered became an important ideal for modern self-formation.