IN THIS QUOTATION FROM A LETTER written to Gunda Brentano on August 29, 1801, Karoline von Günderrode takes Ossian as an inspiration for her wish to challenge a specific gendered boundary: the boundary excluding women from warfare and glory. The disjuncture between a masculine-gendered mind and a feminine body felt so keenly by Günderrode fuels her fascination and identification with Darthula, a princess turned cross-dressed warrior who dies on the battlefield. Through the many female warriors that Günderrode creates or adapts in her work, she explores what Patricia Simpson terms a “female imaginary identity.” The battlefield functions as an imaginary space to transcend gender difference, allowing women to claim and exercise otherwise traditionally masculine emotions like pride, anger, patriotism, courage, and hatred, a space where notions like heroism can be detached from gender (Simpson 106). Or, as Helene Watanabe-O’Kelly states, it allows women to “imagine a space for themselves in which they can think the unthinkable.” As an imaginary space, at least for female warriors, the battlefield has the potential to overcome the disjuncture between masculine desires and the feminine body. Despite, or perhaps because of, Günderrode's frustration with gendered boundaries, in her 1804 epic poem “Darthula nach Ossian,” the potentially liberating space of the battlefield does not enable a reconciliation of a “masculine” mind and a “feminine” body; it does not erase gendered boundaries. This, however, does not mean that the poem replicates the solidifying notions of gender complementarity that were so pervasive around 1800; as Elisabeth Krimmer states, it does not “construe men and women as polar opposites” (Krimmer 137). In one of the few critical analyses of the poem, Krimmer argues that Günderrode exposes the unreliability of traditional gendered signs and, moreover, that the body becomes an arbitrary sign (Krimmer 137 and 34).