Canonicity, Anonymity, Exemplarity

AS WITH NEARLY ALL OF GOETHE's literary output, the Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (Confessions of a Beautiful Soul) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) is endowed with an irrevocable air of canonicity. The unnamed title figure, generally referred to either as the beautiful soul or as the Stiftsdame, carries with her an exemplarity that by now seems inevitable—though it is noteworthy that scholars remain undecided as to whether she is a positive or a negative example. Nevertheless, this sixth book of the novel, which interrupts the Bildungsweg of the male protagonist to such an extent that Schiller worried that to some readers it might appear “als wenn die Geschichte stillestünde” (as though the story had stood still), is generally viewed as a formative contribution to discussions on religion and feminine identity. This reception history, though we neither can nor should wish to erase it, has the effect of obscuring both the sheer strangeness of the title character and the connection to other texts that also participated in these discourses about family, religious or secular care of the self, and the role of women in society.

Like Goethe's Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, the anonymous 1803 Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself) and the 1806 Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, Written by Herself—likewise anonymous but often attributed to Friederike Helene Unger) are long, single-perspective, first-person narratives supposedly written by women who are unusually unattached. They examine—at length, and with nuance and, I would claim, sensitivity—a mode of life that was ignored or effaced by dominant narratives that idealized the marriage partnership and motherhood, and they begin to advance alternatives to those narratives. All three, by staging themselves as autobiographical confessions created by women, assert the interest and value of the feminine voice even—or perhaps especially—when the female subject remains unattached. None of the three women has children of her own: both “beautiful souls” are unmarried; the poisoner's marriage is destroyed when she proves to be infertile, and she later poisons her husband.