Open to the Public: The Creation of the Museum and the Construction of Gender in Nineteenth-Century German Literature and Culture

Drawing on art history, social history, and literary culture, my dissertation springs from the realization that the dynamics of nineteenth-century European society created the modern museum and consequently brought about a thorough realignment of art, culture, and the politics of representation. I employ the concept of a museum function, or how a culture valorizes, acquires and discards, organizes, displays and hides the objects that articulate its art and history, both within and outside the institutions of museums. Related to a specific text, a museum function yields insights not only into how people collect and exhibit objects, but also how the experience of those collections alters their perceptions and behavior along gender lines. An additional strength of the museum function is that it permits more than one theoretical perspective. Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Elisabeth Bronfen respectively develop powerful arguments about ideology, behavior and gender that facilitate historicized contextualization of collecting and gender constructs.

In my first dissertation chapter I treat Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1809 Die Wahlverwandtschaften in order to explain the logic of Ottilie's death and display as the necessary fulfillment of the novel and its exhibitions. In Adalbert Stifter's 1857 Der Nachsommer, Natalie escapes Ottilie's fate. My second chapter demonstrates that Natalie survives because Heinrich's social education, which depends heavily upon his learning to produce scientific and art collections like those his father and Risach own, leads him to see Natalie as the invaluable, living epitome of those collections. The third chapter maps Rilke's 1907-1908 Neue Gedichte and 1909 Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge as literary appropriations of Rodin's modular and fragmentary method of sculpting and collecting in his "studio-museums." The dissertation closes with a suggestive overview of twentieth-century developments and controversies in museums and literature, on the example of Ingeborg Bachmann's 1971 Malina.