Vibha Bakshi Gokhale
Walking the Tightrope. A Feminist Reading of Therese Huber’s Stories
Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996. Pp. 119. US $55.95
Reviewed by Marianne Henn
As the title indicates, this book aims to provide an analysis of five of Therese Huber’s stories, using Elaine Showalter’s feminist terminology to uncover the stories’ subtext of social protest. As Gokhale puts it, “women in Huber’s stories negotiate, rather than appropriate, masculine domains” (3). In the initial chapters, Gokhale sets the stage by providing the sociopolitical situation and women’s place in society as well as the politics of women’s writing at the time.
To Gokhale, there exists a disparity between Huber’s life and the themes dealt with in her stories. Her unconventional life, her failed marriage to Georg Forster, and her succeeding marriage to Ferdinand Huber were a source of great notoriety and elicited extreme responses. In her father’s home, Therese Heyne-Forster-Huber was exposed to and, in fact, surrounded by an intellectually stimulating atmosphere, meeting well-known artists and writers, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Gottfried August Bürger, Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, Christian Stolberg, and others. She had a truly amazing and at times very difficult career as a wife, divorcée, mother, widow, breadwinner, translator, writer, editor, and biographer.
The fact that much of Huber’s writing and editorial work was performed without public recognition was due to her need ot provide for her family and her children. She translated from French to German and wrote novels, short stories, and essays under the name of her husband, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. This and the fact that, as a writer, Huber depended on the sanction and mediation of her husband and, later, her son was not unusual for the time and was a situation with which many women writers were faced. Her self-deprecating stance, as far as her literary activity was concerned, was born out of necessity. She proved that she was able to assert herself when she fought to be paid equitably for her work as editor for Cotta’s periodical Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, a position she occupied from 1816 to 1823.
Huber’s thirty-three stories, written over a period of thirty years, were published posthumously in a collection of five volumes by her son Viktor Aimé Huber over the years 1830-33. Unlike her novel Die Familie Seldorf (1795-96), these stories have received little critical attention and deserve a closer look. It is never made quite clear why Gokhale has chosen the five stories treated in the study. However, they are identified with certain traditional elements: In “Die Frau von vierzig Jahren” (A Woman of Forty, 1800) we find characteristics of the Entsagungsroman; in “Klosterberuf” (Calling for the Convent, 1811-14), elements of autobiography and the Bildungsroman; in “Die Jugendfreunde” (Friends of Youth, 1819), the theme of friendship; in “Die ungleiche Heirath” (The Unequal Marriage, 1820), the juxtaposition of woman as angel and temptress; and in “Die früh Verlobten” (Early Betrothals, n.d.), the theme of love versus friendship. Unlike Caroline Auguste Fischer, Huber adhered outwardly to the strategies of women’s writing by presenting the ideals of marriage and family. But, as Gokhale tries to show, there is at the same time a disaffection with the traditional norms, and the contradictions in Huber’s stories between conformism and confrontation “act as an impetus for discussing women’s issues” (29).
The book is written in a clear style and is well structured. However, there are several hyphenation errors in the German texts as well as errors in the German quotations. Both the bibliography and the index are very useful tools. In conclusion, although the book is meagre in its findings, it provides a helpful introduction to Huber as a writer and as a woman.