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Imagining a New World: Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820)

Date Published:

7 June, 2012

Abstract:

The title of Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820) voices the nineteenthcentury imagination of America as the locus of a new civilization in the wake of post-Revolutionary disillusionment. The novel's subtitle, Mehr Wahrheit als Dichtung, echoes the title of the autobiography of Goethe, author of the German Bildungsroman par excellence, Wilhelm Meister. Frölich's title establishes a correlation between new concepts of community and the individual's "Bildung" as the basis for novel forms of communal living in the early nineteenth century. This paper explores the ambivalent legacy of Frölich's text. On the one hand, Virginia has been described as a socialist utopia modeled on thinkers such as François-Noël Babeuf, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Étienne-Gabriel Morelly. On the other hand, however, this new community does not extend equality to women, Native Americans, Blacks, and non-French European immigrants such as Germans. Ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities persist in the North American colony. Frölich's utopia is, therefore, also a dystopia, which is shaped by the same social injustice that provided the impetus for its creation.

 

June 2012: Stephanie M. Hilger is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on gender, class, and race in eighteenth-century British, French, and German literature. She is the author of Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805 (2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as College Literature, Colloquia Germanica, Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Review, Lessing Yearbook, Neophilologus, Seminar, Women in German Yearbook, and in various edited collections. She was awarded a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study for her current book project, “The Warrior and the Traveler: Women in the French Revolution,” which examines the depiction of socially and politically active women in German literature during the thirty-year period following the French Revolution.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 10, Issue 2
Last updated on 04/16/2020