The Frauenzimmer as Sensoryscape: Forming an Enlightened Feminine Identity

Abstract

The Frauenzimmer, the enlightened woman’s private quarters in eighteenthcentury North German homes, offered women an intimate space where they could retreat to take part in personal pastimes such as reading, viewing images, and playing music. Publications intended for use in the Frauenzimmer were meant to enhance and enliven a woman’s sensations, facilitating not merely diversional entertainment but a multisensory experience that contributed to forming her individual morality and feminine identity. Matthew Head suggests that eighteenth-century German women were “emblem[s] of social, moral, and artistic ideals,” performing music in their private sphere as a means to participate in feminine values of the Enlightenment. To extend Head’s argument, this essay will examine publications for women of the Bürger (citizen) class to construct the ways music, literature, and engravings intersected to turn her Frauenzimmer into a multidimensional sensoryscape in the formation of her individual taste. Moreover, I will demonstrate how Lieder (songs) found in these publications could enliven the Frauenzimmer with sound, offering a unique experience of performing German womanhood through the combination of music and text. I propose the concept of sensoryscape in order to envision the experience of NorthGermanBürgerinnen, who would have engaged their interconnected physical,