The male muses of Romanticism: The poetics of gender in Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorff

This essay proposes to open up a new dimension of the Romantic discourse on gender by challenging our critical understanding of the primary of the feminine in Romantic poetic production. Examining the figure of the male muse in three seminal narratives-NovaLis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild-I argue that each text questions the traditional female gendering of its own poetic ground ironically and self-critically, and presents a counterparadigm in which the process of poetic production is coded as male. By setting into play competing discourses that question how poetic production is gendered, the Romantics destabilize conventional models of gender and subjectivity, and suggest that gender itself is produced poetically. The Romantics thus effect a discursive critique of conventional modes of representation that is consistent with current theoretical debates about gender and subjectivity.