Revolutionizing Domesticity: Potentialities of Female Self-Definition in Dorothea Schlegel's Florentin (1801)

Scholars disagree on how to read the cross-dressing scene in Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Florentin (1801). While most critics read it as a reinscription of gender normativity, others claim that it challenges gender binaries. In this article I propose a third possibility: contrary to contemporary theory, which posits cross-dressing as a subversive gesture that severs signifier and signified, I argue that the cross-dressing in the novel maintains the essential femininity of the cross-dressing character, Juliane. The subversive gesture in Florentin occurs through rather than against notions of gender complementarity, in part as a displacement of critiques of class distinctions. Since gender complementarity excluded women from the public sphere, Schlegel’s novel constructs alternative possibilities for female self-definition in the private sphere, in the process radically expanding the boundaries of the feminine private sphere.