Citing the Heterosexual Norm Differently? Applying Butler’s Theory on Gender, Body, and Space to a Novel of German Realism (Louise von Francois, Die letzte Reckenburgerin, 1871)

This paper will explore and reevaluate the main arguments in three books by Judith Butler: in Gender Trouble (1990) declares the sex-gender dichotomy as an act of perception, and gender as a performative act; in Bodies that Matter (1993) she includes the role of physicality and citationality, and in Antigone’s Claim (2000) she focuses on kinship trouble in the frame of familial and political space. Connecting three aspects of her theory, gender, body, and space, I would like to ask in an exemplary study how late 20th-century theories are applicable to literature from the 19th century.

Louise von Francois’s, Die letzte Reckenburgerin (The Last von Reckenburg) appeared in 1871. While previous research on this novel asked about the feminist potential of this text by a woman author, I will try to avoid reducing her to an activist of her assumed gender. Instead I will focus on male and female characters whose identity formation is peformative and citational, in terms of gender, body, and space. Francois’ novel deserves particular interest as a novel of realism, because this aesthetic strategy pretends to deal with the real world, but indeed presents a fictional double of reality: characters that undergo identity formation, family relations, private or public education, intersections of private and political spaces, experiences of coming to live and death. The novel as a whole represents a citational act, the question is, to which extent and with which strategies it cites or questions the “heterosexual norm.”