The rediscovery of writings by women during the early modern period has both challenged and expanded the canon, and deepened our appreciation of the diversity and vitality of literary production over the past several hundred years. In Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act, Wendy Arons uncovers no previously unacknowledged masterpieces; in fact she is scrupulous in recognizing the ephemeral nature of some of the works she discusses. Nevertheless, the works she selects provide us with novel and often fascinating new perspectives on the public image of the actress at a time when modern illusions—and delusions—about femininity were at a crucial stage in their growth.

Not all the works Arons discusses will be unfamiliar to scholars of the period. Sophie von La Roche has long been acknowledged as the first important woman writer in German literature, and her novel The History of Lady von Sternheim (1771), in addition to being translated into several languages, has been recognized as a significant source for theatre historians of the late eighteenth century. Equally valuable are Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld's Memoirs, which were not published until the twentieth century. But Arons has also unearthed works that will be familiar to few scholars—Marianne Ehrmann's quasi-biographical Amalie: A True Story in Letters (1788), the popular writer Elise Bürger's somewhat sensational Labyrinths of the Female Heart (1799), Friedericke Helen Unger's bildungsroman, Melanie the Foundling (1804), and Sophie Mereau's wonderfully brash and liberating stories “Marie” (1798) and “Flight to the City” (1806).

Arons argues that it is impossible for women to sustain the actuality or illusion of female subjectivity in both theatrical and extratheatrical contexts. Rousseau, she maintains, had posited the “ideal imagined woman,” who “was expected to be modest, chaste, honest, loyal, subordinate to her husband, a good mother, patient, kind, generous, self-sacrificing, demure, fragile” (17). This epitome of virtue was automatically assumed as fundamental to all representations of conventional femininity on the German stage; exceptions, such as Marwood in Miss Sara Sampson, served only to highlight the need for perfect transparency among women of virtue. Such a figure is, however, highly problematic; the moment virtue displays itself, either on the stage or in society, it is no longer virtue, which is by nature unselfconscious and artless. Because virtue is a natural expression of female subjectivity, any instance in which it is conscious of itself becomes strategy rather than spontaneity and loses its authenticity as virtue.

It is this unsolvable dilemma of representing virtue onstage and in public that is Arons's theme. As life in the public sphere is dominated by men and the ability to perform effectively is essential to success in that sphere, men are expected to be able to dissemble, to hide rather than display emotion, and to adopt different personae. Performance is therefore “natural” to what they are. Not so for women. Arons pursues their dilemma with admirable single-mindedness. As women's writings on the theatre were not at all copious in the late eighteenth century, she does not have a wide range of material to choose from; nevertheless, the literature available to her allows her to view the phenomenon from several different angles. She explores the tension between the prevailing antitheatrical ethos with regard to feminine subjectivity and the need to perform; the novels she examines frequently question whether virtue in the performer was essential to representing virtue successfully onstage. Arons then contrasts the submission expected of women within the domestic sphere to the self-sufficiency required to flourish in the theatrical profession; she often discusses her findings with regard to contemporary acting theory and drama, especially Lessing's bourgeois tragedies Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti.

One might, however, question whether “Theatre and Performance History,” the Palgrave Studies series in which this book is published, are central to her interests. Her grasp of feminist theory is impressive, and it allows her to formulate some shrewd insights about the works she discusses. She does not, however, discuss her findings with relation to the acting history of the time. If she had done so, she might have found some intriguing parallels between the fixation with the presentation of “authentic” female subjectivity and male actor's concerns that they appear to be spontaneous and artless in their own performances onstage. It was Iffland who first theorized this concern in the Mannheim Protocols, where he gave it a distinctly nationalist twist—French actors engage in flamboyant display of themselves; Germans represent what is true and pure. In light of Iffland's own acting, his statements are, to say the least, problematical. But a writer of Wendy Arons's perspicacity could undoubtedly shed interesting light upon it. This is something she has not done here, but her book is a notable addition to the literature on acting at a crucial phase in its development and conceptualization.