SOURCE: Goodman, Katherine R. “Through a Different Lens: Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's Views on Gender.” In Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, edited by Elke P. Frederiksen and Katherine R. Goodman, pp. 115-41. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Goodman discusses Arnim's radical views on gender, claiming that Arnim rejected the traditional alignment of male and female traits as binary oppositions in favor of more diverse possibilities.

Around 1800 polarized gender characterizations found permutations in a wide variety of literary, philosophical, anthropological, and political speculations. Binary terms, explicitly or implicitly evocative of gender, began to dominate fundamental philosophical positions. In German culture this period is marked by the engendered conceptualization of life by authors like Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Immanuel Kant (Hausen, Hoffmann). Polarized terms ranged from life/death, dignity/grace, and sublime/beautiful to Europeans/native Americans; and each pair evoked...