Cross-dressing Strategies in Benedikte Naubert’s Fairy-Tale Novella Der kurze Mantel

Prior to the advent of feminist studies in the last twenty years, Benedikte Naubert shared the literary destiny of many German women writers of the 'Goethezeit'. Despite being one of the first professional, and most prolific, writers of her time, she was largely ignored in German scholarship. This essay re-evaluates Naubert's contribution to German Enlightenment culture through a study of her fairy-tale novella Der kurze Mantel (1789). In particular, it investigates the forms and functions of narrative cross-dressing, a technique of creating a complex first-person male voice that dominates the story. This narrative strategy, as employed by Naubert, works on two levels. By reproducing the misogynist spirit in its portrayal of women as rivals, it invests her fiction with male authority, thus allowing her to avoid censorship and gain access to publication. On the other hand, this analysis reveals that Naubert's use of narrative cross-dressing ultimately serves to deconstruct dominant gendered identities and give voice to suppressed discourse. This article seeks to address the questions of how literary disguise is accomplished in the novella on the level of plot, motifs and style, its impact on the narrative structure, and its influence on gender discourse in the years to come. © 2012 The author.