Cross-Dressing Strategies in Benedikte Naubert's Fairy Tale Novella Der kurze Mantel

Until the advent of feminist studies in the last twenty years, Benedikte Naubert shared the literary destiny of many German women writers of the Goethezeit: one of the first professional and most prolific writers of her time, she was largely ignored in German scholarship. This essay tries to re-evaluate Naubert’s contribution to German Enlightenment culture through the case 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 works on two levels: it invests her fiction with male authority by reproducing the misogynist spirit in its portrayal of women as rivals, thus allowing her to avoid male censorship and gain access to publication. On the other hand, the analysis reveals that Naubert’s use of cross-dressing ultimately serves to deconstruct dominant gendered identities and give voice to suppressed discourse. The article seeks to address the questions of how literary disguise is accomplished on the level of plot, motifs and style, its impact on the narrative structure, and its influence on gender discourse into the next century.