Confession and Women’s Writing: Sacrament Envy and the Body in the Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin (1803)

Abstract

Although scholars have long recognized the importance of confessional writing for the novel, less attention has been paid to the way that “confessions” were still commonly seen as a Catholic genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated especially with translations of French authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Originating in monastic and ascetic practice, before being codified by the Catholic church in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the practice of religious confession only gradually came to be secularized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turning to the example of the anonymously published Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, most commonly attributed to Friederike Helene Unger, I make the case that the poisoner of the novel’s title explicitly sees her “confessions” as part of a broader engagement with Catholicism, revolving around questions of materiality, embodiment, and sanctification. (PE)