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Amalia Schoppe's Die Colonisten and the "menace of mimicry"

Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858) was well known as an editor, publicist, and popular author in her own time, but she was soon forgotten. She is accorded a place in German literary history as the mentor of Friedrich Hebbel, but rarely as a writer, and until now there has been little response to calls for a reassessment of her work. Here I examine just one of Schoppe's books, the two-volume novel Die Colonisten (The Colonists, 1836). The text draws on traditional topoi of the time in what appears to be a conventional script reaffirming the values of middle-class European society. Drawing on the popular legend of Inkle and Yarico and the concept of mimicry elaborated in Bhabha's The Location of Culture, I attempt to show how the text, in a sophisticated double-voiced discourse, links colonization and middle-class gender relations. Such a reading challenges previous interpretations of the text and the unqualified dismissal of Schoppe's work as trivial and insignificant. (JW)