Chapter 2 - Germany through a Female Lens

Summary

Jameson’s writings modelled ethnoexocentrism and cultural exchange and reflected the cross-cultural freedoms and opportunities she enjoyed as a result of her interchange with Germany and Ottilie von Goethe. Her three resulting ‘German’ books advanced feminist agendas in England by way of German models. Visits and Sketches (1834) details the empowerment of Jameson as writer, cultural critic, and intellectual underwritten by solo travels and her commentaries on German women’s literature, art, intellectual exchange, and sociability. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) represents Jameson’s fullest command of contemporary German letters, often by way of writers and thinkers such as Rahel, who were underestimated or ignored by English masculine writers on German culture. Her cultural exchange with Ojibwa women including June Schoolcraft and Schoolcraft’s mother, while more limited, built in part upon the ethnoexocentrism she had learned to exercise in Germany. Social Life in Germany represents Jameson’s work as a translator but, more important, her recourse to German models for alternative marriage and divorce practices she tacitly endorsed for Britain. Her subsequent writings, while not focusing so exclusively on Germany, still drew upon the freedoms and opportunities she discovered there.