Gesten schreiben

Abstract

The article reads Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde focusing on the written gestures she describes in the remembered and imagined encounters with Goethe. Based on the rhetorical devices of actio and ekphrasis, Bettina von Arnim establishes a rhetoric of bodily interaction, which subverts the restricted gestural codes recommended for women in 18^th/19^th Century etiquette manuals. Thereby she transforms an instrumental actio based on disciplining and controlling the (female) body into a bodily relation to the self and to the word that resonates with female wants.