A Historical Case Study of Girlhood in Bohemia: Relationships, Agency, and ‘Sleeping Czechness’ in the Autobiographical Memories of Magdalena Rettigová (1785–1845)

Abstract

This thesis examines Magdalena Rettigová’s autobiographical memories to learn about her experience of the relationships that framed and formed her childhood and youth. Taking a new perspective on reading Rettigová, my case study extends our understanding of the complexity of this historical figure, as well as the values that shaped her ideas, agency, and the grassroots of the Czech national identity in Bohemia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Bohemia was an important cultural and intellectual region in the Habsburg monarchy, and Magdalena Rettigová (1785–1845, née Artmannová) became one of the most significant authors of the Bohemian domestic health tradition and an acclaimed middle-class literary authority of Czech national history. While Rettigová’s adult life has been examined mostly in the light of her involvement in the Czech national movement, there has been little scholarly attention paid to her manuscript autobiography and early life. Historians have usually applied a nationalism perspective, nurturing the nineteenth-century portrayal of Rettigová as a matrona, a construct of an exemplary Czech woman who codified Czech national cuisine through her cookbooks. Yet, Rettigová only began to identify as Czech in her adulthood. Born in 1785, she was also a child of the Enlightenment, a Bohemian girl who lived through the period when Bohemia, a part of the Central European multi-ethnical empire, was undergoing a ground-breaking transformation to civic society, and when the Czech nation was seen as deeply ‘asleep’. This thesis investigates what Rettigová experienced during her childhood and youth between 1785–1807, in the times when she was a ‘sleeping Czech’. Framing Rettigová’s reconstructed experience of relationships as a vantage point of my analysis, I organise the memories of her early life within three substantial chapters thematically: family relationships, friendship, and courtship. Keeping in mind the key critical characteristics of the autobiographical texts such as subjectivity and constructedness, my approach builds upon the cultural history scholarship which is interested in the subjective perspectives of people (girls and women) living in the past, applies bottom-up approaches to individual agency, emotions, experiences, and studies ego-documents to extend our understanding of people’s lives and activities within their historical contexts – in this case with a focus on the importance of women’s relationships to their lives and activities. In doing so, my case study extends our historical and conceptual understanding of girlhood, agency, and ‘sleeping Czechness’, contributing to the cultural history of childhood, women, family, emotions, everydayness, and nationalism in Bohemia, an important historical region within a Central European context.