It is out of convenience that people have spoken and that we still speak today of romantic women since, in truth, there is no type of “the romantic woman.” Furthermore, that is what is fascinating about this handful of young women who knew, I think, before Rimbaud’s injunction, how to reinvent love.
And paradoxically this evocation that fits Bettina so well could more or less fit all women of romanticism to the precise extent that none of them takes pains to be: they are. And they are intimately, innocently, impudently, madly, scandalously, tragically but always, always superbly.
(1) How, when the feminist idea had hardly begun to exist, did a few young women spontaneously find themselves risking their lives in the alarming freedom of being what they are?
(2) How is it that contemporary feminists, otherwise eager to find ancestors, have up to now literally censored the existence of these women of romanticism?
Of this revolt, without which the idea of freedom is reduced to being only a means of socio-economic development, without which love is reduced to an individual weakness; of this revolt, of this thirst for the absolute, one hears not a word in contemporary feminist discourse, and that is, as far as I am concerned, the definitive reproach that should be made of it. For I think it is by having had in common with a few young men this absolute revolt, this fierce refusal to adapt to banality, that the women of romanticism knew how to invent their freedom.
I am furthermore persuaded that it is this revolt in common – and specifically because this revolt is in common – that permitted Friederich Schlegal to decide, just as radically as naturally, the question of equality, hoping for “the complete destruction of the prejudices that have established between the two sexes an inequality of rights fatal to him who it favors.” But it is also this revolt in common that incites them all to look to love as one of the privileged paths of this desperate quest of the individual beyond his or her self.
And this is why the women of romanticism merit the privilege of having, despite everything and against everything, reinvented love because they had searched for what women had never before searched for: love becoming knowledge and knowledge becoming love.
"اُس عجیب بیَٹیِنا نے اپنی تمام تصانیف سے ایک ایسے عالم کو تشکیل کیا ہے کہ جو کسی توسیع شده دنیا کی مانند ہو۔ شروع ہی سے اس نے اپنے آپ کو ہر چیز میں اِس طرح غرق کیا کہ جیسے وه پہلے ہی سے اپنی موت سے آگے نکل چکی ہو۔ ہر طرف اُس نے اپنے آپ کو وجوُد کی گہرایوں میں داخل کیا، اُس کا حصہ بنی، اور اُس پر جو کچھ گذری، وه سب اَبَد تک قدرت میں ہی موجود تھا۔۔۔"