Wieland's nude bathers: visual pleasure and the female gaze

In her essays on Wieland, written around 1980, Elizabeth Boa went against contemporary fashion both by praising a neglected writer and by vindicating the role of pleasure in the reception of literature. She noted how Wieland varies a literary topos – a man watching a woman bathing naked – by letting women watch men bathing naked. This topos most often occurs in the pastoral, a popular eighteenth-century genre. Various examples are examined to show that they suggest equality rather than male dominance in relations between the sexes: men watching women bathing in James Thomson and Gottfried Keller; an example involving cross-dressing in Kleist; and finally women watching men bathing naked in Swift, Voltaire and Wieland's Idris und Zenide.