Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the last of the universal thinkers. The greatest writer of his age, one of the greatest of any age, he published eighteen dramas, eight collections of some of the best poetry in the German language, numerous essays on art, literature and science, but only four novels. Two of them, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, were among the most influential works of the Romantic era and are still widely read today. The other two, the Wilhelm Meister novels depicting the social development of a young man, became the prototype for the Bildungsroman. Along with Werther, the first confessional novel, Goethe gave the world two literary forms still much used today.
Of the four works mentioned, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's somewhat autobiographical first novel published in 1774, had the greatest immediate impact. The novella's title says it all: in a series of letters a young man tells of his love for his best friend's girl. It's a simple tale, an unremitting expression of anguish, the pain he suffers when he knows he can not have her. But what pain. No one who reads of Werther's grief can escape his agony and hope against hope that the stricken young man will come to his senses and give the girl up. Published when Goethe was only twenty-five, the book was an immediate runaway bestseller-the Werther character attained cult status with young men across Europe fashioning their dress-blue coat, buff waistcoat `in the English manner'-and their attitudes after Goethe's romantic hero. The character Werther, and the first half of his story, were patterned closely on Goethe's own recent experience of unrequited love. Goethe did not choose to end his life in a tragic fashion; he went on to write about it. But his good friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, when disappointed in love, did kill himself. And in the most premeditated manner: wrote some letters, paid his bills, took a walk, borrowed a brace of pistols from a friend, ordered his servant to bring him a bottle of wine, and now alone in his study, shot himself (in the head, one presumes, although just where has not been recorded). They found him the next morning. An eye witness account tells us "There was a great deal of blood on the floor. He must have thrashed about...in his blood...still fully clothed, wearing his boots and his blue coat and buff waistcoat. He then dragged himself to the window"-I like to think for a last look out-then sunk to the floor, where his servant found him, still alive but incapable of doing anything but groan. A doctor was called who "to crown it all opened a vein in his arm..."
Legend has it that following the release of Young Werther there was a spate of Liebestod across the continent with young men (and women) caught in similar situations going so far as to choose Werther's method of resolving life's trials, which prompted leading civic figures in several countries to condemn the novel as a threat to the health of the nation. The Sorrows of Young Werther influenced every aspect of European culture-drama, songs, opera, parodies, decor (illustrated teacups and other bric-a-brac) and poetry, much of it bad. The great writers of the Romantic era (Scott, Pushkin, Balzac) took Young Werther as a prototype. Napoleon, when visiting Goethe in 1808, spoke of it as his favorite novel, claiming to have read it seven times.
Elective Affinities, a novel of illicit relationships published in 1809 at the height of Goethe's powers, is the more important literary work, more complex in structure, more revolutionary in content. The title, which sets out the premise of the novel, refers to the tendency of chemicals to combine with other substances to form new properties, or to put it metaphorically, the capacity of one person, when subjected to strong emotional attraction, to displace another to form a new union. Human attractions, like chemical attractions, cannot be avoided, and (according to Goethe's novel) neither should they be. The major characters in Elective Affinities accept this premise and are quite bold in discussing its consequences: divorce and realignment.1
Goethe was no stranger to scandal. He lived openly with Christiane Vulpius in Weimar for eighteen years and had five children by her. Not until Napoleon's unruly troops occupied the town did the by now famous Goethe bow to social pressure and finally regularize his relationship with Christiane-to show the French a good example perhaps? Goethe had a lifelong interest in the tension that exists between the sensitive individual and the conventions of society that goes as far back as Young Werther, where it became the catalyst of tragedy. In 1808, when the fifty-seven year old Goethe, now a legally married man, fell in love with the eighteen-year-old Minna Herzlieb,2 his life took a turn in imitation of Elective Affinities, the novel he was then writing.
At the story's onset, Charlotte and Eduard, an aristocratic couple, are happily married. But not for long. They invite the Captain, a friend of Eduard, and Ottilie, Charlotte's pretty young ward, to join the household. Eduard is inexorably drawn to the young Ottilie, but rather than be put out by her husband's new love interest, Charlotte admits that she is similarly attracted to the Captain. The scene is set for working out the details of these elective affinities.
We of course live (and write) in a very different world than Goethe's. That being said, no writer today would likely use the structure of Elective Affinities. Right from the start Goethe sets down the ideas of the novel, something like the rules of the game expressed in universal human terms, then goes on to create characters, situations and detail to dramatize them-just opposite from what writers do today-and it works. Part I is a well structured intellectual setup for the complications to follow. Part II, however, which would logically focus on the complications resulting from the changed relationships, ignores them by sending Eduard, a major player, off to war while the three remaining characters dawdle away their days, and much of the novel, in aristocratic amusements-creating new gardens, taking long walks, visiting-filling all of the very long Part II with these distractions while doing nothing to further the story. We hear almost nothing of Eduard, while his attraction to young Ottilie that sent him abroad lies dormant for the major block of the novel. He returns in the short Part III to activate the story's tragic conclusion, predictable to us knowing the romantic turn of mind, but not necessarily foreseeable to the readers of Goethe's day.
In his foursome Goethe created romantic connections so shocking that it would be a century or more before the English novel dared examine such an audacious relationship, a husband and wife openly accepting adultery even if the affairs are consummated only in the fantasies of the characters: a child born to Charlotte and Eduard looks like Ottilie and the Captain because that is who the married couple had in mind when they conceived the girl.. "Take Ottilie." Charlotte cries, "and let me have the Captain, and in God's name let us make a trial of it!" Perfect. In Charlotte's impassioned-and pragmatic-response to overpowering emotions, she defines an era and its literature.
For continental Europe, but not for the English. It was the elastic nature of sexual morality in Elective Affinities, the willful breaking of society's rules without retribution, that so shocked the English-speaking world. Double adultery, a teenage girl, an army officer-this swapping of partners! - English writers dared not touch such a subject (although the aristocrats of London were carrying on in precisely the same manner as was the aristocracy of Weimar). Sex could be whispered, even parodied, but no attacking the institutions. It would take a century for the English to rise to the frank and rational discourse of sexual matters we find in Goethe's novel, if indeed they ever have.3
Goethe's characters come to bad ends, but not as payback for their sins: Eduard, Ottilie, and young Werther accept their fate not out of a sense atonement or guilt, but because they fear the loss of their personhood, that something that embodies their identity. They have become fused with the unattainable love of their life and loss of the loved one spells the end of what makes them who they are. Heartrending. The stuff of best-sellers. And much more in Europe: Goethe's novels became a cultural font of inspiration to artists-story tellers, painters, poets-for generations to follow.
Great romantic novels would be written in the decades afterwards-Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights-but they took the form of the modern narrative. They are not shaped by ideology. Nothing quite like Goethe's two great novels conceptualizing man's response to unattainable love have been done since: live the ideal, and if unachievable, die for it. At the turn of the century the genre's torch passed from novels to film, with predictable results. What Hollywood did with "romance" became kitsch at its best, trash at its worst. It was Goethe's formal, intellectualized treatment of the anguish of love that saved his novels from a similar fate. Although both Elective Affinities and The Sorrows of Young Werther deal with unrequited love, there is nothing sappy about them. The highly charged emotional characters approach their fate rationally: they analyze their predicament, comment upon it at length, and freely choose their tragic response. They are not just swept along on a river of schlock. Hollywood, never a stranger to overwrought emotion, would try repeatedly to match the romantic power of Goethe's novels with all too familiar results-think of the Lana Turner vehicle, Imitation of Life [perfectly titled]. Of the hundreds of attempts to create a memorable "romantic" movie, just one was successful in capturing the tone of classic romanticism, and this was done by working faithfully from Goethe's template. Bo Widerberg's 1967 film, Elvira Madigan, exactly plumbs the soul of Goethe's works. The movie is a faithful retelling of a historical event in 19th century Sweden. Lieutenant Count Sparre, a handsome aristocratic cavalry officer, abandons all-his family, his career, his social standing-to run off with Elvira, a beautiful, and famous, tight-rope walker. Cast out by society, the tragic lovers roam the countryside for a few weeks of nature-saturated romantic bliss, until the forces of convention bring their affair to its fatal conclusion. They pack a picnic basket, gambol in sun-drenched meadows, dance with butterflies, scoop up handfuls of strawberries smothered in cream-and Sparre shoots Elvira, then himself, in the head. True story. Elvira was twenty-one, Sixten Sparre thirty-five. The destruction of the ideal, the inevitable consequence of a forbidden match, the rules of convention destroying lives of genius, the tragic predestination: such are the romantic ingredients first set down in Goethe's novels. Through color and music-Elvira Madigan is one of the most beautifully photographed films of all time and is scored to the Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21-Widerberg perfectly captures Goethe's tragically intelligent tone.
In classic literary romanticism, man can not alter fate, but Hollywood can and frequently does: in the 1935 filming of Anna Karenina, the director chose to kill off the husband Kerinin to allow Greta Garbo to live happily ever after with Count Vronsky. Disgraceful. When life was no longer worth living, Werther, Eduard and Ottilie-Anna too-came to bad ends, and the romantic ideal died with them.
© 2008 by Hugh Mahoney.