Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter (review)

With reference to the intricate and at times incendiary questions of inbreeding, cross-breeding, and the inheritance of madness, Christine Lehleiter’s study offers a rigorous exploration of how selfhood was conceptualized in the context of a widespread cultural interest in heredity that continues to this day. This is in many regards a bold piece of scholarship, positioning itself—as the title’s implicit reference to matri- and patrilinear discourses already suggests—against the grain of a cultural emphasis on “fraternity” in the wake of the French Revolution. One of the arguments Lehleiter develops after taking this position has precisely to do with the claim that it is insufficient to explain modernity and the development of the self in terms of a rejection of genealogy, a common argument in the British and European contexts around 1800. What distinguishes Lehleiter’s study from others, however, is the remarkable attention to historical detail she gives to the scientific research on heredity around 1800 and how she then uses this knowledge to debunk one commonly held view after the other. This book marks an ambitious intellectual contribution whose historically detailed arguments do not necessarily lend themselves to facile summaries; for that reason, the present review will limit itself to one or two of its significant contributions.

Goethe scholars will be particularly interested in Chapter Two, where Lehleiter’s focus on heredity (here, in the context of incest) allows her to formulate a persuasive argument about Goethe’s key novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years. She devotes her attention to one of the most-debated characters in German literature, Mignon (the child of an incestuous brother-sister relationship), and takes advantage of the fact that the biological dimension of the incest motif has tended to escape critical attention. Working against the common assumption that Mignon is a biological female in male clothing (which would relegate her to a group of Mannweiber in the novel and suggest she had not yet grown into her ‘true’ identity), Lehleiter instead dives into the early nineteenth-century discussion of biological inbreeding to make a case for Mignon’s androgyny. According to Lehleiter, Mignon’s inability to enter a heterosexual society stems neither from a traumatic childhood nor from a failure of Bildung (two common arguments), but rather is the result of a biological problem that also prohibits her from becoming part of the cultural system of genealogy. In the face of those scholars who claimed that Goethe’s contemporaries did not have the benefit of Darwin and Mendel, Lehleiter shows that there was, in fact, extensive documented knowledge about the effects of inbreeding on animals that predates these two thinkers by several decades. She then goes a step further to relate this discourse directly to Goethe’s intellectual milieu, drawing plausible connections to his description of Mignon. It is this attention to historical nuance that allows Lehleiter to make strong claims about the literary case studies she examines. Against the often-repeated argument that personal identity in Wilhelm Meister is a matter of choice, rather than of heredity, Lehleiter shows that our understanding of the novel has been overshadowed by the powerful philosophical discourse of autonomy around 1800, leading to readings of the novel that are too naïve by far.

Lehleiter does, however, remain objective with regard to discussions of proto-Darwinian thinking in the decades before The Origin of Species. She observes, for example, that several key intellectuals (she takes the case of the German Romantics and other writers in their orbit) were hesitant to embrace evolution, preferring a stronger notion of selfhood, but this comment comes with a caveat. In Chapter Three, she offers a compelling reading of Jean Paul’s novel The Comet by situating it within the context of his essay on the emergence of the first plants, animals, and humans as well as in relation to the hybridization experiments conducted by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter. Her focus on hybrid forms in...