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

Christine Lehleiter's Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity tells a story about inheritance: not merely how literature and science around 1800 grappled with questions of heredity and the bioethics of incest, cross-breeding, and whether or not intelligence, madness, or various personality traits could be inherited, but more significantly, how these issues remain unresolved and active in our own time. The book thus describes how we have inherited from the eighteenth century the issue of inheritance as a problem, thereby bringing the history of science and literature around 1800 decisively into the horizon of the present. The central interventions of the book, however, may be regarded primarily from two different perspectives, although the book itself constantly insists on blending these two perspectives: first, from the perspective of the history of science, and second, from the perspective of the particularity of the literary act.

The first chapter of the book, which focuses primarily on the history of science, illustrates the ways in which heredity becomes a subject of scientific discourse. Lehleiter notes that the transmission of traits constitutes a problem for both the preformationist and the epigenetic paradigms (the two dominant eighteenth-century models for understanding development): beings who already have their form at the moment of creation (preformation) or who self-organize from amorphous matter (epigenesis) cannot account for consistency in development from generation to generation and between individuals and species.

She thus considers a third model, which she calls the "genealogical model" (35), to address this deficiency. The genealogical model, as described by Lehleiter, does not yet do away with natural teleology—something achieved in the "evolutionary model" of Charles Darwin (35)—but seeks to account for the consistency of development in a way that emphasizes species stability. Lehleiter isolates three "principles" that characterize the genealogical model: the principle of fertile offspring (56), according to which only a species that can reproduce itself counts as a species; the principle of equilibrium or economic distribution (56), according to which modification within a species takes place via an economy of equilibrium (the strengthening of one organ demands the weakening of another); and the genealogical principle (58), which claims that all members of one species can be traced back to a common origin. In general, she argues that many German thinkers sought a middle ground: a conception of natural development that was just stable enough to guarantee order (including teleological order), but not so stable that it would preclude freedom or individuality.

After the first chapter, the book illustrates how competing discourses surrounding heredity shaped eighteenth-century notions of the self, above all in the context of literature. Literary representations constitute a significant site in which such discourses become strategically invoked (or criticized) for the purposes of envisaging what sort of self could emerge from the tension between the supposed autonomy of the individual and the potentially deterministic forces of heredity. In these sections, Lehleiter makes a claim for a specific form of literary agency: the literary act does not merely illustrate a scientific episteme, but probes its limits and explores its imaginative possibilities.

Chapters 2–4 focus mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96), Jean Paul F. Richter's The Comet (1820–22), and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs (1815). Discourses that invoke heredity—whether in cases of inbreeding, hybridization, or the inheritance of insanity—function like resonance chambers that allow Lehleiter to develop surprising readings for each of these texts. With a deft degree of sensitivity and refinement, Lehleiter does not allow the science to overshadow the power of the literary text; instead, the two domains reciprocally illuminate one another. The scientific discourses open new possibilities in the literary texts, just as the literary texts resignify scientific discourses within contexts of action and emphasis saturated with tensions and ambiguities.

Drawing on contemporaneous biological discourses of inbreeding, Lehleiter thus reads Mignon in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship as the hermaphroditic offspring of an incestuous...