Goethe's "Elective Affinities": An Interpretation (review)

Goethe Yearbook 257 historical, and sociological background. Here, however, as in the chapter on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the author presents an uncritical summary of the action and presumed purport of the novel without giving sufficient consideration to the possibifity that Goethe used even his most sympathetic fictionat characters ironically and had them voice ideas and doctrines (about education, for instance) that he did not share. The most recent (and most illuminating) criticism on the Wanderjahre is not dealt with. In general, it seems that the book under review is based on scholarship of the 1970s and earlier, and that more recent scholarship has been dealt with only in the endnotes. It would have been preferable to have reworked the newer criticism into the main body of the text. In sum, in spite of a useful discussion of Goethe's relationship to the Enlightenment this study is a disappointment, and I fear I can recommend it neither for Goethe specialists nor for those seeking an introduction to his work. University of South Carolina James Hardin Winkelman, John, Goethe's "Elective Affinities": An Interpretation. New York, Bern: Peter Lang, 1987. Die Wahlverwandtschaften is perhaps Goethe's most perplexing major work, and has called into being interpretations which as a group are less notable for their variety and number than for their contradictory conclusions. The Elective Affinities — these days possibly the most widely read of Goethe's novels — is, as Winkelman puts it, "the commentator's despair" (4). Oskar Walzel, Benno von Wiese, Paul Hankamer, and many othere have bemoaned the book's opaqueness and ambiguity. Heretofore, Winkelman argues, analyses of Die Wahlverwandtschaften have falten into three general categories: moralistic commentaries (on marriage, divorce, extramarital affairs); metaphysical interpretations that view the novel as an allegory treating the inescapable power of fate, and a third, much less well represented tradition according to which the novel treats primarily the relationship between the individual and society in a broad sense that includes but transcends the relationship of the sexes. This critical line is likewise supported by a statement by Goethe, made in the course of writing the novel, that the novel presented social relationships and conflicts in symbolic form (16). In the firet tradition fails one of the earliest reviews, that of Rudolf Abeken in 1810, followed by many subsequent critics including Walzel in 1906, who concluded that the novel was intended as a warning against the presumed moral laxity of the Romantic school. In Walzel's view, Die Wahlverwandtschaften was meant to counteract the "damage" done by Goethe's much misunderstood Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The influence of the erotic escapades of Philine were to be offset by the renunciant exampfe of Ottilie, or so went the theory. HA. Korff in 1930 views the "moral" of the work in the context of Goethe's classicism, which placed society and the general good over individual happiness. Related to this critical tradition is a line of studies that center on Ottilie almost to the exclusion of all else. Friedrich Spielhagen, in fact, argued that 258 Book Reviews Goethe should have retitled the novel Ottilie and concentrated exclusively on the relationship between her and Eduard. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (1956), Werner Milch (1957), H.G. Barnes (1967), and Esther Schelling-Schär (1969), to name a few, have likewise concentrated largely on the figure of Ottilie and tended to idealize her. The second tendency, subsumed by Winkelman under the rubric "metaphysical school," sees Die Wahlverwandtschaften as a "contest between free will and the power of fate" (12) and was largely inspired by the famous discussion of chemical reactions in Chapter Four, Part I. Such an approach was encouraged by Goethe's own announcement when the book was published that suggested he had used a chemical metaphor to illuminate an ethical problem. Friedrich Gundolf in 1916 claimed that the work basically has to do with laws rather than deeds or events; one finds similar statements in Benno von Wiese's introduction to the Hamburg edition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften , remarks, incidentally, that are more vaguely portentous and inspirational than precise. Winkelman is impatient with earlier interpretations that fait into the first two categories: "surveying these efforts, and those like them, to discern...