Ehe and Entsagung: Fanny Lewald's Early Novels and Goethe's Literary Paternity

Ehe and Entsagung : Fanny Lewald's Early Novels and Goethe's Literary Paternity MARGARET E. WARD Fanny Lewald, born Fanny Markus to a Jewish family in Königsberg in 1811, reveals in her autobiography, Meine Lebensgeschichte (1862), that her merchant father was the central figure of her childhood, the object of her greatest affection, the parent with whom she identified, and the one from whom separation was most difficult. Having first allowed her to be educated at a Pietist private school with her brothers, at the age of thirteen he recalled her into the confines of what she always referred to as her "Vaterhaus." While the daughter by now rejected the domestic model provided by her uneducated mother and longed for significant activity, the father drew up a weekly schedule for her which emphasized domestic duties and hours of piano practicing (ML, II, pp. 213-14). He also dictated her reading matter, which included the dramas and ballads of Goethe and Schiller. Lewald seems to have shared her father's veneration for Goethe, but she specifically records an early rejection by his preference for Die Natürliche Tochter. Eugenie's Entsagung (renunciation ) aroused her antipathy because the heroine's self-sacrifice presented an idealized version of her own father's expectations (ML, I, pp. 246-47). The fourteen-year-old Fanny had already acquired a strong enough sense of her individuality to resist the idea that a daughter should place family above personal considerations and marry whomever her father chose. The otherwise subservient Fanny even dared in this case to openly disagree with her father's positive assessment of Eugenie's humility and renunciation. To her, the daughter's willingness to marry without love seemed unnatural. The drama left her cold, but when she tried to explain this to her father he simply regretted having let her read the work and refused to discuss it further. But Fanny sought personal support for her view. It was well known in the family that her father's younger sister led an unhappy life in a marriage of 57 convenience she had entered only at her brothers' insistence. Fanny often visited this aunt and took the opportunity to discuss Goethe's drama with her, sensing that she would get a fairer hearing. But she was surprised at her aunt's openly bitter response. Es ist Unsinn zu behaupten, dass eine Frau sich an Etwas gewöhnen könne, was ihr abstossend ist. Habe ich mich denn an mein Loos gewöhnt? Ich wusste, das ich mein Todesurtheil unterzeichnete, als ich mich verheirathete, und ich habe es ihnen gesagt. Aber sie haben mir Alle zugeredet, Alle — nun bedauern Sie mich alle! (ML, I, p. 248) These were strong, emotional words, an unusually explicit statement in a family where such matters were rarely talked about. Whether or not Fanny actually made up her mind on that very day that she would never marry except by her own choice and out of love — as Lewald would have it in the autobiography -- there can be no doubt that the unhappiness of her aunt made a deep impression on her and helped to undergird her growing internal resolution to resist the model which was being held up to her in the person of Goethe's Eugenie. In the summer of 1832 Lewald — then a young woman of twenty-one — accompanied her father ostensibly on a business trip. It was her first time away from Königsberg. In addition to a sojourn in Berlin, they made a pilgrimage to Weimar, to Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt am Main, and in Baden-Baden they stayed with an uncle, who could even tell Fanny anecdotes about his personal acquaintanceship with the author she so revered. But other aspects of this journey made a more profound impression on her, in particular the humiliation of realizing that her father's real goal was to find a suitable husband for her (ML, II, 10). He was not successful in this, and he decided to leave his daughter with relatives in Breslau for the winter. It was here that she met and fell hopelessly in love with her cousin, Heinrich Simon. In Breslau Lewald enjoyed...