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

From the growth of biotechnologies to controversies about epigenetics, evidence of a renewed anxiety concerning the line between biological and social life is present everywhere on the global stage. Christine Lehleiter’s Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity is a genealogical intervention in these debates. Its wealth of fascinating documentary material from the present as well as from the period of its focus (around 1800) is complemented by a central insight: that the problem of the autonomous self and the bounds set on it by heredity reveals that pre-Darwinian cultural techniques and their symbolic negotiations are at least as fascinating for our current worried discourse as are those more familiar strains of thought that stretch from high imperialism to fascism. One result of this study is that this earlier discourse—in which “heredity” is a complex problem of simultaneously economic, protobiological, and legal provenance—is perhaps more fruitful for present thinking on these issues, marked as it is by a predisciplinary framework that does not demand unidirectional causal determinism between fixed abstract entities like “biology” and “the social.” Lehleiter suggests that the well-known debate about epigenesis and pre-formation bears a closer resemblance to the current debates about life than one might at first suspect (a suggestion also made by Catherine Malabou in Before Tomorrow (2016). Lehleiter seeks to demonstrate a crucial role for literature in this threshold moment in the history of knowledge.

Lehleiter leaves open the relationship between “biology” (before it was named such just after 1800) and a literature not yet enclosed in the boundaries of a professional philology, writing that “biology becomes a leading discourse around 1800 in the sense that it gives thematic impulses for other disciplines … [and that] literature increasingly assumes a correlative function, showing the potential limits of the supposedly ‘rational’ scientific claims” (17). The exposition of this problem reveals that contingency is a crucial hinge in this shift, raising a number of questions. If artifice and nature are briefly coupled, does this not introduce contingency into the result? Is the boundary not a priori undermined by the fictional setting, making narrative’s construal of life always formally contingent on the specific difference to a composite biological standard of knowledge, here wonderfully depicted in statu nascendi?

The book includes four chapters, one introducing the problematic of heredity through the development of animal breeding, and three on Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hoffmann respectively. Breeding of sheep led to attempts to determine a nonartificial way of separating between species and determining heredity, including the Linnean principle of fertile offspring, the equilibrious distribution of forces within and without the individual organism, the imagination of the mother, and climate (56–57). An account of Kant’s anthropology of race illuminates this history, and vice versa, suggesting that climate as well as habit might set limits to biological constraints. The section concludes with an interrogation of the Allgemeines Preussisches Landrecht and its treatment of biology—including a prohibition on incest—in the context of legal inheritance, illuminating literature’s outsize role in dealing with this problematic.

The literary chapters are dominated by nonclassical narrative strategies, “monsters of the mind” (198). The career of the animal breeder and experimentalist Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter is extensively examined in some of the most illuminating passages in the book. He had an “emphatic notion of imagination” (198), suggesting that narrative might play a role in setting limits to nature. The incest taboo is analyzed through the examples of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister and Nikolaus Marggraf in Jean Paul’s Der Komet. Lehleiter’s original thesis is that Mignon, the famously androgynous child who is the product of sibling incest, is biologically intersex, a claim supported here by historical documentation of the treatment of cases of intersexed individuals in the period. The Tower Society erases this characteristic in its embalming practices, and the eighth book of the novel can be interpreted as a critique of this kind of policing. The...