Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge (review)

This sturdy book begins with a graceful cover image by Daniel Chodowiecki entitled Cabinet d'un peintre. As the back cover indicates, it depicts the artist "with his family in his study." Eldridge's monograph offers perspectives on the novel and its influence on evolving concepts of the family. Rather than foregrounding individual character development, Eldridge considers the ways in which eleven different novels represent family units, and in the process she reveals how Goethe and his contemporaries (as well as we ourselves) came to understand their roles and rights in and through the family. She examines the structures and conventions of the novel form and situates it vis-à-vis various biological, pedagogical, and legal texts from the period (8).

Eldridge draws on a wealth of canonical as well as less familiar texts; she presents information about early nineteenth-century readership in general and argues that "any sharp divide between canonical literature … and trivial literature … is to a large extent the creation not of the eighteenth century but of more recent decades of literary scholarship" (8–9). Among the so-called "trivial" examples she cites are books that were immensely popular in their day and that likely had a yet unexplored influence on contemporary attitudes.

Goethe's novels frame the book, which begins with references to Werther and ends with extensive comments about Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The book is divided into two parts and includes helpful, often extensive notes. Beginning with biological and pedagogical theories, Eldridge explains how ideas of the preformation of anatomy and character were replaced by conceptualizations of selfhood as the product of epigenesis, defined as the sum of influences or education experienced, differently, by each individual. Here she discusses debates between Haller and Wolff and between Blumenbach and Kant.

Eldridge considers themes of misrecognition and distance in Caroline Wobeser's Elsa, oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte (1795), Caroline Auguste Fischer's Die Honigmonate (1801–2), and Johann Jakob Engel's Herr Lorenz Stark (1795). She discusses "epistolary multiperspectivism" (69) in Sara Reinert (1806), a novel written by two Dutch women but edited and translated by Johann Gottwerth Müller, as well as in Sophie Mereau's Amanda und Eduard (1803). She presents a section on Schlegel's famous essay "Über Goethes Meister" (81–88) and discusses the role of pedagogical institutions (88) before concluding her consideration of epigenetic thought.

The first segment in the second part of the book concerns the influence of the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (ALR) and questions of inheritance on novelistic production, showing the challenging effects that deliberations about the future have on these novels' protagonists. Via multiple examples of what she terms "testation," Eldridge discusses legal and adoptive heirs, narrative inheritance, indirect testation in documents, written cultures, and the writing of life. She discusses Therese Huber's Die Familie Seldorf and Sara Reinert and August Lafontaine's Karl Engelmanns Tagebuch (1800). There is a brief consideration of "perhaps the most famous instance of an embedded text" (125): the scroll that Wilhelm Meister receives toward the end of the Lehrjahre. Finally, she discusses "testation without an heir: confession and the reader as receiver" (129–44). Here she addresses three pieces of confessional literature: the famous "schöne Seele" from Wilhelm Meister and two other, anonymous confessions ostensibly written by Friederike Helene Unger. The first anonymous confession is that of a poisoner—a criminal and lost soul—who blames her misspent life on deficits in her education. The second anonymous confession is that of another "beautiful soul," the Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (1806). The author makes the interesting assertion that "all of these confessions start from the premise that a woman who is not a mother must provide some kind of explanation for herself" (143). She further states: "Although one ought to be cautious about making strong claims that life imitates literature, it seems safe to say that by portraying...