Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Julie Koser Susan E. Gustafson. Goethe's Families of the Heart. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 208 pp. In this persuasive new study on family in Goethe's works, Susan Gustafson extends the focus of her award-winning scholarship on male same-sex desire to attend to the multiplicity of affinities and non-exclusive attractions constituting familial configurations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expanding recent scholarship on gender and sexuality in Goethe's literary corpus, Gustafson foregrounds the varied iterations and diverse constellations of the family manifested in works spanning from 1776 to 1829. The aim of Gustafson's project is to illuminate how "Goethe's literary texts provide a counter discourse to the predominant aristocratic and emerging civil constructions of 'ideal families'" (2) by examining "the multiple ways in which his texts challenge common eighteenth-century notions of family and relationships between women and men, men and men, and women and women" (4). At stake in [End Page 300] Gustafson's critical readings is the claim that Goethe "clearly rejects the norms of his time in defining and accepting all love relationships, and in dismissing the notions of ideal civil or aristocratic families" (5). Through careful analyses, Gustafson's book participates in and successfully deepens Goethe scholarship by offering further insights into Goethe's attitudes and views about gender, sexuality, and kinship. Confining its analysis of Goethe's unconventional families to the novel Die Wahlverwandschaften, the play(s) Stella, and the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, primarily, Goethe's Families of the Heart is organized into four chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, readers are presented a concise summary of the historical, political, and legal definitions of family as they emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Gustafson positions this important study on kinship within the existing scholarship on Goethe and establishes the theoretical framework for nuanced readings of the family with recourse to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I and Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity. The first chapter, with its in-depth examination of the changeable and fluid nature of attraction in Die Wahlverwandschaften, functions as a fulcrum for detailed explorations of familial configurations in subsequent chapters. In this foundational chapter, Gustafson persuasively establishes the non-conformist, non-exclusive, and changeable nature of love that permeates the panoply of Goethe's literary families. In chapter two, same-sex relationships between women take center stage in Gustafson's compelling reading of the play Stella. Juxtaposing the two versions of the play's conclusion, the author notes that the drama "presents one of the most daring representations of same-sex desire between women in Goethe's works" (66). This chapter, as well others in which Gustafson exhibits a sustained engagement with elective affinities between women in Goethe's texts, offers perhaps the most innovative and impactful contribution to recent scholarly discussions. The majority of Goethe's Families of the Heart, chapters three and four, is dedicated to the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre respectively, which offers numerous examples of the manifold and arguably unconventional forms of family conceptualized by Goethe. From incestuous attractions, same-sex and heterosexual partnerships, to non-biological, adoptive families, Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre provide Gustafson with the most compelling evidence for her claim that Goethe not only radically redefined notions of family and rejected conformist, conservative definitions of kinship promulgated by the dominant discourses of his time but that such elective affinities "are not only present, not only real, not just acceptable, but (as the Wanderjahre asserts) actually the highest and holiest of feelings that bring relationships and families together" (153). The study's arguments are synthesized succinctly in the book's conclusion which once more articulates the radical and controversial views of family instantiated by Goethe's works that took aim at conservative, restrictive notions of family in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German-speaking society. Gustafson's concluding remarks affirm the transformative potential of Goethe's characters in their pursuit and consummation of elective affinities: "Goethe's stories confront us with not only the persistent...