Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

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Reviewed by: Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Heidi Schlipphacke Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830. By Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Pp. x + 202. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571139597. Goethe’s Families of the Heart. By Susan E. Gustafson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. vii + 199. Cloth $105.60. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-1501315763. The topics of family and kinship have recently enjoyed a renaissance in German studies in light of new approaches to thinking about the relationship between the family model and the state. The shifting contours of modern familial and marriage paradigms, evident in recent legislation supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples, have surely informed reconsiderations of the nuclear family and its origins in the eighteenth century. In addition, the enhanced visibility of both nonbiological affective communities (adoptive, increasingly international, and even virtual) and purely biological relationships (for example, sperm donor families in which members have no connection beyond the biological) spurs us to rethink assumptions about the simple mapping of the nuclear family onto the (imagined) state in the German Enlightenment. For the past few years the German Studies Association has hosted a “Family and Kinship” network that has provided a highly productive forum for new reflections on the shifting connections between blood ties, economics, and politics in German-speaking countries. Sarah Eldridge’s and Susan Gustafson’s books respond to this call for nuance and reconsideration of the definition and function of “family” in the eighteenth century. Both Eldridge and Gustafson have chaired the “Family and Kinship” network, and each has written a book that intervenes in crucial ways with cutting-edge discussions about the intersection of family, economics, politics, and aesthetics. In Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830, Eldridge offers a nuanced study of the ways in which the form of the novel mirrors, responds to, and, in turn, helps shape conceptions about family and generation that emerged in the German states around 1800. Gustafson focuses explicitly on seminal works by Goethe: one play (Stella [1775]) and three important novels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795], [End Page 158] Die Wahlverwandtschaften [1809], and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [1821]), in order to elegantly show us how anathema these works are to any restrictive notion of love. On the contrary, Gustafson convincingly argues, Goethe’s works are not only nontraditional in their critical representation of nuclear families, they are likewise radically progressive (perhaps more so than our present age) in their consistently positive depiction of nontraditional affective bonds, including same-sex, polyamorous, and adoptive ones. In this sense, Gustafson’s monograph could be seen as a companion to Astrida Tantillo’s Goethe’s Modernisms (2010), in which Tantillo forcefully argues for the presciently modern nature of Goethe’s views on economics, education, and religion. Interestingly, although Eldridge’s work is not focused on Goethe per se, she concludes Novel Affinities with a beautifully astute interpretation of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, drawing out the ways in which it offers a subtle metareflection on the relationship between the genre of the novel and shifting notions of generation and testament—two concepts central to any understanding of the family. Eldridge shows convincingly in clear prose how we must think through the form of the novel together with that of the nuclear family, two “genres,” we might say, that are linked to emerging notions of subjectivity around 1800. Eldridge is particularly sensitive to the ways in which the novel—itself a malleable genre that becomes, as Eldridge argues, reflexive almost the minute it emerges as a dominant literary form—invites its readers to what she calls “imaginative engagement” with its material and form. The novel around 1800, she shows quite elegantly, is a literary genre that is not only concerned with the interior development of its protagonists but also with conceptions of generation and testament that are at the core of the bourgeois subject’s understanding of him/herself in the early nineteenth century. What is more, precisely by focusing on generation and testament, two concepts that link the...