Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter Stefani Engelstein Christine Lehleiter. Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 323 pp. Christine Lehleiter's engaging first monograph delves lucidly into the complex currents of scientific and literary investigations into heredity in the period around 1800. Lehleiter's contribution to this growing field includes fascinating accounts of breeding experiments on plants and animals, medical literature on hermaphrodites, and early naturalist speculations on species transformation, culled from painstaking archival research. Her approach leads to provocative new readings of work by Goethe, Jean Paul, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, as well as to a [End Page 313] more robust understanding of the diversity of the theoretical landscape surrounding questions of individual identity, species identity, and transmission of traits. Lehleiter's interdisciplinary analyses also enable her to discover in the works of her chosen literary authors an implicit theory of the relationship between literature and science that has enjoyed significant and lasting influence and that establishes literature as a legitimate site for interrogating scientific methods, theories, and jurisdictions. Lehleiter opens with a readable and informative history of ideas about the inheritance of traits, culled from texts on medicine, natural history, and breeding. The quest to understand the transfer of traits, both physical and mental, merged with speculations about their metamorphosis and their retention, leading to debates about the possible transformation of species and to evaluations of the effects of inbreeding and hybridization. Here and throughout her volume, Lehleiter demonstrates that reflections on reproduction and heredity at the turn of the nineteenth century extended beyond the exclusionary rivalry between epigenesist and preformationist camps familiar from the growing literature in this field. She demonstrates that these discussions implicated humans not only in the context of incest and racial mixing but also in considerations of determinism, education, and identity formation. While an Enlightenment attitude had segregated the human from nature, she argues, thereby creating a space for spiritual or mental freedom, this dualism was threatened by the acknowledgment of human as animal. Lehleiter's subsequent three chapters interpret literary works within the context established in this first chapter. She begins each case study by situating the author within a debate and then turns to an analysis of the way each author comments on and contributes to the emerging definitions of the sciences and humanities. Lehleiter's reading of the Mignon episode in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre forces the reader to confront the neglected surface, namely, of Mignon's body, as indecipherable because truly hermaphroditic, what we would now call intersex. Hermaphrodism, infertility, and infirmity were among the reported risks of inbreeding in the literature on livestock. The offspring of sibling incest, Mignon thus demonstrates for Lehleiter Goethe's insistence on a firm reality of nature that the Tower Society anachronistically denies and screens. Goethe participates in a nuanced differentiation of value spheres both here and in the Mann von funfzig Jahren episode of the Wanderjahre, in order to enable the coexistence of a biological and a moral domain in which the latter is informed but not subsumed by the former. Lehleiter soon moves from animals to plants, where breeding experiments similarly interrogated inheritance and questioned the stability of species in the wake of speculations about evolution (or transformationism, as it was known at the time) that spread from Erasmus Darwin in England to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus in Germany and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in France. Here Lehleiter uncovers intriguing connections between the discourses of transformation in biology and in alchemy. Less amenable to the idea of nature's influence on morality than Goethe, Jean Paul Richter would seem to subvert the logic of heredity in his novel Der Komet, where a kind of speculative self-generation or monstrous poetology substitutes for inheritance—whether of traits or of social position. And yet, this spiritual freedom arises against the fixity of a natural substratum that rejects evolutionary thinking and anchors physical drives in instinct. Richter thus returns to an earlier dualism that adheres to a divine order in nature and a human realm of freedom beyond it. [End Page 314] In her final chapter, Lehleiter turns to explicit considerations...