The Metamorphoses of Ottilie: Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften and the Botany of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay situates Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften “Elective Affinities” within the botanical discourse of the eighteenth century. According to Foucault, the botanical classification of plants is the paradigm of the old “Naturgeschichte,” whereas biology as a newly emerging science of the living relies on the description of animals. Yet it is the very notion of a sexuality of plants put forward by Carl von Linné that paves the way for new concepts of life as a (re-)productive force. By tracing the scene of a woman being transformed into a plant in texts from La Mettrie to Schlegel and Novalis, this essay suggests reading Ottilie as a figuration of Goethe’s own concept of the metamorphosis of plants. At stake here is not only a new line of scientific reference in Goethe’s encyclopedic novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but also a model of art transcending nature. Whereas Early Romantic poets—following Herder—envision aesthetic creativity as a “Fortpflanzungskraft,” a quasi-biological power of procreation, Goethe transforms not the living, but only the dead Ottilie into a work of art thereby stressing the gap between life and death, nature and art.