A bored married couple invites a man and a young woman to their estate, without realizing that these two new elements make other attractions and couplings likely. Love is presented as an irresistible chemical force, pulling partners apart in a quartet of friends.
Elective Affinities, Goethe's third novel, is an elusive
book. Even Goethe's contemporaries didn't know how to explain it: was
the great author in this tragic story of persons attracted to each
other as by some natural force, against which nothing helped,
pleading in favor of marriage or rather against it? The novel was
even misunderstood as a metaphorical argument for the chemical origin
of love (as in the tendency of chemical species to combine with
certain substances in preference to others)! Written in a detached,
even august tone (the principal characters always maintain the
strictest decorousness, no matter how strong their feelings) and
composed with well-balanced care, the novel itself is an expression
of Weimar Classicism, a movement
inspired by the humanistic, classical art of Greece and Rome, of
which Goethe was the foremost proponent.
Elective Affinities tells the story of Baron Eduard and his wife Charlotte, wealthy aristocrats who have married each other for love after earlier marriages of convenience. They live on an idyllic country estate near Weimar (to which the action of the novel is limited) and spend most of their time managing and improving the estate. No expense is spared on garden design, the construction of a summer house, road improvement and church restoration. Then they decide to bring some variation into their life of rural idyll by inviting a couple of visitors: Eduard's best friend, Otto – in the novel usually called "the Captain" – and Charlotte's beautiful, docile niece, Ottilie, an orphan who is just coming of age.
Goethe here introduces the chemical metaphor of “elective affinities” – as in an experiment in chemistry, also in human relations instant recombinations may take place – this is what the title of the novel points at. Or is there a free choice ("Wahl")? When Eduard and Charlotte start playing games with their own and otter’s lives, they will notice that things can easily get out of control – human nature is different from the nature in their park and cannot be so easily mastered. There are perfectly good reasons for inviting The Captain and Otille, but doing so can very well upset the balance between Eduard and Charlotte. The house and estate become as it were a chemical retort in which human elements are mixed for an experiment.
And indeed, the inevitable happens. At first these four people get along famously: they take long walks together and in the evenings make music. But it gradually becomes clear that Eduard is strongly attracted to Ottilie and Charlotte to the Captain. Charlotte and the Captain, two rational characters, struggle against their inclination, without transgressing any borders; but Eduard helplessly succumbs to his affection and the young Ottilie also falls for the older man. They are both emotional natures and their lives will end tragically as they are unable to keep the necessary balance.
Charlotte confronts her husband but refuses to agree to a divorce. So both Eduard and the Captain leave the estate for a trial separation – Eduard starts living apart on one of his farms and later decides to join the army (it was the time of the Napoleonic Wars), even though Charlotte has just given birth to his baby. The second part of the novel introduces new characters, such as an architect who decorates a chapel in the village church; and the Assistant of Otillie's college who is in love with her. We also see Charlotte's exuberant, hyperactive daughter and her extravagant wedding party to a rich Baron, brought up by Goethe as a contrast to the quiet and serious Otillie. Otillie, for her part, grows more and more ethereal and has started a diary in which she mainly writes down impersonal maxims.
But when Eduard returns, things quickly come to a head. When he unexpectedly appears before Otillie, who is out in the park carrying his and Charlotte's baby, she panics so much that she ends up dropping the baby in the lake. The first victim has been made, but it will not end here. Seemingly harmless at first, the experiment which toyed with real feelings has gotten out of hand and finally will have deadly results. Eduard later commits suicide, and Otillie in the end dies of anorexia. She is buried in the newly decorated chapel of the village church, in a glass coffin, and the villagers adore her as a saintly figure...
The novel ends with the transfiguration of Otillie, who is seen as a saint by the villagers. This may be because Goethe himself was a bit in love with her character – although married, even until high age he entertained spontaneous passions for various young women. One could say that he has written what can almost be called a postmodern novel about the conflicts those passions caused in him.
The Writer: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) needs no introduction, although he is perhaps more famous – especially in Anglophone countries – for his poetry and verse drama Faust than his novels. But it was a short epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its glorification of love suicide, which propelled him to fame in 1775. Less popular were the two more deep and difficult Wilhelm Meister novels (written between 1795 and 1829), about self-realization and the philosophical idea of renunciation. The present novel, in German called Die Wahlverwandtschaften, was published in 1809 as Goethe’s third one. It deserves to be much better known in English lands, as it inspired both Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and John Banville’s The Newton Letter, with their partner switching between two couples (John Banville even copies the names of the characters of Elective Affinities in true postmodern style).
English translation: There are excellent modern English versions in Penguin Classics (by R.J. Hollingdale) and Oxford World’s Classics (by David Constantine). Both have interesting introductions. The original German (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) can be found at Gutenberg.
Influence: Both The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and The Newton Letter by John Banville allude with a similar set-up to Elective Affinities.