Marriage as a National Fiction Represented Law in the Modern Novel Dagmar Stöferle Marriage as a National Fiction Dagmar Stöferle Marriage as a National Fiction Represented Law in the Modern Novel Dagmar Stöferle Institut für Romanische Philologie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München München, Germany ISBN 978-3-476-05909-3 ISBN 978-3-476-05910-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05910-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 N ovel and Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 M arriage and Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.3 C ouple and Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4 T ext Corpus and Structure of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Marriage Around 1800: Between Contract and Sacrament . . . . . . . . . 15 2.1 S ecularization of Marriage? Sacramentality and Jurisdiction . . . . . . 15 Marriage as Metaphor and Dispositive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Visibility, or Pauline Mystery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Process of Making Visible: The Couple Consensus Between Sacrament and Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 From the Sacred State to the Moral State Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.2 B and of Division: The Revolutionary Marriage Legislation . . . . . . . 41 Divorce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Marriage Practice: Festival, Law, Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 2.3 T wo or Many: Rousseau Between Social and Marriage Contract . . . 52 Julie as the General Will Personified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Modern Art of Government: Julie and Wolmar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Julie’s Death and the Question of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 The Politics and Religion of Civil Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 3 Manzoni: Law and Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3.1 C ouple Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3.2 R enzo in the Process of Profanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Storia della Colonna Infame: Intertextual Self-Assertion . . . . . . . . 94 The Narrator as the Judges’ Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Metapoetics: Logic and Rhetoric of Improbability . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Legal Poetology: Earthly Criminal Law and Marriage Law . . . . . . 105 Renzo’s Irony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Ambivalent Politics of Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Between Mass and Power: Renzo’s Disappointed Revolution . . . . 119 Conversion, Impure and Natural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Nascitur Renzo: The Dream of the Profane Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . 140 v vi Contents 3.3 Lucia in the Process of Sacralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Marianna de Leyva as Geltrude/Gertrude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Included and Excluded Passion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Gertrude, la Signora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Between Action and Language: On the Question of Guilt . . . . . . . . 157 Latent Love: Gertrude – Lucia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Lucia’s voto: Conversion as an Error . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 The Solution of the Vow, Critical of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Communauté Inavouable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 4 Between Märchen and Novel: Goethe’s Marriage Experiments . . . . . . 195 4.1 From the Marriage Novellas of the Ausgewanderten to the Utopia of Domination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Revolutionary Passions and Troubled Marriages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Spouses and Legal Entities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 4.2 Excursus: Romantic Mating, Transcending Marriage (Novalis) . . . . 210 4.3 Herrmann und Dorothea: Epic Disguise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Marriage Idyll and Patriarchy (Voß’ Luise) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 From Dressing Gown … . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 … to Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Marriage of Love and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Apotropaic Pairing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Engagement as a Touching of Opposites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 ‘Purely Human’: Between Aesthetic and National Norm . . . . . . . . 260 4.4 Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Representation of the Production of a (Decision Not to) Divorce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 From the Attempt to the Fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Escalations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 Divorce Prevention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 The Ottilie Case: Double Law and Asymmetrical Appearance . . . . 291 5 Novels on Trial: Notre-Dame de Paris and Madame Bovary . . . . . . . . . 299 5.1 Dynastic Nuptials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 5.2 Marriages of Convenience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 5.3 Quasimodo’s Wedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 5.4 Production and Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 6 Close . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 6.1 Novel and Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 6.2 Marriage and Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324 6.3 Couple and Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Abbreviations CI Manzoni: Storia della Colonna Infame (1840), in: id., Tutte le opere, vol. II/1: I Promessi Sposi. Testo definitivo del 1840, ed. by Alberto Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti. Milan: Mondadori 1963, pp. 675–785. CS Rousseau: Contrat social, ou principes du droit politiques (1762), in: id., Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard 1964, pp. 347–470. FL Manzoni: Fermo e Lucia (1823), in: id., Tutte le opere, vol. II/3: Fermo e Lucia, eds. Alberto Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti. Milan: Mondadori 1964, pp. 1–669. HD Goethe: Herrmann und Dorothea (1797), in: id., Werther. Wahlverwandtschaften. Kleine Prosa. Epen, ed. by Waltraud Wiethölter (= vol. 8 of the Frankfurt edition). Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch 2006 (1994), pp. 807–883. MB Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1857), ed. by Jacques Neefs. Paris: Librairie Générale Française 2008. ND Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482 (1831), ed. by Benedikte Andersson. Paris: Gallimard (folio classique) 2009. NH Rousseau: Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), in: id., Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard 1964, pp. 1–793. OMC Manzoni: Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (1855), in: id., Tutte le ope- rediAlessandroManzoni, vol. III: Opere morali e filosofiche, ed. by Fausto Ghisalberti. Milan: Mondadori 1963, pp. 1–250. PS Manzoni: I promessi sposi (1840), in: id., Tutte le opere, vol. II/1: I Promessi Sposi. Testo definitivo del 1840, ed. by Alberto Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti. Milan: Mondadori 1963, pp. 1–673. UA Goethe: Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795), in: id., Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 9: Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. vii viii Abbreviations Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, ed. by Wilhelm Voßkamp and Herbert Jaumann. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1992, pp. 993–1119. W Goethe: Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), in: id., Werther. Wahlverwandtschaften. Kleine Prosa. Epen, ed. by Waltraud Wiethölter (= vol. 8 of the Frankfurt edition). Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch 2006 (1994), pp. 269–529. Introduction 1 If the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution fades, it decays. (Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence” (1921), in: id. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1977, pp. 179–203; here: p. 190.) … what pairs the pair is not a pair, without, of course, being an individual. What pairs and thus “is,” in the transitive sense that Heidegger demands here, is that which traverses and moves the existing, enraptures it and allows itself to be enraptured by it; in other words, that which carries it along, transcends it simultaneously and suddenly. This is neither one nor two, nor anything that can be counted. (Jean-Luc Nancy, “There is Sexual Intercourse” (2001), in: id. There is – Sexual Intercourse, ed. and transl. by Judith Kasper, Zurich: diaphanes 2012, pp. 7–57; here: p. 10.) 1.1 Novel and Marriage From the very beginning, the history of the novel has been the history of justifica- tion. Hans Blumenberg called the novel the “genre of the bad aesthetic conscience” because its fictional reality expands that which is humanly possible.1 It is no acci- dent, he shows, that Plato warns against poets in his work Republic. Novels not only depict reality, they also have an effect on it, to the extent that the homogeneity of a 1 Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans” (1963), in Hans Robert Jauß (ed.), Nachahmung und Illusion, Munich: Fink2 1969, pp. 9–227. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of 1 Springer Nature 2022 D. Stöferle, Marriage as a National Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05910-9_1 2 1 Introduction concept of reality is lost, their effect gains in significance and they can be regarded as the literary genre of modernity par excellence. By claiming to represent a world, the novel has become a (historical) philosophical object. In doing so, it is related to the ancient epic as, the original fictional reality of a state and criticized or justified as its successor formation. Where Hegel poists that in a bourgeois society which has institutionalized itself in the state, there can no longer be an epic and only a subjec- tive novel of education and development, Georg Lukács, in his Theorie des Romans (The Theory of the Novel), attempts a renewal of the genre as an “epopoeia of the godforsaken world”2 and “form [of a] matured masculinity.”3 His theory of the novel has remained incomplete; the Dostoevsky monograph of which it was intended as a prelude was never written. However, the text remains central to the history of the novel because it pursues novel theory as modern theory and emphatically assumes that one can transcend “the social forms of life”4 with a literary genre. In this way, the novel becomes an aesthetic norm placed above the normativity of a ‘godfor- saken world’ perceived as deficient. On the other hand, in his book Mimesis, whose latent Hegelianism is reminiscent of Lukács, Erich Auerbach does not explicitly place the genre of the novel at the centre of his interest, but rather an entire body of literature, which is described as ‘represented reality’ in selected examples from a span of almost 3000 years.5 Nevertheless, even for the historical-processual concept of realism in Mimesis, the genre of the novel secretly plays an aesthetically norma- tive role. Auerbach’s history of literature begins with The Odyssey, which is com- pared to the style of the Old Testament, and it ends with Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), on which is once again elaborated that serious “attitude of the writer to the reality of the world” which the book pursues in the leitmotif of the mixture of genres. Couldn’t Auerbach’s ‘represented reality’, then, also be described as a represented right of literature, for which the novel occupies a key position? Among the texts analyzed in Mimesis, To the Lighthouse is the only one written by a woman; and perhaps not coincidentally, it is a novel that is about the story of a married couple. Now, as far as the representation of marriage in the novel is con- cerned, the topos of a supposed aesthetic resistance of the subject matter persis- tently arises and persists in modernity. The ubiquity of marriage as a motif in Enlightenment and Romantic literature goes hand in hand with the fact that its rep- resentability as a story and a narrativizable form of progression is contested, or at least aesthetically devalorized. If one understands marriage novels as texts that describe the history of a couple from marriage to the death of one or both partners, one will indeed find little in the literature of around 1800, or one will involuntarily 2 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (1916), Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag 2009, p. 68. 3 Ibid., p. 66. 4 Cf. Ibid., p. 111 ff. 5 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Tübingen/ Basel: Francke9 1994 (1946).