A Second Life in Image: Ottilie and Memorialization in Elective Affinities

Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

Thou art not conquered.                                                         

— Romeo and Juliet         

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), the Christlike Ottilie dies a sacrificial death to atone for the sins of herself and others. Following a series of disillusioning events—which cumulate in the death of Charlotte’s son, Otto, by drowning—Ottilie is alerted of her anomalous presence in the family politic. Her subsequent view of the human body as a transient medium of art and posthumous portraiture as “a sort of second life” reconciles her with the inevitability of death (Goethe 126). Goethe’s novel concludes with the placing of Ottilie’s corpse under a glass structure, which is eerily stable and “full of life,” that serves as a material and simultaneously iconic marker of her person (235). Her image surpasses the longevity of life and transcends into a platonic form. Free from the transience of spacetime and the ad hoc whims of a painter tasked with illuminating bodies with their former vigor, Ottilie creates memorial identical to its referent—herself. In doing so, she fashions a keepsake of her person. Elective Affinities tackles the human urge to wield eternity as seen in the tableaux vivants and preserve life activity through posthumous memorabilia despite its worldly susceptibility to erosion and temporality. In this paper I will discuss the implications of this paradoxical urge to remember in Elective Affinities vis-à-vis the character Ottilie.

The iconic and the un-ionic are two competing modes of remembrance in Elective Affinities: “these entities, which seem lifeless and are yet in themselves always disposed to be active” (Goethe 34). The iconic marker and the un-iconic body are perpetuations of their referent, the deceased individual, but they are not accurate preservations of a life energy. In Part II, a solicitor arrives to discuss Charlotte’s renovated churchyard. Her landscaping project had proved unpopular with the townsfolk because it breached their connection with their loved ones: without a gravestone “the memory of them was thereby, as it were, extinguished” (118). She had relocated the memorial stones of the deceased to level the land and sow it with “with different kinds of clover, now beautifully verdant and flowering” (118). The families are unhappy with the discontinuously between the iconic, the gravestone, and un-iconic markers, the bodies: “it is not the stone itself we are drawn to, but what is contained beneath it” (119). In their view, Charlotte had debilitated the commemoration and preservation of deceased family members for posterity. The solicitor argues the landscaping had spoiled and perverted the dead by removing their memory from their bodily presence: “it is not just a matter of remembrance…so much as of presence” (120). Charlotte retorts, the “concern for the memory of others…is mostly selfish,” and rebukes the solicitor’s point with her own: “the likeness of a person [is] surly an independent thing [from the body that] stands for itself” and therefore “we shall not require it to designate the actual place of burial” (121, 120). In Elective Affinities, she reflects the human inclination to “fix” things apart from their natural lifespan by resisting their subordination to the perpetual movement of the universe (Mücke 72). Charlotte’s failure to accommodate the preferences of the majority, the townsfolk, arises from the argument that unlike the body, those energy of the deceased is eternal in essence and cannot be unended by her moving of representative artifacts. Therefore, moving the gravestone away from the body does not inhibit the capacity to honour and respect the dead: “[the stone] stands for itself and we shall not require it to designate the actual place of burial” (Goethe 121).

All forms of commemoration are susceptible to temporality and decay: “Time maintains its rights” (Goethe 126).  Both iconic and un-iconic memorials are incapable of preserving life because they are inherently transient entitles. In response to Charlotte’s landscaping, the Architect states his opinion that art, an iconic medium, is the chief perpetuator of life because posthumous portraiture recreates the feature that best satiates the memory: “the finest memorial is always the person’s own image” (121; emphasis added). As such, the townsfolk “are not being asked to give up remembrance, only the particular place” (120). According to the Architect, the opportunity to perpetuate life “is the dearest wish of every architect and sculptor” but “only very rarely is the artist able to bring [them] back to life” (120, 121). Here the Architect recognizes two discontinuities. First is the discontent between producer and product; the artist cannot reap enjoyment from the commissioned portrait as the deceased subject was, most likely, a stranger to the artist in life and because the product will be given away or physically produced on something out of material reach, like the chapel walls: “like a child provided for, [the art] no longer reaches back to touch its father” (131). Secondly, the Architect notices the general temporality of material substance: “[the Architect] would not be able to stay for ever in such perfect company” of decorated chapel ceiling (124). The term “company” refers to Ottilie and her angelic doppelgängers plastered on the walls: “the faces too…began to manifest a peculiar quality: they all began to look like Ottilie” (128). It is here that Goethe begins to explicitly foretell Ottilie’s death and rise to saint status in the concluding climax of Elective Affinities: “perhaps only Ottilie could feel herself to be among her own kind [at the chapel],” the Architect remarks, in a “state of innocent sufficiently” where “every character there seemed meant for an act of worship” (124). Notwithstanding Ottilie’s unique mastery over eternal mementos, the referential powers of memory practices are limited to span of the natural erosion of all things—the gravestone cannot last forever. “Is everything we do done for eternity?” she writes in her diary following the dispute with the solicitor, “do we not leave on journeys only to return?” (125).

For Ottilie, death is not a departure from life but rather a de-dramatized way to perpetuate her life. Attempting to memorialize human life activity is a futile endeavor because of the body’s temporality and the shortcomings of memory (recall Ottilie’s concern about insufficient “sign[s] of remembrance” and memory aids for the townsfolk (Goethe 120)). It is impossible to preserve a corpse, the un-iconic signifier of physical presence, and the iconic images of the deceased, which distract from their absence, forever. For much of the book, Ottilie’s character struggles to reconcile with the lethal and unforgiving authority of time-space: “No one is more enslaved than the man who believes himself to be free and is not” (151). It is the inescapability of time, not the inevitability of death, that compels Ottilie to choose salvation from her sins: “death may seem a sort of second life into which we enter as a picture [and] dwell there longer than in our real and living lives” (126). It is her fear of life itself that “shackled and almost immobilized her gentle nature” (Drake 252). For Ottilie, to die is to become an image, transforming the “human body [into] one lasting, identity-granting medium” (Mücke 73). Death is not a departure from life but a step in the cyclical path of the universe; it is momentary as opposed to the eternal rotation of life, death, and rebirth. In Elective Affinities, a parson dies immediately following the birth of Charlotte and Eduard’s son, Otto. However, “Ottilie gazed at the parson, now gone to his rest” not with pity but “with a sort of envy” (Goethe 174). Ottilie chooses to die because she believes death to be liminal and temporary, and secondly because life, the subjection of the self to time, leads to the corrosion of all things; therefore, an early death would serve as an opportunity to control her memorabilia and create an image that is immaterial and eternal. In a way, death is the preservation of one’s qualities through in-action, which prohibits iconic and un-iconic markers from destabilizing or altering the essence of referent. The referent themselves, the person, is stable underneath the unstable mediums—such as clothing, appearance, body, portrait, and gravestone—like a platonic ideal. In other words, to die on her terms is to embody her platonic ideal and subsequently transcend beyond the human and to the saintlike: “the life of her soul had been killed, why should her body be preserved?” (174).

Paradoxically, those concerned with preserving, capturing, and wielding time itself, are entrained by short, 30 second glimpses of artificially reconstructed images—the tableaux vivants. In Elective Affinities, the tableaux work to expose Ottilie’s active reckoning with the balance of pseudo-life and pseudo-inertia in death. After her return from boarding school, Charlotte’s daughter, Luciane, organized multiple tableaux vivants for the purpose of showcasing her eccentric, irrational character and infatuation with “this art of living pictures” (Goethe 147). For Luciane, the human body is an archaic and monkeylike, but the tableaux are a step above reality, a beautiful illusion that reveal her best features. Ottilie comments on the danger of comparing humans to monkeys in her diary, stating the Luciane gives “in to the temptation to look for people we know behind those [monkey] masks” when “the proper study of mankind is man” (168, 169).  Evidently, the plasticity of illusion evoked by the tableaux is an unstable because it is a constructed façade. The tableaux are physical expressions of fancy, which are as unstable as the monkey pictures (“repulsive manlike creatures”) in comparison to their human counterparts: “Luciane discovered a resemblance between each of these animals and people she knew” (139). Although Luciane’s jealously had kept Ottilie from participating in the tableaux, the Architect decided on “a perfect conception” that was unique to Ottilie’s capabilities: “if she refused there was no question for him but the whole enterprise must founder” (156). Ottilie, tasked with representing the Virgin Mary, bore an expression that exceed art and exuded energy akin to the Virgin Mary herself, so much so that the angels looked “somehow more solid and in need of light” (157). Here Goethe introduces Ottilie’s saintly predisposition: she is “the newly created Queen of Heaven” of “purest humility” (158). However, she felt the frozen façade of the Virgin Mary was disingenuous to her life essence: “now behind a mask,” she thought, subjected to the “sacred guise” of the tableaux (159).

To satisfy their audience, posthumous portraitures and the tableaux vivants produce illusions of their referents. In other words, they are parodies of life and representatives of pseudo-activity that mend the fragmented constellation into an illusion of wholeness. Therefore, a posthumous portrait must picture its subject at their most active, “it provides the best text to his life’s greater or lesser quantity of music,” to succeed (Goethe 121). Thus, portraiture serves a purpose akin to an un-ionic body prepared for burial because the human body is as much a transient art form as a painting or a tableaux: consider how a corpse is an inherently liminal entity, a mediator between life and death, until decomposition kicks in. Moreover, the paintings on the chapel ceiling draw “a line between [the Architect] and the holy of holies” as those with God’s grace are unrealizable by one the worldly artist (131). These intermediaries serve as illusionary and lifelike images for an indefinite period before falling into decomposition, ruin, or in the case of the tableaux, behind the curtain. During the pious presentation of the Nativity of Jesus, Ottilie remarks “by a clever arrangement of the lighting… [gave the] idea that all light emanates from the child” (157). She then realizes that the energy emanating from the precisely crafted tableaux—an energy to which she contributes and with which she engages—will vanish as soon as the curtain falls; likewise, Ottilie’s life essence will cease to be tangible after her death. Once deceased, her body, possessions, character, and purpose will be twisted and wrapped by the ad hoc whims of illuminators tasked with reviving her essence and layer-outs dressing her corpse. It is the inaccuracy of memorabilia that motivates Ottilie to create a perfect image of her essence, which she achieves by detaching from material possessions, surrendering her voice, and leaving behind a perfect image for the world (Steele 46).

In preparation to reap perfection from an imperfect medium, Ottilie withdraws from all things subjected to erosion. To achieve sinless perfection by means of complete renunciation of her worldly affections and disruptive role in the family politic, Ottilie partakes in a vow of silence: “Let me persist in it [and] leave my soul to me!” (Steele 49; Goethe 228). In conversation with Charlotte following the accidental drowning of Otto, Ottilie exclaims that if she can resolve her imperfects then “I [would] not mind what human eyes are looking at me, because then I can face the eyes of heaven too” (Goethe 217). Implicit in the remark is her desire to “face” and become one with the heavens, which are synonymous with eternity itself. Additionally, she revokes worldly connections by removing a miniature of her father that she wore on a chain (“remove it from your breast, remove something … so dangerous to you” but “give it the finest and holiest place in your apartment” (51)) and locking Eduard’s gifted chest, in which “she had hidden a number of notes and letters… various dried flowers [and] lock of her beloved’s hair,” with the golden key around her neck (231). She exchanged of neckwear replaces the fickle image of her father with an eternal symbol of the keys of St. Peter that legitimize divine authority. Now dressed in the clothing she had prepared, placed into an open coffin, and carried into the chapel, “the rising sun gave the flush of life again to her ethereal face” (236). Her body, a fragile iconic marker, exhibits a paradox; her fragile body becomes an image of permanence, in which memorialization seems to last forever (Mücke 70). She is effectively the author of her own death, a vehicle of her own image, and a referent of herself—an ideal created out of imperfect materials (“opposing qualities make an intenser union possible” (Goethe 32)). Only in her dreams, which are characterized by fancy as much as immateriality, could she find consolation; the hovering between sleep—a total passivity to unknown forces—and waking is analogous to Ottilie’s forever limbo between life and death in her “death as sleep” (Drake 255; Goethe 126).

Ottilie transcends her death by redefining it as a state of suspended vitality. Elective Affinities introduces and immediately severs the bond between iconic and un-iconic representations during Charlotte’s dispute with the solicitor. Following the dispute concerned with landscaping and gravesites, Ottilie decides to resolve the bond between fickle, material representations of life by preparing a posthumous image that she, as a metaphysical painter, fashioned for herself at her pinnacle state. What has been characterized as Ottilie’s docile acceptance of her destiny is a silent triumph over fate by unifying the binary: “a decided wish for union” (Goethe 32). Authorship of her own representation enabled Ottilie to find her agency and resolve the binary by unifying the body and image into a single form. Like the nightingale mentioned in her diary, Ottilie “exceeds [her] kind and became incomparable” by rejecting flawed systems of remembrance (179). Charlotte, Eduard, the Architect, and the Assistant are reluctant to recognize themselves as substances no different from a decaying corpse or undecipherable gravestone. In contrast, Ottilie faces her human ineptitude in the face of eternity by fusing her iconic and un-iconic markers and transcend into a state above death. Though deceased, her image is “full of life and full of love” (235). For her, the death is not a rupture but a continuation of the cyclicality of existence and non-existence. Typically hidden by faulty memorabilia and ad hoc whims of illuminators, the platonic ideal of human essence is finally on display.

***

Works Cited

Drake, Patricia. “Ottilie Revisited.” The German Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, 1953, pp. 248–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/401999.

Mücke, Dorothea. “The Power of Images in Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–81.

Steele, Melodie Joy, "Ottilie: Expression of the Ideal of Romantic Childlikeness in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften" (1996). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 5201.