3 - Direct Testation: Legal Inheritance, Plot Inheritance, Origin Stories

Summary

Inheritance in the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (ALR)

CODIFIED LEGAL WRITING must necessarily work with generalities, whereas novels portray specific characters in specific situations, and it is true that none of the novels treated here makes explicit reference to legal code. Nevertheless, it is clear that jurists and novelists alike, in their respective fields, were concerned with how property could be fairly (systematically) and sensibly (rationally) transmitted between generations— and with what role the state had to play in guaranteeing this transmission. The ALR thus presents evidence of the attempts in this era to explore and define what constitutes the family; we see this in particular in cases of inheritance that are somehow complex or difficult, such as those of children from morganatic marriages. But this is not to say that the development and introduction of the ALR somehow simply determines and explains independently the plots of the novels. Rather, both novels and the ALR represent two kinds of contribution to the discussion of what testaments are and how they work within the framework of the family and beyond, and reading the two together illuminates both the ways in which the value systems of legal code and certain novels align and the ways in which the novel can vary these norms and standards. This is particularly visible with regard to gender: women's independence before the law and their rights when it came to inheritance were limited and usually required explicit declaration—but in the novel, women often function successfully as both testators and recipients of both fortunes and narratives. These portrayals are no substitute for actual legal standing, but they do suggest that practices of testation around 1800 are both more flexible and more multifaceted than reading the legal texts alone might suggest. Most frequently, as will become evident in the following sections, novels address (and sometimes transgress) prescriptive legal norms by attaching emotional significance to certain types of inheritance, which in many instances takes place outside the realm of actual biological ties.