3 - Sympathy for the Sublime: Das Blütenalter der Empfindung (1794)

Summary

“Im Vergänglichen lerne ich das Unvergängliche ahnden; und wenn ich über die Irrungen des Verstandes trauere, erscheint mir die Würde und die Unfehlbarkeit des Gefühls desto herrlicher.”

—Sophie Mereau

[In what is transitory, I learn to apprehend the everlasting; and if I mourn the errors of understanding, so it seems to me that dignity and infallibility of feeling are all the more magnificent.]

THE NEXT NOVEL selected for inclusion on the figurative shelf of great books appeared in 1794—that is, more than two decades after Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim and a decade after the first edition of Julchen Grünthal: Eine Pensionsgeschichte. While my approach relies on aesthetic evaluations, my study spans a significant period of time, almost a half-century, and I will therefore look for signs of development across these novels of emotion. Indeed, at the end of the eighteenth century there was a flurry of similar publications by women, and so the competition within this narrow time period is particularly keen. Looking at the timeline in Appendix A to this study and examining the decade around 1794, when Sophie Mereau's Das Blütenalter der Empfindung (The Vernal Epoch of Sensitivity), was published, we find more than a dozen competitors, including Amalie: Eine wahre Geschichte; Hatto Bischof von Mainz; Miß Lony und der schöne Bund; Adolphine; Die Familie Seldorf; Elisa oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte; Agnes von Lilien; Liebe und Trennung; Florentin; Marie Muller; Walther und Nanny; Die Honigmonathe; and Albert und Albertine. While two are on my short list of canon-worthy novels, it is important to note how many more contenders there are. Some are mentioned in the final chapter on this study under “honorable mentions.” Taken together, all these novels of emotion form an interesting corpus of literary culture that has not received commensurate critical attention. This is particularly the case with Mereau's sophisticated and beautifully written novel, which is canon-worthy both because of its development of the protagonist pair technique and its interpretation of contemporary philosophy in its fictional depiction of tender emotions. In lyrical prose, the novel portrays how men and women feel and express pain and pleasure without pandering to commonplaces, thus putting it on the same high level of artistry as the works of La Roche's and Unger.