For a fairly simple story, the title of this novel is – let's face – a trifle confusing. “Elective Affinities”? What the heck does that mean?
Fortunately, the novel itself includes a definition. “Elective affinities” is a phrase from chemistry. It's what happens when a substance only reacts with another substance under certain select conditions; that is, it's as if the substance might react with the other substance because it wants to. Of course, chemicals don't really have preferences for particular reactions, but it can seem that way. So, with the word “elective” meaning “by choice” and “affinity” meaning “preference”, in chemistry, a substance might seem to have a preference by choice. The novel “Elective Affinities” is about people rather than chemicals, but the principal is the same. And we're reading about a married couple and their two friends, so you can guess where we're going with this. Uh oh.
The married couple consists of Eduard and Charlotte, who fell in love many years before. Their parents did not approve of the match, so they both married other people. Charlotte had a daughter named Luciane, and a sibling of Charlotte's also had a daughter, so Charlotte has a niece named Ottilie, whose parents have both died. Eduard had no children, and his wife and Charlotte's husband are dead. So, of course, Eduard and Charlotte both being widowed, they married. You'd think they'd live happily ever after, except that then you wouldn't have a novel. And we do, so of course they don't live happily ever after. Not for very long, anyway.
They move to Eduard's estate and start a good deal of landscaping and architectural work. Eduard wants to bring a friend of his to live with them. We don't learn this friend's name; he's called the Captain and he has quite a lot of skill and taste in landscaping and architecture, so it makes sense that Eduard would want him around. Charlotte isn't very enthusiastic about this, but she goes along with it because she wants to have niece Ottilie move in with them – Ottilie is having some difficulty at school and Charlotte is responsible for her. Because Charlotte went along with having the Captain move in, Eduard goes along with having Ottilie move in too. Bearing in mind that the title of this novel is “Elective Affinities”, guess what happens? Yep.
Well, actually, the Captain and Charlotte don't really move toward each other much, though they're obviously in love. Ottilie doesn't make much of a move toward Eduard either, though she's also in love with him. As you might guess, As for Eduard – well, he's a wealthy man in early 19th-century Europe, so I don't really have to tell you what his attitude is, now do I?
The four characters react to these emotional upheavals in various ways. The most notable aspect of these reactions, to me at least, is the gender stereotypes that they seem to fulfill. Charlotte tries her very best to stay away from the Captain, partly because she either loves her husband or thinks she should love him, and partly because she can't seem to face the possibility of behaving like a bad wife. The Captain, too, resists his feelings to the utmost, mostly out of a sense of moral imperative – that is, because he thinks loving another man's wife is not within his own sense of honor. Ottilie loves Eduard very much, but for the most part does very little about it – she embraces him once or twice, but that's about it. Eduard, on the other hand, does just about anything he can to dump his wife and get his hands on Ottilie – he does all this in as gentlemanly a fashion as he can manage, such as asking Charlotte for a divorce, making it crystal clear that he thinks she ought to marry the Captain, and stating his intention to give the estate to her – but he also indicates that he intends to have his own way, come hell or high water.
Anyway, as events catch up with these people – including the birth of a son to Charlotte, with some accompanying confusion as to whether the child resembles Eduard or the Captain – we as readers come to realize that on balance, they agree pretty well that Eduard should be with Ottilie and Charlotte with the Captain. So why don't they switch partners? Mostly, it seems, because social mores won't permit it. Then again, as the title of the novel indicates, they chemically cannot remain with the partners they have at first. And their friends are no great help. One of them considers it his duty to butt in whenever he gets the chance and sort of indirectly lecture them all about the evils of breaking marriages apart. On the other hand, there's also another couple on hand, both from the nobility, who left their respective spouses to be together, regardless of what the neighbors think.
Actually as melodramatic as all of this is, the narrative is very far from the “sturm und drang” (“storm and stress”) style that brought Goethe his celebrity 35 years prior. That is, until the inevitable tragedy ensues, and even that is not as overrun with exclamation points as “The Sorrows Of Young Werther”. Perhaps it's that more relaxed quality that has modern critics call “Elective Affinities” Goethe's best novel.
Yeah, maybe. It's certainly well worth reading. If I said I tended to get a little impatient with some of these characters, would that indicate that my level of literary taste isn't quite up to par?
Benshlomo says, The fact that something is a classic may mean that you have to encounter it some way, but not that you have to like it.
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