Interpretación de los Resultados de la Entrevista

Painting, Ritual, and Christian Discourse in Fontane’s L’Adultera (1882) Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to rearrange your sense of reality.

- Simon Schama, The Power of Art345

The title of Fontane’s novel—L’Adultera—already offers a sense of the complex relationship between painting and the world beyond it within the text. Referring at once to a painting by Tintoretto of the woman caught in adultery from the Gospel of John and to the novel’s main character, Melanie van der Straaten, the title raises the question: What is the relationship between the Tintoretto painting and the plot that unfolds following its introduction? One of the novel’s secondary characters claims that “alle Kunst ist

Hexerei,” a phrase that recalls texts of late German Romanticism such as Das

Marmorbild (1818) by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, in which art is not only magical, but even dangerous in its mysterious ability to make dream and reality indistinguishable. Similarly, Eduard Mörike portrays painting as the gateway to a dark, supernatural world in Maler Nolten (1832). But what sort of painted “Hexerei” do we find in a novel that shares more with the social realism of nineteenth-century Europe than with the mysterious forces of romanticism?

In the previous chapters, I foregrounded several aspects of modernity that scholars of secularization theory have identified as integral to a revised understanding of what Charles Taylor calls the “subtraction theory” of secularization. According to the subtraction theory, as science progresses, religious belief falls away, leaving a core of human goodness to flourish. In the first chapter, I introduced this secularization narrative via Storm’s novella Im Schloß (1862) as a backdrop against which the second and third chapters unfold, each introducing complications to the subtraction theory and the scholars that posit those complications. In the second chapter, I examine the ordinary realities of home and family portrayed in Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) in terms of the “disenchanted” world that Taylor describes. In Grüner Heinrich, the disenchanted world is simultaneously mundane and alien for the protagonist who is never able to experience his home as a place of familiarity and belonging. Painting offers an imaginative

experience of belonging, but fails to overcome the disenchantment of Heinrich’s home. In the third chapter I claim that in Stifter’s Nachkommenschaften (1864) painting becomes a means of uniting otherwise exclusive sacred and secular discourses. Art strikes a blow at the secularization thesis’s privileging of rational modes of understanding. In each chapter painting offers an alternative to secularization, or at least it exerts some opposing

pressure to it. But what characterizes the alternative or opposition that is painting? In this chapter I offer sociologist of religion David Martin’s characterization of liturgy and “Christian language” as a model for understanding the function of painting vis-à-vis secularization.

While the novel alludes to Christian liturgical practices such as baptism, confirmation, and church attendance, the efficacy of those distinctly religious rituals

pales in comparison to that of the Tintoretto painting, which is both reflected in the narrative and also shapes it. My argument is that Fontane portrays his characters’

practices of viewing painting in ways best understood in terms of both nineteenth century art history and in terms of religious practice. The result is a conception of art (and

literature) as not only reflective of the deepest values and desires of those who view it, but also integral in their formation. Furthermore, this ritualized function extends to the viewer, who is guided by the literary depictions of paintings to view the novel and its characters in terms of Christian discourse. The notion that art can be understood in terms of Christian ritual allows for the integration of several ideas that are generally thought of as binaries – the sacred and the mundane, narrative progression and repetition, reflection and transformation. The paintings in L’Adultera must be understood as more than literary devices that foreshadow future events, although they certainly do. In the case of the Tintoretto painting, the characters are aware of its predictive power and are thus aware of belonging to a narrative—the narrative of the woman caught in adultery. My claim about the relationship between the painting and the events that unfold following its introduction are two-fold. By combining an examination of nineteenth-century viewing practices with theories of religious practice, an understanding of painting as potent in its potential to shape the audience emerges.

The scholarship on L’Adultera focuses primarily on the significance of gender and the societal conventions of the nineteenth century that are thematized through the protagonist’s transgression of them. Many interpretations of the Tintoretto painting share this focus on gender and conventions. The overwhelming consensus is that Fontane posits Melanie’s affair as self-liberation from an oppressive patriarchal system, which the

painting represents. Henry Garland, for example, identifies the act of adultery as part and parcel of a process of maturation in which Melanie gradually leaves behind the norms and superficial values of high society for more fulfilling relationships. The miniature Tintoretto painting that she receives at the end of the novel reflects a similar growth on the part of van der Straaten, whose small gift indicates that the offense has diminished in his eyes.346 _{Sabina Becker approaches the text, and the painting in particular, from a} gender studies perspective to argue that by viewing and discussing Tintoretto’s painting of the adulteress, the male characters in the novel are shown to perceive women as objects to possess and evaluate.347 Similarly, Katharina Grätz characterizes Melanie’s divorce and remarriage as the rejection of a familiar, conventional narrative for her own individual narrative: “Melanie wird nicht zur Kopie von Tintorettos Ehebrecherin, sondern erhält eine individuelle Geschichte.”348 Here the painting as a copy and a familiar narrative of the adulteress highlights the mimetic nature of gender roles and the reoccurring narratives that society compels women to reenact. Patricia Howe notes that by comparing Melanie to the woman depicted in the painting, van der Straaten reveals his perception of her as his possession, which, just like the painting, he views as an

expression of his own status.349

346 _{Henry Garland, The Berlin Novels of Theodor Fontane, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980): 65.} 347 _{Sabina Becker, “ ‘Wiederhergestellte’ Weiblichkeit, alternative Männlichkeit. Theodor}

Fontanes Roman L’Adultera,” “Weiber weiblich, Männer männlich”?  Zum Geschlechterdiskurs in Theodor Fontanes Romanen, (Tübingen: Franke Verlag, 2005)

348 _{Katharina Grätz, Alles kommt auf die Beleuchtung an: Theodor Fontane, Leben und Werk,}

(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015): 130.

349 _{Patricia Howe, “ ‘Ich hätte so geschrieben’: Fontane’s Reception of Zola,” Fontane and}

Cultural Mediation. Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, (Cambridge: Legenda, 2015): 177.

On the other hand, some scholars’ analysis of painting in L’Adultera foregrounds the novel’s rich intertextuality without much reference to social convention. The fact that the Tintoretto painting is a copy of the original is often a point of interest. The dominant note of Marion Doebling’s deconstructive reading is the loss of the “original” and the “real” amid the copies. For example, she notes that, from the biblical text to Tintoretto’s painting to the copy that Ezechial van der Straaten purchases, there is a “dreifach

gebrochenen Distanz zum eigentlichen ‘Original’” that obscures the original’s

significance.350 For Eva Geulen, the painting’s status as a copy undercuts what appears to be Melanie’s development throughout the novel, for it draws attention to the ways in which her second marriage is indeed a repetition of the first.351 Although Gerhard Neumann shares my interest in the presence of the Christian narrative and ritual in the novel, he argues that as copies, the biblical paintings are robbed of their potential to infuse the plot with the weight of the sacred text. Instead, the works of art fit into a series of clichés and conventions that Fontane uses to reveal the hollowness of the bourgeois society.352 Arturo Larcati, rather than focusing on the fact that the painting is a copy,

350 _{Marion Doebeling, “Eine Gemäldekopie in Theodor Fontanes L’Adultera: Zur}

Destabilisierung traditioneller Erwartungs- und Sinngebungsraster,” The Germanic Review 68 (1993): 9.

351 _{“Hieß es eingangs über Van der Straatens Verhältnis zur Gattin, dass Melanie ‘fast noch mehr}

sein Stolz als sein Glück’ war, so zeigt sich auch der neue Mann am Ende vor allem stolz auf seine ‘süße Melanie’. Und im Kleinformat ist auch der Tintoretto schon wieder vor Ort. Wie im Märchen vom Fischer und sei- ner Frau, dessen letzte Station aus Anstandsgründen ‘bei Tische’ nicht zitiert werden darf, findet sich Melanie ziemlich genau dort wieder vor, wo sie vordem auch schon war, nur ein bisschen kleiner gesetzt – vorläufig jedenfalls.” In “Realismus ohne

Entsagung. Fontanes L’Adultera,” Herausforderungen des Realismus. Theodor Fontanes Gesellschaftsroman, (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2017): 48.

352 _{In “Speisesaal und Gemäldegalerie. Die Geburt des Erzählens aus der bildenden Kunst:}

Fontanes Roman ‘L’Adultera,’ ” Roman und Ästhetik im 19. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Christian Grawe zum 65. Geburtstag, (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2001)

locates it amid a dense web of allusions to Venice (Tintoretto was Venetian) and the sensuality and decadence often associated with that city in literary texts.353 Finally, Lieselotte Voss makes an interesting observation about the role of the painting to reveal the nature of reality: “Die Kunst bildet das Typische, ewig sich Vollziehende ab, sie sagt den Betroffenen im voraus, was in der Realität noch schlummert.”354 Whereas Grätz interprets the painting as a symbol of a calcified convention, Voss claims that it reveals an essential, eternal truth.

While scholars have taken into account the role of the biblical narratives portrayed in several of the novel’s paintings, examinations of them have been far too quick to offer overly simplified explanations of the biblical allusions, either as trappings of the repressive patriarchal milieu from which Melanie escapes, or as empty signifiers in a society that speaks and acts in clichés and copies. The former interpretations tend to focus on the biblical narratives themselves to the exclusion of the network of religious practices and elements in which they are embedded. The latter link those practices and elements to the many idioms, citations, and allusions that Ezechial van der Straaten uses as a means of trivializing ideas and situations that are better taken seriously. For my argument, a close examination of the characters’ practices of viewing art calls for an interpretation that opens up the sacred practices associated with the Christian narrative. In order to shed light on the significance of the viewing practices portrayed in this novel, I

353 _{Arturo Larcati, “Ekphrasis bei Fontane und M.L. Kaschnitz: Zur Tintoretto-Rezeption in der}

deutschen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” In Fontane und Italien: Frühjahrstagung der Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft e.V. Mai 2009 in Monópoli (Apulien), (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011): 122-123.

354 _{Lieselotte Voss, Literarische Präfiguration dargestellter Wirklichkeit bei Fontane: Zur}

offer two sections. In the first, I provide close readings of the passages in which Melanie and Ezechial view and respond to the paintings – while I will focus on the “L’Adultera” painting, I will also refer to the other paintings mentioned in the text – and relate my readings to nineteenth century understandings of painting and its relationship to the viewer. Of particular importance for this section is the tendency of the characters to strongly identify with the situations portrayed in the paintings, a propensity that art history can account for. The second section links those viewing practices to David Martin and James K.A. Smith’s accounts of liturgy – specifically, of the role liturgy plays in societies shaped by secularization.

Although among Fontane’s lesser-known novels, L’Adultera includes many of the elements for which he is known as a novelist—depictions of Berlin’s upper middle class, the restrictions of bourgeois convention, adultery, and a sympathetic female protagonist. Like his famous novel Effi Briest (1896), L’Adultera is the story of the cataclysmic shifts that follow a young woman’s marital infidelity, though Melanie van der Straaten fares much better in the end than Effi Briest does, for she marries her lover and establishes a modest but happy life with him and their child. The painting of the adulterous woman from the Gospel of John is introduced in the early pages of the novel and then again on the final page. This framing of the events with copies of Tintoretto’s painting

“L’Adultera” indicate a noteworthy relationship between the painting and the world beyond it. Her story begins when Melanie’s husband, councilor of commerce Ezechiel van der Staaten, shows her the painting, which he commissioned while he and Melanie were traveling in Venice. He predicts that Melanie will someday be unfaithful to him, like the woman portrayed in the painting. Following this prediction, Melanie does indeed

fall in love with another man, Ebenezer Rubehn, and she conceives a child with him. Although Ezechiel offers to raise the child as his own if she will agree to stay with him, Melanie leaves him to marry Ebenezer. Several years of rejection, guilt, and uneasiness follow, for her divorce and remarriage render her an outcast from Berlin’s upper middle class. Eventually she and her new family find acceptance among the working class. In the last chapter of the novel, Melanie finally experiences a sense of absolution when van der Straaten sends her a miniature painting of “L’Adultera”, which she takes to be a symbol of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Beside the novel’s plot, it is also important to an overview of the short narrative alluded to throughout the text – the biblical pericope from the Gospel of John

traditionally entitled “The Woman Caught in Adultery.” The Gospel writer records that religious leaders brought an anonymous woman to Jesus to see whether he would

commend her stoning for adultery: “Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” The paucity of detail about the woman speaks volumes about her subservient position in her society and specifically in this situation. The writer offers no identifying information beyond the act of adultery for which she was accused. In the eyes of her accusers, she is just one of many “such women.” While others discuss her fate, she speaks only once. The narrative portrays her as contingent on other voices and judgments. Jesus neither condemns nor condones her stoning. His statement instead obscures the line dividing sinner and saint: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” Presumably recognizing that they did not meet this criterion, the woman’s accusers leave her and Jesus alone. Finally, Jesus does not condemn her (“Neither do I condemn you”), but neither does he suggest that she is guiltless. He tells

her “go, and from now on sin no more.”355 _{The writer suggests a destabilization of the} established order – the sinner is pardoned and the religiously pious condemned. It is a pattern that appears throughout the Gospels; in the parable of the “Good Samaritan,” for example, the despised Samaritan receives praise for his mercy, while those respected as pious receive criticism for their indifference.356 We will see that this paradoxical pattern exemplifies the pattern of Christian language that David Martin delineates and that pervades the novel.