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Tableaux Vivants and Triviality 161 little Otto's death and stunningly rehearse her permanently frozen display in the glass coffin at the novel's end. The tableaux vivants have profound cultural bodily effects even though they are clearly demarcated as entertainment in Goethe's text, effects the characters notice superficially at best. This is true not only in the case of Ottilie, but also for the Architect, who appears in Luciane's tableau vivant depicting the mourning of Belisar. Later, having heard of Ottilie's death, the Architect visits the chapel he helped adorn with her image, and as he approaches her casket, he strikes precisely the same pose as in the earlier tableau: "Schon einmal hatte er so vor Belisar gestanden. Unwillkurlich geriet er jetzt in die gleiche Stellung; und wie naturlich war sie auch diesmal!" (HA6: 487). Tableau performance has been so compelling for the Architect that he repeats its role involuntarily. With regard to tableaux vivants' ability to affect men as well as well as women, it has been argued that the tableaux vivants do not prove life-threatening to him because the aesthetic values at stake in this painting inscribe a classical opposition between the daring, clever, active man and the quiet, unreflective, passive woman.^^ gut what a reader familiar with the operations of tableaux vivants can likewise appreciate is that this closing scene might be described as a composite, but unannounced tableau vivant whose key elements have been rehearsed by previous tableaux." The dynamics of the "merely entertaining" tableaux vivants are therefore instrumental for this text's high aesthetic functions and pretenses.^"* In Goethe's text, the tableaux' function depends on their association with the revelation and ultimate containment of feminine desire and their retaining the status of entertainment.^^ By means of these functions, the novel inscribes tableaux vivants into a high/low divide. This high/low divide was apprehended in, and reinforced by, the novel's immediate reception. Even readers who had questions about Goethe's intentions were convinced that, though not high art, the tableaux vivants needed to be comprehended in order to interpret Goethe's novel.^^ According to Karl August Bottiger, for instance, the novel's use of tableaux vivants presented an exemplary interpretive problem.^'' In their literary form, Bottiger writes, the tableaux vivants represent a "toUe Zusammenschmelzung" that violates classical aesthetic criteria in much the same way as their extratextual counterparts, making them seem out of place in Goethe's novel.^* Yet their role in the text is clearly too important for them to appear merely as an object of Goethe's scorn, thus prompting Bottiger to ask, "Billigt Gothe also dielJ Spiel?" Even as a "toUe Zusammenschmelzung" and "Verkehrtheit," Bottiger admits that the tableaux vivants help construct Luciane and Ottilie's opposing qualities and also express the complex emotions Ottilie would feel toward the baby Otto, the most immediate impediment to the union she desires with Eduard. Confronted with the perceptible presence of low art in a high art project, Bottiger worries that the novel might lead the reader to accord the tableaux vivants with
162 Peter M. <strong>McIsaac</strong> a higher status than they deserve.^^ More articulate in his assessment of the high/low divide is Karl Solger, who valorizes Goethe's text precisely for its ability to present the quotidian whims of the day as entertainment and, in the process, produce art. As Solger writes. So wie [die Details der Umgebungen] das ganze tagliche wirkliche Leben der Personen immer in gleicher Schwebung erhalten und gleichsam als Folie dienen, so verhalt sich die Einflechtung von allem, was jetzt Mode ist, als Gartenkunst, Liebhaberei an der Kunst des Mittelalters, Darstellung von Gemalden durch lebende Personen und was sonst dahin gehort zu dem Leben der Leser und des gesammten Zeitalters. In der Behandlung dieser Dinge liegt ebenfalls eine Kunst, die ich nicht genug bewundern kann. Sie sind als vollkommen gliltig, wahr und in der Zeit lebendig aufgefasst und von dem hochsten und reinsten Standpunkt aus dargestellt. Sie sind sogar in die Handlung selbst als bedeutend verflochten: wenn zum Beispiel der Architekt am Ende beim Sarge Ottiliens dieselbe Stellung annimmt, die er einst als Hirte in dem Gemalde halten musste.""* As the copula (und) twice indicate, Solger admires this text because it aptly captures the passing fancies of the day in one register at the same time as it manages to use them as a foil for attaining higher artistic purposes in another."" Though the two registers are related, Solger regards the text as art precisely because the strands of the former remain recognizable even when they are woven into the moments of great artistic significance, such as, tellingly, the Architect's repetition of his tableau pose before Ottilie's glass coffin. As Bottiger's and Solger's respective readings demonstrate,"*^ contemporaries familiar with tableaux vivants' operations discussed their important role in the novel's intellectual agenda despite (or perhaps in some sense also for) their remaining marked as aesthetically inferior, female-focused, cultural practice. The high/low divide in Goethe's text was to shape the art form's subsequent practice and literary reception. In his 1810 review, Bottiger presciently predicted, "Gothe's aufregende, lebendige Darstellung wird noch mehrere zur Nachahmung reizen.'"*^ In a review of an 1811 performance arranged by Carl Ferdinand Langhans, Goethe's text provided the idiom in which tableaux vivants could be discussed, in part because the reviewer believed that the text was both widely read and had inspired private performances: Wer Gothe's Wahlverwandtschaften mit Interesse gelesen hat, und wer hatte das nicht, wird im Voraus flir diese Gattung von Darstellungen eingenommen sein...Seit dem genannten Werke, haben mehrere Privatgesellschaften dergleichen Bilder dargestellt, und ein neuer Reiz des geselligen Umgangs ist dadurch hervorgegangen .'^ The new mode of social interaction had become so authoritatively associated with the Wahlverwandtschaften that this reviewer deployed lengthy passages from the novel to illuminate the faults of the observed tableaux vivants (for instance, the failure to replicate the novel's transitions in Ottilie's nativity scenes;
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