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Tableaux Vivants and Triviality 153 for his ability to create unabashedly "high culture" out of a trivial practice such as tableaux vivants, making the Wahlverwandtschaften instrumental in popularizing tableaux performance as a form of "domestic" entertainment in nineteenth-century upper and middle class salons. A similar point can be made about the way Goethe and his novel shaped tableaux vivants' literary life, particularly for women writers such as Johanna Schopenhauer and Fanny Lewald. In their novels Gabriele and Jenny, these authors used tableaux vivants and attitudes to probe not only a fascinating range of issues having to do with female bodies and emotions, including tableaux vivants' role in socializing young women, but also Goethe's own beliefs about women and their place in society. In spite of this strategy, Schopenhauer and Lewald's textual tableaux are usually read to confirm the belief that, as popular women writers, they could only have reiterated Goethe's insights. Paradoxically, their engagement with Goethe's novel worked over time to reinforce a gendered fault line separating great and trivial literature. The high/low divide has compounded the prevailing view of tableaux vivants as trivial, tending to further obscure the complexity of these women's texts and the contributions they made through tableaux vivants. By deploying the notion of a high/low divide, I seek to avoid this limitation. Ratiier than rehash old arguments comparing the "quality" of Schopenhauer's and Lewald's writing to Goethe's per se, I wish in particular to be mindful of canon formation in shaping our approaches to texts, their conditions of production, and their audiences. Around 1800, the boundary between high and low culture was still fluid. The three literary texts in this essay were chosen because their welldocumented interrelationships enable me to reconsider tableaux vivants' cultural status and their impact on bodies and minds as a function of the emerging literary high/low divide between 1780 and 1850.^ I. Tableaux vivants and the High/Low Divide In assessing the "low" cultural status of attitudes and tableaux vivants, I wish first to delineate what I mean by a high/low cultural divide. As Andreas Huyssen argues in his essay "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," high modernism's claim to artistic superiority depends on its disowning of what it considers to be popular, trivial, banal and/or feminine, even as high modernist writers appropriated the "feminine" within their own projects to serve modernism's own ends. As a case in point, Huyssen reads Flaubert's Madame Bovary, stressing that the novel presents the kind of life and literary predilections that ultimately destroyed Emma Bovary only to be able to repudiate them."* At stake in this repudiation is an aesthetic transcendence of dilemmas of real life that, among other things, threatened to overcome the writer himself. As the famous statement "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" indicates, Flaubert struggled with the boredom of quotidian domesticity and the seductive escapes offered
154 Peter M. Mclsaac by pulp literature, aspects of a fantastic identification with femininity that had to be repudiated and suppressed to make great literature.^ By inscribing femininity and the consumption of trivial literature together on the low side of the divide, Flaubert's aesthetic product can lay claim to high-cultural status, attaining the status of "authentic literature" by distancing itself from the taints and banalities of everyday life. For Huyssen, this divide and its association of femininity with mass culture emerged as a function of modernization, receiving its full articulation as the century progresses.'' A gendered, high/low cultural divide began to form around 1800 with respect both to literary and consumer culture. One of the most significant developments at this time was an expanding literary market, driven by growing numbers of women writers and readers.' Characterized as dilettantes in Goethe's and Schiller's "Uber den Dilettantismus," women writers and readers alike were for the most part deemed incapable of distinguishing between the work of art and its emotional effects, thereby defining serious works in opposing and implicitly gendered terms.* If these criteria would one-day result in expectation that the serious writer was almost assuredly male, around 1800 the categories of the professional writer and "high" and "low" writing were still in flux. By its third year of publication, Schiller in fact had to turn to women writers in order to maintain the Die Horen's viability.^ Though, or perhaps in fact because, commercial considerations clearly intruded upon classical literary practices, measures such as these tended to reinforce Goethe's and Schiller's conviction that high literature could and should be distinguished from forms they held were lower (WAI 47: 312-13, 318).'° In this regard, it is worth recalling that Goethe and Schiller attempted, as part of their "dilettante project," to convert Amalie von Imhoff's and Caroline von Wolzogen's writing into "true art" by systematically eradicating its dilettante qualities, only to have the result remain too "feminine" to attain the exalted category of true art." And while Goethe and Schiller's inclusion of exceptional women's texts likely formed part of a strategy designed to lead readers to a better appreciation of "true" literature,'^ that strategy could only function by maintaining a perceptible divide between "high" and "lower" forms of art. However it is viewed, "classical" literary quality requires that "feminine" qualities be expunged or shown to be identifiably foreign elements within a larger literary work. A similar high/low divide can be seen in Weimar-era consumer culture, whose trends were associated with fashionable cultural practices such as tableaux vivants. Fashions in clothing and mass-manufactured home decoration (busts, vases, medallions) shared much of the same Enlightenment heritage and Grecophilic sources of inspiration as traditional Weimar classicism.'^ As Catriona MacLeod has demonstrated, the mass marketing of neo-classical sculptures and other decorative items went some way toward "exporting the image of Weimar as classical center."''' Though prominent Weimar intellectuals profited from this image, they were uncomfortable with, perhaps even
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