McIsaac_ElectiveAffinities - iSites

Tableaux Vivants and Triviality 171
believe that converting would end the threats of violence and the tortured division
of the self (399-401).
As if to confirm this conviction, Jenny's conversion plunges her into a
"Kreis von Widersprtichen, aus denen nur ein gewaltsamer Ausweg moglich
sein wird" (214), violence that not only destroys her relationship to Reinhard
but also creates an aporia of identity complicating her relationship to
her family and loved ones (177, 208-09). But in similar fashion to Ivanhoe,
Jenny's indictment of religious proselytizing inserts Jews and difference
into German culture, deftly figuring conversion's anguish as a wrong against
German culture. When, in preparing for her new life, Jenny slowly discovers
her inability to accept Christian teachings, it becomes clear that she had
naively thought her "faith" in Bildung—her affinity for Goethean pantheism
and German aesthetics—was the same as being Christian (174). Following
Jenny's profession of belief the narrator explains, "Der Pastor muBte naturlich
sein erstes Augenmerk gegen die pantheistische Weltschanschauung richten,
in der Jenny, ohne es zu ahnen, erwachsen, und in welcher die dichterische,
gewissermassen heidnische Vorstellung der Gottheit ihr lieb geworden war"
(132). Or, as she answers Reinhard when asked about the Trinity, "Nun, eine
Dreieinigkeit habe ich immer gekannt [...] Es ist die Dreieinigkeit der Kunst!
Diese ist mir von jeher einleuchtend gewesen, so sehr, daB ich Poesie, Musik
und bildende Kunst gar nicht voneinander im Innersten der Seele zu trennen
vermag" (138). A well-educated haskalah Jew, Jenny must learn that her behefs
are inadequate for Reinhard not because they are somehow not German,
but rather, and only, because they are not Christian. Jewish heritage is not
erased here in the name of some simple notion of assimilation: Jenny's Jews
continue to affirm their history of persecution and ties to other Jews (40-5,
151-53, 273). Rather, these differences are no more in conflict with German
culture than those between Christianity and Bildung. By dissociating Christianity
and German culture in this fashion, the reader can understand that more
than personal social injustice is at stake when Reinhard cannot bring himself
to wed an unbelieving Jenny, when the Jewish Eduard and the German Clara
are forced to renounce each other, or when the German nobleman Walter dies
for loving Jenny. From the failure of these unions, the text warns, will emerge
a homogeneous German social order predicated on an unnecessary and irrational
exclusion of some its finest proponents, secular Jews. Whatever likeness
Jenny's conversion might have had to Lewald's—and criticism has tended to
approach the issue exclusively in these terms ^^—recognizing the relationship
between Jenny and Rebecca in the tableaux vivants helps to bring Ivanhoe,
and English history and culture more generally, to bear on the interpretation of
Jenny in a more complex way than scholarship has so far managed.^* In Jenny,
the low culture tableaux vivants are an integral part of the narrative, advancing
the novel's critique of certain Goethean notions such as feminine renunciation
even as it affirms others. Perhaps because it has been on the wrong side of the