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Tableaux Vivants and Triviality 159
desire, tableaux therefore performed peculiarly compelling cultural functions
in the early nineteenth century. Though unable to rise to the level of high art,
tableaux vivants' revelation of women and their desires was ultimately not a
mere matter of entertainment.
IL Reading Low-Culture Tableaux in the High-Culture
Wahlverwandtschaften
The issue of the display and ultimate containment of feminine desire via tableaux
vivants accompanies their deployment in Goethe's 1809 novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften.
In that text, two sets of tableaux vivants are performed, one
that centers on the boisterous daughter of Charlotte, Luciane, and one that centers
on Ottilie. It is a critical commonplace that Luciane is brought into the text
to offer a negative foil to Ottilie, with this contrastive pairing being nowhere
more apparent than in the tableaux vivants. Indeed, Luciane's participation in
the tableaux would seem to be the most lavish attempt to entertain the large
group she has brought with her. Ottilie's later series represents a much more
subdued, even sober presentation, yet one that is much more crucial to the text
for the way it forces Ottilie to reckon with her submerged inner desires and
take on a saintly role.
Though this disciplinary function allows Ottilie's tableaux to be analyzed
more thoroughly in terms of contemporary audience expectations than
Luciane's, in most respects, Luciane's performance nevertheless conforms to
what I have been describing as characteristic of tableaux. For one thing, men
such as the Architect and the Count arrange the staging. In recent accounts,
Luciane's performance in her three tableaux scenes (van Dyck's Belisarius,
Poussin's Ahasverus and Esther, Terborch's Eatherly Admonishment) has been
interpreted as representing a narrative arc.^" In each successive scene, Luciane
progressively alters her appearance so as to conform to an aesthetic that finds
beauty in female paralysis and speechlessness. By her third tableau vivant,
the narrator laments: "hatte sie [Luciane] nun gar gewuBt, daB sie schoner
aussah, wenn sie still stand, als wenn sie sich bewegte [...] so hatte sie sich
mit noch mehrerem Eifer dieser naturlichen Bildnerei ergeben."^' Luciane's
not explicitly knowing that standing still and keeping quiet would make her
more beautiful suggests that her success in the tableaux vivants is a surface
effect. Indeed, the narrative registers nothing of Luciane's emotions or movements
between the scenes. Although the narrator's descriptions of her body
triple in length as the cycle continues, offering detailed descriptions of most
of her body, there is no indication of Luciane's desires being contained, or how
the tableaux affect her internally (HA6: 392). Perhaps because she does not
internalize this aesthetic of feminine paralysis, the narrator resumes his biting
criticisms of her as soon as she moves again, continuing even after she has left
the text (HA6: 395).