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Abstract
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In Part II, Chapter 9 of Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities, the narrator quotes diaries of the heroine Ottilie. They serve as an encrypted pastiche from Hamlet and Winter's Tale: Goethe stages Denmark and Bohemia as the cradle of modern astronomy (Tycho Brahe and Kepler); furthermore, he makes us associate the Sicilian princess Perdita (who returns from the "coast of Bohemia") with Ceres. the asteroid discovered and rediscovered in 1800/01 by Sicilian, Hanoverian and Saxon astronomers (Piazzi, Olbers and Zach). Olbers regarded asteroids as remnants of a destroyed planet; his view is symbolized in the "wreath" of "asters" decorating a "common grave" (Ch. 3). The achromatic telescopes used by them are depicted as "greenhouses", for they reduce the time lag (arc minutes and seconds) of colorful "blossom" (aberration; Ch. 9). The contemporary political crisis of Sicily and Hanover is suggested in the sorrows of a "gardener" (the British King George III). Like the Bohemian King Polixenes praising the "bastards" of dianthus, the gardener could "challenge nature itself" with his various "carnations" (forming a large family with natural grandchildren); as Polixenes is followed about by the faker Autolycus, the gardener also becomes suspicious of "commercial gardeners" (French and Russian negotiators administering the parterre de rois at Erfurt, 1808). Ottilie encourages him in his work; embodying the light of stars, she supports the sea power in navigation. Her "emotion" illustrates the orbital movements of planets and asteroids. In her diary, she alludes to flowered portraits of Nicolaus Copernicus by praising the night work of poor "street children" - i.e. planets begging for sunlight and offering conic "bouquets" of its reflection around the ecliptic - as an awakening "present" (like that of Santa Claus or St. Nicolaus). Then she caricatures the dramatized struggles over sovereignty by describing deciduous (family) "trees", the song of "nightingale" (Procne in Birds of Aristophanes), and what she calls a "comédie à tiroir" (the last scenes of Winter's Tale); the comically divergent gazes of reunited characters put the Hobbesian model of sovereignty in question, for the image of drawers (tiroirs) serves elsewhere to suggest the Hobbesian subordination to the sovereign's gaze (Ch. 2) and to illustrate the accommodation of eyes (the zonule fibers are strained: Ch. 18). In Ottilie's funeral procession, the wreath of asters on her motionless "head" symbolizes the failure of Olbers' accommodation theory (he ascribed it to the transformation of cornea). At the end of Ch. 9 and Ch. 17, the semiannual growth of "summer plants" suggests Olbers' and Bessel's plans for parallax measurement.
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