Society and the Sources of Legality in Goethe’s Die natürliche Tochter.

This paper presents a reading of Goethe’s problematic play Die natürliche Tochter (1803) in terms of the law–the specific ways in which French inheritance law treated illegitimate children before and during the Revolution, the legal status of the lettres de cachet, and the more general and ideological terms in which Goethe conceived of the law. Goethe’s source material was the memoirs of Stéphanie Louise de Bourbon-Conti. The most striking change Goethe made to the source material was to recast the husband forced upon her as a respectable bourgeois lawyer, and not a greedy minor royal official as he is in the memoirs. This shift and the play’s ending– in which the heroine Eugenie marries the lawyer and thus renounces her claims to high aristocratic lineage–have given rise to a tradition of reading the play as a celebration of the bourgeois legal sphere. This paper argues that the play is only weakly committed to bourgeois notions of legality and that ultimately it favours a proto-conservative theory of the law and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]