'Great passions are a hopeless sickness. What might cure them is what really makes them dangerous.'
A penetrating study of marriage and passion, Elective Affinities so disturbed its first readers that, although an established literary giant, Goethe was to remain an uneasy and scandalous figure. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocrats with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into their lives; against morality, good sense, and conscious will, all four are drawn into relationships as inexorably as if they were substances in a chemical equation.
In a merciless study of the lives of people who are living badly, Goethe not only poses questions about free will, but portrays characters sunk so far in convention, fear, and unnaturalness that even the dawning of a more vital life must appear to them as something terrible and destructive.
