Moving Texts, Moving Communities: Emotions, E. Marlitt’s Fiction and the Circulation of Controversial Texts in Periodicals across Linguistic and Cultural Borders in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe

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This article studies the emotional dimensions involved in the circulation of literature in order to better understand how literary texts can be detached from a specific reception context and incorporated into others. Using the best-selling fiction of E. Marlitt (1825–87) as a case study, it analyses Marlitt’s place in the German illustrated family magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Bower) (Leipzig/Berlin, 1853–1944), before following her texts to the pages of the illustrated fashion and family magazine La Mode illustrée (Illustrated Fashion) (Paris, 1860–1937). Its editor-in-chief and Marlitt’s French translator, Emmeline Raymond (1828–1902), strongly identified with the poetics of the heart embedded in Marlitt’s texts. When sectarian differences and the experience of the Franco-German War severed the emotional community of La Mode illustrée from that of Die Gartenlaube, Raymond had to undertake a painful readjustment of the relations she had woven between herself, her magazine, its readers, Marlitt’s fiction, Die Gartenlaube, France and Germany. By contrast, the very distance of the Spanish political newspaper El Siglo Futuro (The Future Century) (Madrid, 1875–1936) from the emotional communities that identified with Marlitt’s work facilitated its partisan adaptation of one of the author’s novels, aligning the emotionality of the text with a Catholic media campaign for the re-Christianisation of Europe. At a theoretical level, the article combines Sara Ahmed’s relational approach to studying the emergence and circulation of emotions with relational models of periodicals and translations. Overall, it argues for the need to consider the complexities and interrelatedness of contact zones between readers, texts, publishers, translators and distributors when studying the circulation of literature across linguistic and cultural borders.

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Raymond’s diary of the siege of Paris in La Mode illustrée provides an essential background for her much more interventionist approach to the translation of Marlitt’s texts after the war, which arguably goes far beyond changing the nationality of the villain in Reichsgräfin Gisela from French to Italian. Her additions and elaborations in Barbe Bleue suggest that she had developed an increased awareness of plot elements and language use that could be read as expressions of German nationalism, and that she was not willing to simply transmit these to her readers. Rather, her rewriting could almost be described as a form of hijacking, not from a feminist but from a liberal as well as nationalist position. (9)

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Even though the readership of El Siglo Futuro was not the target audience of Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell in Spanish, many of its members would have been interested in the novel at what could be called a meta level, inasmuch as the anonymous translation, written and partially adapted specifically for El Siglo Futuro (Anonymous, “Nuestro folletín”), could serve as an example of how Catholic propaganda could be combined with lay reading for pleasure. Meticulous scrutiny and rewriting of the French source text through the lens of Catholic dogma forms the basis of the adaptation. [...] Additions to the text go, however, beyond ensuring perfect Catholic orthodoxy. The translator uses every opportunity to point out supposed forms of Protestant heresy and lack of sense in comparison to Catholic truth.(13)

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Emotions are an important dimension of the movement of texts. Combining textual analysis with insights from periodical studies and translation studies opens promising avenues for understanding how emotions shape, and are shaped by, the ways in which texts move between literary systems, especially in the absence of archival sources concerning the agency of editors and translators or the reactions of historical readers. Marlitt’s moving texts are an apt example. The textual analysis of the novel Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell shows how the author invited readers to engage with the emotional turmoil experienced by its protagonist. Readers witnessed a fictional education addressing hearts and minds, which mirrored the programme of the illustrated family magazine Die Gartenlaube, the medium in which the public first encountered Marlitt’s oeuvre in serialised form. Marlitt’s fiction thus became an important part of the specific emotional community interpellated in the periodical. (14)