Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, The Blue Flower, is a powerful exploration of loss and love as well as the importance of fiction in illuminating both the mundane and the sacred aspects of human life. The novel focuses on a seven-year period in the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg from 1790-1797 before he was known by his pseudonym, Novalis, as the "prophet of German Romanticism." Through the story of the young poet and philosopher, Fitzgerald examines the ways in which love can be both irrational and profound and how seemingly simple aspects of everyday life are, at times, transfigured into something sublime. The novel itself pushes past the boundaries of "historical fiction" into something more insightful: the ability of the imaginary to illuminate reality.
In its fifty-five chapters, the novel reads like a precious, memory-filled stroll through a gallery of small but powerful portraits and landscapes where the characters and places surrounding Fritz Hardenburg are clearly and beautifully revealed. Fitzgerald is less interested in writing the biography of the actual Fritz Hardenburg and more interested in the possibilities of Fritz, his family, his friends, and the young girl with whom he falls in love. In doing so, she shows us how fiction helps to make sense of the world, not by explaining it, but by showing the reader "the interwovenness of our being in the world" (Felski 104).
One of the central themes is loss and the ways in which it permeates our daily lives. The characters in The Blue Flower are faced with losses both trivial and significant. Fritz's precocious younger brother, the Bernhard, mourns the loss of both his red cap, "[i]t was the only thing he had possessed which indicated his revolutionary sympathies" (32), and his status as the youngest child, "[t]here are now two more younger than myself, it will be hard for me to attract sufficient attention" (88). Fritz's mother, Freifrau Hardenburg, mourns the loss of possibility as she realizes "that she was forty-five, and she did not see how she was going to get through the rest of her life" (162). Significant losses occur as well as we see in both the novel proper and the "Afterword" where Fitzgerald tells us, in an almost clinical tone, of the deaths of Sophie as well as five of the Hardenburg children.
The novel also explores the idea that love itself can be a source of loss, as it can lead us to make choices that may ultimately lead to heartbreak or separation. Fritz's love for twelve-year-old Sophie impacts those around him, especially his brother, Erasmus, who, at first, cannot understand his brilliant brother's affection for the "empty-headed" Sophie (101). Although Erasmus later becomes as besotted with Sophie as his brother, his concern for Fritz's choice leads to a "quarrel [which] arose not from enmity but from love" (102). Fritz's irrational love for Sophie also impacts his friend, Karoline Just. She is an intelligent, thoughtful young woman, easily Fritz's intellectual equal, but he is unable to see that she is in love with him. Fritz writes a poem entitled "Reply to Karoline" and the last verse causes her anguish because she realizes "[t]here he was, her non-existent admirer, the unloved Verliebte, conjured out of her own unhappiness, sitting at a table with her . . . ." (89-90). Her only solace is the poem, which, "at least, was for her and her alone" (90). Under Fitzgerald's deft hand, these losses underline and illustrate our own trivial and significant losses in such a way that clarifies our reality.
Fitzgerald uses the seemingly mundane aspects of eighteenth-century German life in such a way that changes the familiar into the fantastic, allowing us "a more illuminated sense of reality" (Dellming 5). Fritz's first experience of the Just household illustrates how one's ability to "see" the world can transform the simple into the sublime. Fritz sees both the parlour and Rahel's niece, Karoline Just, as "beautiful, beautiful" (64). When Rahel questions his perceptions, Fritz tells her, "When I came into your home, everything, the wine decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated" (64). What he sees are "not their everyday, but their spiritual selves" and although these "transfigurations" come to him unbidden, "it was as the world would be when body at last becomes subservient to soul" (64). Fitzgerald thus shows the reader how the mundane can become something exalted and marvelous.
Fitzgerald's novel also explores the vagaries of love and the many ways in which it can be both a source of great joy and great pain. Fritz's love for twelve-year-old Sophie is passionate and intense but also fraught with difficulties and ultimately unfulfilled. She is not Fritz's intellectual equal, an obstacle those around him see as insurmountable; however, Fritz is undaunted by such criticism and concern. In many ways, Sophie becomes a cipher for Fritz; his inability to "comprehend her" to "get the measure of her" confuses him but not does not deter him. Yet, interestingly, for all her lack of intellectual prowess, Sophie remains her own person, a subject rather than an object for Fritz to shape. As he says, somewhat disingenuously, "I do not want to change her, but I admit that I should like to feel that I could do so if necessary" (97). He continues to attempt to capture her essence, even going so far as to commission a portrait of her because he does not "altogether understand Söphgen [himself]" (129).
Another aspect of the novel I found significant was Fitzgerald's portrayal of the female characters, especially Fritz's sister, Sidonie, his friend, Karoline Just, and Sophie's sister, Frau Leutnant Mendlesloh. All three women are authorities within their respective spheres but their intellect and wisdom are often ignored and overlooked by their male counterparts. Sidonie and Karoline run their households even though both are young, unmarried women. Sidonie is in charge because her mother cannot manage the large, boisterous Hardenburg household as she births two children during the novel's timeframe. Karoline Just has managed her uncle's household after the death of his first wife and continues in that role after he remarries. Frau Mendlesloh steps in to care for Sophie during her illness and has a "brusque, semi-military manner, developed since she married at the age of sixteen, her china-blue eyes suggested her mother's assurance, her mother's calm" (111). Both Karoline and the Mendlesloh are the only two people who grasp the significance of the blue flower when Fritz shares his writing with them. In addition, all three women see Sophie as she is, her personhood, her subjectivity. Yet, in spite of their wisdom, the men disregard their intelligence. Fitzgerald illustrates this disregard in a conversation Erasmus, Fritz's brother, has with the Mendlesloh, believing her age and experience are the reasons for her insight and not her intellect:
'The years have taught you philosophy.'
To his amazement she smiled and said, 'How old do you think I am?'
He floundered. 'I don't know . . . I have never thought about it.'
'I am twenty-two.'
'But so am I,' he said in dismay. (209)
It is here, I would argue, where Fitzgerald is pointedly asking us to consider those "shortcomings of history." These perceptive, brilliant women are missing from Novalis' history and we are forced to wonder about the myriad other female voices missing from so many other historical accounts.
At the novel's heart is the Blue Flower, a symbol that Fritz believes represents the ultimate goal of his poetic and spiritual quest. For Fritz, the Blue Flower represents a kind of transcendent, mystical love that is beyond the ordinary world of human relationships and Sophie becomes the embodiment of this ideal. In many ways, the Blue Flower represents a kind of hope or aspiration that is always just out of reach, but which drives us forward nonetheless. It is the objective correlative of the German Romantic ideal; it "is never found in this world; poets may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a glimpse of it . . . but it is vain to try to pluck it" (Boyesen 695). Fritz feels its nearness in Sophie but her early death illustrates the inability of finding and keeping it and the continual desire to search for it.
In the end, The Blue Flower is a novel about the lasting power of hope, even in the face of loss and disappointment. Fritz's quest for the Blue Flower may be ultimately futile, but it is also a testament to the human spirit and the enduring power of the human imagination. What we learn from the novel is that what is important is not the possession of the flower, but the search for it. Ultimately, this search for meaning and purpose gives our lives depth and richness, even in the face of insurmountable loss.
There are literary works that haunt me. I remember reading for the first time Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones. For several years after, scenes from the stories would come to me unbidden, almost as though they were half-forgotten memories. Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower will take its place alongside Ficciones and the novel will become a memory of lives I never lived and people I never met.
Works Cited
Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth. “Novalis and the Blue Flower: The Romantic School in Germany.” The Atlantic, 1875, pp. 689–698.
Dellming, Elisabet. “Imagination, Irreality, and the Constitution of Knowledge in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, vol. XXIII, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–11.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2008.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower. 4th Estate, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
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