The Blue Flower of the title is an image from an unfinished novel by Novalis and is a symbol of a deep, unfulfilled longing of the human spirit. It stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable. It symbolizes hope and the beauty of things. The symbol has remained an enduring motif in Western art.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_flower
situations that closely reference actual events.
Novalis was a polymath, a student of the sciences, mathematics, history and philosophy; he was also a writer and poet. Penelope Fitzgerald takes the narrative approach that less is more which can be frustrating when you are wanting detail. Nevertheless, even with a deliberately limited palette she creates compelling images for the reader; you find yourself drawn into 18th Century Saxony society, immersed in the lives of the characters, turning the pages as events unfold but then pausing to think about some provocative philosophical statement.
Penelope Fitzgerald was set on the trail of The Blue Flower by reading The Fox by DH Lawrence who pours cold water on the Blue Flower symbol; he sees it as a trap. He writes:
The more you reached after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you became aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any farther.
Fitzgerald seems to agree with Lawrence by portraying Fritz as a naïve, privileged student; a dreamer more interested in airy-fairy ideas than the hard realities of daily living. His pious Moravian father didn’t have any sympathy with his son’s philosophising and forced him into a sober career as an inspector of salt mines. Fitzgerald also brings Fritz down to earth by putting common sense into the mouths of the strong, young women of the novel - his sister Sidonie, Karoline Just and Sophie’s sister, Friederike.
Sidonie: That’s easy. She cannot.
Fritz: But you have never so much have seen her.
Sidonie: That’s true. But I shall see her, I suppose, and when I do shall tell you exactly the same thing.
Fritz: Courage makes us dreamers. Courage makes us poets.
Friederike: But it would not make Sophgen into a competent housekeeper.
Sophie on the other hand is shown as a simple unsophisticated child. Her diary is as empty as her head. Her tutor has made no impression on her and quits. She is distracted by her dogs. If reincarnated she would like to have fair hair. According to Hofmann the painter, even inanimate objects ask a question of us, but Sophie asks no question. There is no communication from her soul.
Karoline Just asks Erasmus, “How could he?”. And Erasmus says to Fritz, “Sophie is stupid”
However, is this a true portrait of Sophie? Fritz’s brother Karl wrote flatteringly of Sophie in a memoir:
Not long after he came to Tennstedt he became acquainted with Sophie von Kuhn from the nearby estate to Grunningen, and that first moment of seeing her set the course of his resolution for eternity. Sophie was of such tenderly deserving loveliness and exalted appearance, that already at that time when she was in her 13th year, one could not help but recognise her native affinity to heaven.
And Constanein Just in his memoir of Novalis says:
During the course of a business journey he took with me, he made the acquaintance of Sophie von Kuhn, a girl of 13 years old. She possessed the judgement of a grown-up person, joined to the attraction and animation of youth, beauty, wit and excellence. The charming creature became his Madonna; and the hopes of one day calling her his, gave him the assurance of that happy home for which he longed.
To the modern reader Sophie is not the realisation of some poetic ideal but simply a strange and to us creepy, infatuation. It could be argued that Fritz who has had a narrow escape from a previous liaison realises he must keep his passions in check so fixes his attention on someone who he cannot marry for another 4 years. Also, does the piety of his upbringing make a connection between Sophie, whose name means "wisdom" and the Book of Proverbs?
“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore, get wisdom: And with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: She shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her.” Proverbs 4:7-9
Fritz, the young romantic, is searching for meaning. On the one hand there is religion, philosophy and poetic imagination, on the other is mathematics, chemistry and salt mines. The novel skilfully brings out the conflict between these worlds.
He wrote: We think we know the laws that govern our existence. We get glimpses, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime of a totally different system at work behind them. One day, when I was reading between Rippach and Lutzen, I felt the certainty of immortality, like the touch of a hand……As things are, we are the enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth.
He has a vision of a young man in the church yard: He said aloud. The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the Kingdom of Light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone, and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards always inwards.
These brief moments when it seems another world breaks into normal existence are epiphanies that leave him with a deep, unsatisfied longing.
DH Lawrence considers the Blue Flower motif and search for an unattainable happiness to be destructive, but Christians like CS Lewis see a far more potent meaning, nothing less than the longing of the soul for God. “Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” (St Augustine).
Lewis writes about his own conflict in his biography, Surprised by Joy, where he records three key moments when it seemed that light from another world broke through. He took inspiration from the writings of George MacDonald a Scottish congregational minister who translated the poetry of Novalis, wrote fairy stories and is sometimes called the father of fantasy writing. Lewis called MacDonald, “his master”. The Narnia stories are partly a device to open our thinking to the possibility of other hidden worlds.
Emily Dickinson, in one of her poems wrote:
This world is not conclusion, a species stands beyond, invisible as music and positive as sound….
Much gesture from the pulpit, strong hallelujahs roll. Narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul.
Summary
The Blue Flower is an intelligent, witty and provoking book. I consider myself to be a scientific rationalist but also a romantic. These two forces pull in opposite directions and create an unresolved tension. I am sure that science and mathematics are the best tools to understand the physical world but am not convinced this is the whole story. In The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald cleverly encapsulates the dilemma between the rational and the non-rational worlds that Fritz wants to explore and reconcile. His journey was unique to him as our journeys are unique to us. The Bernard, Fritz's young brother puts his finger on that uniqueness:
He had been struck – before he crammed the story back into Fritz’s book bag - by one thing in particular: the stranger who had spoken at the dinner table about the blue flower had been understood by one person and one only. This person must have been singled out as distinct from all the rest of his family. It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came.
Vision at Sophie's Grave
Novalis recorded this in Hymns to The Night
Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life -- lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable -- powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery. -- As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: -- then, out of the blue distances -- from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight -- and at once snapped the bond of birth -- the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning -- the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world -- Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me -- the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust -- and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed -- I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream -- and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.
