The Blue Flower #5: What is pain?

Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 34–42 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Sophie's cough soon put Günther's into the shade. It came with an immense draught of breath which reminded her of laughing, so that in fact she would have been hard put to it, except for the pain, not to laugh.

last week | main page | reading schedule | further resources

Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. My name is Simon Haisell and I am the host of Footnotes & Tangents, book guides and slow reads of novels worth savouring. Check out our read-along plans for 2026.

In Week 5 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 34–42. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.

To get this post as an email in your inbox, turn on notifications for “The Blue Flower” in your subscription settings.

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851. Source.

This week: What is pain?

   What if there were no such thing as pain?

This week is all about suffering, and especially those pains that go unnoticed by others. Fritz sets out his stall to Sophie: “Although God created the world it has no real existence until we apprehend it.” What we notice and understand is reality and existence.

OK, so what does Fritz notice? The happiness of Colestin Just in his garden house. The unproblematic world of Rochenthien, where his daughter “dances, jumps, sings … and is as happy as a fish in water.” In the dry reports on the salt mines, he sees the fantastical release of Mother Earth. To his own mother, “I do not need to ask for anything more, for I know your tender heart.”

What does he not see? Karoline’s unhappiness, dead words unsaid in her mouth. Sophie’s pain, of which she tells him for the “pleasure” of seeing him take no notice of it. His mother, under the cherry tree, who wants to tell him about her pain but cannot, and is hurt by his rejection of her bracelet.

The consequence of this blindness to pain is suggested to us by Friederike (aka the Mandelsloh) in her story of “a certain honest shopkeeper” who “felt no pain.” Without warning, he is visited by Death and is ill-prepared for his end. Pain has a purpose, the Mandelsloh warns us, even if she herself is a picture of health.

Fritz/Novalis valorises the imagination and creates a fantasy. He means well. Early in the novel, he criticised Fichte’s philosophy for having “no place in it for love.” His worldview is infused with love, hope, and happiness. He sees the best in people, and everything and everyone is interesting and beautiful. No wonder they all love him!

But as Fitzgerald notes in chapter forty-two, “Thoughtfulness can be much more painful than neglect.” This is a theme running through many of her novels: the unhappiness caused in the pursuit of happiness.

The contrast between Fritz’s fantasy and other people’s reality produces these stark contrasts within the book, sometimes comic, other times tragic. Often, the comedy and tragedy are so closely entwined that we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are like Sophie, whose consumptive cough reminds her of laughing, “so that in fact she would have been hard put to it, except for the pain, not to laugh.”

• Tangent: What is pain? (LSE The Forum)

• Watch: “The History of Pain” with historian Joanna Bourke

Goethe’s Garden-house in Weimar. Source.

Footnotes and tangents

1. Happiness is the morning sun

So much happens off the page! It took a quarter of an hour at Grüningen to decide Fritz’s life, but we get only glimpses of it as a memory and in correspondence with his brother. Here, Karoline has “twenty minutes alone with him on the walk down to the garden,” arm in arm. If they were once “two watches, set to the same time”, then here they might talk again as they once did.

But they will not talk because all of Tenntesdt will get in the way, with the same trivial salutations they make every day. Fitzgerald pushes the scene into the conditional: she would, he would, they would, people would … as life’s inevitable ordinariness stacks up against the unlikely extraordinary moment that has been missed.

Fritz has uncannily read her mind, and perhaps given her a sort of hope that wasn’t there moments ago. He states his romantic belief that “never does the heart sigh in vain.” It’s a consoling idea that makes the heart’s journey the focal point of life’s existence. Fritz means the best by it. But Karoline tastes death, not life, and the disappointments of lost chances and things unsaid.

In her mouth was something bitter, that tasted like the waters of death.

Are these deathly waters the opposite of the Holy Spirit, “the water of life” described by John the Apostle in the New Testament? The taste on the tongue comes as Karoline watches Fritz wash his hands with water from the pump, like Pontius Pilate ridding himself of the responsibility of killing Christ.

If these biblical allusions are tenuous, the next one is “conspicuous.” The Just garden-house is called Der Garten Eden. There is, significantly, only room for two on the bench in the porch, the Vorbau, which receives the morning sun. The deathly afternoon sun is to be avoided. Happiness, as Fritz sees it, is derived not from passion but from a restless “dismantling and re-constructing” of the universe within.

“Hail, ever-blessed pair!” The Justs have found their flowers – hop-vines, honeysuckle and tobacco. It is a heady happiness in the Garden of Eden; everyone unaware of the bitter unhappiness in Karoline’s heart.

• Explore: Goethe’s Garden House

• More: Goethe in his garden

Table of excitement and excitability in Elementa Medicinae by Dr John Brown. Source.

2. My philosophy is sick

What terrible knowledge lurks in chapter thirty-five? Fritz says Günther’s “smiles and coughs” are democratically applied, but “it is much more pleasant to deceive oneself” when a baby smiles – “and coughs” – at you. This deception is our misapprehension of the world; what Fritz/Novalis claims is its “real existence.” The dream is our reality.

This is the truth of Fichte’s Ich-philosophy that Fritz learned at Jena. But is it “the whole truth”? And what would it cost to know that?

For while the Mandelsloh was “born to be always well”, Sophie has “coughs and sneezes”, and “a pain” in her left side. After Fritz has gone, the Mandelsloh asks why Sophie mentioned the pain.

‘He took no notice, you know, Frieke, I laughed and so he did not notice it.’

Whether it is Karoline’s unrequited love or Sophie’s sickness, Fritz the philosopher is conspicuously unobservant of suffering.

Dr Hofrat Ebhard doesn’t need the “whole truth” to know that Sophie has tuberculosis. Probability is on his side – “one in four of his patients” die of consumption. Neither diagnosis nor prognosis bodes well for Sophie.

He had never had the chance to hear the opening of The Blue Flower, but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant.

This observation links the blue flower to mortality and the question of life and death. If the flower is freedom from death, it will never be found. If it is death itself, we may see it but not possess it. As Karoline once told Fritz, you must leave home to find it. It is neither happiness nor poetry.

An allegory of tuberculosis by Richard Tennant Cooper. Credit: Wellcome Collection

3. The romantic disease

Sophie von Kühn has tuberculosis, a contagious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. TB is as old as civilisation: the bacteria’s DNA has been found in the bones of 9,000-year-old human remains in a Pre-Pottery Neolithic village off the coast of Israel. By the nineteenth century, it was responsible for one in four of all deaths in Europe.

Phthisis, in ancient Greek, translates as the wasting disease. It was also known as the great white plague, or consumption. John Bunyan called it “the captain of all these men of death.”

The disease thrived in Europe’s growing cities, and the urban poor were the worst affected. But it was highly contagious and crossed class boundaries, infecting all levels of society. And among the upper classes, the pale complexion, ethereal thinness, and feverish glow of its victims led to its being received as “the romantic disease.” Consumptive chic – pale skin, narrow waists and fragile figures – became the dominant fashion for women.

It also became associated with creative genius. In 1821, the poet John Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Many attributed his artistic gifts to a heightened sensitivity and creativity induced by the sickness. Tuberculosis was regarded as an aspirational way to live and a romantic way to die.

• Tuberculosis: A fashionable disease?

• Fatal Beauty: Romanticism and Tuberculosis

• Tangent: The Story of Ophelia

On the sailing ship, Caspar David Friedrich. Source.

4. Survivor from drowning

Karoline at Grüningen. Fitzgerald wrote that the world is divided into exterminators and exterminees, and her novels tell the stories of those worn down and destroyed by life. Karoline Just is one such exterminee.

Chapter thirty-eight moves inwards from the pig and peppermint fair at Tennstedt to the interior of the morning room at Schloss Grüningen. The chapter opens with food, dance and music (“of sorts”) and the gossipy, jovial observation that Karoline “has no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!” It ends deep inside Karoline’s thoughts, as she looks hopelessly to Erasmus, for “another survivor from drowning.”

But even he has abandoned her: “Karoline perceived that Erasmus also had fallen in love with Sophie von Kühn.”

• Tangent: Kesselfleisch, a pork feast from my childhood

Working in the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. Source.

5. Life underground

‘Your son would like to live underground.’

Aren’t mines marvellous? Novalis found inspiration from his subterranean work, and the imagery and ideas of the mines seeped into Hymns to the Night and Heinrich von Ofterdingen. His novel’s protagonist encounters men who teach him the wisdom of the world’s interior. They are a miner and a hermit who lives inside the mountain with only books for company.

We may associate mining with the Industrial Revolution and the technological domination of Nature – as Karoline suggests to Fritz in chapter forty. The miner is an embodiment of modernity. But Novalis’s thoughts were very different, calling miners “astrologers in reverse”, going into the mountain to return to a geological past and return with Nature’s wisdom. This reminds me a little of Robert Macfarlane’s book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, a magnificent exploration of our subterranean world.

• Deep time: William Dalrymple on Robert Macfarlane’s Underland

The history of salt, salt mines and salt mining is endlessly fascinating. Check out Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History for a detailed overview.

• Mountains Inside Out: The Sublime Mines of Novalis (PDF download)

• City of Salt: Wieliczka Salt Mine

Have you ever been down a salt mine? I have visited one near Hallstatt, Austria, and I would love to see the famous Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. One of our fellow slow readers, Glenys Murnane, sent us a couple of photos of her with her daughter in the Salt Cathedral near Bogota in Colombia:

6. Courage and ignorance

Fritz contemplates eloping with Sophie and marrying without his father’s permission. This reminded me of the eighteenth-century English custom of nipping across the border to Gretna Green in Scotland, where marriage laws were more permissive.

• Gretna Green: The bit of Scotland where English people go to get married

• All Things Georgian: 18th-century marriage customs

This plan prompts an exchange between Fritz and the Mandelsloh on the nature of courage and ignorance. The wise words of the Mandelsloh:

‘Courage when you don’t understand what it is that you have to face is no better than ignorance.’

Fritz’s ignorance has been a key theme this week. Fritz often wonders whether “it is so much more pleasant to deceive oneself” than to know the “whole truth.” He romanticises ignorance by styling it as the courage to imagine the world as we would like it to be:

‘Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.’

The Mandelsloh raises the practical objection that courage will not make Sophie “into a competent house-keeper.”

And so continues the book’s dialogue between dreams and reality, romanticism and realism, imagination and sensibility. At times, the characters of The Blue Flower feel allegorical. In my own self, I feel these tensions and hear this dialogue. I am Fritz, and I am the Mandelsloh. And I wonder whether we ever resolve these tensions, or if the contradictions themselves are a sign of life.

Still Life With Cherries And Peaches, Paul Cézanne, 1885-87. Source.

7. Under the cherry tree

We began this week’s reading in one garden. We finish in another. The two “old wooden chairs” beneath the twilight cherry tree at Kloster Gasse are a million miles from the new bench for two in the morning sun outside the garden-house of Coelestin Just.

It’s impossible not to dwell on the significance of the cherry tree. I thought about how Fritz “cherry-picks” from reality to construct his romantic vision of the world. Sweet, blood-red cherries are associated with sexual desire and sensuality, but also a symbol of youth, virginity and purity. In Christian iconography, it represents both Mary’s virginity and her son’s sacrifice on the cross.

Fritz arranges this meeting with his mother to obtain her approval of his engagement to Sophie. But from the perspective of the novel, this exchange reveals to us the secret sadness of the Freifrau, who was given the blame for her “sickly and stupid” child but received none of the credit for the handsome genius he has become. Like Karoline on the walk to the garden-house, fate and Fritz prevent the Freifrau from speaking of her pain.

All that she ahd to say could be put quite shortly: she was forty-five, and she did not see how she was going to get through the rest of her life.

If this sentence does not leave the reader devastated, then Fritz’s “thoughtful” rejection of her bracelet surely will. She suffers in silence, in contrast to her four children, who “were not unhappy that morning, but had too much good sense to say anything, even to themselves, about it.” Fitzgerald notes that the Freifrau “had not come down”, summoning an image of her alone in her room – the air bringing in “the scent of the cherry-trees.”

Meanwhile, the Freiherr has gone to seek the counsel of his Moravian Brethren. On the return, he and his pious servant Gottfried “exchange very few words. Silence between them said more.”

And so silences speak this week, from Karoline at the garden-house to the Freiherr on the road home.

• Second bite: Cherries, from spoils of war to modern obsession

• Tangent: The story of Quentin Metsys’s masterpiece, The Madonna of the Cherries

• Watch: King’s College, Cambridge Choir sing “The Cherry Tree Carol”

The Madonna of the Cherries, Quinten Metsys, 1530. Source.

Next week

Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Next week, we will read chapters 43–47. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main page for The Blue Flower at Footnotes & Tangents.

This slow read and book guide is free. If you have enjoyed it and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription or a one-off donation to support Footnotes & Tangents. Thank you!

In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.

Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.

Simon