Gretchen and the Romantic Attitude: An Approach to Goethe s Faust

Transcription

1 Gretchen and the Romantic Attitude: An Approach to Goethe s Faust Wei-min Sun, General Education Center of Far East College ABSTRACT German philosophers and writers play an important role in coining and spreading the Romantic spirit. Even before the French Revolution takes place, the Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s has already served as a precursory German form of European Romanticism. Goethe s Faust, thus, is often regarded as an affirmation of Romanticphilosophy. The purpose of this study is to see how Faust is related to the Romantic attitude through the presentation of Gretchen. Keyword: Romanticism, Rousseau, natural man, intuition, Plato, Neoplatonists, archetype 339

2 In the Prologue in Heaven, Goethe has already affirmed human nature and human potentiality. Men make mistakes as long as they strive (77), and yet, like the trees tended by God, the gardener (70), they will keep on growing and finally bear fruit. Man s striving or action, the Deed ( Study I 60) which Faust regards as the very beginning of creation, is what God values, and Faust, with his mistakes, is to be forgiven by such a refusal to relapse into inactive complacency. Faust is thus led to his salvation because of his recognition of and constancy to the capacity of striving innate in human nature, Here, as Boyle points out, Goethe s view is quite similar to Fichte s: In thus identifying the heart of living nature with the heart of human nature Faust has advanced to a position similar to that of Goethe s Idealist contemporary, the reputedly atheist Fichte. Fichte saw the ultimate certainty of philosophy as lying not in some mere fact (Tatsache) that was known, but in which the reflecting self posited its own existence. (44) Undoubtedly, Goethe s Faust is also an affirmation of the philosophy of Romanticism. But how are the two related, and to what extent? Since a full discussion of this topic seems impossible here, in this essay I will focus my discussion on Gretchen to see how this character in Faust is connected with the Romantic attitude. From the very beginning, Goethe makes it rather clear that Gretchen owns a character of innocence, selflessness and naturalness. Faust falls madly in love with Gretchen when he first sees her, insisting that Mephistopheles gets her for him. At first Mephistopheles hesitates upon request because the Devil also recognizes the powerful virtue in this young girl: An innocent thing. Innocent? Yes! At church with nothing to confess! Over that girl I have no power. ( In the Street I 21-23) Later, the hostility between Gretchen and Mephistopheles is further illustrated. After Mephistopheles and Faust have left, Gretchen returns to her room and senses, with fear, the evil contamination of the Devil: It is so sultry, so fusty here, And it s not even so warm outside. 340

3 I feel as if I don t know what I wish my mother would appear. I m trembling all over from top to toe I m a silly girl to get frightened so. ( Gretchen s Room 62-67) It is obvious that Gretchen provides a sharp contrast to Mephistopheles. When Gretchen sings The King of Thule, her famous song about a king s faithful love to his dead mistress, such a contrast is marked again in that Mephistopheles regards love as mere sexual intercourse: A supernatural gratification! To lie on the mountain tops in the dark and dew Rapturously embracing earth and heaven, Swelling yourself to a godhead, ferreting through The marrow of the earth with divination, To feel in your breast the whole six days of creation, To enjoy I know not what in arrogant might To overflow into all things in ecstasy; After all which your lofty intuition (He makes a gesture.) Will end hm unmentionably. ( Forest and Cavern 66-76) Gretchen s purity, simplicity and naturalness lead her to her tragedy as well as her final salvation. In Gretchen, we find the representation of an ideal character upheld and praised by the Romantics. She reminds us of Rousseau, who gives natural man and childhood such unprecedented prominence in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men and Confessions respectively. According to Rousseau, Man in a primitive state was happy and learning has only served to confound his natural goodness (Horton 344). Humanity is essentially good when it is rid of the accretions of society and culture. Such an idea of natural man is obviously against the Christian doctrine of original sin: Meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I believe I And then, with the Old Adam discarded quite, can see in them two principles which precede the use of reason: the first 341

4 attaches us passionately to our well-being and preservation, the second inspires in us a natural disinclination to see any sentient being, and principally our fellow human beings, perish or suffer (Discourse 125). As Rousseau maintains, the human soul in its first and simplest operation is good, because it is guided by two instincts: love of self and pity. It has no desire to harm other human beings. In Faust, Gretchen seems to be an embodiment of such qualities of natural man, as well as of an innocent child. As Luke observes, But the new enthusiasm, inspired by Rousseau, was for the natural, the primitive, the uneducated, and the unspoiled; and nowhere were these ideals embraced with more fervour than by the young Goethe and his Storm and Stress followers (xv). The Gretchen story reflects, for one thing, the current sentimental enthusiasm about natural simplicity. Gretchen appeals so strongly to Faust because he is an intellectual and she is not, because of her naivety, intuitiveness, integrity and fundamental innocence (xviii). The simplicity and innocence of the child-like Gretchen are also praised in the works of other Romantic writers. In England, for instance, Wordsworth is famous for his belief in the unspoiled child to perceive the truth of life intuitively, and thus, as he announces in My Heart Leaps Up, The Child is father of the Man (7). In Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth goes further to use other terms to address a six-year-old child: Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul s immensity; Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read st the eternal deep, Haunted forever by the eternal mind--- Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest. ( ) Wordsworth s unreserved praise of the innocence and intuition of the child is related to his understanding of Plato s, or the Neoplatonists s, assumption that the soul is 342

5 eternal and exists elsewhere before it descends into this world of mutability. The glory of the soul is gradually quenched when it enters the darkness of matter, but the child still retains some of the memories of its previous existence. In Wordsworth s words, the child is still trailing clouds of glory (64), while to the adult such a glory has already faded into the light of common day (77). Among the Romantic poets in England, Wordsworth is certainly not alone to believe such a Platonic or Neoplatonic doctrine. Shelley s tie with Platonism is renowned. When discussing Shelley s A Defence of Poetry, Abrams points out that there is more of Plato in the Defence than in any earlier piece of English criticism, even though it is a Plato who has obviously been seen through a vista of Neoplatonic and Renaissance commentators and interpreters (126). In his poems like Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, To a Skylark and The sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard I saw them not When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of birds and blossoming, Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! (49-60) To Plato and the Neoplatonists, as well as to Wordsworth and Shelley, it is difficult or almost impossible to find true knowledge in this Cloud, to mention just a few, Shelley also expresses a similar idea. The following lines are from Hymn to Intellectual Beauty: While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and world of change, suffering and mortality. According to the Platonic doctrine, true knowledge is gained only through recollection, that is, through the memory of the previous 343

6 existence. Such a view of the passage to knowledge is reminiscent of Rousseau s theory of natural man, because, as Rousseau is also aware of, there is no way of reversing the historical process and hence the impossibility of going back to nature again. In other words, it is unlikely to acquire genuine knowledge in the external world. However, Rousseau also suggests that there is one source for the true knowledge of man, and, like Plato and the strip it of its artificial wrappings, its arbitrary and conventional trimmings (Cassirer 15-16). In Faust, Gretchen may be regarded as an embodiment of natural man, who has found the source of true knowledge. This is very likely the main reason that Faust is so much attracted to her, since in all kinds of books the former has been able to find only the impossibility of knowledge ( Night 12). Romantics, Rousseau claims that this source can be located only internally: The true knowledge of man cannot be found in ethnography or ethnology. There is only one living source for this knowledge the source of selfknowledge and genuine self-examination. And it is to this alone that Rousseau appeals; from it he seeks to derive all proofs of his principles and hypotheses. In order to distinguish the homme naturel from the homme artificiel, we need neither go back to epochs of the distant and dead past nor take a trip around the world. Everyone carries the true archetype within fortunate enough to discover it and to Works Cited [1]Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp:Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Norton, [2]Boyle, Nicholas. Faust. Part One. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, [3]Cassirer, Ernst. The Question ofjean-jacques Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, [4]Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust. Trans. Louis MacNeice. New York: OxfordUP, All quotations are taken from this edition and are cited by linenumber Faust. Part One. Trans. David Luke. Oxford: Oxford UP,

7 [5]Horton, Rod William and Vincent F. Hopper. Backgrounds of European Literature: the Political, Social, and Intellectual Development Behind the Great Books of Western Civilization. Eaglewood: Prentice-Hall, [6]Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men. Trans. Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin, [7]Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Modern Library, All quotations are cited by line number. [8]Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, All quotations are cited by line number. 345

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