European culture underwent a paradigm shift in the last third of the eighteenth century that, depending on point of view and disciplinary focus, goes various names—the displacement of classicism (or Enlightenment) by romanticism, a fundamental change in literary style, the emergence of historicism, an epistemological shift from surface to depth, and above all the emergence of a subjectivity that locates meaning within the individual. It has become clear in the last fifty years that the issue is not just the period’s focus on emotion, its “cult of feeling,” but a profound change in the way in which emotion was...

Interiority hardly begins with Rousseau, but the notion of a self inaccessible to the light of reason, knowable at best through dreams and inchoate feelings, does find its earliest widely influential formulation in his work, especially inJulie, ou La nouvelle Héloïseof 1761, in which the heroine renounces her lover, marries the older, rational husband selected by her father, and settles down to an apparently happy and virtuous ménage à trois with both lover and husband—a ménage in which, however, the renounced passion continues (at least to modern eyes) to burn beneath the surface. Passion has always had...

Both Goethe and Rousseau framed their versions of the subject in terms not only of passion, explored in the previous chapter, but also in terms of the individual’s place in society. Renaissance man though he was, Goethe did not write essays in political theory and cannot be compared directly to Rousseau in that respect. Rather, his response to Rousseau’s social thought can be read first in the conversation his novel of education,Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre(1796;Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), conducts withÉmile, ou De l’éducation(1762;Emile, or On Education), and second in his use of theReveriesinFaust,...

The classical playsEgmont,Iphigenie auf Tauris, andTorquato Tassoall deal at bottom with how to recognize and represent identity, even though they seem quite different on the surface:Egmont, in prose, has a large cast and disjointed scenes and owes much to Shakespeare and English bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, whileIphigenieandTasso, in blank verse, have small casts and tight linear plotting and look more like Euripides in the French neoclassical mode (Iphigeniehas a typical Euripidean prologue and even passages that evoke the tone of choral ode). Thus it is necessary to explore first...

Fausthas already appeared in these pages as a document of Goethe’s engagement with the problematic morality generated by Rousseau’s interior self. Now, in the wake of the epistemological problems raised in the classical dramas and Goethe’s initial struggles to represent interiority, it is time to consider the representational issues inFaust, which was first published in 1790 as a fragment, then elaborated during the 1790s intoFaust, part 1 (published in 1808). As the drama that engaged him for the remainder of his life, it is perhaps not surprisingly a summa of Goethe’s thinking about representing interiority in drama....

Faustis not only Goethe’s most sophisticated dramatic allegory, achieved after the coherent cosmos on which allegory depends had passed, and managed by sheer force of individual genius, but it also remains unclassifiable for our essentially secular culture today and tends to be received as epic as much as drama.¹ Since narrative allegory has had a different history from allegory in drama and has been tied less closely to specific religious structures, the ambiguous genre ofFaustreveals the implicit connection to Goethe’s use of dramatic allegory in his later novels, where the allegory is less open, more mysterious, and...

When passion was repressed and turned inward in the previous chapter, it seemed reduced in intensity: anger and guilt appeared merely asVerdruss. The most recognizable form of this phenomenon for children of the twentieth century is the reduction of the GermanAngst(fear of what is to come) to anxiety or “angst” as used in English, the generalized sense of insecurity coupled with ill-defined feelings of guilt modeled in the pervasive mood of Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or Edvard Munch, the often formless fear that arises with no objective external threat. The topic is hardly obvious for Goethe,...

Goethe’s adaptation of dramatic personification allegory into a tool for representing the subconscious demands precisely the readiness to read allegorically that emerged among the young Romantic generation assembled in Weimar and Jena in the second half of the 1790s (the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), all of whom came to be near Goethe and Schiller. This readiness shows not only in their emerging defenses of allegory, but also in a new narrative style that suddenly appears in Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert” (1797). This tale and those for which it set a paradigm reveal allegorical reading as well as writing...

The trajectory fromWerthertoDie Wahlverwandtschaftenwas the starting point of this investigation because it marked so clearly the period of Goethe’s struggles with Rousseau. SinceWertherwas also the starting point for the Romantics’ encounter with representing depth psychology, it is only appropriate to end withDie Wahlverwandtschaften, where the last building block for Goethe’s representations of depth psychology is set in place. This is not to say that Goethe does not advance further in his thinking; the discussions ofFaust, part 2, in this book have already demonstrated as much. It means only that by the time...