Substitution, Self-blame, and Self-deception in Goethe's Stella: Ein Schauspiel für Liebende

ELLIS DYE Substitution, Self-blame, and Self-deception in Goethe's Stella: Ein Schauspiel für Liebende1 Intellectual discourse, and, indeed, language as a system, depends on representation. Representation involves presenting something that stands for something else, something that is absent or eclipsed by the substitute presented in its stead, e.g., an icon or a word. Because what is eclipsed in a representation must return as a term of reference, this word is not a misnomer, as it may seem to be. Otherwise we could not speak of a substitute or an eclipse. These terms affirm the presence of what their referents are supposed to replace. As a result, every representation is a misrepresentation, as has often been pointed out.2 Knowing this, Goethe both employs substitution and subverts it by foregrounding and multiplying cases of representation, among other ways. In Stella: Ein Schauspiel für Liebende, substitution is thematized, with what purpose and effects it will be part of our purpose here to show. We will go on to examine the function of substitution in Goethe's creation of literary characters as confessional representations of himself. In this early play about polyamorous love, Stella discusses with Cäcilie, Fernando's lawfully wedded wife, the difference between an "Ersatz" and an "Entschädigung," and does so in an almost professorial way. Cäcilie says to Stella that "Geschäftigkeit und Wohltätigkeit" may take the place of romantic love in the lives of "unglückliche liebende Herzen" (FA 1.4:547). No, there can be no "Ersatz" for a lost love, answers Stella— "Entschädigung wohl, nicht Ersatz—Etwas anstatt des Verlornen, nicht das Verlorne selbst mehr—Verlorne Liebe, wo ist da Ersatz für!" But a female -female friendship might serve as at least an "Entschädigung," for the love of a man, somewhat as Schiller describes male-male friendship as a "Surrogat" of heterosexual love:3 "Wir wollen einander das sein, was [die Männer] uns hätten werden sollen!" (547). Stella has been called a "Pendant zu Werther . . .; die Figuren der Dreiecksgeschichte sind vertauscht" (MA 1.1.757). In this play about a triangle of two women and one man, Madame Sommer, as Cäcilie is known until she and Fernando meet and acknowledge each other in act 3, arrives with her daughter Luzie at an inn managed by a robust Postmeisterin in the village where Luzie is to take employment with Stella, a young noblewoman . Cäcilie has fallen on hard times since she was deserted by her husband. Stella too is an abandoned woman, forsaken by the same man Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 42 Ellis Dye who had earlier left Cäcilie, but, although still in mourning over the loss of Fernando and the death of their child, she is productively engaged in teaching peasant girls useful skills and then placing them in good houses. Coincidentally, Fernando, the partner absconditus of both adult women and Luzie's father by Cäcilie, arrives at the same inn. He had left Stella in a vain search for Cäcilie and then, to his shame and regret, fought in the foreign service to suppress "die sterbende Freiheit der edlen Corsen" (560). He now intends to return to Stella, whom he had first swept away from the home of her rich uncle and then, five years later, left behind on the estate they had occupied together. He has been gone for three years. Fernando's reunion with his wife and child in the village in which he had abandoned Stella ignites a fierce conflict in his breast. His first impulse is to forsake Stella anew, and take flight with Cäcilie, but Cäcilie has now met Stella, admires her goodness, and decides to withdraw her prior claim to Fernando and leave them and their love a clear field (570-71). She proposes that he and she can write letters and remain friends at a distance . When Fernando rejects this solution as the result of self-deception on Cäcilie's part and when Cäcilie herself sees that it would impose an extra burden on its intended beneficiaries, she recalls the story of the Graf von Gleichen...