Witch and Infanticide: Imaging the Female in Faust I

BARBARA BECKER-CANTARINO Witch and Infanticide: Imaging the Female in Faust I While critical debate has centered on the figure of Faust and his world, the Gretchen tragedy is generally viewed as merely "a necessary expansion and culmination of the scholar's tragedy"1; critics have asked the question of Gretchen's significance for Faust, have looked at her relationship to his goals and have explored the spaces in which the play shows Gretchen.2 My reading will historicize Gretchen—as "witch" and "infanticide"—and will question the assumptions of human, philosophical, and structural universalism ascribed to "Faust's World," by looking at the sex-gender system in Faust I. Resisting the dichotomy of a "masculine Faustian" and a "feminine maternal" principle,3 I will treat the imaging of woman and the concept of "the feminine" as culturally inscribed by using a different matrix: the context of women's collective (rather than individual) history in early modern Europe and gender construction related to the prosecution of witches and infanticides. Indeed, the female protagonist Gretchen, who is transformed from virgin into child-murderess, has roots in early modern German cultural history, as do Faust and Mephisto. In a gendered reading of several crucial scenes in Faust I (especially "Hexenküche," "Walpurgisnacht," and "Kerker"), I intend to analyze the reappearance and transformation of the witch and infanticide in Goethe's text. I will ask how they inform the figure of Gretchen, the concept of the "feminine," and the construction of gender . Goethe's text, I will suggest, appropriated the trajectories of women's collective history, reshaping and re-imagining this history in a celebration of patriarchy, in an atavistic interpretation of woman's 2 Barbara Becker-Cantarino sexuality and body, while concurrently scripting a seemingly progressive , universal significance for Faustian man, his mind and his world. 1. The Witch-Hunt Craze4 and the Symbolic Witch in Faust I In 1775—about the time when Goethe wrote the Urfaust—the last official execution of a witch took place in Germany.5 The witch hunts in central Europe—with tortures to extract confessions and carefully orchestrated trials, convictions, and public executions—had lasted approximately from 1500 to 1750, peaking during the first half of the seventeenth century. However, we know relatively little about the perpetrators, the witches themselves, for a striking aspect of these trials is the lack of concrete evidence linking the defendant to a factually established or establishable deed or crime.7 Trial records merely name acts of witchcraft or sorcery, which comprised a large number of quite disparate "crimes": causing an illness, causing a person or animal to die; causing a bad harvest or some other (natural) disaster by casting evil charms or spells; killing a child; acquiring magical powers through potions or interactions with the devil; and always: having sexual relations with the devil. The actual trials proceeded within a fixed, well-established framework in order to extract with torture the "right" answer, that is, the defendant's confession of having employed witchcraft and having had sexual relations with the devil. The accused, who were asked a series of questions (in Latin) to which only "yes" or "no" was permitted as an answer, were mostly illiterate, poor peasants or city dwellers from the lower strata, but even more important, the vast majority of the accused were women.8 This identification of the witch with the female was, if not invented , at least popularized by the most influential text on witchcraft: the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) of i486.9 Already in its title the "witch" {maléfica) was equated with the female. In its lengthy discussion of why women were especially prone to witchcraft the Malleus asserted that women were more credulous than men, more impressionable, more talkative, deceptive, had less faith (because femina, "woman," was supposedly derived from/e minus "less faith") and thus fell prey to the devil. The Malleus took its key argument, however, from the Biblical tradition of woman's greater sexual appetite and lust and presented woman's sexual depravity, her lust, as a major cause of witchcraft: The natural reason [for woman's proclivity towards witchcraft] is that [woman] is more carnal than a...