The Critical Idyll: Traditional Values and the French Revolution in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea by Peter Morgan (review)

Book Reviews109 of McDermott's brief yet important observations on Aeschylus' Agamemnon and its Clytemnestra, to which Trachinian Women and its Deianeira must also be related.) (4) Allowing that a play whose cast of characters includes kings of Athens and of Athens' bitter enemy Corinth should have some topical reference, she leaves it very vague, shying away from an obvious conclusion about the playwright's likely warning against Athenian meddling with Corinthian daughter-cities (which Thucydides adduces as a leading reason why the Peloponnesian War began the year Medea was first staged). (5) Her comments on the choral "tag" Euripides may have placed at the end of this play and at the end of others are not compelling; for although McDermott is quite right about the unexpectedness of events here, Zeus and the gods play a small role, if any, in this tragedy, and can hardly be said to accomplish the unexpected. Some of her other arguments and speculations, moreover, are far from persuasive. She argues as if Euripides alone among Attic tragedians innovated boldly in plot or used suspense, not so much about outcomes as about causes (e.g., ofAlcestis' rescue, ofthe death ofJason's children, ofPhaedra's suicide); and she suggests that Euripidean "deformation" (Knox's term) of characters and mythic patterns was something new to the Athenians when Medea was produced. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles had, however, routinely innovated in myth/plot as well as in dramatic technique; and Euripides himselfhad been bringing his own brand ofun-edification to the Theater ofDionysus with some regularity since 455 BC. Many of the scandalous heroines and ragged heroes that the comedian Aristophanes catalogues antedate Medea. So that this book may be accessible to a deserved wide readership, all its Greek phrases and passages, mostly in Greek characters (with only two typos among them—and a third, unluckily, in the Greek dedication), are translated, either immediately or in a concise Glossary (143-44). Overall presentation is quite pleasing, notwithstanding a number of missing cross-references (viz., to "p. 00" or "p. 000"). VICTOR CASTELLANI University of Denver PETER MORGAN. The Critical Idyll: Traditional Values and the French Revolution in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990. 183 p. While he was pursuing his graduate work, Peter Morgan did research in the area of ethnic and cultural relations, and it is this approach he uses in reevaluating Hermann und Dorothea. He analyzes Goethe's reactions in this epic poem to the effects ofthe French Revolution on the cultural and national identity in Germany at his time. Monumental changes were occurring in Europe, and these changes had profound repercussions in the thinking of German intellectuals. While the eighteenth-century adherents of the Enlightenment viewed the French Revolution largely as a liberation of the people from absolutism and tyranny, the nationalists ofthe nineteenth century 110Rocky Mountain Review considered it as a "traumatic birth" of a modern nation state. Morgan notes in Hermann und Dorothea the "apparent contradictions between ancient form and modern problems, revolutionary upheaval and idyllic German identity" (4). Morgan discusses the changes in traditional values—for example, the concept ofthe idyllic and safe home town—and shows how these changes affect the characters in the poem. He refers in detail to the comments and actions ofHermann, his father, his mother, the apothecary, and particularly Dorothea. Hermann is confronted with the misery of the refugees, and through his empathy for them and his love for Dorothea he rejects the old values, which his father upholds, and becomes the symbol for the new developments. A major portion ofthe study is devoted to Dorothea and her relationship with her former fiancé, the Jacobin who became a victim of the revolution in Paris. Morgan identifies her as the strongest character and as the only one who faces reality. The male characters continue to hope for an idyllic, Utopian future. The study is divided into an introduction, eight chapters, and an excursus on Revolutionary Enlightenment, the German Jacobins, and Dorothea's first fiancé. The appendix consists of a welcome and thoughtful twenty-page critical and analytic history of the reception of Hermann und Dorothea, starting at Goethe's time and ending with contemporary...