Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations

This essay reads the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe alongside the material culture of motherless creations—the automata and androids that his contemporaries imagined and created. Automata and androids are motherless in the sense that men create them, and they represent an attempt to usurp women’s primary role in reproduction. Examining Goethe’s relationship to the artificial life-forms of his period sheds light not only on the role parentage plays in Faust, a text replete with references to reproduction, but also on the author’s relationship to discursive debates around what contemporaries called Erzeugung, “generation.” This contextualization of Goethe and Faust in the field of artificial life also helps to better explain the peculiar absence of mothers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German writing, a phenomenon that Gail Hart and Susan Gustafson investigate.¹ In the Goethezeit, narratives of creation sometimes downplayed women’s contribution to the development of the embryo; debates surged between those who believed in epigenesis, the gradual formation of the fetus, and the preformationists, who argued that viviparous animals existed preformed, either in the sperm (spermists) or in the ovum (ovists).² This essay argues that Faust II reflects this interest in who contributes more to the creation of new life: the father or the mother.

The scene during which Homunculus, a motherless creation, is born satirizes the theory of preformation, if not creation itself.³ Scandinavian scholars have recently pointed out that Goethe’s Homunculus in Faust II relates to the contemporary field of artificial life,⁴ and Jessica Riskin ties eighteenth-century automata to the philosophical, historical origins of artificial life.⁵ In The Philosophy of Artificial Life (1996), the premier cognitive science researcher of artificial life, Margaret Boden, defines life as “self-organization, emergence, autonomy, growth, development, reproduction, evolution, adaptation, responsiveness, and metabolism.”⁶ These terms are, of course, modern; in Goethe’s time, “creationism” substitutes for “evolutionism,” and “vitalism” (translated into Kraft in German)⁷ for “emergence.”⁸ Traditionally critics have relied on Goethe’s Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790) to explore his concept of generation, while his writings on morphology further establish the author’s interest in the form and process of creation.⁹

Generation in Faust I and II is worth reflecting on because life, afterlife, and the redemptive power of love form their thematic core; as Jane K. Brown’s allegorical reading of the play suggests, the female figures help redeem Faust’s humanity through their love.¹⁰ In fact, Faust’s female figures remain vehicles for procreation but never quite inhabit their roles as mothers. Conception, birth, and rebirth in Faust I and II happen by artificial means and follow their own fantastical logic. Faust (whose own mother is never mentioned) meets Gretchen after Easter, and by Walpurgis Night, she has presumably given birth, if her apparition is to be believed, and then she drowns her own nameless, sexless child. Faust needs the help of the mysterious Mothers to reach Helena, but they, like other maternal figures in the play (Gretchen’s mother; the pregnant Bärbel, about whom Lieschen gossips; and Helena’s mother, Leda), never appear onstage, and scholars remain perplexed about their function in the tragedy.¹¹ Helena is already dead but comes to life, and she gives birth to a nearly grown Euphorion mere lines after she meets his father. Euphorion, of course, dies when, like Icarus, he flies too high in the sky. Indeed, as Robert Anchor points out, Faust features the loss of children repeatedly: “Mater Dolorosa, Gretchen’s mother, Gretchen herself, and Helena all lose their offspring to untimely and violent death.”¹² In this way, Goethe’s depiction of motherhood in Faust places importance on surrogate motherhood, as Ellis Dye suggests: “Gretchen is identified with Helena and she, in turn, with Galatea and with Galatea’s mother Aphrodite.”¹³ All these figures stand in for the archetypal vessel of transmutation, the Virgin Mary, who takes on a masculine guise, Doctor Marianus, during Faust’s final ascension into heaven.

Thus, Faust points to...