"Myth and Psychology": The Curing of Orest in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris

CYRUS HAMLIN "Myth and Psychology": The Curing of Orest in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris1 "Alle menschliche Gebrechen Sühnet reine Menschlichkeit." Goethe, 31 March 1827 (HA 5:406) Goethe's drama Iphigenie aufTauris (published in final verse form in his Schriften, 1787) is not widely known to readers today outside the somewhat closed confines of German Classicism. Even the traditional legend of Iphigenia from ancient Greece—above all in the drama by Euripides that served as the model for Goethe's play, presumably in the French translation by Pierre Brumoy, Iphigenie en Tauride, contained in his Theatre des Grecs (1730)—is unfamiliar in its details to general readers. The single, most salient fact of this legend—familiar above all from the opening Chorus of Aeschylus's Agamemnon—is the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis by command of her father in response to the anger of the goddess Artemis, who has raised contrary winds that prevent the Greek armies from saiMng against Troy. That fact, of course, is radically revised by Euripides : Iphigenia appears at the outset of his drama to reveal that she was rescued at the last moment by Artemis and carried off to the remote barbaric kingdom of Tauris at the far end of the Black Sea to serve as priestess in the sacred grove of the goddess. The irony in this revisionary reading of the myth resides in the fact that the intended sacrificial victim from Aulis must now officiate at the sacrificial deaths of all strangers who happen to reach the alien shores of Tauris. In Euripides's play there is an altar on stage stained with blood and decorated with the skulls of previous victims. In Goethe's version of the drama it is made clear that Iphigenie has succeeded in suspending the practice of human sacrifice, although the barbarian king Thoas attempts to reinstate the practice in response (in act 1) to the refusal of his priestess to marry him. The intended victims of the sacrifice in both dramas, adding a further irony to these revisionary readings of the legend, turn out to be Iphigenia's own brother, Orestes, accompanied by his companion Pylades. The former is haunted by the curse of a blood crime, having murdered his mother Clytaemnestra to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon, and both Greeks have been sent to Tauris on instructions of the god Apollo through his oracle at Delphi, to bring the cult statue of the Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 60 Cyrus Hamlin god's sister Artemis back to Greece, thereby effecting a cure for the curse on the House of Atreus. In Goethe's version of the drama, it turns out that an ambiguity in the wording of the oracle reveals that it is the sister of Orest, Iphigenie, who is presumed to have died at Aulis, and not the goddess , who must be returned home. That intention of an eventual homecoming is hinted at in the famous opening lines spoken by Iphigenie to indicate her deepest desire: Denn ach! mich trennt das Meer von den Geliebten, Und an dem Ufer steh' ich lange Tage, Das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend. (10-12) This longing for home, which has inspired illustrations of Goethe's highly romanticized version of the classical drama—notably in the famous painting by Anselm Feuerbach—provides a central theme in both Euripides and Goethe, which offsets the complex imperative for a cure to the blood curse that oppresses Orestes to the point of madness. It is the manner of this cure that constitutes the most singular revision (among many!) introduced by Goethe to his version of the drama. The following essay will attempt to shed new light on this remarkable achievement and to argue that Goethe thus anticipates a central feature of modern drama, above all in the conscious adaptation of ancient myth and legend in accord with psychological processes that take place on the stage. It may seem questionable to claim that Goethe's Lphigenie auf Tauris is a drama currently known in this country only to specialists. It was certainly not always the case. During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth this work stood...