Wilhelm Meister's Women

MARTHA B. HELFER Wilhelm Meister's Women IN a POST-PARTUM comment recorded by Eckermann in 1828 Goethe reflected on the birth of his female characters, a preternatural birth the proud papa casts as divinely inspiredpoiesis: Heute war bei Tische von Frauen die Rede, und Goethe äußerte sich darüber sehr schön. "Die Frauen," sagte er, "sind silberne Schalen, in die wir goldene Äpfel legen. Meine Idee von den Frauen ist nicht von den Erscheinungen der Wirklichkeit abstrahiert, sondern sie ist mir angeboren, oder in mir entstanden, Gott weiß wie. Meine dargestellten Frauencharaktere sind daher auch alle gut weggekommen, sie sind alle besser, als sie in der Wirklichkeit anzutreffen sind." (22 October 1828) With this formulation—a redaction of the biblical verse likening not women, but "well-turned" words, to preciously displayed fruit1—Goethe goes far beyond casting his female characters as simple rhetorical constmcts. In his description of women as "silver bowls" into which he places "golden apples " in an inseminating gesture, the male poet metaphorizes women, commodities women (gold and silver derive their worth solely from their exchange value), makes his paper women more natural (apples versus bowls), more valuable (gold versus silver), "better" than the real object. And the male poet creates this superior product, the commodified woman, without the intervention of the natural woman, the mother.2 In essence, Goethe articulates an aesthetic theory of "woman" that is a statement of male selfdefinition , a celebration of the male subject's own prowess as progenitor (the producer of paper women) and autogenitor (the self-production of the poet Goethe himself). The same paradigm is operative in slightly inverted terms in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The novel, I will argue, instantiates an aesthetic theory of male self-definition, and this autopoietic production relies on and results in the conscious commodification of woman, the reduction of woman to metaphor. In other words, in this model of male self-definition women function as objects of exchange or as transmitters of a meaning imposed on them by an external source. The theory of male self-definition enacted in the Lehrjahre is grounded in the interplay between three metaphoric registers: aesthetics, economy, and the feminine. My analysis Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 230 Martha B. Helfer considers why the feminine is programmatically paired with economic tropes in a text that advances an aesthetic theory of male Bildung. Against Friedrich Schlegel, who approvingly saw in the novel's characters Natalie and Thérèse a nascent "Theorie der Weiblichkeit" that forms an essential component of the grand "Lebenskunstlehre" laid out in the Lehrjahre? I maintain the text's "Theorie der Weiblichkeit" systematically subverts the feminine by desexualizing and commodifying women. More precisely, the text corrupts sex and gender roles as it constructs its own aesthetic theory , a theory of textual economy. (Economy, in the sense it entered into the German language in the sixteenth century from the Graeco-Latin oeconomia , refers not only to the ability to manage a good household or business in a thrifty or efficient manner [haus-, landwirtschaft und Sparsamkeit ] , as Thérèse and Werner exemplify in the novel, but is also used in a more general sense to indicate the arrangement and purposive organization of a totality [die anordnung und zweckmäszige einrichtung eines ganzen] .*) In short, I propose to read Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as a gendered aesthetic theory and as an aesthetic theory of gender,' demonstrating that an economy of female characters informs the novel's narrative structure. ' The following analysis interprets the "Theorie der Weiblichkeit" inscribed in the Lehrjahre in light of the self-reflexive, self-critical discourse of early German Romanticism. This methodology is justified by the fact that Friedrich Schlegel (and to a lesser extent, Novalis) celebrated Goethe's novel as a model of Romantic discourse. In early Romantic discourse the text reflects on itself as it constructs its own theory. Thus, elements appearing on the narrative level (characters, themes, signifiers, textual structures, etc.) simultaneously articulate a metananative theory. The ultimate goal of Romantic discourse is autopoiesis, the construction or creation of the subject (das Ich) in and through the language of the text itself,7 an enterprise largely concordant with the genre of...