Margarete-Ariadne: Faust’s Labyrinth

Readers have been justifiably puzzled and disturbed by the violent, churlish response of Valentin upon learning of Margarete’s relationship with Faust. Valentin’s public condemnation of his sister forces readers to ask how patriarchy in this instance measures up against the feminine. The excessive, self-indulgent, and self-pitying behavior displayed by Valentin is better understood, I argue, when we consider the stature of Margarete herself, as opposed to seeing her as “his sister.” Valentin’s inclusion in the tragedy of Margarete is in no way gratuitous or merely technically expedient. The reason frequently cited for Valentin’s appearance and quick death is that Goethe needed a mechanism to extricate Faust from the all-too-alluring Gretchen tragedy and its strong gravitational pull; Faust needs to get on with the business of being Faust, it is argued, and by killing Valentin, he is forced to flee the city in the company of Mephistopheles.¹ This reasonable explanation is made all the more plausible when we consider how Margarete carries most of the dramatic interest in Faust I, providing strong motivation for Goethe to close out her agency and liberate Faust for bigger deeds.

My reading of Margarete elevates her to universal womanhood as an Ariadne figure and encourages a reading of Faust that resembles what Penelope Reed Doob refers to as “labyrinthine literature.”² The labyrinth in her sense can be the divine labyrinth of creation, impossible to navigate effectively using only reason (Doob 67), or it can be the labyrinth of words represented by works that are difficult, ambiguous, and “force us to share the protagonist’s limited point of view,” in which case “the text itself is a kind of Ariadne’s thread extricating us from the maze we all inhabit for the work’s duration” (Doob 225). Margarete is an Ariadne figure, for reasons I detail below, but she is also a character who functions according to roles that remind us of Ariadne—as would normally be the case if Goethe even remotely conceived of Margarete as an Ariadne figure.

Goethe’s motivation for casting Margarete in Ariadne-like terms is grounded on his understanding and intuition of the eternal feminine. If Faust is the one who acts, and by acting incurs extreme guilt, then Margarete’s role in precipitating this action needs closer examination. Lawrence Lipking places Ariadne at the forefront of the historical repudiation of masculine heroics, suggesting that the historical Ariadne “may have been the last of the great matriarchs or White Goddesses of preantiquity,” a figure who “presides over timeworn mysteries that men have always failed to understand.”³ Margarete as Ariadne makes sense then as Goethe’s contribution to unearthing feminine wisdom, which performs a historical service, but it makes even stronger sense because, as Lipking succinctly puts it, “[T]he male poet needs an abandoned woman to inhabit. He also needs to understand the sources from which that figure draws her power” (Lipking 29). Goethe was just such a poet, highly capable of blurring the gender lines for the sake of creating a labyrinth for Faust, and a labyrinth for readers of Faust.

Margarete from the Particular to the Universal

I propose a new reading of Margarete that underscores her importance, one that draws on recent scholarship detailing Goethe’s sources in antiquity (mythological and epic) and grounds the relationship between Valentin and Margarete in such a way as to show why Goethe recast Valentin as a brother, giving him the brief but vital role as Margarete’s zealous, dishonored sibling. I argue that Margarete is an Ariadne figure as depicted in the mythology with the triad Theseus, Ariadne, Dionysus. Ariadne’s mortal hero, Theseus, proves to be a let-down, abandoning her even though she rescues him from the labyrinth and the Minotaur (her half-brother) by means of her thread. In her abandonment, the suffering, lovelorn, and completely exposed Ariadne becomes a deep symbol of all human (mortal) suffering, to such an extent that Nietzsche would later compose “Ariadne’s Lament” as a dithyrambic expression of the soul’s trial within the existential labyrinth.⁴ I argue...