Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane K. Brown (review)

No one reads German literature like Jane K. Brown, and it is a real pleasure to read the great works of Goethe along with her. Brown, who has written several distinguished books and many articles on Goethe, mounts a complex and intriguing argument that, while tracing literary influence in unexpected ways, also dwells on a number of interpretive problems, finding consistencies and coherence in some very unusual places. Her broad vision of literary inheritance yields patterns of rewriting from Rousseau to Goethe to the Romantics, and, in a less specific way, to Freud. At issue is the representation of subjectivity and what came to be labeled as “the unconscious.” To offer a crude oversimplification: Goethe took from Rousseau, developed his own version of interiority, and ultimately gave to depth psychology and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Brown’s argument rests on the much more nuanced observation that “the discourse of modern psychology owes much to a literary language of depth psychology that Goethe developed in his response to Rousseau” (6).

The book itself examines Rousseau as the “consummate writer of feeling” (10) and looks ahead to Freud in sections on repression and the uncanny, but the major emphasis is on Goethe’s work, especially Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Die Wahlverwandschaften, and Faust, though other major plays, poems, and prose works are also addressed. Brown is a noted expert on Goethe and his work but this is not simply a master-scholar riffing on her erudition and expertise; rather, this study presents a fully developed theory of Goethe’s efforts to depict interiority and what they mean for our understanding of the modern subject.

What Goethe took from Rousseau was a means for expressing interiority through an economy of passion, but where Rousseau attached a moral weight to the shepherding of passion, Goethe saw psychological consequences decoupled from a moral law. Werther and Wahlverwandtschaften are very much rewritings of Julie, Brown states, but without Rousseau’s moral oppositions. One of the interesting aspects of the book is Brown’s capacity for seeing homologies of plotting within and outside of Goethe’s oeuvre. Rousseau, Goethe, and the Romantics were, to an extent, writing the same story—sometimes repeatedly, as in Goethe’s case.

In three chapters on the dramas, Brown posits three distinct stages in Goethe’s developing representations of interiority: “The theatrical Self” (Egmont, Iphigenie, Tasso) involves an ongoing investigation of identity and how to depict it; “The Scientific Self” follows Faust and Goethe’s interest in science and scientific method and delineates the connections between “theatrical representation and scientific epistemology” (76); and finally, “The Narrative Self” addresses the many ways in which narrative constitutes and contributes to a representation of self. A long section on the “Language of Interiority” concludes the volume with indepth discussion of anxiety and the uncanny and how they figure in both Goethe’s work and the discourses of Romanticism. Here Brown returns to Werther and the “Werther Paradigm”:

A nature enthusiast falls in love with a woman he cannot marry. First he idealizes her, then interprets her inaccessibility as his complete alienation from nature. Confronted with the prospect of eternal suffering caused by the indifference of a nature beyond the control of his own subjectivity, he commits suicide.

(145)

Brown also includes the Undine motif in this reasonably elastic narrative paradigm, relating it to the poetry of Wilhelm Müller and the tales of Tieck and de la Motte Fouquè. These are bold arguments, but Brown, with her vast knowledge of the German literature of the period, has her bases covered. There follows a fascinating discussion of Die Wahlverwandtschaften and “Das Märchen” and the thematic affinities between Ottilie and the green snake and their acts of self-sacrifice.

Many of Brown’s observations are new, strange, and unorthodox, but, ever aware of her departures from the usual, she remains a constant source of guidance for her reader: carefully explaining her methods and goals, foreshadowing her assertions, recollecting the strands of her argument...