Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles

4. Gendering Faust

96 gendering faust 96 4 Gendering Faust S ocialist Fausts have heretofore remained male—this suggests a reluctance of socialist utopian thinkers to rethink issues of gender and relations of power between the sexes. Isn’t this a failure to think through all the implications of the Faustian bargain? Goethe’s Faust, after all, demands to experience “what to all of mankind is apportioned ” (1770–71). Shouldn’t this include experience as a woman as well as a man? In his two Faust plays, Goethe briefly flirts with the idea of gender transformation. Mephistopheles does undergo a female metamorphosis in part 2 of Faust, changing himself into one of the Phorkyad deities. He sees it as a shameful disguise: “They’ll call me a hermaphrodite” (8031). His metamorphosis enables him to appear as a female adviser to Helen and to convince her that Menelaos means to sacrifice her. As Phorkyas, she/he succeeds in uniting Faust with Helen, who flees for her life and takes refuge in Faust’s medieval castle. Mephistopheles’s female identity as an ugly old woman with only a single eye and tooth is a disguise that doesn’t really explore the politics of gender—Helen trusts Phorkyas precisely because her appearance and manner conform so exactly to the stereotype of the wise crone. Elsewhere, Goethe even purposefully avoids transgender issues: the Homunculus that his assistant Wagner creates in a test tube is clearly marked as male, though in the tradition of alchemy, this would normally be a hermaphrodite . Spinning through the air in his glass enclosure, the Homunculus crashes his glass upon spying the beautiful female figure of Galatea, who rises from the sea (8472–73). There is only a hint of cross-gender sexual dynamics in the two parts of Goethe’s Faust in the relationship between the two main protagonists. The exasperation Mephistopheles expresses at Faust’s continued dissatisfaction might be read as a lovers’ quarrel. At the moment of Faust’s death, the devil comments, “No joy could sate him, no delight but cloyed, / For changing shapes he lusted to the last” (11587–88). This hint about a possible queering of Faust—where the relationship between the two antagonists might be seen 97 gendering faust as a reciprocal seduction with erotic tensions—has yet to be fully explored. The feminization of Faust has, however, been developed in several ways in twentieth-century expressionist theater, in Weimar cinema, in French écriture féminine of the 1970s, and in modern fiction. A Precursor to Feminism: Louisa May Alcott In 1866, Louisa May Alcott, daughter of the Concord educator and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, wrote the first of two novels that she titled “A Modern Mephistopheles.” The second was published in 1877; the first was recently discovered among her unpublished manuscripts and appeared in 1995 with the title A Long Fatal Love Chase.1 Rosamond, the heroine of A Long Fatal Love Chase, is a Faustian spirit whose first utterance is that she feels as though she would gladly sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom from the reclusive life she lives with her grandfather. Soon a mysterious visitor named Tempest appears, who promises to marry her and take her away. From the beginning, Rosamond is struck by Tempest’s resemblance to a portrait of Mephistopheles that hangs in the house. After a year of happiness, she learns thatTempest is already married and resolves to flee. The greater part of the novel relates the heroine’s many hair-raising escapes from various hideouts, with her seducer in hot pursuit. Whether she goes to Paris, to a convent, to Wiesbaden, or to Staffordshire, where she lives in the same household as the first Mrs. Tempest and her son Lilo, Tempest relentlessly tracks her down. At the convent, Tempest disguises himself as her confessor; in Wiesbaden, he prevents her from marrying an aristocrat by telling the prospective husband that Rosamond is mad; and when Rosamond resolves to return to her island with her protector from the convent, the friar Ignatius, Tempest manages to separate them by subterfuge. He tries to drown Ignatius by running down his boat, only to discover that it is Rosamond whom he has killed. Although Rosamond shows a remarkable independence and resourcefulness for a heroine of her times, she deploys all her ingenuity to rescue what amounts to a very traditional notion of a woman’s “honor.” Moreover, she does love her “Mephistopheles.”2 Her Faustian bargain is real enough, although...