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Conclusion: Classicism and Goethe’s Emotional Regime
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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c o n c l u s i o n Classicism and Goethe’s Emotional regime In his autobiography Goethe revealed his works to be “fragments of a great confession”—so convincingly, that generations of readers, professional and lay alike, considered his poetry above all “poetry of experience.”1 It is known that Goethe was susceptible to powerful emotions, to great enthusiasm and to profound depression. On more than one occasion he suffered the kinds of physical and emotional collapses experienced by Werther, tasso, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust. Even in the years of his maturity, as the privy councillor resented by the friends of his youth, he was still capable of casting himself to the floor to mourn the death of his infants,2 or at age seventy-four of writing passionate love poetry and proposing to the nineteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow. He also had repeated experiences of rebirth through renunciation, of turning from passionate self-involvement to new life in the world, of accepting reality. and as his subtle analyses of anxiety and the uncanny surely demonstrate, he had considerable experience with nuances of emotion and with how to deal with them. But the regime was not just personal. Goethe’s powerful descriptions of emotional upheaval captured the attention of his age, as witnessed by his lifelong fame as the author of Die Leiden des jungen Werther. His importance for subsequent ages, this book has been arguing, was his depiction of repressed emotion. In his own day, only the literary avant-garde understood how his increasingly tamed, “classical” works continued the psychological labor first undertaken in Werther, how they replaced the cosmic referent of an older allegorical style of representation with a psychological referent. It is not that Goethe discovered or invented the interior subject; that work had been already conclusion 181 under way for a century when he wrote Werther. His unique contribution to the chain was adapting the rhetoric of allegory, which made it possible to represent what was invisible or even ineffable, to what was ineffable deep within the self rather than high above it. I have focused on Goethe’s place in a narrative of the emergence of depth psychology, but he occupies an equally pivotal place in many other representative accounts of Western subjectivity, three of which I would like to describe briefly here—psychological analysis in the novel, Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of subjectivity, and Norbert Elias’s psychosocial analysis of the civilizing process. Thus I will conclude by pointing toward some other ways that the development demonstrated in this book made the emotional regime of the last two centuries, in part at least, Goethe’s. Most obviously, the emergence of psychological analysis in the novel of the nineteenth century—whether weighted more toward ethical and epistemological dimensions, as in George Eliot and Herman Melville, or more toward the transient nuances of thought and feeling, as in Henry James and, later, Virginia Woolf—might have already occurred to readers of my introduction . I point to it at the end, however, rather than there, because my reading of Goethe makes sense out of the strong allegorical component in much nineteenth-century fiction. The critical emphasis on realism in the period makes the allegory often harder to trace. Dickens is obviously an allegorist, but the tight connection of his allegory both to eighteenth-century satire and to gothic narrative obscure his Goethean psychological projection. allegory emerges most clearly when it falls out of balance with explicit psychological analysis, as in late Hawthorne and Melville. While the often bizarre allegorical style of Dickens and the americans might have been mediated in part through Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, these authors all knew Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister as well. Melville’s Pierre (1852) offers a good example of Goethe’s explicit presence behind such strange allegorizing. at the beginning of this meandering narrative the young hero is already engaged to angelic Lucy, with the approval of his beloved mother. a mysterious portrait of his recently dead father and a mysterious young woman named Isabel draw him from his initial innocent bliss; Isabel turns out to be his half sister, whose existence has been suppressed, and Pierre must choose between his passion for her and being dispossessed by his mother. He and Isabel flee to the city, where they live in poverty as Pierre tries to support her by his writing. Lucy joins them; Pierre eventually dies in prison mourned by both. Like...