The Devil Himself
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THE DEVIL HIMSELF: AN EXAMINATION OF REDEMPTION IN THE FAUST LEGENDS by KRISTEN S. RONEY (Under the Direction of Katharina M. Wilson) ABSTRACT Careful readers can see Faust everywhere; he continues to appear in film, in politics, and in various forms of popular culture. From Hrotsvit, to Spies, to Marlowe, Goethe, Mann, Mofolo and even Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Faust is a fascinating subject because he is so human; the devil (in whatever form he takes— from poodle to bald androgyne) is representative of our desires—many of which we are fearful of expressing. He fascinates because he acts on the very desires we wish to repress and reveals the cultural milieu of desire in his damnation or redemption. It is from this angle that I propose to examine the Faust legends: redemption. Though this dissertation is, ideally, part of a much larger study on the redemption topoi in literature, Faust exemplifies the problems and definitions. Studied most often as a single text subject, say Goethe’s Faust or Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” redemption lacks significant research on its own grounds, despite it prevalence in literature, except where it is encoded within the discussion of the function of literature itself. I propose, instead, that Redemption has a four related, but separate, uses in literature and literary interpretation involving sacred, secular, political, and aesthetic redemptions. In order to elucidate the matter, I will use the Faust legends and the appearance of redemption within them. INDEX WORDS: Redemption, Faust, Rosemary’s Baby, Frankenstein, Manfred, Hrotsvit, Doctor Faustus, Mephisto, Aesthetics, Walter Benjamin, Penitential THE DEVIL HIMSELF: AN EXAMINATION OF REDEMPTION IN THE FAUST LEGENDS by KRISTEN S. RONEY B.A., Norfolk State University, 1998 M.A., University of Georgia, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Kristen S. Roney All Rights Reserved THE DEVIL HIMSELF: AN EXAMINATION OF REDEMPTION IN THE FAUST LEGENDS by KRISTEN S. RONEY Major Professor: Katharina Wilson Committee: Anne F. Williams Joel Black Hyangsoon Yi Lioba Moshi Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2006 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my husband, Gordon, who not only tolerated the process but actually (and bravely) married me during it. Thank you. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My many thanks go to the members of my committee, all of whom provided excellent advice and food for thought. Hyangsoon Yi and Lioba Moshi provided excellent guidance in the areas of film and linguistics. Joel Black challenged my thinking in the areas of obscenity and innocence, providing me with fertile ground for further exploration of this trope. Anne Williams has my humblest gratitude for her gracious demeanor when faced with reading the manuscript again and also for her excellent editing assistance. Finally, for Katharina Wilson, I do not know how to properly convey my heartfelt gratitude for her encouragement over the last (far too many) years: Thank you. Thank you. My colleagues at Gainesville State College, all of whom seemed to believe that I would actually complete this, also deserve my thanks. Patsy, Bob, Sam, Michelle, Penny and many others have given me much support and many laughs during this process. Go Fighting Geese! Finally, I could not have finished this dissertation without the love and support of my dear friends and family: Gordon, Shawn, Marshall, Avery, Mom, Nonee, the Carters, Rhonda, Steve, Laura, Madeline and far too many others to name—Thank you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ v LIST OF FIGURES...................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 REDEMPTION, PENANCE, AND VIOLENCE......................................... 18 2 SACRED REDEMPTIONS.......................................................................... 47 3 SECULAR REDEMPTION AND THE MOTHER...................................... 71 4 THE POLITICS OF REDEMPTION......................................................... 112 5 AESTHETIC REDEMPTION, OR ART AFTER AUSCHWITZ .............. 141 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................... 171 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 177 WORKS CONSULTED.............................................................................................. 183 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Israel Museum, Jerusalem........................... 35 INTRODUCTION When I first began to work on the subject of redemption, I envisioned a project substantially different from the one that appears here. Initially, I was investigating the redemption of female characters in modern literature; that is, I had noticed a rather distinct trend in the last thirty or so years in which female characters—generally legendary figures such as Lilith, Mary Magdalene, and Freydis Eiriksdottir or fairy-tale characters such as The Wicked Witch of the West and Cinderella’s stepsisters—were being revised, or redeemed if you prefer, by contemporary authors who either recontextualized the character’s deeds or fleshed her out more fully. In either case, an odd literary brand of feminism was clearly at work: saving the bad girls.1 I stumbled onto this subject through decidedly non-literary means when Sarah McLachlan christened her all-female tour Lilith Fair, after the legendary first wife of Adam, in 1996. One significant feature of their namesake’s mythology was repackaged in order to be more palatable to twentieth-century feminists by transforming misogynistic images and language into ones of feminine power: 1 See Gregory MacGuire’s Wicked:The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Joan Clark’s Eiriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck; and Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. 2 In her revision of the story, McLachlan chooses the "parts that can guide us in our lives" and discards the elements that displease her. McLachlan's version, which informs the masses of Lilith Fair attendees, ignores the parts of the story that vilify her or call her a demon, because these alterations are "surely only the rantings of terrified men who were trying to keep other women from getting any silly ideas.” (Westmoreland 4) Lilith’s legendary demon stories were being written out of the herstory passed to a generation of Lilith Fair fans.2 Is it reasonable to discount stories of Lilith’s “bad” (read: socially unacceptable) behavior and reductively revise “masculine” mythmaking? Curious, too, were the depictions of Lilith that so often remade her into Mother Nature-cum-Lady Godiva, complete with long hair and no clothing.3 It was apparent that the authors (as well as McLachlan) were altering the legends in order to “rescue” the figures from the bad behavior to which they had been relegated. The word that continually came to mind as I read the new characters was redemption—the figures were being saved from their “sins.” It did not take long for the most significant problem to appear in my notes: I was not really defining what I meant by “redemption,” a word with terrifically 2 This was not the first such transformation of Lilith’s role; one can see similar recontextualizations occurring in 1970’s era Jewish Feminist literature and criticism including the 1976 founding of the magazine Lilith and Judith Plaskow’s 1979 "The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology." 3 An image wrought with problems of objectification, which seem no less problematic. Granted, the connection between Lilith and Godiva is an interesting one; the one sought to force her husband’s hand in matters of sexual relations and the other in matters of the taxation of Coventry. 3 nuanced meanings. I thought, foolishly, that I could simply explain myself in the introductory remarks and be on my way; surely I could examine the criticism of redemption and forge a solid meaning or, at least, a reasonably comprehensive notion of it. At this point, significant problem number two arose: nobody else was explaining it either.4 Rather than continuing research into problems in the feminist redemption of warrior women figures, I found myself gravitating toward how we write about redemption. Socially, legally, politically, and religiously, the notion of redemption has a long and storied history, which will be considered in more detail in Chapter One. One of the most famous recent struggles with the various meanings of redemption occurred during the 1990s fight to commute the death penalty sentence of Karla Faye Tucker. Convicted in 1983 of murdering two people as they slept, Tucker’s subsequent religious and social conversions sparked a tremendous controversy regarding the nature of redemption. Early in her incarceration, the drug addicted Tucker5 turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and to Bible Study in order to come to 4 At least in the world of literary studies. Much more can be found on the subject in religion and law, of course. 5 Boudreau and others have suggested that a significant part of Tucker’s popularity as an anti-capital punishment