Goethe's Faust, Part

Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808) First Lecture ¶ While this initial lecture will offer some content about Goethe’s Faust, Part One, it will primarily present key data concerning the Romantic movement, which followed the Enlightenment as the second great movement within Modernity, the overall theme of our course, World Literature Two. I • Strum und Drang; Romanticism ¶ Considered the preeminent modern German author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (generally known as just Goethe [pronounced Gurr-ta]) lived from 1749 until 1832. We are studying his closet drama (a play to be read) — as opposed to stage drama (a play to be acted) — popularly referred to as Faust, Part One, which debuted in print in 1808. A sequel, Faust, Part Two, appeared in 1832, the year that Goethe died, aged 82. Many deem Faust, Part One the single greatest masterpiece of German literature. ¶ At just 24 years of age, Goethe became a cultural celebrity due to the success and influence of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which is: (1) epistolary in style (i.e. it presents its content as a series of letters); and (2) somewhat autobiographical. The sensitive, melancholy title character, a young artist (painter), writes to a friend about his unrequited love for a “very charming young lady,” Charlotte, resident in the countryside, a “terrestrial paradise.” She is engaged to — and later marries — a man, Albert, 11 years her senior. ¶ Becoming emotionally frustrated in the Werther-Charlotte-Albert love triangle, Werther eventually kills himself with a pistol (although the attempt is not immediately successful). Certain authorities banned the novel in an effort to prevent young men from adopting Werther’s signature clothing style (yellow waistcoat; blue jacket) and, in addition, committing copycat suicides. ¶ The Sorrows of Young Werther receives mention in other important novels, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It is part of the Sturm und Drang (German for “storm and stress”) movement in literature, music, painting, and other arts. That movement (1760s - 1780s) emphasized individuality and extremes of emotion, by contrast with the Enlightenment’s privileging of universality and cold, calm rationalism. ¶ Strum und Drang may be seem as a precursor to a major phase of modernity: Romanticism. (Thus, we call it proto-Romantic.) Some scholars claim that the Romantic movement opposed the Enlightenment; however, it’s more accurate to assert that it sought to provide balance. While the Enlightenment stressed rationality, dispassion, and the mind, Romanticism accentuated affectivity, passion, and the heart and spirit. ¶ Science and empiricism, intimately associated with the Enlightenment, did not go away. What the Enlightenment began, we continue; indeed, our age is sometimes called the STEM era, with the acronym STEM standing for science, technology, engineering, mathematics. ¶ By affectivity, we mean feelings and appetites of one kind and another, not least: • emotional states, such as anger, kindheartedness, and fear; • spiritual longings and/or the sense of a personal relationship with God; • cravings for money, luxury goods, food, alcohol, sex, and more; • the sense of patriotism, extending to a willingness to die for flag and nation. ¶ During the Romantic period, which we especially associate with the nineteenth century (i.e. the 1800s), the term “sentiment” was commonly used to indicate feelings, especially moral feelings. Having feelings towards — and/or recognizing and respecting the feelings within —others was called “sympathy.” Acting alongside others in response to shared sympathy was called “fraternity.” Sentiment à Sympathy à Fraternity Feeling Fellow-Feeling Action 1 ¶ Much of the anti-slavery, abolitionist, or emancipation movement, which expanded consequentially and achieved signal victories during the Romantic period, was based on the sympathy-fraternity dyad. Often driven by their membership in reform-based Christian denominations (such as Quakerism, Unitarianism, and Methodism), free individuals increasingly regarded enslaved individuals with sympathy; that is, they recognized the affective or emotional suffering — indeed, trauma — that the slave (whether man, woman, or child) chronically experienced. This religiously informed sympathy developed into programmatic fraternity; in other words, sympathetic free people organized themselves to act, as fraternities, to eradicate slavery. ¶ Due to the worldwide extent of the British Empire, one of the most important early fraternal efforts was the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slave Trade (founded in 1787), whose core aim was to stop the transatlantic shipping of slaves from Africa to the Americas, a practice then dominated by British entities and individuals. Nine of the Society’s 12 founded members were Quakers. ¶ The significance of sympathy or fellow-feeling (i.e. recognizing and respecting the feelings of others) in the abolitionist movement is well illustrated in the iconic medallion that a successful English manufacturer of pottery, a Unitarian named Josiah Wedgwood, made — and donated for free — in support of propaganda efforts by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. ¶ A copy of the medallion appears in the top left corner of this page of the lecture. As ceramic cameos, Wedgewood mass-produced versions of this image, which emphasizes the shackled-and-chained slave’s feelings or sentiment (“Am I Not a Man …”), as well as his need for sympathy (“… and a Brother?”). Clearly, in addition to a Romantic appeal to sentiment, the Enlightenment’s preference for logical cogitation— an appeal to reason — is also manifest in the rhetorical question attributed to the slave. ¶ In 1788, Wedgwood mailed to Benjamin Franklin a parcel of the medallions. In his capacity as President of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin enthusiastically accepted the gift. ¶ In 1807, Britain’s parliament (sometimes known as Westminster) banned slave-trading by British subjects (i.e. citizens); however, it did not abolish slavery within the Empire. Legislation to mandate the latter outcome passed only in 1838, still several decades before President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), issued towards the end of the second year of the Civil War between the anti-slavery United States of America and the rebel, pro-slavery Confederate States of America. ¶ In 1823 in Britain, a new abolitionist fraternity emerged, generally known by its short-form name: the Anti-Slavery Society. Within that movement, which underwent several reorganizations over time, one camp (the gradualists) held that slavery should be dismantled gradually; however, another camp (the anti- gradualists) advocated for the immediate and absolute cessation of slavery. ¶ By the 1840s, the most important international voice among the anti-gradualists was the Irish lawyer and politician Daniel O’Connell, a Roman Catholic. The American former-slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass honored O’Connell as his foremost model and inspiration. II • Affectivity: The Passions; the Sublime (Awe); the Volk ¶ As we gain understanding of Romanticism, we can usefully invoke three categories by which to contemplate and assess affectivity — that is, the realm of feelings, emotions, and desires. Those categories are: the Passions; the Sublime; and the Volk ¶ The Passions (note the convention of using a capital “P”) refers to emotions that spring up internally — and generally spontaneously — within the individual. A classic example is sexual lust. Think, for a moment, about how many “In a Relationship” change-of-status notifications on Facebook result from 2 the posting individual’s having suddenly fallen in love/lust with another person. Fast forward some weeks, and the affair may be over, with the once-besotted individual wondering, “What (the ****) was I thinking?” The point, obviously, is that the party in question was not thinking, at least not with her/his cognitive faculties (i.e. “the head”; reason). Instead, she/he responded to spontaneous passion (i.e. “the heart”). Most likely, all of us are familiar with the head/heart dichotomy. ¶ Visceral, violent anger is another mainstream example of the Passions. When someone commits violence, prompted by an upwelling of anger, she/he will sometimes later reflect, “I don’t know what I was thinking” or “I lost my head.” These two statements indicate that the individual became temporarily divorced from thinking and reason as a result of strong stimulation by an internal surge of passionate feelings. ¶ As to the Sublime: while the term can cover various matters, for our purposes we will associate it with feelings provoked by grand, even overwhelming external phenomena. In the face a prodigious phenomenon — either natural or human-made — an individual may experience a sense of being entirely emotionally consumed, even stunned and debilitated. This sense is the Sublime. Consider one’s emotional responses to an incoming tornado or hurricane: a crushing feeling of fear; a humbling sentiment of existential jeapordy. Consider, too, the kind of battlefield terror that causes long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major reason for high rates of alcoholism, drug-abuse, divorce, and suicide among US military veterans considered as a whole. ¶ We particularly use the noun or substantive “awe” in connection with the Sublime. Indubitably, experiencing a category-five hurricane (a natural phenomenon)

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