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The Daisy Oracle: A New Gretchenfrage in Goethe’s Faust
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 125-140
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Abstract: The daisy oracle in Goethe's Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808) is one of the most prominent instances of flower divination in literary history and is crucial to understanding the Gretchen tragedy. By examining its origin and evolution in German literature and its role within the drama, this article argues that the daisy oracle offers critical insight into Gretchen's agency, desire, and resistance to eighteenth-century gender conventions, and poses an alternative Gretchenfrage that demonstrates the character's relationship to love, desire, and the divine. Gretchen, who embodies the characteristics of purity and innocence represented by the daisy, is also the agent who destroys the daisy and thus manipulates her own fate, setting the plot in motion. The coda of this paper outlines some of the most significant iterations of twentieth-century daisy oracles that borrow their form from Goethe, demonstrating the enduring resonance of the daisy oracle and its connotations and positing the daisy oracle as an allegory for the self-destructing potential of humankind's striving to manifest its own ideals and nevertheless achieve redemption.
Keywords: Daisy oracle, eternal feminine, Faust, flower divination, Gretchenfrage
Introduction
In the “Garten” (“Garden”) scene of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808), Gretchen playfully plucks the petals from a daisy in what seems like nothing more than a childlike game of flower divination. Couched between the scenes of “Straße” (“Street”), in which Faust and Mephistopheles plan their visit to deceive and seduce Gretchen, and “Ein Gartenhäuschen” (“A Garden Bower”), where Faust and Gretchen kiss for the first time, her seemingly innocuous consultation of the daisy oracle changes the action in the drama. Even though it appears to be Faust and Mephistopheles who plan to deceive and seduce Gretchen, it is Gretchen herself who coordinates Faust’s declaration of love and thus changes the course of action in the first part of the drama that is often, and for good reason, referred to as the “Gretchen tragedy”:
Margarete: Laßt einmal!
(Sie pflückt eine Sternblume und zupft die Blätter ab, eins nach dem andern)
Faust: Was soll das? Einen Strauß?
Margarete: Nein, es soll nur ein Spiel.
Faust: Wie?
Margarete: Geht! Ihr lacht mich aus.
(Sie rupft und murmelt)
Faust: Was murmelst du?
Margarete (halblaut): Er liebt mich—Liebt mich nicht.
Faust: Du holdes Himmelsangesicht!
8 - Haoh-Kiöh-Tschuen (The Tale of a Perfect Match) (1800–1801)
- from The Translations
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- By Friedrich Schiller, Carrie Collenberg, University of Minnesota
- Edited by Jeffrey L. High, California State University Long Beach
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- Book:
- Schiller's Literary Prose Works
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2008, pp 169-170
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- Chapter
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Summary
Book One
IN TAMING, a great city of the CHINESE EMPIRE, there lived a noble young man named Tiehtschongu, who applied himself to scholarship. His figure was handsome, his soul magnanimous and pure; justice was his passion and it was a joy for him to stand up for the oppressed. Here he was swift and bold and not concerned about reputation; nothing could contain his fervor when he had an act of violence to avenge.
His father, named Tieh-ying, was a mandarin of justice and administered a judicial office at the court of the emperor in Peking. Because he feared the fiery disposition of his son, he had him pursue his studies at a safe distance from the court. When Tiehtschongu had reached his sixteenth year, his parents thought that the time had come for him to marry; however, he declared that he could not commit himself to such an indissoluble bond until he had found a woman in whom all the virtues of body and spirit were combined.
He was twenty years old when he read in a history book about an emperor who had demanded that the heart of one of his mandarins be removed in order to prepare a medicine out of it for the empress, who was sick. A mandarin named Pikang immediately offered himself for the operation. This great selflessness astounded the young man and reminded him of the obedience that he owed his parents and had hitherto so little shown.