Katherine Lyman and Dr. Christian Clement, Germanic and Slavic Languages
Main Text
Ada Christen (1839-1901), Viennese feminist, naturalist, and popular poet, published Faustina: Drama in fünf Akten, in 1871. The drama, which was set as a melodramatic version of Goethe’s Faust, did not succeed, and today, Faustina still exists only in library archives (Kord 344). The purpose of my work with Faustina was twofold: to transcribe the text of the play for SOPHIE, BYU’s database of German women’s literature, and then to write a paper analyzing the text.
For the first stage of my project, I referred to an online scanned copy of the Faustina manuscript produced by the Austrian national library. I transcribed this scan from its Gothic script into standard modern typeset, and then I submitted my finished document to Dr. Michelle James, the head of the SOPHIE project. Under Dr. James, this document will be edited and then published on the SOPHIE website (http://sophie.byu.edu/).
For the second stage of my project, I was interested in exploring Faustina’s status as a Faust-drama. The title of the play, as well as the importance of Faust in German literature, suggests at first glance that the drama is a variation on the traditional Faust story. However, I found few traditional Faust elements in my first reading of Faustina, and critics of the play have described it as a weak imitation of Faust or even as nothing more than a socioeconomic drama about the role of women in society (Eigler 64; Kord 78-80).
Through my research, however, I have found that Faustina contains explicit, though subtle, references to the traditional Faust story, particularly Goethe’s Faust (1832). Because of this, although Faustina is cast structurally as a melodramatic Salonstück, or salon play, rather than a poetic epic like Goethe’s, it still marks itself clearly as part of the Faust tradition in terms of content. And although Faustina takes place in a contemporary German household, rather than the semi-mythical, semi-fantastic setting of Goethe’s Faust, it still incorporates much of Goethe’s plot into its narrative.
Exactly how this works was the subject of my research—I wanted to learn how Christen managed to produce a drama that is truly Faustian in content while still being truly original in form. What I found is that Christen’s work is full of characters, situations, and even philosophical questions that match parallel characters and scenarios from Goethe’s Faust, and that Christen deliberately distinguishes these parallels as Faustian.
Often, the parallels are marked by images or names that Christen borrows from Goethe’s work and inserts into her own text, thus tagging a certain character as being the equivalent of another character in Goethe’s Faust. For example, at one point in Faustina, a woman cries the name “Heinrich” twice and then falls unconscious (Christen 123). A similar situation happens in Faust, when a woman cries the name “Heinrich” twice and then dies (Goethe, Bd. 16, 238, 4613-4). This common name helps to show Christen’s character as parallel to the woman from Goethe’s work.
At other times, Christen creates a Faustian connection by situation. This is possible because the Faust-motif contains several specific situations that are easily identifiable as Faustian—for example, the Faustian quest, where a character is desparate to achieve a certain all-consuming goal. In Faustina, this takes the form of a quest for revenge: the drama opens on a woman who has spent twenty years seeking revenge, and she finally achieves it during the course of the play.
Finally, Christen also references Faust by inserting specific philosophical questions into her work that match questions and issues from the traditional Faust story or from Goethe’s Faust. For example, one important issue from Goethe’s work is the idea of paradigm shifts. Goethe’s Faust character experiences major paradigm shifts, both at the beginning of the work, when Faust decides to begin a new stage in his Faustian quest, and at the end of the work, when Faust finally finds a pursuit that brings him satisfaction. Likewise, Christen’s work contains paradigm shifts both at the beginning and the end of Faustina’s Faustian quest, and Faustina explicitly reflects on this at the end of the drama, when she is contemplating how her heart has been changed and she no longer cares about revenge (Christen 109-110). The idea of the paradigm shift is just as important for Faustina as it is for the traditional Faust. And furthermore, the way Christen treats this issue, among other issues, brings new insights to the philosophical questions originally raised by Goethe.
I have written about these and other topics in a paper that I intend to publish as my honors thesis. I also plan to submit an article for publication at the 2012 conference of the Goethe Society of North America. I hope, however, to continue editing and expanding my paper before I do so.
References
- Christen, Ada. Faustina: Drama in Fünf Akten. Wien: Jakob Dirnböck, 1871. Frauenliteratur der österreichischen Moderne. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2006. Web. 27 Apr 2010.
- Kord, Susanne. Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992. Print.