Category: Literature

In my continuing music education, I was recently introduced to Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (hear, for example, Renee Flemming’s performance of this work). The song is a setting of Goethe’s poem “Gretchens Stube,” in which Gretchen, a poor but upright maiden, sits alone in her room at the wheel, thinking longingly of Faust. Gretchen spins her mind and her threads on the cusp of ruin.

Faust desires Gretchen and with the help of his demonic wingman Mephistopheles (to whom he has bartered his soul in exchange for worldly favors), Faust has laid a trap to seduce Gretchen. Faust eventually gives Gretchen a sleeping potion to administer to her mother so he can come to Gretchen at night undisturbed. Contrary to the assurances of Faust, the potion kills Gretchen’s mother, even as Gretchen is conceiving a child from the illicit union, with the voyeur-devil panting in the wings. Gretchen’s enraged soldier-brother is subsequently fatally wounded in a brawl over the sordid matter, living just long enough to tell Gretchen exactly what he thinks of her. Destitute, Gretchen drowns her illegitimate child, is imprisoned, and dies burdened with grief. In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen is ultimately saved because she was once so stainless a figure and in her failings became so sufficiently penitential. Stripped of her name and transformed as una poenitentium, her soul re-appears in the final scene of the second act of the tragedy among the choir of angels receiving Faust in his own redemption, who, by those same angels, is himself bewilderingly whisked away from the clutches of a very confused Mephistopheles.

Leaving off for the time being the interesting and important question of men writing women’s stories, the whole of Faust, and specifically Gretchen’s song within it, engaged me in a feminist religious critique in ways I found counter-intuitive. On one level, I could not help but read Faust as a Promethean sort of hero. Here you have an accomplished scholar who is simply exhausted by the futility of his work, and especially the shortcomings of theology. He is seeking empirical knowledge from any place that it can at last be found. Minus his grandiose local stature, he kind of reminds me of myself (and lots of other academicians in theology who have glimpsed religious faith and myth in their most tiresome and dangerous social distortions). I incline to commend Faust for entertaining the background, the darkness, the animal, the bodily, the elemental, the unspeakable – for, that is also classically the “feminine,” yes? Continue reading “Gretchen at Her Spinning Wheel by Natalie Weaver”