We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2023
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!
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
