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”: