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RITUAL AND THEATRICALITY IN GOETHE’S WILHELM MEISTER ——~<~o»—___ JENNIFER A. HERDT As Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister outgrows his aspirations to a life in the theater, so the novel Wilhelm Meister asks whether the formative powers of drama, and with it ritual, have been outgrown in the prosaic world of modernity. Taking its point of departure from the ritual scene in which the Tower Society reveals itself to Wilhelm, this essay will argue that even as Goethe seeks to write a novel capable of serving as “secular scripture,” he wrestles with the question of the role of ritual for the modern individual, tasked with taking responsibility for his own self-formation. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is a novel that reflects extensively on the theater and at a key turning point incorporates a ritual, upon which it then reflects.! In part, the novel is taking stock of the relative significance for ethical formation — Bildung, the ethical formation of modern, mature human individuals — of theater on the one hand and the novel on the other.’ It is also asking whether Kunstreligion — the religion of Art — can and should replace inherited religions, and what place ritual might have in Kunstreligion.* As Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister outgrows his aspirations to a life in the 1 This essay is a modified version of portions of chapters 5 and 6 of Jennifer Herdt: Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was hailed as an exemplary Bildungsroman; it was published in 1795, just as Schiller launched Die Horen, a literary journal in which Goethe was a key collaborator; it was a moment in which literature, and the novel in particular, was seen as playing a key role in the project of aesthetic education, itself envisioned as a path to political maturity and emancipation. See Herdt: Forming Humanity, 133-155; Todd Kontje: Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction, University Park (Pa.), Penn State University Press, 1992, 3-9; Todd Kontje: The German Bildungsroman: History ofa National Genre, Columbia (S.C.), Camden House, 1993, 5-6; Rolf Selbmann (ed.): Zur Geschichte des deutschen Bildungsromans, Vol. 640 of Wege der Forschung, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988, 64-66. On Kunstreligion, see Herdt: Ibid., 121-122; Wolfgang Braungart: Literatur und Religion in der Moderne, Paderborn, Fink, 2016, 200; Dorothea E. von Mücke: The Practices of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public, New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, 65. + 107 +
