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RITUAL AND THEATRICALITY IN GOETHES WILHELM MEISTER
become a productive bourgeois citizen, instead entertains aspirations of help¬
ing to cultivate a cultured public through the establishment of a German
National Theater. Sent on a business trip, he instead falls in with a traveling
theatrical troupe and indulges his acting fantasies, only to realize after some
time that he has idealized the tawdry reality of theatrical life. Groping around
for a sense of direction in life, Wilhelm discovers that a mysterious Tower
Society has intervened at various stages of his journey to influence the course
of events and offer him veiled guidance. When Wilhelm seeks direction, they
retreat, yet when he attempts to act independently, he discovers that they have
anticipated and outmaneuvered him. Via a series of dramatic reversals and
unexpected revelations, the tale ends happily: Wilhelm is extricated from a
misguided engagement to the capable but unimaginative Therese, becomes
involved in the noble Lothario’s enterprise of dismantling feudalism on his
estates, and wins the heart and hand of the benevolent and aristocratic Natalie.
But instead of settling down into some specific form of active life, he sets out
on yet another journey, postponing marriage and settled adult life.
What does Wilhelm learn by way of his lengthy detour through the world
of theater? To some extent, the dominance of this theme reflects the earliest
form of the novel, in which Goethe envisioned that Wilhelm’s theatrical am¬
bitions would be realized. Goethe worked on the novel from 1777-1785, and
it reflected his own involvement in the Weimar court theater and the hopes
of many of the time to transform society by establishing National Theaters
throughout Germany. The notion of a “National Theater,” while reflecting the
ideal of a national literature rooted in the special character of the German lan¬
guage, was not quite what the name indicates. These were theaters, the first of
which was established in Hamburg in 1767, which performed plays in German,
but many of these plays were translated from French and Italian, as there was
not an adequate supply of original German material. The idea was that court¬
subsidized theaters would raise theater to cultural respectability, improve the
lives of actors by giving them a steady income and taking them off the road,
and by relieving these economic pressures also release the inherent power of
theater to form sounder, more elevated public taste.° In a 1784 lecture to the
“German Society” at Mannheim, Schiller expressed the aspirations of the day:
The stage is the channel, open to all, into which the light of wisdom pours down
from the superior, thinking part of the people, to spread from there in milder beams
through the whole state. More correct ideas, sounder principles, purer feelings
flow from here through all the veins of the people. The mists of barbarism, of dark
superstition vanish, night gives way to victorious light.’
° W.H. Bruford: The German Tradition of Self- Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas
Mann, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 31-32.
7 Friedrich Schiller, quoted by Bruford: Self- Cultivation, 31.
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