Although the title character does have a prominent role in Faust, much of the story is actually about his daughter, Gretchen. This is an entirely new addition by Goethe. Dr. Pan notes that this is not the only innovation in Goethe's recasting of the story. He sees this as a larger project of recasting the Faust story as one about the struggle between the individual and society. The story about Gretchen is a well-known form of bourgeois tragic drama. The story comes originally from Lessing, who wrote a story, Emilia Galotti, about a prince who wants to bed a young woman about to be married to a baron. The prince plots a fake attack on the bride and groom and captures the woman, Emilia, under the pretense of protecting her. The daughter eventually has her father kill her so that she does not succumb to the lecherous will of the prince. In short, this follows the form of an evil aristocrat scheming to harm a bourgeois family. The middle class families are portrayed as moral and good whereas the aristocrats are are portrayed as scheming and evil.
In Goethe's Faust, the bourgeois family drama is altered. Whereas the point of view is usually from the family perspective, Goethe's tale is told from Faust's perspective. Also, the father does not play such a large role, allowing the young woman to be more independent. Another point of contrast is that whereas traditional bourgeois tragic dramas were about conflict between two kinds of communities, Faust is about the conflict between a society and an individual. Speciically, this is is the story about Faust's dynamic individualism in conflict with Margaret's commitment to traditional conservatism and her family.
One scene that reveals this tension is the scene where Faust responds to the "Gretchen question". Faust seems to believe in some pantheistic, physical manifestation of divinity. He gives feelings as evidence for God, and denies the traditional names for this feeling. We can also see this notion of divinity when the old man version of Faust talks to a spirit in 510-517 and 3217-21. What is divine is thus something grounded in worldly experience of emotion. Feelings become the highest justification for Faust's actions. By embracing feeling and emotion, Faust seems to try to join with nature as a kind of divine hero.
In lines 3055-72, the devil is trying to convince Faust that he must lie to Margaret in order to seduce her. Margaret wants eternal love and Faust is unable to offer that. Faust notes that although his words might not represent true facts about the world, his words are grounded in passionate feelings which makes them seem true. Words are used for rhetorical purposes, not for saying true things. Faust admits that the devil is right because Faust cannot help but lie. Dr. Pan notes that Faust thinks his words are meant to express his feeling and not to express a promise or an agreement.
Dr. Pan thinks that the story of Margaret is a fine example of a story about the conflict between individualism and respect for the community. Whereas she brings a first jewelry box to her mother, she hides the second box with Martha. She seems to further reject community pressure by choosing to be with Faust in spite of his rejection of "God", even going so far as to drug her mother to stay with him. Then her social guilt kicks in when she hears about another woman (Barbara) being criticized for similar behavior. After becoming pregnant, she wants to rejoin her community, but she is unwelcome. She asserts her individualism again by killing her baby before finally resigning herself to the punishment that waits for her in prison rather than escaping with Faust. Starting at line 4544, Margaret asserts this principle. Faust, however, does not bee indebted to his community in the same way, as expressed in lines 1754-59. It is also significant that the words of the community criticizing Margaret are mirrored by the words of an evil spirit (starting at line 3776). This seems to be a way in which Goethe is criticizing society as embracing an evil, repressive, overly conservative spirit. Hence the problem is not that the individual does not conform to the society. Rather, the problem is that the community is too constricting in the first place. Alternatively, we can also read the play as an indictment of individualism (if we see Faust as a traditional villain).
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