ABSTRACT
The crucial importance of family dynamics in the so-called archetypal Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, however, becomes most evident in retrospect, starting with Wilhelm's childhood memories as adolescent. In Goethe's Meister, however, all family constellations contain transgressions and obscurities of identity as well as dissolutions of boundaries between conventional roles and family types. In Apprenticeship Wilhelm grows up in a bourgeois nuclear family with clearly defined gender roles. Wilhelm Meister reflects more than just "a nostalgia for a form of community that preceded the nuclear family". The novel seems to suggest a hybrid form of the old and the new merging the flexibility of the pre-nuclear family with the affection and compassion of the modern nuclear family for the benefit of both communal welfare and authentic individuality. In the end, the theater provides Wilhelm with an opportunity to assume an exterior masculine identity that allows for a "subversive multiplicity" that is conventionally associated with a femininity that escapes patriarchal control.
