ABSTRACT
An older Goethe may have looked back on Die Leiden des jungen Werthers as evidence of the unhappy confusions of his youth, but the identification of even the young writer with his self-destructive hero was never a complete one. If Goethe's analysis of the patriarchal idyll uncovered a worm in the bud, namely a knot of incestuous feeling involved in the fantasies of innocent desire, then the question arises, where that discovery left the cause of innocence, the prospect of love without blame. Goethes first great hero identifies two epochs as sites of the 'patriarchal idea', the biblical and the homeric. The negotiation between the imperatives of instinctual life and the countervailing pressures which emanate from the social and ethical norms of the world is the essence of Goethe's patriarchal theme. Novelle could be regarded as Goethe's final word on the subject of the patriarchal theme, though it is preferable to see it only as one 'fragment' amo.
