ABSTRACT
This chapter about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy Faust focuses on the little man artificially constructed by Faust’s assistant, Wagner, with help from Mephistopheles in Act II of Part II. Homunculus comes into the world fully formed and able to speak but dies searching for a normative body. As a philosophical child in the alchemical tradition, Homunculus allegorizes the search for immortality by accessing the Eternal Feminine through heterosexual union, the alignment of masculine and feminine. At the same time, Homunculus belongs to the tragedy’s critique of creating life without mothers, who provide the ingredients for immortality: love, redemption, and rebirth. Traditionally born life emerges as the only authentic kind of entity in Goethe’s Faust. Homunculus is an ironic figure who brings humor into an otherwise dense text. Alchemy and alchemists were frequent objects of ridicule in the eighteenth century. The creation and education of Homunculus satirize the idea of preformation and professors who seek to remake young men in their own image, leading them astray. Analysis of Goethe’s science and the tragedy’s depiction of homosexual attraction supports this argument. This chapter concludes by suggesting that this anti-intellectual sentiment relates to Goethe’s experience with students and professors in the wake of the Napoleonic War.
