THE DEATH OF DIONYSOS - ETD - Vanderbilt University

Wilhelm’s twofold attraction to aristocracy and theater, as well as his mistrust of
productive, profitable activity, follow from his conception of personality–both the source
and the manifestation of individual identity–as inseparable from representation. The
linkage is not accidental. In both English and German the mediaeval word person referred
originally to the characters in a play and the masks they wore, reflecting their origin in the
Latin persona. By extension the word applied to the roles occupied by such individuals as
performed prominent social functions, typically within the hierarchies of church and court.
The similarities extended to the standard costumes and customs that were defined strictly
for either theatrical or social personae. The semantic range of person extended to include
the actual body of a living, breathing soul: a costume, too, after all, that would return in
the end to ashes and dust. But by the eighteenth century the meaning of the word in
English had undergone a shift that registered the presence and importance of a wealthy
and influential middle class. Beyond naming a dramatic, literary or aristocratic character,
person was more likely to signify the unique individual, and personality those physical
and psychological traits that distinguished him or her from others. Still more striking is
the fact that, in the legal jargon of an increasingly merchant and industrial economy,
“person” referred to the private individual as distinct from the functions he performed. In
a very literal way, the genteel significance of person and personality changed hands, just
as so much of the property of aristocratic families was liquidated and added to the capital
of the middle class. The person, then, as distinct from his vocation, was the private
individual, who discovered and cultivated his unique personality in the intimacy of home
and family.
While the meaning of the German words follows largely similar lines, the changes
appear to have taken place more slowly than in English. 17 Person retained much longer in
Germany than in England–even into the nineteenth century–its primary meaning of
dramatic or social representation, accumulating only slowly, like layers of sediment, the
17 See entries for “person” and “persönlichkeit” in: Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm
Grimm, vol. 13, ed. Matthias von Lexer (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), pp.
1561-1562 and 1567-1568. Compare “person” and “personality” in: The Oxford English
Dictionary, 2 nd ed., ed. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, vol. XI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
pp. 596-598 and 602-603.
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