THE DEATH OF DIONYSOS - ETD - Vanderbilt University

the representative forms of the Adel gradually assumes the character of a critique, as he is
forced to recognize that the habits and vanities of the court are often at odds with the
aesthetic demands of art. This awareness leads him to the stage, where he hopes to realize
his personality in a vocation that calls for representation. After Wilhelm becomes caught
in the web of selfish interests and intrigues that prevail among actors and audience, he
encounters the model humans (“treffliche Menschen”) of the Tower (500).
The introduction to aesthetic humanism takes place too late for the elderly
canoness to have any influence on her personal development; she already had assumed her
final form, as it were, as which she would be remembered by all who knew her.
Nonetheless, the encounter did come in time to influence how she perceived her subjective
experience. Her definitive “Ich bin” (“I am”) signifies how far she had come (strayed?)
from faith in God as transcendent Other to an ultimate and abiding confidence in her self.
Wilhelm, on the other hand, is still young, but he too insists in his letter to Werner that he
has progressed personally. Even if he defines it in purely representative terms–a public
role similar to those that the schöne Seele preferred to avoid–he can assert with
satisfaction: “‘ich habe viel von meiner gewöhnlichen Verlegenheit abgelegt und stelle
mich so ziemlich dar’” (291ff.). [“‘I have overcome much of my usual awkwardness and
present myself very well’” (DWH).] Again, this confidence in his ability to represent
himself well stands in stark contrast to the ontic certitude of the schöne Seele–but it is a
form of self-assurance all the same. 33 And the path through the theater, rather than ever
inward, has an advantage, due precisely to its openness to an admiring public and to a
larger social environment: it is an openness mirrored in Shakespeare’s dramas, with their
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Strack’s brief and passing comparison of the Confessions to Wilhelm’s theatrical detour is
nevertheless insightful: “Wie das bürgerliche Theater erweist sich das religiöse als ein
notwendiger aber heilsamer Irrtum auf dem Weg zu einer edlen Humanität, die des
metaphysischen Scheins nicht mehr bedarf” (68). [“Like the middle-class theater, religion proves
to be a necessary but healing error on the way to a noble humanity than no longer needs any
metaphysical illusion” (DWH).] Strack is referring specifically to the motif of changing apparel in
the Confessions, a recurrent theme in the novel that is of significance to Michael Neumann in his
cultural-archetypal analysis, Roman und Ritus: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Frankfurt a/M:
Klostermann, 1992). As for the healing benefit of Wilhelm’s brief career as an actor, Strack is
unspecific. He may be thinking of the psycho-analytic reading of David Roberts, who sees in
Wilhelm’s identification with, and performance of, Hamlet a therapeutic resolution of Wilhelm’s
oedipal fixation with his grandfather’s lost art collection in general and specifically to the painting
of the (oedipal) sick prince. See Roberts, The Indirections of Desire: “Hamlet” in Goethe’s
“Wilhelm Meister” (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980). We will have reason to consider both Strack’s
and Robert’s insights in the following two chapters.
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