The Marriage of Artist Novel and Bildungsroman: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, A Paradigm in Disguise

Abstract

Goethe described the fruitful years from 1794, when he found Schiller's friendship and completed Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in metaphors of creativity, insight and abundance: ‘ein neuer Frühling’ and ‘ein unaufhaltsames Fortschreiten philosophischer Ausbildung und ästhetischer Tätigkeit’. Yet since the mid‐twentieth century what has been called Goethe's ‘prototypischer Bildungsroman’ and its central concept have come under attack. The more the novel's structure and the symbolism of the hero's relationships to all other characters were disregarded, the more Wilhelm's identity became ambiguous. Since the issue of genre is a major key to understanding the novel, Goethe's poetological and morphological principles are examined to make sense of the ‘Masken’ the author employs both to hide and to reveal Wilhelm's identity as a creative and self‐reflexive poet. The first part of the ‘Lehrbrief,’ which deals with art and the artist as well as the mature Wilhelm's inheritance of his grandfather's art collection, receive focused attention. The hero's healing process from personal trauma, and his ultimate discovery of the solid foundation for his ‘produktive Einbildungskraft’ are tied to his poetic ‘Doppelgänger’, Mignon and the Harpist, and further to Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Tower, the picture of the sick prince, and to Natalie. The new interpretation of these interconnections reveals that with this novel Goethe produced nothing less than the paradigmatic ‘Bildungsroman eines Dichters’. In the colourful figures that enter into or leave the hero's life, Goethe symbolises the increasingly demanding challenges his Wilhelm Meister has to confront and comprehend in order to master his vibrant imagination.