7 - Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Identity and Difference

Summary

WE ARE EXPLORING A NARRATIONAL FIGURE in which lovers attempt to overcome their existential opposition and blend together as one identity. There are many shades of identification, however, all of which imply, in one way or another, the submergence of duality in unity. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is a tour de force of identification, including multiple psychological identifications, mistaken identities, and the eventual union of sexual partners who are ideally matched but held apart by the exigencies of narrative and plot.

Among the questions the novel takes up is whether an actor can, or should, try to identify with the character he or she is playing. Challenging the view, held by many critics, that Wilhelm Meister identifies with Hamlet, Mark Bonds remarks, “Ähnlichkeit darf nicht mit Identifizierung verwechselt werden.” Nor identification with identity, one might add. There is a difference between absolute identity and similarity of any kind — a difference consisting in the presence of difference in any set of similars. Identification too implies difference. Attired in the Count's own dressing-gown and sitting in his favorite chair, Wilhelm looks like the Count and will be mistaken for him by the pretty young Countess — or such, at least, is the Baroness's plan. As it turns out, the likeness is so great, the illusion so perfect, as to make the unexpectedly returning Count think he sees himself, just as Goethe once encountered himself riding toward himself on the road to Sesenheim (FA 1,14:545).