Pamela Currie, Goethe’s Visual World. Germanic Literatures 3. London: Legenda, 2013. 166 pp.

Summary

Pamela Currie presents a thoroughgoing analysis of Goethe's color theory and perspective of color in works of art. The book's eight chapters flesh out his collaboration with the artist and art historian Heinrich Meyer whom he met in Rome during his first trip to Italy. Although Goethe already had developed a rudimentary understanding of color, it was from this point on that he developed his mature perspective and even to some extent obsessed over color.

The first and third chapters establish the psychology of Goethe's visual perspective. The first chapter deals with Goethe's “mental images.” Drawing on David Wellbery's readings, Currie demonstrates that Goethe's early works such as Werther reveal his obsession with imagery. She also uses Jacques Lacan's psychological hypothesis of the individual's “narcissistic fixation on the mental image of the counterpart of the mirror stage” (7) to explain Goethe's thinking. Currie's point via both theorists is that Goethe's use of mirror images explains his penchant for portraying the subjective beholder as being in love with someone who reflects himself. Such a condition clarifies the relationship between Werther and Lotte or even between the youth and his paramour in early lyrics such as “Willkommen und Abschied” (32).

Currie further explores Wellbery's idea that this mirroring relationship results in a “specular moment,” which supposedly functions as an organizing concept (32). For Wellbery this involves the psychosexual mother-son relationship. Although Currie cannot wholeheartedly underwrite Wellbery's argument, she does agree with both Wellbery and Lacan that Goethe purposely portrays individuals who often possess narcissistic inclinations that depend on mirroring.

Currie's second chapter, “Ambiguous Figures in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” expands upon this idea. Here Currie conceives of the Lehrjahre as a novel that “identifies childhood with self-absorption, and … narrates a narcissist's quest for a partner who is not a mere self-image” (22). For Currie, this explains Wilhelm's attraction to women who possess a (slightly) masculine side that mirrors himself. These figures include Chlorinde, Natalie, and even the “hermaphroditic Mignon” (23). We might easily add other Goethean female figures with similarly masculine traits to this list, such as Götz's wife Elisabeth, Adelheid von Waldorf, and Egmont's Klärchen, not to mention Goethe's gender-ambiguous lads in Faust II, Knabe Lenker, and Euphorion.