"Die Vaterschaft beruht nur überhaupt auf der Überzeugung": The Displaced Family in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

Heidi M. Schlipphacke, Old Dominion University

Perhaps no other German novel has been granted the status of paradigmatic testament to shifting notions of bourgeois subjectivity so much as Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Georg Lukács has deemed the novel the most important literary product reflecting the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Generally viewed as both the first and the penultimate Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre signals a defining moment for the German Spätaufklärung. Through the depiction of the "education" of the protagonist Wilhelm, the novel reflects Enlightenment notions of subjectivity and education and at the same time calls into question the foundation of these notions. Through a repetitive dialectic of harmony and destruction, I suggest, Goethe's novel shies away from synthesis and rather multiplies than simplifies. The bourgeois family, a notion that is paramount to any conception of bourgeois subjectivity, is, I argue, consistently and repeatedly deconstructed; biological relations are unstable, and ostensibly "natural" familial relations are often revealed to be "unnatural" in their lack of love.