SOURCE: Gustafson, Susan E. “‘Don't See, Don't Tell’: Gender Transgression and Repetition Compulsion in Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter.” Monatshefte 89, no. 2 (summer 1997): 148-67.

[In the following essay, Gustafson views Die natürliche Tochter as a play about gender transgression and the protection of the status quo.]

Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter depicts the emblematic eradication of a gender-bending daughter.¹ Throughout the play Eugenie is subjected to multiple symbolic deaths. She is surmised, described, and reported dead, only to be revived to die again. More than a drama about the French Revolution, Die natürliche Tochter cannot be reduced to its overt political content. The main characters of the play are, indeed, a father and his daughter. Familial instability is intricately conjoined in Die natürliche Tochter to the fear of societal collapse. The domestic tensions of the play reveal, above all, a paternal struggle to protect the prevailing social order through the expunction of a daughter's transgressive gender identifications.²

A close examination of Eugenie's role in Die natürliche Tochter reveals that the father figures of the play return obsessively to the issue of her potential death, recounting her masculine feats and her subsequent disappearances and reappearances. The entire play revolves structurally around compulsive repetitions of Eugenie's death and resurrection. These multi-layered reiterations of Eugenie's fate function in Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter much in the same way that Freud describes the purpose of repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the play the repetitive returns to Eugenie's annihilation mark an attempt on the part of the “fathers” of the drama to master a shocking occurrence. In the manner of the psychoanalytic patient suffering from childhood traumas, the former soldier plagued with “war neurosis,” and Freud's grandson faced with the intolerable loss of his mother, the “fathers” in Goethe's drama repeat the same distressing scenario (Eugenie's death and revival) over and over again.

We recall that Freud's grandson “mastered” his mother's absence by constructing a game in which he symbolically threw her away and then retrieved her back again: “At the outset the [Freud's grandson, Ernst] was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but by repeating it, unpleasureable though it was, as a game, he took an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery. …”³ In a like manner, the “fathers” of Die natürliche Tochter strive to control, mold, and delimit Eugenie through repetitive poetic and political enactments of her disappearances and reappearances. This, according to Freud, is “the complete game—disappearance and return.”⁴ The pleasure of the game derives from mastering an initially overpowering experience. Drama, according to Freud, “does for adults what play does for children.”⁵ The play is all about play and becomes, therefore, a site for the acting out of compulsive responses to unresolved traumas. In tragedy the fantasy of mastery over some shattering event or moment reiterates and flaunts itself ad infinitum on stage.

Lacan assures us, however, that there is more to the “Fort/Da” game than compulsive repetitions and the pleasure they secure. For him the combination of “Fort” and “Da” comprises an originary signifying event which marks the subject's entrance into the Symbolic order. While Freud emphasizes how the game reduces unpleasure, Lacan highlights the subject's self-alienation as signification severs the subject from the Real—from the body, drives, and natural phenomena. The signifiers “Fort” and “Da” establish a closed system of signification. By referring to each other and not to signifieds, they set into motion a chain of signifiers which can be endlessly displaced. Such signification is contingent upon the subject's rupture from her or his own being. The structural place of the Real in relation to the Symbolic order is that of a stain, blot, or place of the unsignifiable. It marks a space of excess, of that which somehow eludes signification and which becomes the focus of the subject's desire. As such the Real provides the structural foundation of the Symbolic order. The Symbolic order is contingent upon the subject's fantasy that she/he can somehow attain that which the Real appears to withhold (that, for example, signifiers can somehow recapture whatever was lost, i.e., mother's presence, etc.). At the same time, the Symbolic order ensures that the unattainable remains elusive—the desire to obtain the illusory is reproduced indefinitely.

Intriguingly, Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter is constructed upon multiple layers of compulsive repetitions which enhance pleasure (as Freud saw it), but which also follows Eugenie's entrance from a state of nothingness (the Real) through a series of “Fort/Da” events to a place within the Symbolic order. At the same time, Eugenie constitutes the traumatic event or figure her father and the father figures of the play feel compelled to master. The purpose of the repetitive returns to images of her death and resurrection point to the father's desire to transform Eugenie's character. Each poetic repetition of “Fort” and “Da” brings Eugenie back to her father in a form ever closer to his linguistic, poetic, and social ideals. Eugenie, who initially represents not only a real, physical body, but also a natural phenomenon, is replaced through a series of appearances and disappearances by a string of amorphous signifiers. The “Fort/Da” game marks the father's continuous attempts to fashion and re-fashion Eugenie poetically—through and in words—in accord with his own desires. The fact that the paternal repetition compulsion operates at full force in Die natürliche Tochter discloses, of course, that the father's “mastery” of Eugenie has never been actualized. Something of her “being” always remains outside of the Symbolic—part of her continues to elude signification.

During the course of the play it becomes evident that the compulsive returns to representations and fantasies of Eugenie's death and resurrection are inextricably conjoined to her transgressive gender identification.⁶ The gender trauma which the “fathers” of Die natürliche Tochter [hereafter referred to as NT] endeavor so strenuously to overcome is the realization that Eugenie is an “Amazonen-Tochter” (NT 244).⁷ She is terrifyingly man-like. She is the daughter destined to play a man's role in the highest courtly circles. She, indeed, is a better son to her father than her brother. Eugenie's intense identification with her father and her unruly masculinity seem to know no bounds. Accordingly, the characters of the play highlight repeatedly Eugenie's disturbing and incomprehensible masculinity. Her gender ambiguity functions as the “spoken unspoken,” as “ein offenbar Geheimnis” (NT 246) around which the Symbolic order revolves and coheres—and yet denies. Eugenie is her father's “Versöhnung/Ver-Sohnung” (NT 262)—what Goethe refers to in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as a “misratener Sohn” (MA 5: 362). As such she joins the ranks of Mignon and the Beautiful Soul, both masculine daughters who are only fully mastered/poeticized through some form of real or symbolic death.⁸ The masculine daughter resides in Goethe's works consistently in the place of the Real. She is posited as an unattainable, transcendent being who must necessarily remain, at least to some degree, unsignifiable. Those daughters who “break in upon” the Symbolic through and because of their masculinity traumatize the prevailing social order which in turn banishes them or kills them off, or—in the case of Eugenie—accomplishes both.

Even more unsettling than her masculinity is Eugenie's gender ambiguity. She, herself, flaunts her gender identifications in a cross-dressing/gender-bending scene in which she describes herself as first feminine and then masculine. Eugenie's gender identifications threaten the dissolution of rigidly conceived notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” and “woman” and “man.” The fathers of Die natürliche Tochter perceive in Eugenie's gender ambiguity the end of civilization.⁹ It is her transgression into “manhood” which the “fathers” understand as a threat to societal stability—as an attack on the very foundation of society—that is, on the family itself. Eugenie clearly represents the abject in the Kristevan sense of that which threatens a culture's fantasy of stable order and identity.¹⁰ Or in Lacanian terms, she is the Real, the excess which threatens to alter the Symbolic—to undo its very foundations—shattering society's conceptions of gender difference.

Eugenie (as the return of the Real) forces her society to acknowledge the inadequacies of its assumptions about gender and family. She signifies a potential chaos, a dissolution of paternal order and an amorphous mix of gender identities. Eugenie reveals that the patriarchal insistence on maintaining rigid distinctions between woman as feminine and man as masculine is illusory. Subsequently, the father figures of the play fantasize obsessively about her death. Her masculinity must be expunged in order to insure her exclusive femininity. Only through the total suppression of her masculinity can her gender amorphousness be undone.

Eugenie is finally banished from her “Vaterland” by a society that refuses to see the travesty of its own uncompromising restrictions on gender, by a society that resists recognizing the illusions upon which its own social structure is maintained. For the characters of Die natürliche Tochter to accept Eugenie, they would have to give up civilization as they know it. And for that reason the penalty for Eugenie's gender transgressions is severe: she is stripped of her fortune, her name, her very sense of self. Ultimately, Die natürliche Tochter suggests that she can survive her inevitable emasculation only as a poetic image, in banishment, or in marriage. As we shall see, each of these “options” is nothing more than a symbolic death. Eugenie, the gender-bending daughter-son must—one way or another—die.

In order to illustrate the struggle over gender ambiguity in Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter it seems appropriate to begin with a detailed outline of the father's repetitive accounts of Eugenie's death. We will then turn to representations throughout the play of Eugenie's problematic masculinity, to the significance of her cross dressing/gender-bending scene, and finally to her concession to marriage and the attempted avulsion of her masculinity.

“Fort/Da” structures and gestures permeate and form the strategic core of Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter. Accordingly, Eugenie is first introduced by her father to the king through the recounting of her most recent disappearance and reappearance. Eugenie's father identifies his wild daughter for the king as the “Amazonen-Tochter, / Die, in den Fluß, dem Hirsche sich zuerst, / Auf raschem Pferde, flüchtig nachgestürzt” (NT 244). Both men immediately recall (and repeat) how Eugenie disappeared from view. The king remarks: “Gewaltsam und behende riß daß Pferd / Sich und die Reiterin auf jenes Ufer, / In dichtbewachs'ner Hügel Dunkelheit / Und so verschwand sie mir” (NT 245). While the king emphasizes her disappearance, her father underscores his last sighting of Eugenie and her subsequent loss: “Noch einmal hat / Mein Auge sie gesehen, eh ich sie / Im Labyrinth der hast'gen Jagd verlor” (NT 245). Not only does the dialogue between king and father revolve around reiterations of Eugenie's vanishing, but her father's adverbial references such as “noch einmal” and “nicht zum erstenmal” accentuate the fact that these constitute perpetual repetitions. As many times as Eugenie appears to be gone forever (to be “Fort” for good), she returns (is suddenly “wieder da”).

Eugenie's father discloses that he bears the same ambivalent feelings each time she rushes over cliffs and plunges into chasms: “Und nicht zum erstenmal empfand ich heute, / Wie Stolz und Sorge, Vaterglück und Angst, / Zu übermenschlichem Gefühl sich mischen” (NT 245). Just like Freud's grandson, Ernst, Eugenie's father feels the mixture of pleasureable and unpleasureable sentiments which accompany the “Fort/Da” experience. He revels in the pleasure of the loved object's/one's return. Moreover, Eugenie's father reveals that his central concern is his own gratification. Indeed, he describes the impression of self-completion, greatness, and promise which the sensations of “Fort” and “Da” afford him.

Eugenie's father also insists that the superhuman feeling he subsequently perceives hinges upon the juxtaposition of loss and return. Intense self-joy is acquired after a daughter's absence—and only then through her renewed presence. The disappearance of the daughter is a structural necessity. As Eugenie's father remarks: “Durch Trauren wird die Trauer zum Genuß” (NT 286). Departure, and the mourning it occasions, leads not to bitterness, but to delight.¹¹ The father secures perverse pleasure from the displeasure of the “Fort/Da” game. Eugenie functions here obviously as a certain “something” which is unsignifiable and therefore highly desireable. The father derives the greatest happiness, not from the daughter's presence, but from her absence. He procures enjoyment through the multiple reiterations of Eugenie's loss, by means of his own endless revolution around the elusive, always missed, and therefore ever coveted object.

For Eugenie's father, participation in the play of loss and return is, significantly at this stage, less one of active mastery than of passive reception. As we recall, little Ernst gained mastery over the traumatic evanescence of his mother by replacing her with a reel (and later language), but Eugenie's father is (at least for the time being) confronted with his daughter's actual, physical disappearances and reappearances. For him the “Fort/Da” experience has not yet been “mastered” through language. He is simply reacting to the actual losses and returns of his daughter, much in the way that Ernst must have responded to his mother's absences before he constructed his game.

Certainly in this context it is important to remember that Eugenie is her father's “natural daughter.” She is illegitimate and as such has no accepted familial or social position. She is perceived to lie outside of the social order, outside of signification. In fact, until her meeting with the king, her father has kept her secluded from all society. She has had no Symbolic place or role. The play literally commences with her father's first attempts to “call her forth” into social life—to establish her as his daughter and as the rightful heir to his position at court. Before her father's summons Eugenie was a “kindlich Nichts.” She appears here as a natural phenomenon bursting forth from a concealed, unnamed “place” and thoroughly oblivious to the ways of the court. In these respects Eugenie is not unlike Mignon. While Eugenie is a bastard child, Mignon is the product of incest between a brother and sister—both forms of illegitimate birth. Moreover, Mignon is also relegated to a “space” of “kindlich Nichts” by virtue of her broken speech, gestural “language,” illegible writing, and resistance to “Bildung.”¹² Both women represent androgynous, originless Amazons (or in the case of Mignon, perhaps, a nascent Amazon). Indeed, Goethe insists that the literary Amazon must be characterized by her lack of clear origin, her incongruous relationship to typical female roles:

Der Verfasser, um seine Amazone selbständig zu erhalten, muß sie ohne Vater und Mutter entspringen lassen. Er kann sie zu allem dem, wozu das Weib von Jugend auf bestimmt ist, nur annähernd, nicht aber zum Genuß, nicht zu Thätigkeit, zum Erlangen, zum Leisten hinbringen. Sie ist weder Tochter, noch Schwester, noch Geliebte, noch Gattin, noch Mutter. …¹³

Both Eugenie and Mignon, while having fathers, grow up largely without them present. Neither enjoys the care of a mother. At her funeral the Abbe describes Mignon as a child about whom it “ist uns unbekannt, woher es kam, seine Eltern kennen wir nicht, und die Zahl seiner Lebensjahre vermuten wir nur” (MA 5: 577). Amazon-like, Eugenie and Mignon “spring” out of their traditional female roles and into the lives of the men around them. Accordingly, Eugenie's father has no apparent control over her disappearances and appearances. He only reacts as Eugenie (the ebullient force) erupts into his life—only to subside once more.

Interrupting her father's dialogue with the king, Eugenie flings herself into yet another crevasse. While she lies motionless on the ground, a surgeon is urged to deploy his every art to save her life. As she begins to regain consciousness, her father intervenes and as though managing her physical responses—or staging them—he commands:

… sie wird nun bald
Auch ihren Vater, ihre Freunde kennen.
Nicht so umher, mein liebes Kind, verschwende
Die Blicke staunend, ungewiß; auf mich
Auf deinen Vater wende sie zuerst.
Erkenne mich, laß meine Stimme dir
Zuerst das Ohr berühren, da du uns,
Aus jener stummen Nacht, zurückekehrst.

(NT 247-48)

Unlike the earlier scene of Eugenie's loss and return in which her father was passive, here he begins to assert a Symbolic mastery over her body. She lives and dies in accord with her father's voice. His speech assumes performative power as he literally calls her back into life. Throughout the play Eugenie is repeatedly “neugeboren” as “sein Wort” (NT 268). Miraculously, her father's word “cures” Eugenie of any possible injuries. As long as her father is present no wound, no scratch is ever said to mar her body. As she herself quips to the Hofmeisterin after her latest fall: “Sei ruhig! Siehst du doch mich wieder, / Gesund und hochbeglückt, nach diesem Fall” (NT 267). Eugenie may sink into unconsciousness but her body is more than indestructable—it always remains untouched, unscathed. Much like the victim in Sade's Juliette, Eugenie can endure any physical torment and still retain her beauty and health. In fact, Goethe's contemporary, Karl August Böttiger, complained to his friend Rochlitz about the absurdity of Eugenie's “deaths” and “revivals,” rejecting the notion of “Ein Mädchen, die den Fels herabgestürzt und in der zweiten Minute kerngesund dasteht.”¹⁴ But in the paternal fantasy of Die natürliche Tochter it is the father's voice which preserves Eugenie's total corporeal health and wholeness. Eugenie's father tells her that it is his voice which saved her: “Dein Vater, den, mit diesen holden Tönen, / Du aus den Armen der Verzweiflung rettest” (NT 248). Even in the final moments of the play when Eugenie seems lost for good, she continues to search for the father-word that will cure her: “O! sprich es aus, / Ein hohes Wort, das mich zu heilen töne” (NT 300). Whereas in the first scenes Eugenie appeared as an elusive natural phenomenon (as desired excess) now it is clear that she is constructed as such by/in/through her father's words. The fantasy of Die natürliche Tochter is that the father creates, cures, and restores his daughter's body by means of his voice. That her body is never harmed, establishes less the absurdity of Goethe's play, than the unreal, phantasmagoric, paternal fantasy Eugenie represents in Die natürliche Tochter. In other words, Eugenie is not a real daughter, with actual corporeal limitations, but rather a poetic fantasy through and through.

In addition to protecting her body, her father's voice also ensures Eugenie's recognition first and foremost of her father. Each occurrence of Eugenie's loss and return reinscribes her as her father's daughter—a daughter with eyes only for him. She is continually revived and rescued from a dark night of unconsciousness and near death to see, recognize, and adore only her father. For his part, he perceives in her an object solely for his own gaze (NT 287). Eugenie's perpetual ‘deaths’ and ‘resurrections’ serve to reinscribe their mutual adoration. Once again, the father's sense of self-completion is dependent upon his daughter's presence and this time in the closed exchange of their admiring gazes. Eugenie, as we now see, is constructed by her father as that “something” of himself—which he seeks in order to retain a sense of self-completion. Ironically, he establishes her Symbolic role as that of “playing” the Real.

Eugenie is fully cognizant of the rules and implications of the “Fort/Da” game. As soon as her father has revived her from her latest mishap, he offers her a cloth he obtained from the surgeon. Eugenie takes the cloth and, immediately concealing her face in it, disappears once more from view. Suddenly she leaps up, tosses off the cloth, and proclaims: “Da bin ich wieder!” (NT 248). Eugenie re-enacts the critical gesture of loss and return, recounts briefly her most recent misadventure, and begs her father's forgiveness for the pain she has caused him. Her father emphasizes in reply how his fear of her death contributed critically to his infinite joy: “Nun steigert mir gefürchteter Verlust / Des Glücks Empfindung ins Unendliche” (NT 248). And yet as father and daughter prepare to depart from one another, Eugenie's father reinvokes the devastating scene of Eugenie's supposed death: “Wer nimmt das Bild vor meinen Augen weg! / Dich hab' ich tot gesehn … / Eugenie, das Leben meines Lebens, / Bleich, hingesunken, atemlos, entseelt” (NT 257). Eugenie's father is overwhelmed by the image of her lifeless body. She quickly stills his fears by asserting her real, physical presence: “Lebendig siehst du sie vor deinen Augen, / indem sie ihn umarmt / Und fühlst lebendig sie an deiner Brust. / So laß mich immer, immer wiederkehren!” (NT 258). If the earlier accounts of Eugenie's death and revival revealed the infinite joy, the sense self-perfection, and the mastery which accrues to the father through each “Fort/Da” event, here Eugenie demonstrates that her return involves not just her own revival—but a kind of “cure” for her father as well. Her physical presence ensures his pleasure—and, as he avers, fills his torn heart with bliss: “O! bleib! und steh an diesem Platz / Lebendig, aufrecht, noch einmal, wie du / In's Leben wieder aufsprangst, wo mit Wonne / Du mein zerissen Herz erfüllend heiltest” (NT 258). As her father exclaims—Eugenie must return “noch einmal,” “wieder”—even their parting words invoke the compulsive repetition: “Von diesem allzu weichen Lebewohl / Soll ein erfreulich Wiedersehn uns heilen” (NT 259).

Eugenie is destined to disappear and reappear for her father one last traumatic time in Die natürliche Tochter. Her father's enemies plot against her debut at court, abduct her, and banish her from the kingdom (from her “Vaterland”). Essentially, Eugenie is shut off from the Symbolic role her father envisioned for her at court and is condemned to the chaos, disease, and vermin of some unnamed islands beyond her fatherland (the Real). Her abductors then enlist a secular priest (Weltgeistlicher) to convince Eugenie's father that he has witnessed her gruesome death. He vows to destroy Eugenie's image, causing her to vanish forever: “Tausendfach / Zerreiß' ich das geliebte Bild … / Sie ist dahin für Alle, sie verschwindet / In's Nichts der Asche” (NT 276). The secular priest informs Eugenie's father that she has been crushed to death in yet another wild fall into an abyss. Her body is so hideously disfigured, so “zerrissen und zerschmettert und zerbrochen” (NT 285) that no father can be allowed to view it. Eugenie's father immediately accepts the priest's determination that he, as father, should not/can not see Eugenie's dead body. To view her would bring the traumatic presence of the Real—this time in the form of death—much too close to him.

Eugenie's father chooses to distance himself from his daughter's dead body through several layers of abstracting significations. He first urges the secular priest to preserve her body. Despite its mangled condition he insists that it might yet be possible to prevent its decomposition: “Laß uns den schönen Körper der Verwesung / Entreißen. Laß mit edlen Spezereien / Das unschätzbare Bild zusammen halten! … Ja, die Atomen alle, die sich einst / Zur köstlichen Gestalt versammelten, / Sie sollen nicht ins Element zurück” (NT 284). At this point, Eugenie's father still hopes to save her body—her perfect physical likeness as a memento of her continued presence even after death. The embalming ought to conceal her death—to prevent her irrevocable return to the elements (the Real). Keeping her body is an attempt to translate her loss into eternal presence. But as much as the father might like Eugenie's embalmed body to secure presence—a dead body is a dead body—it signifies absence.

Despite her father's intentions to restore her body, the priest assures him that Eugenie's body is much too mutilated. When he learns from the secular priest that her body is beyond repair, Eugenie's father then pleads for her ashes: “O! sammle mir, in köstliches Gefäß, / Der Asche, der Gebeine trüben Rest, / Daß die vergebens ausgestreckten Arme / Nur etwas fassen …” (NT 286). Eugenie's father relinquishes the notion of preserving or saving her body and settles for a more abstract signifier of his daughter. Like little Ernst's reel which signifies for him his mother's presence and absence, the urn symbolizes for her father Eugenie's presence and absence. She is dead—but he can still hold her in his outstretched arms. Or more precisely, he can hold the symbol (urn) of her in his arms. While the urn is a material object—something daddy can touch—it is also now a signifier standing in for someone who is no longer there. The container of ashes “holds” Eugenie in place—but it is no longer the image of her—that is, of her body. Like little Ernst who gives up his mother for a reel which he can manipulate at will, Eugenie's father forfeits his daughter's body in order to secure her presence in at least some material form.

So, what cannot be embalmed, ought to be burned … or given up entirely. Artificially restoring Eugenie's body and/or embracing her run would have only underscored her absence. As her father laments: “Ich glaubte sie zu fassen, sie zu halten / Und nun ist sie auf ewig mir entrückt” (NT 286). Accordingly, Eugenie's father's attempts to recapture her (after her death) become more and more abstract. His discussion of her detaches her more and more from any trace of her corporeality. His linguistic strategy transports her further and further from any remainders of the Real (body, death, life) to more and more abstract Symbolic representations. Finally, both he and the secular priest refer to Eugenie exclusively in terms of abstract verbal images: “das geliebte Bild” (NT 276), “das unschätzbare Bild” (NT 284), “das zerstörte Bild” (NT 285), “ein schön entworfnes Bild” (NT 285), “das Götterbild” (NT 286), “du vielgeliebtes Bild” (NT 290), “Gestalt” (NT 284), “ein Gegenstand” (NT 287), “jenes Bild, das einzige geliebte” (NT 287), “die schmeichlerische Kraft” (NT 289), “das Verlorne” (NT 290), “du vielgeliebtes Bild” (NT 290), and “diese Form” (NT 285). In no instance do the men depict Eugenie's physical features. There is no remembrance of how her body looked before her final demise. The secular priest encourages Eugenie's father to search for his “daughter” in himself, for there he will find her as memory and poetic image:

Und bleibe mir, du vielgeliebtes Bild,
Vollkommen, ewig jung und ewig gleich! …
Du bist kein Traumbild, wie ich dich erblicke;
Du warst, du bist. Die Gottheit hatte dich
Vollendet einst gedacht und dargestellt.
So bist du teilhaft des Unendlichen,
Des Ewigen, und bist auf ewig mein.

(NT 290-91)

Eugenie's father (in the manner of little Ernst) “masters” his loss by substituting linguistic signifiers for his absent daughter. Her crushed form has been symbolically displaced by a fantasy of her youth, divinity, and infinite perfection. Indeed, throughout this exchange, Eugenie is described in the most abstract terms—as a “Vorbild,” as “Kraft” and in terms of being “vollkommen,” “ewig,” “unendlich,” “gedacht,” and “dargestellt.” Concepts like divinity, wholeness, thought, and representation are endlessly connected to “re-construct” Eugenie—not as a body—but as an infinite chain of polysemous and elusive signifiers.¹⁵ Ironically, Eugenie's father constructs his fantasy of her complete presence through the systematic severance of her “image” from her corporeality, from traces of her physical being. Paradoxically, Eugenie's father inscribes her in the Symbolic as the Real (the natural daughter who lies outside signification), but only to the extent that she becomes less Real (i.e., severed from her body or being in and through language).

Eugenie is, of course, not actually dead. Her father and the secular priest have only succeeded in killing her off linguistically. The priest's callous lies about her horrendous death initiate only the first of her symbolic deaths. And so we might ask at this point: Why her father is destined to return obsessively to the sites of her appearance and disappearance? Is it simply his inability to face the reality of her ultimate death? Does her linguistic disembodiment in the play serve as a subterfuge? a way to deny or process her loss? a means to escape the realities of her real, corporeal, and/or sexual being? In other words: what exactly is it that is so traumatic about Eugenie?

The problem with Eugenie is her gender. She is simply too masculine. She identifies almost exclusively with her father and is destined to replace her brother at court. She is an “Amazonen-Tochter” (NT 244)—renowned for her “son-like” qualities and Symbolic function: “An ihrem Vater hängt ihr frommes Herz, / Und wenn ihr Geist den Lehren edler Männer, / Sich stufenweis' entwickelnd, friedlich horcht: / So mangelt Übung ritterlicher Tugend / Dem wohlgebauten festen Körper nicht” (NT 244). Even Eugenie's body is praised for its masculine strength and form. Eugenie continually “bursts in upon” the society of men (the Symbolic) depicted in the play. She is an aggressive “young man” throwing “herself” from one “ritterliche” (NT 297) activity to the next.

Eugenie is as well-practiced as any young gentleman in “ritterliche Übung” (NT 258) and consistently outdoes all the other “men” with her “tollkühner Reiterei” (NT 280). They can only watch in horror as she flings herself into one bold adventure after another. Eugenie wants nothing less than to be the best “man” that she can. She views enthusiastically her introduction to court—her usurpation of her brother's position—and anticipates joyfully participating “An jeder großen Handlung, die den Vater / Dem König und dem Reiche werter macht” (NT 255). Like every good son, she is ready to act her part at her father's side. When it comes to men's tasks, Eugenie is more masculine, more daring than the men who passively observe her performances. Indeed, men seem to exist in the play only to recount her daring feats. Once again, Eugenie represents excess (the Real). In this instance she signifies (for the guys who gather around her) an incomprehensibly exaggerated masculinity. In the world of Die natürliche Tochter Eugenie is more masculine than any man should be.

Eugenie's father, as we have seen, is quite ambivalent about her masculine feats. While he thrives on her wild acts and her subsequent disappearances and reappearances, he also castigates himself for having encouraged her in such boundless boldness. As Eugenie justifies her rash behavior by reminding him that it was he who introduced her as a small child to “ritterliche Übung,” her father retorts: “Ich hatte damals Unrecht; soll mich nun / Ein langes Leben sorgenvoll bestrafen! / Und locket Übung des Gefährlichen / Nicht die Gefahr an uns heran?” (NT 258). Once the secular priest has convinced him of Eugenie's death her father chides himself for reveling in her masculine prowess:

Sie überall zu sehn als Meisterin
Das war mein Stolz! Zu teuer büß' ich ihn.
Zu Pferde sollte sie, im Wagen sie,
Die Rosse bändigend, als Heldin glänzen …
So, hieß es, kann sie jeglicher Gefahr
Dereinst entgehen. Statt sie zu bewahren,
Gibt Übung zur Gefahr den Tod ihr nun.

(NT 281)

Her father is convinced that Eugenie has died as a result of her overly masculine training. What he perceives as the consequence of her recklessness (death), is, in the fictional “reality” of the play, cause rather for her Symbolic execution (the staging of her death and ultimate banishment from society).

But Eugenie's masculinity in and of itself is not the sole gender issue in Die natürliche Tochter. While her masculinity seems to occasion some amazement and anxiety in the men around her, her gender ambiguity poses a terrifying threat to the very foundations of the social order. Her amorphous mix of gender identities and its disruptive potential is foregrounded in a cross-dressing/gendering scene in which Eugenie masquerades before a mirror in clothes her father has bestowed upon her for her debut at court.

Eugenie's father expressly forbids her to don her courtly attire before her introduction to court, but she ignores his mandate: “Der Vater zwar verbot's. / Doch was verbot er? Das Geheimnis nicht / Unzeitig zu entdecken; doch dir ist / Es schon entdeckt” (NT 271). Eugenie ought not to disclose the secret of her gender identities prematurely. But because she realizes that the “spoken unspoken” secret of her masculinity is already out, she dares yet again to transgress paternal order—and opens the “Putzkasten” containing her apparel—despite her father's “Vaterverbot.” Inside she discovers mirrors and sumptuous courtly dress—which beckon her (as she suggests) to try on her new wardrobe. Eugenie plays her traditional role as woman as she prances before the mirror admiring her new garments. Indeed, when she brought to her father's attention that she required special raiment for her entrance into court (the Symbolic), she insisted that women concern themselves with issues of costume in a manner that simply does not occur to men:

Wenn der Mann
Sein Äußeres, in solchem Fall, vergißt,
Nachlässig oft sich vor die Menge stellt,
So wünscht ein Weib noch Jedem zu gefallen,
Durch ausgesuchte Tracht, vollkommnen Schmuck,
Beneidenswert vor andern zu erscheinen.
Das hab' ich oft gehört und oft bemerkt,
Und nun empfind' ich, im bedeutendsten
Momente meines Lebens, daß auch ich
Der mädchenhaften Schwachheit schuldig bin.

(NT 256)

Eugenie insists that a woman is always concerned foremost with her outer appearance. Her desire to please, her feminine weakness, account for her intense interest in her apparel. Dress, apparently, is a particularly feminine concern and it is here, for the first time in the play, that Eugenie's femininity is highlighted.

But suddenly Eugenie notices a family sash among the other toiletries and must immediately array herself in it as well:

Laß sehen, wie es kleidet? Es gehört
Zum ganzen Prunk; so sei auch das versucht!
                    Das Band wird umgelegt.
Nun sprich vom Tode nur! Sprich von Gefahr!
Was zieret mehr den Mann, als wenn er sich,
Im Heldenschmuck zu seinem Könige,
Sich unter seines Gleichen stellen kann;
Was reizt das Auge mehr? als jenes Kleid,
Das kriegerische lange Reihen zeichnet?
Und dieses Kleid und seine Farben sind
Sie nicht ein Sinnbild ewiger Gefahr?
Die Scherpe deutet Krieg, womit sich, stolz
Auf seine Kraft, ein edler Mann umgürtet.

(italics mine, NT 274)

The entire performance before the mirror underscores the cross-gendered semiotics of Eugenie's clothing: the femininity evoked by her gowns and the warlike masculinity evinced by her Ordensband. Trying on the family banner, she shifts to an account of her masculinity, of her role as a man: “Was zieret mehr den Mann, als wenn er sich …”¹⁶ Eugenie envisions her reception at court where she will finally be among her own kind—with other “men” (“unter seines Gleichen”). Her dressing up is clearly an act of cross-gender coding.

Eugenie isolates the act of double-gender coding as her unpardonable sin against the paternal order.¹⁷ Her forbidden act is one of cross-gendering. Her father's “Vaterverbot” against unlocking the “Putzkasten” has less to do with the actual opening of the chest, than with the gender performance which it unleashes. As Eugenie asserts, during her masquerade, “Ich sah, ich sprach, was mir zu sehen, zu sprechen / Verboten war” (NT 296). According to her, it wasn't so much the breaking open of the wardrobe which her father forbade her, but her own act of seeing and saying that which ought to remain unsignified. And what did Eugenie see? what did she say? She saw her own cross-gendered self. She dared to stand before the mirror and to tell the secret of her femininity and masculinity. Eugenie's crime against her father is one of gender-bending. She has disclosed, against his stern interdiction, her cross-gendering, disregarding the paternal mandate of “don't see, don't tell.”

Recognizing her error, Eugenie queries: “Wird ein so leicht Vergehn / So hart bestraft? Ein läßlich scheinendes, / Scherzhafter Probe gleichendes Verbot, / Verdammt's den Übertreter, ohne Schonung?” (NT 296). The answer to Eugenie's question is an unequivocal yes. Gender-crossing is cause for banishment and death in Die natürliche Tochter. Accordingly, the king insists upon Eugenie's abduction and removal to a chaos of islands beyond “society” and “culture” (somewhere beyond the Symbolic). She must be transported to those islands she heard such horror stories about as a child. As Eugenie, herself, finally realizes: “Verbotne Schätze wagt' ich aufzuschließen, / Und aufgeschlossen hab' ich mir das Grab!” (NT 297). Eugenie is clearly the abject—that which is so disturbing to the social order that it/she must be banished—severed from the society for which she presents an imminent threat. Once her sins of gender are revealed, the fathers of the play expel her from their midst. She forfeits any Symbolic role at court and is condemned to perish in a hellish realm beyond the boundaries of the paternal order. Eugenie is exiled to the space of the “Real”—of ferocious, uncontrolled, unknown natural phenomena—to that place which society prefers not to acknowledge, to the site of the horrifyingly unsignifiable. Only there will Eugenie's life, her form, her gender ambiguity recede from view.

Throughout Die natürliche Tochter Eugenie's gender ambiguity, her amorphous identifications, are cast in terms of a threat of infection. In the final scenes of the play Eugenie is being returned to her “rightful realm”: to chaotic islands of infection and death: “Wo, peinlich quälend als belebte Wolken, / Um Wandrer sich Insektenscharen ziehn, / Wo jeder Hauch des Windes, unbequem / Und schädlich, Stunden raubt und Leben kürzt” (NT 298). She is banished to a realm of disease: “Der Sonne glühendes Geschoß durchdringt / Ein feuchtes, kaum der Flut entriss'nes Land. / Um Niederungen schwebet, gift'gen Bodens, / Blaudunst'ger Streifen angeschwollne Pest” (NT 298). Moreover, Eugenie describes her expatriated self in terms of a pestiferous body part: “Verbannung! Ja, des Schreckenworts Gewicht / Erdrückt mich schon, mit allen seinen Lasten, / Schon fühl' ich mich ein abgestorbnes Glied, / Der Körper, der gesunde, stößt mich los” (NT 317). The healthy paternal body amputates its masculine daughter as a sick, dead limb. The surgery is a drastic measure designed to protect the integrity of the father's body from the “disease” with which the daughter's body/gender threatens him. Eugenie is not only the daughter who can make her father “whole,” she is also the daughter who can contaminate him and for that reason, the healthy paternal body feels compelled to expell her.

Eugenie infects her father with gender ambiguity. Her very presence induces him to switch roles with her. Despite his objections, Eugenie argues successfully for the continuance of her daring masculine acts and in his acquiescence her father reveals his feminization: “Gewiß! vergib, wenn du in dieser Stunde / Mich, schwächer findest, als dem Manne ziemt. / Wir tauschen sonderbar die Pflichten um. / Ich soll dich leiten und du leitest mich” (NT 256). His exchange with Eugenie about her masculinity renders her father (in his own view) less of a man. He becomes weaker (implicitly more feminine) than a man ought to be. Not only does Eugenie “infect” her father with femininity, she usurps his role. Now he is no longer setting the terms of their relationship—she is. The problem with Eugenie is that she does not simply replace her brother, her gender-bending displaces her father as well.

Eugenie's feminization of her father parallels that of the king. After her first encounter with the king, Eugenie praises his “mildness” to her father who discounts it as fomenting bold opposition to his rule. Not to be ignored, Eugenie persists in admiring the king's boundless “virtue.” Her father retorts that if the king has so much virtue then it is virtue “Zur Häuslichkeit, zum Regimente nicht” (NT 254). From the very beginning of the play the king is associated with attributes generally assigned to women in Germany in the early nineteenth century: mildness, virtue, domesticity. It is those same characteristics, according to Eugenie's father, that threaten to sap away all of the king's strength: “Die Kraft entgeht vielleicht dem späten Zweige” (NT 254). The king's increasing femininity will eventually render him useless for matters of state and rule. By reason of feminization both the king and Eugenie's father stand before the abdication of their social and familial authorities.

Eugenie represents the dissolution of her culture's conceptions of the parallel relationships between “masculinity” and “femininity” and “man” and “woman.” What is at stake, as the king asserts, is the very foundation of the social order:

O! diese Zeit hat fürchterliche Zeichen,
Das Niedre schwillt, das Hohe senkt sich nieder,
Als könnte Jeder nur am Platz des Andern
Befriedigung verworrner Wünsche finden,
Nur dann sich glücklich fühlen, wenn nichts mehr
Zu unterscheiden wäre, wenn wir alle,
Von einem Strom, vermischt dahingerissen,
Im Ozean uns unbemerkt verlören.

(NT 252)

The society depicted in Die natürliche Tochter flows on the banks of total destruction. The breakdown of social order is imminent and the cause is gender ambiguity. Each participant in society is now only happy in the “place” of another—men are becoming more feminine, daughters like Eugenie are more masculine. Men and women are no longer easily distinguished in terms of their masculinity and femininity. But the real terror of gender-bending, according to the king, is that it precludes any identity at all. It is not just that boys will be like women and girls will be like men—but that gender-crossing is perceived to provoke the total loss of social order. The king fears that everyone will simply flow into an ocean of indistinguishability. Everything and everyone will be lost in a polymorphous sea of gender amorphousness.

The intense anxiety in the Die natürliche Tochter surrounding the “travesty” of gender-crossing is countered (as one might expect) by an exultation of the traditional family structure. The play begins with the king's evocation of domestic bliss: “Hier sollen Gatten aneinander wandeln, / Ihr Stufenglück in wohlgeratnen Kindern / Entzückt betrachten; …” (NT 242). Unlike Eugenie, the “misratener Sohn,” the children of this domestic utopia ought to be “wohlgeraten.” They will be the offspring of domestic ecstasy and they will (presumably) not cross genders. The king asserts that if he could be assured of strength of the family and its “wohlgeratene Kinder,” he would give up his kingdom (“my kingdom for a home!”): “O! wäre mir, zu meinen reinen Wünschen, / Auch volle Kraft auf kurze Zeit gegeben; / Bis an den letzten Herd im Königreich / Empfände man des Vaters warme Sorge … / Und hätt' ich einmal ihres Glücks genossen, / Ensagt' ich gern dem Throne, gern der Welt” (NT 253). While Eugenie's father accuses the king of being too domestic—too feminine—the king isolates the family as the foundation of societal bliss.

In the final scenes of the play, the domestic ideal resurfaces. By this time Eugenie is cognizant of the dangers that await her on the islands and is desperately searching for the “father-word” that will rescue her. She pleads to the Gerichtsrat: “O! sprich es aus, / Ein hohes Wort, das mich zu heilen töne” (NT 300). In despair she hopes for a “Mittel,” for a paternal word to cure her: “Ist denn kein menschlich, ist kein göttlich Mittel, / Von tausendfacher Qual mich zu befreien? / O! daß ein einzig ahnungsvolles Wort, / Zufällig, aus der Menge, mir ertönte!” (NT 318). The Gerichtsrat promises Eugenie that there is one remedy, one word which can reclaim her for her “fatherland.” That word is marriage. As the Gerichtsrat proposes to Eugenie, he describes the glories of married life:

Dem Ungestüm
Des rohen Drangs der Menge zu entgehn,
Hat uns ein Gott den schönsten Port bezeichnet.
Im Hause, wo der Gatte sicher waltet,
Da wohnt allein der Friede, den, vergebens,
Im Weiten, du, da draußen, suchen magst.

(NT 303-04)

Marriage cures all ills. Eugenie must only forfeit her role outside of the home. She must subordinate herself to her husband's command. What she receives in return is safety from the horrors of public life. The Hofmeisterin assures us that her renunciation of her Symbolic position at court, her acceptance of the Gerichtsrat's offer of marriage, will reconcile her to her enemies: “Versöhnt ist alles, wenn sie Gattin heißt” (NT 294). Eugenie can avoid exile, if she consents to a life of domesticity.

Despite the Gerichtsrat's utopian description of marriage, Eugenie is not initially convinced that marriage will be so celestial. Her initial response to the mention of the single word, “Ehstand,” is one of anxiety: “Mich überrascht, mich ängstet solch ein Wort” (NT 301). Not surprisingly, Eugenie, the Amazon-daughter, has not previously contemplated a quiet domestic life. She muses: “Nun soll ich denken was ich nie gedacht” (NT 301-02). Moreover, Eugenie suspects (and rightfully so) that marriage would require her not only to give up her public lifestyle, but to relinquish her masculinity:

Der Gatte zieht sein Weib unwiderstehlich
In seines Kreises abgeschloss'ne Bahn
Dorthin ist sie gebannt, sie kann sich nicht,
Aus eigner Kraft, besondre Wege wählen,
Aus niedrem Zustand führt er sie hervor,
Aus höhern Sphären lockt er sie hernieder.
Verschwunden ist die frühere Gestalt,
Verloschen jede Spur vergangner Tage.
Was sie gewann, wer will es ihr entreißen?
Was sie verlor, wer gibt es ihr zurück?

(NT 307)

Marriage would return Eugenie to her proper feminine role in the Symbolic. She would forfeit her “frühere Gestalt”—her gender ambiguity would be eradicated and social order restored. The Gerichtsrat's proposal is not just the offer of a safe haven. If Eugenie chooses marriage, she dies yet another symbolic death. Eugenie's identity is contingent upon her cross-gendered identification. She is the daughter-son, the gender-bending progeny bursting in upon the Symbolic order. The glorification of the family/marriage at the play's close establishes an ideological/social reality which suppresses the traumatic, real kernel of Eugenie's gender-bending. The obsession with marriage in Die natürliche Tochter functions to obscure the view of the Thing (Real), of Eugenie's gender ambiguity (unveiled in the mirror scene), occluding the view of a forbidden domain, of a space that this particular society would like to have remain unseen. Once Eugenie chooses marriage, she condemns herself not only to seclusion, but also to the loss of her very gendered identity and sense of self: “Woher ich komme, niemand soll's erfahren, / Ja die entfernten Lieben will ich nur / Im Geist besuchen, keine Zeile soll, / Kein Bote dort mich nennen …” (NT 325). Despite the grim opportunity that marriage affords her, Eugenie eventually accepts the Gerichtsrat's proposal. Marriage is, perhaps, her best bet—the only other choices being death in the islands, or execution if she insists upon a public role at court. Each of Eugenie's options entail her symbolic, if not real death. Marriage, at least, allows Eugenie to remain in her “fatherland”—to retain a small Symbolic role—if only in anonymity.¹⁸

Eugenie appears to be successfully rescued for the Symbolic order by means of marriage at the end of Die natürliche Tochter. Her banishment is lifted as she agrees to fulfill her Symbolic role as a wife under her husband's command and tutelage. In retrospect it becomes evident that Eugenie's “banishment” and her “reconciliation” in the last acts of the play constitute yet another structure of “Fort” and “Da.” She is exiled by the paternal order, only to be retrieved again in another, more acceptable form. The sole purpose of this “Fort/Da” game is to “refashion” Eugenie for a domestic position, to return her to an acceptable feminine role. Once again, a paternal game of “Fort/Da” ought to reclaim the daughter for her “father(land)” in a form closer to his social and familial ideals. Die natürliche Tochter insinuates finally that only marriage will end the perpetual game of loss and return.

Or will it? We recall that Goethe intended to write a trilogy. Die natürliche Tochter is only the first of the three dramas which he envisioned.¹⁹ The other two dramas (never written) would have inevitably “returned” to the story of Eugenie, adding to the first drama's layers upon layers of compulsive returns to the trauma of her gender ambiguity. Indeed, Eugenie refers, herself, to her possible “return” from domesticity in her final comments. As the play closes, Eugenie has been “returned” to a “place” outside of the public realm, to a state of “kindlich” and/or feminine “Nichts” not unlike that of her origins. Eugenie reinscribes the inherent structure of disappearance and reappearance as she insists on taking up residence on a distant property owned by the Gerichtsrat. She desires to seclude herself “die Welt vermeidend, im Verborgnen” (NT 298). Here, she informs the Gerichtsrat, she will be buried, only to await a future resurrection: “Sobald ich mich die Deine nenne, laß / Von irgend einem alten zuverläss'gen Knecht / Begleitet, mich in Hoffnung einer künft'gen, / Beglückten Auferstehung, mich begraben” (NT 325). Marriage is just another a state of disappearance from which Eugenie is convinced that she will rise again.

Despite the fact that Eugenie is shrouded in silence as Die natürliche Tochter reaches its denouement, regardless of her loss of property, name, and identity, compulsive reiterations of her losses and returns continue unabated. Moreover, Eugenie, the gender-bending daughter can never, really, entirely be lost from view. Her presence will always reassert itself. The policy of “don't see, don't tell” can never be maintained. As much as the king may insist that: “Gar vieles kann, gar vieles muß geschehn, / Was man mit Worten nicht bekennen darf” (NT 247), it is clear throughout the play that Eugenie's gender crossing will be seen and will be told, in spite of the paternal measures taken to relegate her to a proper domestic role. The count sums it up succinctly when he remarks: “Es ist ein eigner, grillenhafter Zug, / Daß wir, durch Schweigen, das Geschehene, / Für uns und Andre, zu vernichten glauben” (NT 246). Eugenie's gender-crossing cannot be silenced, cannot be eradicated. Diverting the gaze, silencing Eugenie's mirror confession, will not annihilate the scandalous daughter and will not even conceal her from view. Eugenie is destined, as she avers, to “immer, immer wiederkehren” (NT 258). Whether “Fort” or “Da,” her gender ambiguity retains its disruptive relationship to the Symbolic order. Eugenie's gender-bending cannot be suppressed, for her “transgression” has been seen and told.

Notes

1. For an excellent collection of essays on representations of gender and sexuality in Goethe's works and elsewhere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century see Alice Kuzniar's Outing Goethe and His Age (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Essays on gender issues and Goethe include: Sander Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991) and Catriona MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” MLN [Modern Language Notes] 108 (1993): 389-426.

2. Ilse Graham, Goethe: Portrait of the Artist (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977) and Irmgard Wagner, “Die natürliche Tochter and the Problem of Representation,” Goethe Yearbook 4 (1988): 185-208 stress the aesthetic and linguistic qualities of the drama. Wagner's attempted Lacanian analysis of Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter is muddled by misconceptions about his psychoanalysis. She clearly misunderstands Lacan when she insists on concepts such as “true subjects,” on language “as the place where the subject can produce herself” and that verbal symbols enable the subject to “control reality.”

3. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1986) 18: 16.

4. Ibid. 18: 15.

5. “Psychopathetic Characters on the Stage,” The Standard Edition 7: 305.

6. As Graham (263) points out, Eugenie's name has a cognate in the Latin word “genus” which means, in addition to “clan” and “kind,” “sex” and “gender.”

7. All quotations from Goethe's works are from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Münchner Ausgabe, Ed. Karl Richter, Herbert G. Göpfert, Norbert Müller, and Gerhard Sauder, 20 vols. (München: Hanser, 1985), unless otherwise indicated. The title of the play is abbreviated throughout the article as NT and the edition as MA.

8. For more on the Lehrjahre see Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Die Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele: Zur Ausgrenzung und Vereinnahmung des Weiblichen in der patriarchalischen Utopie von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” Verantwortung und Utopie, Ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988) and MacLeod.

9. Irmgard Wagner “Vom Mythos zum Fetish. Die Frau als Erlöserin in Goethes klassischem Drama” Goethe Yearbook 5 (1990): 136, maintains that Eugenie's appearance has the function “die gefährdete Staatsordnung zu stabilisieren.” As I will show, Eugenie is the gender-bending threat the social order strives to expel from its midst.

10. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), outlines in detail her theory of abjection. The abject is whatever is rejected or repressed from the subject's or culture's self-definition. It is all of those things which I or culture designate(s) as outside or excluded from the self. Abjection is the process of separation and expulsion which individual and culture deploy in order to rid themselves of the abject, to establish an Ideal-I, to imply at least a fictional sense of subject cohesion. For the most part, the abject is constituted by those things that disturb order, that threaten to dissolve social and ethical law and cultural stability if they are not abjected.

11. Wagner (1988, 189) asserts that “Durch Trauren wird die Trauer zum Genuß” represents speech which “negates the emotion it is supposed to express.” On the contrary, the “Fort/Da” game, as repetitive practice in the control of loss, affords the father pleasure.

12. See also MacLeod (408).

13. From Goethe's review of “Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele” in Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe, Hrsg. im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, 143 vols. in 4 secs. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887-1919) I 40: 375-76. Cited hereafter as WA.

14. Böttiger to Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, 4 April 1803.

15. Like the Amazons of Goethe's Lehrjahre, Eugenie fades “physically from the text” (MacLeod, 400) or, more precisely, she fades into text.

16. Wagner (1990, 138) and Graham have noted only Eugenie's masculinity in this scene.

17. Wagner (1990, 138) attempts to read Eugenie as a type of Jeanne d'Arc figure. This reading is only possible if one ignores the anxiety expressed in the play about Eugenie's gender ambiguity.

18. Despite the devastating consequences of marriage for Eugenie, most scholars have emphasized her marriage as a admirable renunciation. See Dieter Borchmeyer, Die Weimarer Klassik (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980) and Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Die natürliche Tochter,” Goethes Dramen. Neue Interpretationen, Ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980). Whether one praises her “Entsagung” as a quintessential Goethean gesture or not, the fact remains that marriage means “death” for Eugenie—the gender-bending daughter-son.

19. Goethe wrote about the planned trilogy in his Tag- und Jahreshefte 1803 (WA I 35: 149-50). Although he never completed the second and third dramas, he seems to have been plagued by the “return” of this material (of Eugenie) as well. Here he mentions that the scenes he envisioned for the following dramas “besuchten mich nur manchmal wie unstete Geister, die wiederkehrend flehentlich nach Erlösung seufzen.”