FiredUp Presentation

Women Characters in Doctor Faustus

Brigitte Prutti

1. The Mother Figures

Elsbeth Leverkuhn: We have a maternal figure not included in the classic story of Faust. In Adrian’s childhood world, music is manifested on a personal level concerning both mother and stable-maid.

While Mother uses her voice with restraint, Hanne is unbound by reservations. The motif of the “stable-warmth” of music returns to his childhood influence.

Adrian’s musical history begins with this system based on simple melody and its repetition.

There is also an episode when Mother Faust is speaking with the music teacher Kretzschmar: she is possessive of her son while he wishes to “fling himself into the arms of music.” -----Here music substitutes maternal love by portraying how Mother Faust is jealous of the musical “bride” that is to replace her.

Mother Schweigestill tells a story that closely resembles Adrian’s own experiences. About a girl who wants to be seduced and is willing to sacrifice her life for the seduction. This parallels to Adrian’s willingness to be enveloped by music and the sacrifices he makes when he achieves his own seduction.

2. The Female “butterfly”

The transparent butterfly of his father’s mystical speculations about nature remain with Adrian through his childhood memories when he calls the prostitute “Esmeralda”.

The inspiring Muse, the “eternal feminine,” becomes an agent of the poisonous “angel,”, the devil. The social inversion makes a prostitute out of a seemingly “heavenly Muse”. By having sex with the diseased woman, Adrian gains the desired breakthrough of creative inspiration, even though this liberation comes at a deadly cost. His sexual desire becomes the sinful pact with the devil. The enhancement of his creativity via his illness requires Adrian to direct his sexual energies into art.

Her existence as a social outsider and her “otherness” are captured by the image of the exotic butterfly. As a destructive force, the woman is simultaneously the instrument of artistic inspiration.

THERE IS ALSO another thought to keep in mind: That Adrian’s attachment to music is pictured as a wedding. Adrian the female, music the male. Only after his encounter with Esmeralda, the natural genders are inverted. Adrian’s longing “demonic conception manifests itself in copulation; only after he is impregnated with the disease does he obtain his full male creative potency in art.

Without her, the conservative revolution in the music of Adrian would not be possible.

THE LITTLE MERMAID> She sacrifices her tail in order to have human legs, but every step she takes is like walking on sharp pins. She sacrifices her life for a human soul. “There are pains that one gladly and proudly take sin the bargain with pleasures so enormous, pains such as one knows from a fairy tale, pains like slashing knives, like those of the little mermaid felt in the beautiful human legs she acquired for a tail.”

3. Women of the World

Frau von Tolna: sympathizes with Adrian and supports her understanding of his work. Her gift to Adrian was a ring inscripted with a “hymn to Apollo, by Callimachus.” Apollo a Greek god can bless with healing and curse with death from his arrows.

When Zeitblom recalls Adrian’s encounter in Graz, he summons “Apollo and the Muses in order to talk about the event. Zeitblom realizes that through Arians encounter with Esmeralda, “that love and poison here once and forever became a frightful unity of experience; the mythological unity embodied in the arrow.” The relationship between Esmeralda and Tolna is their “structural identity”, their personifications of the unity of “poison” and “healing” female love, as it manifested in the double function of the god Apollo.