Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

Abstract

In an essay of 1835, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense reflected on a curious aspect of Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, published forty years previously: why, he wondered, had no critical attention been paid to the strange transvestite women who dominate the text?2 They remain an arresting, even troubling, feature of this novel. From the first page of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the reader is cast into a deeply perplexing world of sexual ambiguity. Within the framework of the classical Bildungsroman, typically the account of male maturation, Goethe presents a huge supporting cast of women, many of whom are marked with the signature of transvestism, of gender transgression. That such sexual indeterminacy is bound to generate almost boundless confusion is suggested by the following