WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP
the majority of the play’s characters are viewed and, as the play
progresses, we gradually penetrate deeper and deeper into their past
and present lives.
The symbolism of the wild duck is primarily associated with the
Ekdal family, all of whom have in some manner been injured by old
Werle, a rich merchant and owner of the Hoidal works. Significantly
it was he who shot the wild duck. Werle’s first victim was Ekdal
senior who was, in the past, his business partner but was left by Werle
to take sole responsibility and suffer imprisonment for illegal tree-
felling. In consequence Ekdal has lost his status in society and is now
supported partially by clerical work provided by Werle. Ekdal spends
much of his spare time hunting rabbits in the fantasy forest which he
and his son Hjalmar have created in their attic. Hjalmar and his wife
Gina have also been injured by Old Werle. As the play progresses we
learn that Gina had an affair with Old Werle which resulted in the
birth of Hedvig, who is now 14 years old. To mitigate the conse-
quences of his actions Old Werle encouraged Gina to marry Hjalmar
and set the couple up in a small photography business. Even Hedvig
suffers from association with her natural father in that she has
inherited from him a disease which will gradually lead to blindness.
Whereas Old Werle has at least attempted to provide recompense
for the injuries caused, his son Gregers, who has returned from a
sojourn in the cold north bringing with him an equally cold logic,
attempts to reveal the truth to his father’s victims. He is unshakeably
certain that, as a result, his father will be forced to face his guilt and
that the Ekdals will be happier for being relieved of the delusions
under which they live.
As Ibsen himself employs the symbolism of the wild duck to reveal
the nature of the relationship that exists between the Ekdals and the
Werles, so also do a number of the characters themselves attempt to
infuse their lives with significance, and define a pattern to their
mundane existence by describing themselves and their actions in
terms of Romantic and at times sentimental imagery. Chief of these is
Gregers Werle who has decided that his over-tiding ‘‘task in life’’ is
to unburden others of their illusions. From his arrival in the Ekdal
household, to the incomprehension of Hjalmar, Gina, and Hedvig, he
weaves his own symbolism around the wild duck. He compares
himself firstly to the duck itself and then to the clever dog who
retrieved the duck from the bottom of the lake. The prosaic responses
of Hjalmar and Hedvig provide a touch of comic irony intended by
Ibsen to reveal Gregers’s pretentiousness. By employing such ironic
undercutting Ibsen allows this phoniness to appear at first comic but
gradually, through the interaction between Gregers, Hjalmar, and
Hedwig, he begins to reveal how it can also inhibit and even destroy
relationships with others. Hedvig has already been emotionally
crippled by being confined, on account of her partial blindness, to the
apartment in which Hjalmar and his father live out their lives in self-
delusion. Indeed, she is portrayed as behaving like one much younger
than her actual age. She is in consequence highly susceptible to
emotional pressure and it is under such pressure, exerted by Gregers,
that she adopts his suggested ‘‘spirit of sacrifice,’’ and attempts to
prove her love for her father by killing not her beloved wild duck, as
suggested by Gregers, but herself.
Having cruelly rejected Hedvig when it is revealed by Gregers that
she may not be his child, Hjalmar’s self-dramatization keeps him
ignorant of the real reason for her death. He is unable to understand
her need to prove her love for him and, as the pragmatic realist Doctor
Relling points out, ‘‘Before the year is out little Hedvig will be
nothing more to him than a fine subject to declaim on.’’ It is Relling,
with his insistence that the average man needs his ‘‘saving lie’’ in
1578
REFERENCE GUIDE TO WORLD LITERATURE, 3rd EDITION
order to be happy, who is placed by Ibsen in opposition to Gregers
with his fanatical ‘‘claim of the ideal.’’ At the close of the play
Hedvig is dead but Hjalmar and Gregers remain the same as they
always were. The ironic comedy gives way to the sombre conclusion
that idealism may not be the virtue that it may superficially appear.
—D. Keith Peacock
WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP (Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre)
Novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1795–96
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, first published in 1795–96,
is generally considered the epitome of the German Bildungsroman,
although Goethe did not consciously write such a novel. The term
Bildungsroman was coined later in 1817 by Karl (von) Morgenstern
and popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1870, but one strand of the
divided reception shows a reading of the novel in terms of Bildung,
the successful self-cultivation of the protagonist, already between
1796–1800, although the term Bildungsroman was not yet available.
This reading was to become the dominant interpretation of Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship for the next two centuries to come. There
was, however, from the beginning also a reading which questioned
the protagonist’s development into a mature and well-balanced
human being in the sense of the humanist ideology of the 18th
century, with its emphasis on the ideal of harmony.
The original version of the novel, entitled Wilhelm Meister’s
Theatralische Sendung [Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission], was
written between 1777 and 1785, but remained a fragment. The
original manuscript is lost, but a contemporary copy was discovered
in 1909 and published in 1911. This novel, divided into six books,
corresponds to the first four books of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice-
ship, although the emphasis is on the theatre as a positive experience
rather than a transition to other types of educational experience. If the
title of the original version is not considered ironic, the Theatralische
Sendung is to be interpreted as an artist novel (Künstlerroman).
The story of Wilhelm Meister, the son of a middle-class merchant,
is set in the world of late 18th-century Germany. Wilhelm is not
interested in entering his father’s business, but in becoming a poet,
playwright, and actor, if not the founder of a national German theatre.
Falling in love with a young actress, he uses his business trips on
behalf of the family firm to acquaint himself with a travelling theatre
company. When the latter goes bankrupt, Wilhelm rescues it by
advancing funds from his father’s business. His financial involve-
ment makes him not only a business partner in the theatre company,
but also affords him an opportunity to write, act, and direct. After a
brief engagement of the company at a nobleman’s castle, where
Wilhelm endears himself to the nobility as a well-educated member of
the bourgeoisie, he is invited to direct a production of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. This production reflects the development of professionalism
among actors and the founding of a national theatre in Germany
during the 18th century. Playing the title role, Wilhelm is a success as
actor and director, but soon actors and audience become tired of the
demands of literary drama on the stage, preferring opera and slapstick
farce. Frustrated in his ambitions on the stage, Wilhelm turns his
interests toward the nobility, hoping to find his educational goals
realized within the circles of the aristocracy. Reform-minded repre-
sentatives of the nobility welcome Wilhelm as a member of the
REFERENCE GUIDE TO WORLD LITERATURE, 3rd EDITION
bourgeoisie and acquaint him with their multinational enterprise of
emigration to America and acquisition of land abroad to avoid loss of
property due to revolutionary upheaval in Europe. This union of the
reform-minded aristocracy and the progressive bourgeoisie is Goe-
the’s response to the French Revolution. Favouring the American
Revolution, Goethe has Count Lothario, who distinguished himself in
the service of the revolutionary army, exclaim: ‘‘Here [in Germany],
or nowhere, is America’’ (Book VII, Chapter 3). At the end of the
novel, Wilhelm marries a countess and inherits not only his share of
his father’s business, but also the estate of an Italian orphan of noble
birth (Mignon). The end of the novel reflects the pervasive irony of
the work: instead of being cultivated, Wilhelm becomes married and
rich. The irony of the ending is encapsulated in a quotation from the
Bible: the protagonist feels ‘‘like Saul, the son of Kish, who went in
search of his father’s asses and found a kingdom’’ (Book VIII,
Chapter 10).
Among the characters of the novel that need to be mentioned are
Felix, Wilhelm’s illegitimate son from his first love affair with an
actress, as well as Mignon and the Harper as tragically Romantic
figures who accompany Wilhelm on his travels. Mignon, an immature
child-woman, representing the spirit of poetry, is an androgynous
genius figure, while the Harper is the prototype of the oral poet of the
heroic past. Mignon turns out to be the daughter of the Harper by
incest. Secretly in love with Wilhelm, Mignon dies when his impend-
ing marriage is announced. The Harper kills himself, when his life
story and transgression are revealed. Finally, there is the life story of a
pietist woman, entitled ‘‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele’’ (‘‘Con-
fessions of a Beautiful Soul’’), a kind of female Bildungsroman. The
‘‘Confessions’’ are inserted between Books V and VII to introduce
the reader to the aristocratic circles Wilhelm is about to enter after his
departure from the theatre.
Wilhelm and the reform-minded aristocrats are guided by a secret
society, the ‘‘Gesellschaft vom Turm’’ (‘‘Society of the Tower’’),
which is modelled after the Masonic societies of the 18th century. The
‘‘Gesellschaft vom Turm’’ pronounces Wilhelm’s apprenticeship
completed, when he has acknowledged his illegitimate son. Function-
ing as a ‘‘machinery of fate,’’ as Schiller called it, the ‘‘Gesellschaft
vom Turm’’ is, however, neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Wil-
helm is successful in protesting against its guidance in his marriage to
the countess, yet he is obedient when he is sent on the road again for
further travel. It is part of the irony of the novel that chance and
coincidence constantly interfere with the rational planning of the
‘‘Gesellschaft vom Turm.’’
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship had a great influence on the
Romantics and the history of the German novel. It provided, so to
speak, the blueprint for all subsequent German novels from the 19th
to the 20th century. Among the first commentaries on the novel are
the correspondence between Friedrich Schiller and Goethe, the letters
by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Christian Gottfried Körner, and
Friedrich Schlegel’s essay ‘‘Über Goethes Meister’’ (‘‘On Goe-
the’s Meister’’) of 1798. Goethe’s novel became the prime model
for Romantic irony. It was translated into English by Thomas
Carlyle in 1824.
Goethe’s sequel to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was Wilhelm
Meister’s Travels, published in 1821 and in a revised version in 1829.
This novel marks the transition from Bildungsroman to archival
novel, a modernist prose narrative that functions as a fictional archive
for a multitude of narrative texts. The narrator serves as editor who
presents the various texts stored in the archive of the novel to the
reader. The basic structure consists of a loose collection of novellas,
WILLEHALM
aphorisms, and factual documents connected by a frame narrative
with its own plot. This rudimentary plot shows Wilhelm Meister
depositing his son Felix at a boarding school, while he himself is
trained as a surgeon. Wilhelm’s application to this skill pays divi-
dends as he is able to save his son’s life. At the end of the novel,
Wilhelm Meister is ready to depart from Europe to follow his wife and
the rest of the ‘‘Gesellschaft vom Turm’’ to North America. In his
essay ‘‘James Joyce und die Gegenwert’’ [James Joyce and the
Present] of 1936, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch identified
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels as the prototype of the modernist novel in
German literature. Without doubt, Goethe’s last novel is, in the words
of Jane K. Brown, ‘‘an experiment in narrative form’’ whose achieve-
ments could only be appreciated in retrospect of Joyce’s Ulysses.
—Ehrhard Bahr
WILLEHALM
Unfinished poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach, written c.
1210–12
Willehalm is an epic poem of almost 14,000 lines written by
Wolfram von Eschenbach probably during the second decade of the
13th century, Wolfram von Eschenbach tells us that he acquired a
copy of his source from the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, to
whose death in 1217 he appears to refer towards the end of his work.
Though structural analyses suggest that the work is substantially
complete, most critics agree that Wolfram von Eschenbach failed to
finish it. Although Wolfram von Eschenbach’s source is known to
have been a version of a French ‘‘chanson de geste,’’ La Bataille
d’Aliscans, though not one identical with any extant text, it is
nonetheless obvious that Wolfram von Eschenbach treated his source
with such liberty that it provides only an unreliable guide to the
contents of his intended conclusion. This lack of a final ending,
coupled with the fact that the work does not fit comfortably into any
recognized medieval genre, hampers attempts to interpret the work,
though there is general agreement on a number of themes.
A realistic work with a clear topical relevance, Wolfram von
Eschenbach himself claimed that Willehalm, unlike Parzival or
Titurel, is true. Though the events it describes are essentially ficti-
tious, its hero can be identified with a cousin of Charlemagne, Count
William of Toulouse, who after a military career spent fighting the
Arabs in southwest France and Catalonia, founded and withdrew to
the monastery of Saint Guilhelm-du-Désert in the valley of Gellone.
He was canonized in 1066. The work, written at a time of almost
constant war in the Holy Land, owes its topical relevance to its
discussion of the Holy Wars and the relationship between Christians
and Muslims.
The central question of the work is how to distinguish right and
wrong when they are interwoven: how is one to act when traditionally
unquestionably virtuous modes of behaviour have clearly evil conse-
quences? This is the quandary in which the hero of the work and his
wife find themselves. Willehalm is married to Gyburc, the now
baptized former wife of Tibatt, a heathen, and daughter of Terramer,
the heathen emperor. In the work what begins as a private feud
between two families over a woman, very soon, owing to the religious
difference, acquires the public aspect of a crusade. This becomes
especially clear when, having suffered initial defeat, Willehalm is
1579