"Wenn ich leben soll, so sei es mit dir!" The relationship of father and son in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre".

ABSTRACT

The relationship between father and son is a highly nuanced and persistent theme in Goethe's late novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, but has received relatively little critical attention. Drawing on various aspects of the text, from the relationship between Wilhelm and his own son Felix, to the theme of migration from the 'fatherland', this essay contends that the relationship of the younger generation to the older traces a pattern of departure and return. The development in the son of an identity distinct and independent from that of the father is a preoccupation of the earlier chapters of the Wanderjahre in particular; but this process of individuation tends to be accompanied in the novel by continued, even increased, identification with the father, which may be conscious or unconscious. All the various stages of this fluctuating relationship are telescoped into a few rich, enigmatic images in the novel's closing scene, in which the threat of separation and the desire for proximity are held in suspension.