The young Margarete of Goethe's Faust, the soul of innocent love whom Steiner read as the human heart, ruined by desire yet redeemed.
Gretchen is the girl Faust loves and destroys in the first part of Goethe's drama. Rudolf Steiner, lecturing on Faust between 1916 and 1918, read her as the soul-region of pure feeling, the trusting heart that the Luciferic forces of longing reach through Faust himself. Her story runs from a village street to a prison cell, and ends in grace.
In Steiner's Own Words
Therefore, it is only natural that at the moment when Faust must turn away from the Earth Spirit, when he proves himself unequal to it with his knowledge, which rests in his own soul and in the soul of humanity in general, Mephisto approaches Faust as Lucifer. This results in the union of what connects with the depths with desires, feelings, and cravings. In other words, this results in the wonderful, magnificently poignant tragedy of Gretchen. There is also the possibility that Faust must enter into everything that is connected with desires and will; this makes up a large part of what we experience in the first part of Goethe's Faust. There we experience everything that arises through the Luciferic element.
What it Means Today
Steiner placed Gretchen at the warm centre of feeling, the heart-region where a person loves without calculation. That is why her ruin cuts so deep. Faust comes to her carrying powers he does not understand, and the longing that draws the two together is, in Steiner's reading, coloured by the Luciferic pole that lifts ordinary desire into something feverish. Gretchen herself stays guileless. She loses her mother to a sleeping-draught, her brother Valentine to Faust's sword, her own reason and her child, and at last her freedom. Yet on the Brocken, in the wild Walpurgis-night, it is her image that rises before Faust when nothing else can hold him, because the love in him proves stronger than Mephistopheles can grasp. The vision sharpens until he beholds the soul of Gretchen in her true form, a red line still about her neck.
Depth psychology arrived at the same threshold by another road. The Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz, in her Zurich lectures of the 1970s, read Gretchen as the anima, the inner feminine image a man projects and then betrays before he can love it consciously. Where Jung mapped the wound, Steiner named the redemption: Gretchen is not finally lost but drawn upward, and her voice returns at the very close of the drama among the penitent souls who plead for Faust. The Eternal Feminine that ends Goethe's poem begins in this village girl. For Steiner she is proof that the most injured feeling can become a redeeming force, that love survives the harm done to it and works on from the other side of the threshold.
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