SOURCE: Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. “Patriarchy and German Enlightenment Discourse: From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.” In Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, edited by W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub, pp. 48-64. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Becker-Cantarino examines the role of patriarchal thought in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Patriarchy is deeply ingrained in German Enlightenment discourse and in one of the most influential works in the German literary canon, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). This novel depicts a (mostly) conciliatory, orderly, at times repressive, yet productive, in short a benign, image of enlightened patriarchy¹ as the natural order. The father/son dyad with the absent mother represents the symbolic order, while in realistic terms the Wilhelm-Felix duo moves to the center of the novel's plot and remains there...