More than Heavenly Power Permits: The Faust Myth and Man's Striving in Marlowe's DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Goethe's FAUST and Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Myhill, Nova

Keywords

Faust, Striving, Adaptation

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Originally conceived and propagated in the sixteenth century, the Faust myth endures as an often adapted story about a man's ambitious folly. A morality tale about a foolhardy deal with the devil, the unique quality of the legend relates to the yearning quality of Faust's ambitions, a striving nature meant to represent humanity's own desire for what is beyond its means. Three specific adaptations interpret the core theme in unique, occasionally contradictory, ways: Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, one of the first adaptations of the Faust myth, brings Faustus' plight onstage and crafts a world of ambiguous fates and doubting despair that reflect the conclusions of the original legend while providing the seeds of change that later works would develop; Johann Goethe's Faust, a German masterpiece and the most well known adaptation, inverts the thrust of the Faust story by insisting on the positive nature of striving and subverts the original story's bleak conclusions by providing dialectics instead of oppositions that allow Faust to err even while he strives; Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita follows Goethe's lead, yet does not adapt the story itself, instead opting to use a Faustian framework and alter its roles and components in order to illustrate the symbolic power of the Faust dynamic, the relation between striver, enabler and lover. These three distinct interpretations of the Faust myth maintain the story's relevance by exploring its most pressing concern, Man's striving, and reconsidering its import and influence on Man's fate.

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