Faust, Part One

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1829

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Play Summaries & Analyses

Scenes 1-7

Scenes 8-14

Scenes 15-21

Scenes 22-28

Character Analysis

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Scenes 15-21 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Scenes 15-17 Summary

Scene 15 takes place in Martha’s garden, where Gretchen walks with Faust while Martha walks with Mephistopheles. Gretchen is surprised and ashamed that Faust is giving her so much attention, when she’s poor and uneducated, while Martha suggests to Mephistopheles that he shouldn’t be a bachelor. Gretchen tells Faust about her home life, where she’s alone much of the time taking care of the house. She tells him that her father and sister have passed away, and that her brother is a soldier who’s not around.

Gretchen and Faust also discuss their first meeting, and Gretchen confesses that she was shocked by Faust’s advances but was taken with him. She takes a daisy and starts picking off petals, saying “he loves me, he loves me not,” ending on, “he loves me.” Faust takes her hands and confesses his love for her, and she runs away, with him soon following. Martha tells Mephistopheles that she would invite him to stay, but the neighbors are extremely gossipy, and they remark on how Gretchen and Faust seem to have found their true loves.

Scene 16 takes place at a summerhouse, where Gretchen runs in with Faust following and they happily kiss and declare their love. Mephistopheles enters and tells Faust that it’s time to leave, and Gretchen tells Faust he can’t escort her home because of her mother. Faust and Mephistopheles leave and Gretchen remarks how smart Faust is, and how ashamed she is of herself compared to him: “I’m just a child and don’t know a thing,/ How can he find me so interesting?” she asks (I.16.3215-16).

Scene 17 is set in a forest cavern, where Faust alone is speaking to the Earth Spirit, who he believes has “given me all I asked for” (I.17.3218). Mephistopheles then enters and asks if Faust is tired of this lifestyle with Gretchen yet, and Faust tells him that he wishes he would go away and stop bothering him. The two argue and Mephistopheles asks where Faust would be without him, while Faust argues that “his life’s strength increases/ As I walk in these wild places” (I.17.3278-79). Mephistopheles then suggests that Faust’s fate and love with Gretchen will not end well, saying that Faust will “soon feel it’s gone too far” (I.17.3299). Mephistopheles tells Faust that Gretchen is currently sitting and pining over him, and that Faust should go to her, because she thinks that he has run away.

Faust frets that he has “ruined” Gretchen by invading her life, as he is an “aimless, restless reprobate” (I.17.3349), and “rocks could not satisfy/ My rage to rive and burst/ and wreck as I rushed by” (3357-59). Faust says, “She was our victim, hell’s and mine!” (I.17.3361). He tells Mephistopheles to help him “cut short this waiting” and for their dire fate to arrive already (I.17.3362). Mephistopheles again tells Faust to go to Gretchen and that he must keep fighting. He tells Faust that Faust is “well bedeviled now,” and “Devils must not despair” (I.17.3371-72).

Scenes 18-21 Summary

Gretchen is alone in her room at her spinning wheel, and she laments about how sad she is and how badly she misses Faust: “My heart’s so heavy,/ My heart’s so sore,/ How can ever my heart/ Be at peace any more?” she says (I.18.3374-78).

Scene 19 takes place in Martha’s Garden, where Gretchen and Faust are talking. Gretchen asks Faust about religion, because she does not believe that he’s a Christian. When she asks whether Faust believes in God, he responds that he does not either believe or not believe in God, but rather believes in the “heavenly radiance” and “mystery” that the awe of the world inspires in him: “When you’re brimming over with the bliss/ Of such a feeling, call it what you like!/ Call it joy, or your heart, or love, or God!/ I have no name for it. The feeling’s all there is:/ The name’s mere noise and smoke” (I.19.3452-56).

Gretchen goes along with this explanation, but still doubts that Faust is a Christian. She tells him that it bothers her he hangs out with Mephistopheles, whose presence she says “offends me so” (I.19.3477). Gretchen expresses her hate for Mephistopheles and says seeing Faust with him makes her doubt whether she loves Faust. She asks whether Faust feels the same way and he avoids the question, and asks whether they can spend time together to “lie breast to breast and mingle soul with soul” (I.19.3505). She says they cannot, as her mother is a light sleeper, and Faust gives her a flask and tells her to put a few drops in her mother’s drink so she’ll sleep soundly. Gretchen asks if the potion is safe and her mother will wake up, and Faust assures her (though the flask he gives her is presumably the poison from earlier in the play).

Gretchen leaves and Mephistopheles enters, having overheard Faust and Gretchen’s conversation. Mephistopheles says that Gretchen is like other women in checking whether a man is religious (because if he is, he’s more likely to “be at our beck and call”) (I.19.3528), and suggests that Gretchen has led Faust “by the nose” (3535). Mephistopheles asks Faust whether it will be tonight that Faust and Gretchen sleep together, and says that he “take[s] a certain pleasure” in that happening as well (I.19.3544).

Scene 20 takes place at a well, where Gretchen and another girl, Lieschen, are carrying water jugs and talking. Lieschen tells Gretchen that another girl they know, Barbara, has gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and the father has left her. Lieschen shames Barbara, saying she doesn’t feel sorry for her for going out and sleeping around while the other girls were staying inside as their mothers wanted them to: “Now she’ll have her church penance to do,/ And sit in her smock on the sinner’s pew!” Lieschen says (I.20.3567-68). Lieschen exits and Gretchen remarks that she used to make similar comments about girls who had “gone astray” (I.20.3578), but reveals that she is now one of them, having slept with Faust. She says, though, that “all that made me do it/ Was good, such dear love drove me to it!” (I.20.3585-86).

In Scene 21, Gretchen goes to a shrine inside the town wall, where she brings fresh flowers to an icon of the Mater Dolorosa. Gretchen prays to the Virgin Mother in despair and pain. She references how Mary stood by “thy son to watch Him die” (I.21.3591), and then suggests that Mary is the only one who “can know/ The pain that so/ Burns in my bones like fire from hell?” (3596-98), suggesting that her son with Faust has now died as well. Gretchen prays for the Virgin Mother to “save me from shame and death” (I.21.3616).

Scenes 15-21 Analysis

The third section of Faust Part I primarily focuses on Faust and Gretchen’s romance, which culminates in them having sex. Though Faust’s lust for Gretchen seemingly turns to love, with him proclaiming his undying devotion to Gretchen beyond her body, this is the section in which Faust is seemingly most driven by sin and desire. He pressures Gretchen to have sex despite having realized that he has “ruin[ed] her” and being told that she will face a doomed fate, saying he wants to be “doomed with her, and she with me” (I.17.3360-65). Faust then sins by telling Gretchen to poison her mother so that they can have sex, telling her it is merely a sleeping potion from which she will wake up. Even as he falls in love with her, Faust essentially uses Gretchen for his own gain, causing the destruction of Gretchen and her family as collateral for his pleasure and thirst for passion.

This section is perhaps the happiest one for Gretchen until its end, as she falls in love with Faust and has not yet faced the full depths of her shame and sadness. The relationship between Gretchen and Faust is essentially built on an imbalance, however, and Gretchen constantly wonders what Faust sees in her when he is so much more educated and wiser than her. The attraction between Gretchen and Faust and its foundation is left ambiguous in Faust: It is not clear whether Faust is truly in love with Gretchen, or if it is a result of the potion that Faust drinks in the witch’s kitchen, seeing as how Mephistopheles says that after drinking it, “soon any woman will be Helen” of Troy to Faust (I.9.2604).

Gretchen’s downfall also begins in this section, as she sleeps with Faust and, by Scene 21, has drowned her infant son and is now in grief and agony. (Her mother is now presumably dead.) Gretchen’s conversation with Lieschen in Scene 20 sets up the shame and ostracization that Gretchen soon faces, establishing the view that her town takes toward unmarried pregnant women.

While Gretchen has technically sinned under Christian tenets by sleeping with Faust, she initially does not believe that she has done anything wrong, as her desire to unite with Faust was borne out of love, rather than lust or a desire to sin: “Now that sin of others is my sin too!/ […] But all that made me do it/ Was good, such dear love drove me to it,” she says (I.20.3584-86). Gretchen’s hatred of Mephistopheles and recognition of his evilness also suggests Gretchen’s essential innocence and goodness despite her sins, as she can’t be lured by him or give into him, as both Faust and Martha seemingly do. This again perhaps foreshadows why the Lord saves her at the end of the play, suggesting she is not a sinner at her core.

This section also explores the dynamic between Mephistopheles and Faust more, as the two begin to tire of each other and get annoyed. Faust is ungrateful for Mephistopheles and believes that the Earth Spirit is instead behind his gains, telling Mephistopheles to go away, while Mephistopheles is bored of Faust’s obsession with Gretchen and believes Faust should be more grateful to what he’s given him so far. Yet though they argue, Faust also becomes closer to Mephistopheles in this act. Even before Faust’s overt acts of sin, Mephistopheles tells Faust that he’s “well bedeviled now, you’re one of us” (I.17.3371), and when Gretchen starts badmouthing Mephistopheles and telling Faust how much she hates him, he refuses to say that he feels the same way. He tells her that “there’s nothing to fear” (I.19.3476) and describes Mephistopheles as just being “rather odd” (3483), dismissing her concerns: “You’ve just taken against him, and that’s all,” Faust says, refusing to say anything bad about the devil (I.19.3501).