Pleasure and Love Theme Analysis

As Margarete insightfully observes, Mephistopheles is bored with creation, for he has seen everything under the sun and moon, and he would like nothing more than to annihilate the world. Of course, Mephistopheles can’t annihilate the world, and so instead he entertains himself by leading human beings into temptation through pleasure—everything from the fiery wine he serves to patrons in Auerbach’s wine-cellar to the paper money he urges the Emperor to print and circulate in his realm. Pleasures like these, merely physical and ultimately meaningless, distract people from their quests for meaning and from purposeful, creative action. The people who enjoy such pleasures in the play, like the wine-cellar patrons and the gossipy water-bearer Lieschen, tend to be ordinary and self-satisfied. Such folk, Mephistopheles tells us with a wink, “never sense the devil’s presence, / not even when his hands are on their throats.” Interestingly, it is possible to draw an even more direct comparison between such pleasure-ruled people and the devil, as there isn’t much difference between Mephistopheles relieving his boredom with the “pleasure” of tempting people into frivolous pursuits, and the people engaging in those frivolous pursuits rather than engaging directly with the beauty and wonder of creation. Both acts are empty. Mephistopheles, essentially, ruins people by making them into mirrors of himself, of his own frivolous response to boredom.

Contrasted with mere pleasure in the play is love. Love perhaps begins as a desire for sexual union between two people—as it does between Faust and the ideally innocent Margarete, and later between Faust and the ideally beautiful Helen of Troy—but it also has the potential to become a spiritual experience, the experience of transcending oneself by merging with another soul. The play imagines love as extraordinary, even heroic, hurling those possessed by it into intense joy, imagined as contact with eternity. Yet most love in Faust ends in despair. Lovers must live in a society that will judge and destroy them (as it does to Margarete), and lovers also live in time, subject to violent change that can make sustaining their love impossible. That being said, the play does present one love that endures: that which extends from the Lord to his creation. This love is absolute and unchanging, and one might argue that the characters who reject simple pleasure and strive for more, for a more fundamental connection with other people and the universe, are in fact striving to fully experience that eternal love.