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a young man readily accepted the canonical version of the sexual theory, over the years he
reinterpreted it until it became so philosophical and abstract that it all but lost its original
connection to sex. How can we explain this shift in Goethe’s thinking? Part of the answer
lies in Goethe’s evolving attitude toward sex in general.Goet h e’s “Weiberliebe”
Goethe’s botanical writings, especially his views about the sexual theory of plants, were
influenced to an unusual degree by his life experience, especially his love life. Like his alter
ego, Faust, Goethe’s curiosity about the natural world was boundless, as was his lifelong
attraction to women. Indeed, he seemed to have derived much of his poetic inspiration from
his many passionate, yet chaste, affairs, which Schiller later referred to as “the Weiberliebe
(women- love) that plagues him.”^36 In his poetry, women are strongly identified with
nature, and conversely, nature is personified as female. Thus, to understand Goethe’s ideas
about sex in plants, one must view them, at least in part, through the lens of his attitudes
toward women.
Goethe’s close relationship with his sister Cornelia may have served as a template for his
many platonic relationships with women, especially those before his two- year sojourn in
Italy. Cornelia was born a year after Goethe in 1750. The two siblings became inseparable
companions, playing, studying, and reading together. They frequently entertained the fam-
ily by staging plays of their own composition. In his autobiography, Goethe stated that upon
reaching adolescence they both experienced “the amazement of the awakening of sensuous
drives” that were held in check only by “the holy dread of the close relationship.” Several
years later, Cornelia consoled her forlorn brother after his first of a series of romantic rejec-
tions. Goethe wrote that at such moments brother and sister felt the pain of the barrier
between them most keenly, as they “regarded themselves utterly unhappy, the more so since
in this particular case the confidants could not transform themselves into lovers.”^37 When
Cornelia married one of Goethe’s friends, the lawyer Georg Schlosser, Goethe reacted nega-
tively: “This [news] rather took me aback ... and now I first noticed that I was really jealous
with regard to my sister.”^38 He always believed that Cornelia’s marriage to Schlosser was
an unhappy one, and he remained convinced that she was better suited to a spiritual call-
ing than to marriage: “I liked to imagine her, when I sometimes engaged in fancies about
her destiny, not as a wife, but as an abbess, the mother superior of a noble convent.” When
Cornelia died in childbirth at the age of twenty- six, Goethe must have reflected bitterly
that had his sister entered such an imagined convent, she would not have died so young and
deprived him of her company.
Until his trip to Italy between 1786 and 1788, when most biographers agree he finally
lost his virginity at the age of thirty- seven, Goethe’s courtships fell into two main catego-
ries: romantic relationships which he, himself, terminated before they became physical, and
Werther- like obsessions with married or engaged women who were physically unavailable.
His longest and most ardent romance with a married woman began when he was twenty- six
years old and lasted ten years, until his departure for Italy. The object of his desire was the
Baroness Charlotte von Stein, a pious, attractive, and intelligent woman. She had heard
reports that he was “the most handsome, liveliest, most original, fieriest, stormiest, softest,