444 i Flora Unveiled
he was attracted were either married or in search of a husband. Nowhere could he discover
the respectable, yet sexually pliant, woman of his imagination. Karl August, who tended
to throw caution to the winds in such matters, wrote back that he should follow his own
example and become more daring. On February 16, 1788, Goethe wrote back triumphantly:
Your good advice ... seems to have worked, for I can already mention several delight-
ful excursions. It is certain that you, as a doctor longe experientissimus, are perfectly
correct, that an appropriate movement of this kind refreshes the mind and provides a
wonderful equilibrium of the body.The identity of the woman to whom Goethe owed his physical emancipation has never
been conclusively established. In his Roman Elegies (Stanza 21), written either at the end of
his trip or soon after returning, he writes of a brown- skinned woman with flowing black
hair named Faustine. However, another candidate for the lover in the Elegies is the twenty-
three- year- old Christiane Vulpius, who became his mistress shortly after he returned to
Weimar, and who eventually became his wife and the mother of his children.
Goethe and the UrpflanzeShortly before embarking on his sabbatical in Italy, Goethe had begun reading Linnaeus
under the tutelage of the botanist August Johann Batsch, author of Botany for Women and
Lovers of Plants (1795). At first, Goethe was awed by Linnaeus’s encyclopedic knowledge of
plants. In a burst of enthusiasm, he rapidly mastered the Linnaean sexual system and spent
many happy hours identifying the local flora. However, he soon wearied of counting sta-
mens and pistils, chafing at the arbitrary and static nature of an artificial system, which he
termed “a rigid way of thinking.” In the meantime, Batsch had introduced him to the exten-
sive French literature on “natural” systems of classification in which plants were arranged
into families progressing from the simple to the complex. Natural classification systems
were more compatible with Goethe’s taste for embryology and development, which, as we
have seen, he had so successfully deployed in his study of the human premaxillary bone.
Whereas Linnaeus’s goal had been to make sense out of the bewildering array of plant
forms by dividing them up into species, Goethe’s objective as a morphologist was to search
for the common features among all plants in order to discover the fundamental laws of
development that differentiated plants from animals. How is it, he asked himself, that I can
immediately recognize a plant as a plant regardless of species? This was the same question
that both Aristotle and Theophrastus had attempted to answer centuries earlier. Aristotle’s
answer had been that plants were analogous to upside- down animals, with their “mouths”
in the soil. Theophrastus had insisted that plants were entirely different from animals and
could only be understood by analyzing their parts.
Echoing Theophrastus, Goethe also regarded plants as distinct life forms, not variants
of animals. But in what ways did plants and animals differ, and what were the laws that
governed these differences? Goethe turned, as he had in his study of the premaxillary bone,
to the only conceptual framework available to him, Neoplatonic idealism, hoping that he
could discover the ideal form of plants. The idea of an Urpflanze, or primordial plant from
which all other plants are derived, had occurred to him prior to his trip to Italy, but he