Mama Dada by Bay-Cheng Sarah;

Author:Bay-Cheng, Sarah; [Sarah Bay-Cheng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 182996
Publisher: Routledge

While Faust immediately regrets his decision to sell his soul for electric light, his remorse is motivated not by fear of an almighty creator or a crisis of conscience, but rather by his immediate physical discomfort—caused by the relentless glare of the lights. "I keep on having so much light that light is not bright" (89), he complains. As I have implied, the spiritual wrath of God is systematically replaced by the secular wrath of technology, as represented by electric light, in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.

That God is replaced by the modern technology of electricity may be Stein's punning reference to Goethe's criticism of the Enlightenment in his Faust. Despite its centrality to the play, the "spirituality" of the electric lights has so far been ignored in criticism of this play. In recent scholarship about Doctor Faustus, in fact, Faust is frequently compared to so secular a figure as Thomas Edison. In an early consideration of the play, Richard Bridgman sums up Faust's—and Gertrude Stein's—conflict quite simply, or rather simplistically. To repeat:

Doctor Faustus' problem is that he is the dissatisfied inventor of the electric light, which, since the American trip, had been on Gertrude Stein's mind.,. American technology and the threat of success to her personal identity coalesced for her in the phenomenon of electric lights to make Doctor Faustus a disgruntled Edison. (209)

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