Do Witches Belong in the Kitchen? The Gender Economy of the “Hexenküche” in Goethe’s Faust

This article examines the “Hexenküche” scene in Goethe’s Faust and systematically explores its inherent gender and economic ideologies. The witch’s kitchen’s resemblance to a brothel has been pointed out in the scholarly literature, but its relationship to economic structures has been overlooked. At the same time, magic, which pervades the scene, features in Faust as an analogy for art. Therefore, the scene challenges readers to connect economic, gender theoretical, and aesthetic themes and ideas. Underlying all these discourses is desire, as it creates both monetary and aesthetic value and influences platonic and erotic modes of gendered sociability. This article examines the social construction of desire in the “Witch’s Kitchen” scene through different language games, producing differentiated but intersecting discourses of economics, gender, and aesthetics. Using Silvia Federici’s historical analysis of witches and bourgeois patriarchy, this article challenges other readings that privilege Faust’s perspective. I argue that, unlike patriarchal capitalist models, identity, value, and gender in the “Hexenküche” are organized by an erotic orientation towards contingency, which undermines and ironizes stable forms of identity but allows for the ludic pluralization of provisional modes of identification. The scene, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to critique our modern value system as well as its emergence in early modernity and its development at the dawn of the nineteenth century.