Goethe's Faust Lesson Plan

Martha raises the question of why Mephistopheles has never settled down and married. If you had to guess, why do you think Faust has never done this?

Goethe never quite gives an answer to this question in the play. But in a way, it is one of the play's most striking aspects: apart from his interactions with Wagner, Faust appears to be tremendously non-social.

Faust is an old man, and yet he has apparently never taken a wife, or fathered a child. He has no family that we know of (and his briefly-mentioned father is presumably deceased by now). He does not have any friends, either. He is no longer a practicing scholar, and therefore does not seem to have any discernible...