I Gave You My Soul (and I Am Dead): Gender & Faustian Fiction

A lesson in gender norms, compliments of the Devil

by Matilda Lewis

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The motif of the Faustian pact with the Devil is an old and colorful one, remixed and reinterpreted time and again. Always, it invites the audience to consider: What would I sell my soul for? The question is tantalizing, but in so many soul-seller stories the answers are the same: money, power, fame, and knowledge… at least when the character making a bargain with the Devil is a man. Stories with female Faustian characters are rarer than those with men, and what motivates women in these stories to sell their souls is very rarely the same as what compels male characters to bargain with their souls. The difference in motivations ascribed to male vs female Faustian figures reveals a great deal of our thinking about what we expect to matter to men and what we expect to matter to women, and the morality typically ascribed to the sexes.

Though the Faust story has roots in earlier folklore, Christopher Marlowe’s late-16th-century play Doctor Faustus is the earliest dramatization of the legend and creates the mold for the many Faustian narratives that follow, including the gendered motivations of male soul-seller characters. In Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus tires of conventional knowledge and longs for greater power, which is what motivates him to make his pact with Lucifer, granting him magical powers for 24 years. He fritters his newfound demonic power away on petty, venal pursuits and realizes only when his time is up that he has given his soul for nothing of value. Though the Faust character is rendered with more nuance in Goethe’s early 19th century play, Faust, and his desire for knowledge is emphasized more, his bargain still brings disaster at the end of Part I, which is the more famous and frequently referenced half of the play. In both Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, what motivates the characters to sell their souls is self-serving rather than truly altruistic. But it also lines up with the gendered stereotypes of men in the West: men are rational creatures of knowledge, driven to seek power, with a tendency towards hubris.

Women who make Faustian pacts tend to be portrayed differently from men, and in a manner befitting the stereotypes and societal expectations placed upon them. Though in many historical periods women have been viewed as inherently flawed and more prone to wickedness than men, the advent of the Victorian era—and its ideal of the “angel in the house”—brought with it a view of women as the “civilizing” sex, inclined naturally to goodness. Even now, this idea is reflected in our popular media. So much contemporary fiction seems loath to assign even vaguely unsympathetic motivation to female characters—after all, we live in an age when Maleficent has to have a date rape-coded tragic backstory and when Cruella deVille’s mother got run off a cliff by Dalmatians to put her puppy-killing a less unsympathetic light. This plays into how female soul-sellers tend to be portrayed in media. Their motivations tend to be understandable, if not outright noble, and often their bargains are made for the sake of others rather than for their own gain or edification.

Women who make Faustian pacts tend to be portrayed in a manner befitting the stereotypes and societal expectations placed upon them.

One such noble Faustian woman is the titular countess of William Butler Yeats’ play The Countess Cathleen, first performed in 1899. In the play, during a time of famine in Ireland demons have been sent by Satan to buy the souls of starving, desperate peasants. In a magnanimous act difficult to imagine any real noblewoman would ever do, Cathleen sacrifices her land and wealth to feed the starving peasants of her county, but when it still is not enough, she bargains her own soul to save the peasants—both from starvation and eternal damnation. Though by doing this, she should have condemned herself to Hell, she is taken up to Heaven after she dies because God has seen her sacrifice for her people. The altruistic and virtuous Countess Cathleen is a far cry from the petty hubris of Doctor Faustus; she embodies some of the noblest qualities traditionally assigned to women, such as compassion, a sense of duty to her people,  and self-sacrifice for the good of others, while male soul-sellers like Doctor Faustus tend to embody more negative qualities typically assigned to men, like pride, lust for power, and a desire for knowledge and mastery that benefits nobody but themselves.

Like Cathleen and many other female Faustian characters, Christine Daaé in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera sells her soul (though figuratively rather than literally) for sympathetic reasons. The Phantom of the Opera is not usually thought of as a Faustian story, likely because most people are familiar with the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical, which eliminates that the opera most central to the novel is Gounod’s Faust. In the novel, playing the role of Marguerite earns Christine initial acclaim. During another performance of Faust, she is abducted by the Phantom in the lead up to the novel’s climax. This primes the reader to consider to Christine as an analogue to Marguerite rather than to Faust, but while she does share qualities with Marguerite in that she becomes a redemptive figure for the Phantom by the end of the novel, like Goethe’s Marguerite is for his Faust, her role in the story is still distinctly Faustian. In exchange for voice lessons from the Phantom, who she believes is the Angel of Music sent from heaven by her dead father, she agrees to be bound to the “Angel’s” strict rules, giving up her autonomy to honor the memory of her father in a dutiful and daughterly way; she herself does not seem driven by a personal ambition to become a great singer, but rather by taking on her father’s dreams for her, she centers her loved ones over herself in a rather Victorian feminine fashion. This bargain does prove to be burdensome for her, even before things go awry. After Christine’s initial triumph as Marguerite, her love interest Raoul overhears a conversation between the singer and the voice who she still believes is the Angel, discussing her performance, in which she says to the Angel “I gave you my soul, and I am dead,” explicitly framing her arrangement with him as soul-selling.

Unfortunately, most adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera completely ignore the Faustian aspects of the text, focusing instead on the more romantic “Beauty and the Beast” elements of the story or dialing up the pure horror aspects. One of the few Phantom of the Opera-inspired works that retains the Faustian elements is Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise. In this film, however, the soul-selling character is not the Christine-analogue, Phoenix, but rather the Phantom-analogue, composer Winslow Leach, who has signed a blood contract with shady record exec Swan to have his work performed to his specifications (which Swan goes back on). Swan, too, is “under contract,” having made a deal with the Devil for eternal youth unless the filmed recording of the contract is destroyed. In shifting the Faustian narrative back to male characters, the motivations also revert to the self-interest that is typical of male soul-sellers instead of the more sympathetic motivations of the typical female soul-selling character.

One of the better—maybe best?—recent Faustian stories with female soul-sellers is the somewhat notorious 2011 anime, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The story follows young girls who are approached by an extra-dimensional being called Kyubey who offers to grant them any wish if they will agree to become magical girls in order to fight witches. What Kyubey doesn’t tell the girls is that magical girls risk becoming witches themselves the longer they go on fighting. Though more frequently discussed as a dark deconstruction of magical girl anime tropes, Madoka Magica owes just as much a debt to Faust as it does Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura. It’s clear that the viewer is meant to watch the anime with Faust in mind, too, and it isn’t particularly subtle about this; in the second episode, there is a scene where two of the girls pass by an alleyway with graffiti written on the wall in German. Curious viewers who look up the text will find that it comes straight from Goethe’s play. This isn’t the only Faust Easter egg in the series, though it is one of the most blatant.

Faustian narratives that don’t precisely follow traditional gender expectations come off as fresher and more nuanced, even if the deviation is minor.

Over the course of the series, five girls make Faustian bargains with Kyubey in order to become magical girls. Each girl’s motivation behind making the bargains falls in line with the tendency of female soul-sellers to make their deals for altruistic or at the very least sympathetic reasons. The first bargain we learn of in the story is that of veteran magical girl, Mami, and this is the one that least fits the common pattern; rather than sell her soul for the sake of someone else, Mami makes her bargain with Kyubey when he comes to her as she is gravely injured in a car crash. Her wish is simply to not die. While this isn’t self-sacrificing or self-effacing in a matter befitting Cathleen or Christine, it is sympathetic in a way that male Faustian character’s motivations typically aren’t. The bargain we learn of next is made by Madoka’s best friend, Sayaka, who uses her wish to heal the injured hands of a young violinist she has a crush on so that he can play music again—partly, the viewer assumes, out of genuine care and partly because she hopes he will fall in love with her. He doesn’t, and ends up dating another friend of Madoka and Sayaka instead. Another veteran magical girl, Kyoko, wishes for people to listen to her father, a preacher, but when they do he is driven mad and ends up killing her family. Madoka spends most of the series waffling about whether she wants to be a magical girl and after seeing all the suffering the girls go through fighting witches and eventually becoming witches themselves, uses her wish to break the cycle completely and sacrifice herself so that nobody ever has to become a magical girl again, putting her above even Countess athleen as far as feminine altruism in a female soul-seller goes. The final girl, Homura, uses her wish to create a time loop that enables her to try over and over again to prevent Madoka from making this choice because she has grown to consider Madoka her best friend. Some viewers find this choice more ominous or obsessive than others—viewers are roughly split on weather Homura is worse than Hitler or Homura did nothing wrong—but it still falls roughly in line with the trend that female characters who make Faustian pacts tend to do so for the benefit (or perceived benefit) of others and for reasons which are easy to sympathize with even when they’re not clearly noble and just.

Because the characters in so many Faustian narratives sell their souls in exchange for something befitting traditional expectations of their gender, stories that don’t precisely follow this pattern come off as fresher and more nuanced than those that conform completely, even if the deviations are minor. Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal the Necromancer begins with a premise which seems to follow the gendered script to the letter. At some point in the past, the titular character sold his soul to Satan for insight into necromancy—so far, perfectly in line with all the other Faustian men who bargained their soul for power or knowledge. However, it’s not going as well as he would like, so he makes another bargain with Satan to get his soul back, citing that his lack of a soul is causing aberrations in his experiments that make them non-repeatable and unreliable. In order to do this, he is tasked with procuring 100 new souls for the Devil, with the help of a traveling carnival, which he begrudgingly accepts. This bargain, too, fits well within the established framework for a male soul-seller; it’s still about knowledge and power and it only benefits Johannes—and at the expense of others, innocent and otherwise.

It is only at the very end of the novel that Johannes’ exact motivation for selling his soul to Satan in the first place is revealed. His wager won and his life otherwise in shambles, he returns to his home and the lab in his basement, where it is revealed that he has kept the preserved corpse of his dead beloved in a scene which is written in an notably sincere and tender register, compared to the cynicism and sardonicism of the rest of the novel; in the end, his monomaniacal fixation on beating death was borne of personal devastation and the love of another, more in line with the motivations of Christine Daaé, Countess athleen, or the magical girls of Madoka Magicas than of Doctor Faustus. Though it’s not the most subversive revelation—male characters motivated by the death of romantic partner aren’t exactly uncommon in fiction, though they are in soul-seller stories—it does upend the typical gendered behavior in soul-selling narratives, which gives the story more texture and the character more depth as he transitions from loathsome-but-compelling villain into a more sympathetic anti-hero over the course of the series.

While Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal books subtly subvert the typical narrative of a man selling his soul for purely personal gain, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s 2014 horror film Starry Eyes subverts the narrative of a woman selling her soul for the sake of someone else. The film follows Sarah, an aspiring actress down on her luck. As the film progresses, Sarah resorts to more debased and depraved behavior in order to become an actor. Towards the end of the film, as she is literally falling apart (in a grotesque, maggoty triumph of special effects), a film executive (later revealed to be a member of a demon-worshipping cult) gives her the choice to be reborn as a star, which she accepts. After she murders her former friends, members of the film production company—cultists all—perform a ritual that leaves Sarah reborn unearthly beautiful, ready for her close-up.

The rigid adherence to gender norms in even the most modern Faustian narratives would have made the Victorians proud.

Unlike Christine or Cathleen or any of the adorable moe girls in Madoka Magica, Sarah’s reason for selling her soul is baldly self-serving, which puts her story more in line with that which is typical of male soul-sellers’. This makes Starry Eyes noteworthy; that Sarah’s desire for something as ultimately shallow and self-interested as Hollywood fame is so extreme she will go to horrible means to attain it is significant when contrasted with the more well-meaning or tender-hearted motives of the average Faustian woman.

That said, it is worth noting that Sarah’s desire, though ultimately selfish in a similar fashion to the average Faustian man, is still somewhat feminine; desire for fame has an association with vanity and therefore femininity that desire for knowledge and power do not. That Sarah wants to be a Hollywood starlet badly enough to sell her soul for it still doesn’t take Starry Eyes too far from the framework of social norms, stereotypes, and expectations placed on women. The most subversive aspect of the story is that Sarah—a woman—is allowed by the narrative to just not be especially sympathetic or likable in the end, to be made loathsome and pathetic in her hunger for stardom. Though there are some exceptions to the pattern, like Starry Eyes and the Johannes Cabal series, of male Faustian figures selling their souls for largely selfish reasons like desire for knowledge or power and female Faustian figures selling their souls for more altruistic or at least sympathetic reasons, the majority of stories of soul-selling seem to fit.

Selling one’s soul to the Devil is an idea with considerable transgressive heft behind it, but the adherence to gendered expectations tempers that level of transgression. By and large, male soul-sellers are motivated by the more negative traits typically ascribed to men, and female soul-sellers motivated by stereotypically tender and womanly sentiment—it would make any Victorian proud.

In the past, when gender norms were more strictly adhered to and when the sphere of men was work and the sphere of women was the home, men sacrificing for worldly gain and women sacrificing for the sake of their loved ones reflected more closely the actual lives of people.

But here in the present, in a time when women are just as prevalent in the workforce and much more likely to pursue post-secondary education, and we almost daily hear far-reaching conversations about toxic masculinity and the need for men to feel comfortable being vulnerable and expressing their emotions, it seems odd that soul-seller stories by and large haven’t caught up with the times. Where is the Faustian #girlboss who sells her soul for a CEO job? The Faustian frat bro who bargains his soul to save his best friend?

Though many of the stories that fit these gendered molds are excellent works of art, there is room to innovate in new Faustian narratives. The artists of our era ought to put more thought into what characters might really be willing to sell their souls for, and perhaps begin allowing themselves to be comfortable letting the men be tender and the women be wicked, for a change.

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