DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 Faustine in a Fairy Tale Kyung Lee Gagum Midwestern State University, Texas Abstract: In a fairy tale, the social rules and exceptions are flexible, and the social hierarchy is in place precisely to display potential flexibility. In this research, Kore Yamazaki’s Frau Faust (2017) serves as a transmodern fairy tale retelling of the Faustian legend, challenging social boundaries by reimagining Faust as an adolescent female who pursues educational goals beyond her prescribed social status and gender role. Yamazaki employs the trope of absentation , defined by Vladimir Propp (1968) as a hero or family member leaving the security of home. Johanna Faust enacts this trope when she signs a contract with the devil and departs to satisfy her innate drive for knowledge - an opportunity otherwise unattainable due to her gender and social position. Through this contract, she secures the scholarship she desires, transcending societal constraints. In this fairy tale manga, Johanna is not confined by social expectations; instead, she actively challenges her marginalized position, and the educational barriers imposed on her. Yamazaki’s female Faust, across the five-volume series, contests the legitimacy of the dominant male Faustian legend. Her portrayal of the female Faust diverges from both the traditional male Faust, who pursues self-fulfillment through the quest for knowledge, and the figure of Gretchen, who guides Faust toward repentance and redemption. Instead, Yamazaki’s female Faust transcends the socially prescribed and gendered roles imposed by society, positioning her as a fairy tale protagonist who surpasses the limitations of these conventional narratives. Keywords: fairy tale, transmodern, Faustian, manga, gender Manga that engages a wide range of assigned gender topoi often appears in the shōjo genre, not only to challenge conventional gender roles but also to offer a space for critical reflection. These narratives frequently interrogate and subvert normative constructions of gender, cultivating a discursive space for both critique and imaginative reconfiguration. Among such explorations, gender-bend- 306 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 ing has emerged as a notable and recurrent theme - particularly in shōjo manga, Japanese comics primarily aimed at an adolescent female readership. 1 This study examines Frau Faust (2017) by Kore Yamazaki as a transmodern retelling of the Faustian legend, one that synthesizes the narrative conventions of shōjo manga and fairy tale traditions with elements of canonical European literature. In doing so, the text engages in a critical dialogue on gender identity, fluidity, and embodiment, positioning itself at the intersection of genre hybridity and gender discourse. Yamazaki’s five-volume manga centers on Johanna Faust, a character whose gender presentation shifts dramatically over the course of the narrative: initially appearing as a young woman, Johanna adopts a male guise following a demonic pact, later returning to her female form. Her quest to recover the dismembered and dispersed body parts of her demon companion sealed away by the Inquisition - operates both as a literal journey and as an allegorical reckoning with trauma, identity, and embodiment. As an immortal whose injuries cause her to physically regress in age, Johanna queers normative understandings of time, gender, and selfhood. These themes are further complicated by her mentorship of a young boy, Marion, whose relationship with Johanna foregrounds fluid dynamics of desire, care, and becoming. The manga ultimately constructs a narrative space where identity is neither fixed nor binary, but persistently in flux. This study approaches Frau Faust through a queer theoretical lens in order to move beyond conventional feminist readings focused primarily on female empowerment or resistance to patriarchal structures. Queer theory offers a more nuanced approach to interrogating essentialist binaries and opens up possibilities for understanding gender as performative, contingent, and unstable. Drawing especially on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of binary thinking in sexuality and gender, this study foregrounds the ways in which the visual grammar of manga - through panel composition, visual metaphor, and the serialized rhythm of storytelling - renders gender fluidity not only visible but experientially present (Sedgwick 1990). 2 Johanna’s mutable appearance, layered relationships, and emotional ambiguity present a character whose identity resists stable categorization and invites multiple readings. Through a queer theoretical analysis of Yamazaki’s reimagined Faust within the symbolic and cyclical framework of the fairy tale, this study argues that Frau Faust destabilizes normative gender constructs and offers a compelling meditation on the fluidity of selfhood, desire, and power. Ultimately, the manga emerges as a transmodern fairy tale that reinterprets a canonical Western myth through a cross-cultural and queer Faustine in a Fairy Tale 307 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 lens, contributing to broader conversations on identity and representation in contemporary graphic literature. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust mobilizes the fairy tale genre to interrogate the instability of identity, the queerness of transformation, and the performative nature of selfhood through a narrative structure that resists closure and embraces perpetual becoming. Yamazaki explicitly frames Frau Faust as a fairy tale - a genre that, as scholars such as Jack Zipes, Kay Turner, and Pauline Greenhill argue, is inherently “queer” in its structure, themes, and refusal of stability (Turner and Greenhill 3). This queerness is embodied in Johanna Faust, whose shifting gender, age, and identity reflect the genre’s transformative potential. The opening scene introduces a male Faust in doll form, narrated by Johanna with the quintessential fairy tale phrase, “A long time ago, in a far-off place, there was a man named Faust” (Yamazaki 1: 3). This familiar trope immediately situates the narrative within fairy tale conventions. At the same time, Johanna’s dual role as both narrator and character destabilizes clear distinctions - not only between storyteller and subject, but also between fiction and self. As she tells Faust’s story while existing within it, Johanna becomes both creator and creation. In doing so, the narrative suggests that storytelling is not merely an act of crafting fiction but also a mode of self-construction. Fiction and self-become intertwined, as Johanna’s identity is both revealed and shaped through the tale she tells. Within the fairy tale framework of the manga, the Faust doll serves a dual purpose. First, it anchors the story’s magical realm, marking the tale’s entry into a fantastical mode. Second, it foreshadows the arrival of magic and transformation. This dual function deepens the narrative’s cohesion, allowing Yamazaki to embed symbolic elements early on that resonate throughout the text. The doll becomes more than an object - it is a liminal figure that mediates between narrative layers, gender identities, and visual codes. Yamazaki’s integration of fairy tale motifs strengthens this commitment to queerness. By embedding the Faustian narrative within a timeless, placeless fairy tale world, Yamazaki creates space for transformation without destination, for becoming without conclusion. The tale’s opening and closing frames mirror one another, suggesting cyclical structure rather than linear progression - a visual echo of Johanna’s unsettled identity. Yamazaki deepens this framing by titling the first chapter “The Man from the Fairy Tale,” an explicit gesture that positions the story within tradition while also signaling subversion. As Turner and Greenhill note, “Fairy tales are queer […] odd, strange-making, eccentric, different, and yet attractive” (4). Frau Faust inhabits this space of difference, using fairy tale logic not to affirm moral order but to explore ambiguity, instability, and fluidity. Johanna’s representa- 308 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 tion evolves throughout the narrative. She is initially introduced as a female traveling scholar, later revealed through retrospective sequences to have previously lived as an aging male alchemist, and ultimately returns to a youthful female form that regresses in age with each instance of physical damage. These transformations are not merely isolated narrative devices but function as visual and symbolic articulations of identity as inherently unstable and mutable. This progression signals a conceptual shift in the narrative’s treatment of embodiment and selfhood. Johanna’s continual metamorphosis resonates with queer theory’s critique of fixed identity categories, particularly in its subversion of binary gender norms. By rendering Johanna’s form as fluid and in constant flux, Yamazaki not only queers the character but also reconfigures the genre itself, positioning the fairy tale as a space for ongoing processes of becoming rather than resolution or fixity. Framing Frau Faust within the mutable logic of the fairy tale allows Yamazaki to enact a profound reimagining of mythic authority through queered narrative structures and character embodiment. Johanna’s presence within this structure offers a radical intervention in mythic authority. She is not a female Faust cast in the mold of Goethe’s male scholar, nor is she a Gretchen figure redeemed through suffering. She is neither heroine nor martyr but a liminal, self-authored subject who occupies and exceeds both roles. Like the shape-shifting figures of folklore and fairy tale, Johanna inhabits a narrative space defined by transformation and ambiguity. As Julie Nagoshi argues, feminizing the male subject disrupts the binary logic of male superiority and female inferiority - not by inverting it, but by dissolving it (Nagoshi and Brzuzy, “Transgender” 439). Yamazaki does precisely that: she does not merely reverse Faust’s gender but dismantles the ideological scaffolding that made his power intelligible in the first place. Rather than reimagining Johanna as a “female Faust,” Yamazaki constructs a protagonist whose identity resists the very binaries - of gender, power, and genre - that underpin the original narrative. This alignment is particularly powerful within the cultural logic of fairy tales, which traditionally accommodate magical or uncanny transformations. Yet Yamazaki uses these tropes not to reinforce heteronormative resolutions, but rather to question them. Johanna’s changing embodiment is never framed as disguise or deception but instead as an honest expression of her complex self. Her identity is not revealed but constantly rewritten - an embodiment of the queer fairy tale as theorized by Turner and Greenhill: a space where nothing is fixed, and everything is subject to reinterpretation. By framing Frau Faust within this genre, Yamazaki invites readers to engage with fairy tale motifs while recognizing their potential for subversion. Johanna’s queerness is not just thematic but structural woven into the logic of the tale itself, which resists Faustine in a Fairy Tale 309 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 resolution, embraces transformation, and positions identity as performative, mutable, and deeply political. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust exemplifies how the manga form can serve as a powerful medium for exploring queerness, transformation, and identity through visual and emotional grammar rather than linear narrative or philosophical exposition. Yamazaki’s use of manga allows Frau Faust to interrogate embodiment and subjectivity through a medium uniquely attuned to visual nuance and affective resonance. Unlike Goethe’s Faust , which relies on philosophical dialogue and theatrical structure, Yamazaki’s adaptation unfolds through symbolic imagery, paneling, and pacing that invite nonlinear, emotionally charged engagement. This shift from text-based to image-driven storytelling enables Johanna’s transformations to be rendered not merely as narrative developments but as embodied visual facts - immediate, mutable, and deeply expressive. Through the grammar of manga - close-ups, fragmented panel layouts, and dramatic shifts in visual tone - Johanna’s identity is presented as unstable and performative. Her character design fluctuates: masculine in flashbacks, feminine in the present, and often androgynous or ambiguous. These changes are not merely illustrative but function as visual metaphors for the fluidity of selfhood. Rather than relying on exposition, Yamazaki conveys emotional states and identity transitions through symbolic detail such as lighting, posture, and background contrast. As Scott McCloud notes, manga’s power lies in its ability to slow time, deepen interiority, and prioritize affect over continuity - affordances Yamazaki harnesses to dramatize Johanna’s queerness (80). This performativity is not limited to character design but extends to the structure of storytelling itself. In the manga’s opening, Johanna narrates a fairy tale to a young girl, her identity initially obscured - her face partially hidden, her features androgynous. The reader, like the listener, assumes she speaks of someone else. Only later is it revealed that Johanna is herself the Faust of legend. Yamazaki stages this delayed revelation with visual precision, using silhouette, camera angle, and the presence of a crude male doll as a decoy. As Will Eisner explains, surprise in comics must be visually engineered, since readers can control pacing and skip ahead (24—30). Yamazaki meets this challenge through the strategic use of partial visibility and symbolic misdirection, queering not only the character but also the narrative voice. Johanna is both narrator and mythic subject - author and artifact - assuming the feminized role of oral storyteller while occupying the masculine position of intellectual authority. Her androgynous appearance complicates this duality, positioning her between maternal, scholarly, and mythic registers. Her young listener’s question - “What happened to Faust after that? ” (Yamazaki 1: 3) - becomes not only narrative curiosity but also a medita- 310 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 tion on authorship and legacy, as Johanna inserts herself into a canon that has historically excluded figures like her. This critique of narrative and gender authority is also embedded in the manga’s formal structure. Yamazaki disrupts conventional paneling during pivotal moments - such as Johanna’s first encounter with the demon - where two rectangular panels collapse into a single expansive frame. This compositional pause enacts a kind of “slow cinematic movement,” suspending time to convey mythic and emotional weight (McCloud 94—98). As McCloud notes, the manipulation of panel size and sequence directly shapes a reader’s experience of time, and Yamazaki leverages this affordance to heighten emotional and symbolic intensity. The disruption of visual rhythm mirrors the manga’s resistance to binary categories: of good and evil, male and female, salvation and damnation. The queering of resolution is thus rendered both thematically and formally, reflecting Johanna’s refusal to be contained within a single identity or genre. The broader structure of Frau Faust furthers this resistance. Eschewing Goethe’s linear, teleological arc, Yamazaki adopts a cyclical, episodic format rooted in shōjo manga. She draws on its conventions not to reproduce familiar tropes, but to subvert them: using sentimentality and fantasy as tools to explore gender nonconformity, moral ambiguity, and intellectual defiance. In reframing Faust through manga, Yamazaki demonstrates how medium shapes meaning. Johanna’s story becomes not simply a retelling, but a radical reconfiguration—of character, genre, and canon. This queering of form enables Frau Faust to destabilize binaries - gendered, cultural, aesthetic - and to affirm the multiplicity of identity and storytelling. Ultimately, Yamazaki shows that in manga, identity can be not only represented but also performed, deconstructed, and reimagined. In Frau Faust , Yamazaki reimagines the Faustian myth through a gendered and visually performative lens, foregrounding the interplay between embodiment, identity, and scholarly agency. In Yamazaki’s depiction of the Faust figure, the relationship between gender, embodiment, and visual performance is central to the manga’s critique of normative identity. A female protagonist achieves scholarly advancement through her travels, transcending the limitations imposed by both her gender and lack of financial resources. In a society where intellectual pursuits are traditionally reserved for men, Frau Faust critiques patriarchal constraints, using Johanna’s journey to underscore themes of self-determination and resistance to systemic norms. This narrative challenges both class and gender hierarchies, presenting scholarship as a space of potential liberation and reconfiguration. Johanna’s identity is subversive not only in narrative terms but also in visual and performative ones. Her gender is not merely described in dialogue but Faustine in a Fairy Tale 311 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 enacted through the visual grammar of manga: she appears male in flashbacks, female in the present, and androgynous throughout. These shifts are rendered through changes in hair length, clothing, posture, and facial expression, making gender a mutable and context-dependent construct. Yamazaki manipulates manga’s visual syntax - layered paneling, symbolic objects, and shifts in style and framing - to stage moments of revelation and transformation that destabilize normative gender expectations. These formal techniques resist traditional exposition, instead inviting the reader to experience identity as dynamic and performed. As Judith Butler argues, gender is not a stable identity, but a repeated performance shaped by cultural expectations (519). This performativity extends into the narrative apparatus itself, where storytelling becomes a mode of identity construction. The opening image of the manmade doll - a crude male figure with round glasses - functions as both narrative mask and symbolic commentary on gender. As an object that simultaneously mirrors and displaces Johanna, the doll externalizes the masculine role she once inhabited, now reduced to a stitched, silent figure. Its resemblance to Johanna - through the glasses - reinforces its status not as an “other,” but as a version: a performed masculinity she has discarded. The doll evokes Butler’s theory of performativity and Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a constructed identity that reveals the artificial boundaries of the self (149—181). Through this interplay of image and form, Yamazaki queers not only the character of Faust but also the narrative structure that supports him. Johanna’s pursuit of knowledge is similarly reframed. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, whose ambition is metaphysical and driven by existential ennui, Johanna’s quest is rooted in material scarcity and structural exclusion. She trades goods for books, barters labor for access, and risks exile for intellectual freedom. Her marginal status as a woman and outsider marks her as transgressive, and her pact with the demon offers not just power but entry into the forbidden realms of scholarly and esoteric knowledge. In this sense, Yamazaki’s critique moves beyond gender to include class, illustrating how economic and social barriers shape access to intellectual life. Johanna’s metamorphosis from male-presenting scholar to ageless female immortal destabilizes fixed categories of identity and aligns with queer theories of survival and reinvention (Halberstam). This thematic concern with knowledge and transformation is further reinforced through visual symbolism. The doll, then, returns as symbolic reinforcement: a visual artifact that encapsulates the story’s broader interrogation of power, performance, and knowledge. By eschewing intricate detail, its minimalist design evokes innocence and invites projection, amplifying its emotional and symbolic resonance. It is a relic of a former self and a marker of constructed identity, positioned between concealment and revelation. Ultimately, Johanna becomes 312 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 both narrator and subject - simultaneously telling and embodying the Faustian myth. Through her, Yamazaki reclaims the tale not as a story of masculine genius and moral failure, but as a narrative of subversion, endurance, and the radical potential of marginalized knowledge. Johanna’s intellectual journey in Frau Faust - marked by the acquisition of outdated books, anatomical dissection, and scholarly defiance - is consistently framed by society as deviant, gender nonconforming, and socially transgressive. 3 Her community labels her as “creepy” and “unnatural,” and her mother’s remark - “She’s too smart to be my daughter” (Yamazaki 2: 12—13) - exemplifies a deeply internalized discomfort with female intellect. These reactions reflect a broader societal policing of women’s intellectual and bodily autonomy. Yamazaki critiques this gendered gatekeeping by presenting Johanna’s curiosity not as deviance but as a form of epistemic agency - an intentional reclaiming of knowledge and autonomy in defiance of patriarchal norms. This critique is most pointed when Johanna, recognizing shared structural exclusion, advises an adolescent boy denied formal education due to poverty: “Books are the fortune of our forebears. But don’t take their words at face value. Don’t fixate on them. Take a multifaceted view of things” (Yamazaki 1: 15). By offering to teach him herself, Johanna steps into the authoritative role of educator - a role historically reserved for men - and advocates for critical inquiry over passive reception. Her methods, including dissection, are not merely practical but philosophical: she seeks knowledge through embodied experience. This rejection of passive learning parallels the historical realities that feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir (2011) and Virginia Woolf (1929) have critiqued. In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf argues that intellectual freedom requires both space and societal recognition - resources Johanna is categorically denied. Like the women Woolf and de Beauvoir describe, Johanna develops her intellect without institutional support and often at great personal risk, echoing the legacy of women writers who published under male pseudonyms or had their work misattributed. Johanna’s gendered metamorphosis - male-presenting in flashbacks and returning to a female immortal form - further disrupts binary logic. These visual transformations embody what Joan Gould describes as the fairy tale’s capacity to trace “shifts in consciousness as well as biology that propel women from one level of being to another” (3). Johanna’s journey maps these shifts not only metaphorically but literally: her body becomes a visual site of narrative and ideological transformation. This aligns with Yamazaki’s broader reframing of the Faustian myth, where Johanna’s intellectual hunger is not cosmic or metaphysical but grounded in systemic exclusion. Her thirst for knowledge - dismissed as pathological - emerges from material deprivation and social marginalization. Faustine in a Fairy Tale 313 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 In doing so, Frau Faust exceeds the boundaries of escapist fantasy. It uses the flexibility of fairy tale and manga conventions to interrogate who has access to knowledge, how power is distributed, and the cost of defiance. Johanna’s pact with the demon is not romanticized; it is framed as a coerced choice made under duress, in the absence of legitimate alternatives. “Sounds like extortion to me,” she mutters (Yamazaki 2: 28), a remark that starkly contrasts Goethe’s Faust , who seeks his pact from a position of masculine autonomy. Johanna’s decision reflects not sovereign agency but epistemological survival. Her learning stems from lived experience - bargaining for books, concealing her identity, and dissecting bodies in secret. Her knowledge is not abstract or transcendent but embodied, contextual, and profoundly political. In contrast to the masculinized ideal of detached, universal knowledge, Johanna’s epistemology is situated and queer - rooted in affect, risk, and the refusal to be erased. As Michel Foucault argues, knowledge is never neutral but entangled with power; it is produced within regimes that determine who may speak, what counts as truth, and whose bodies are legible within systems of control (131). Frau Faust dramatizes these regimes through the Inquisition and the university system - institutions that surveil, punish, and gatekeep intellectual authority. Johanna’s marginalization as a woman, a scholar, and an alchemist positions her outside sanctioned channels of knowledge, forcing her to invent her own methods and epistemic space. Her work becomes an act of resistance not just to political oppression but to the discursive order itself. Through her, Yamazaki reframes knowledge not as conquest or control, but as a mode of resistance and self-making under conditions of constraint. Yamazaki’s critique extends to narrative form itself. By resisting rigid roles like those outlined in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale , Johanna refuses to become the passive heroine, monstrous villain, or sacrificial victim. 4 Propp’s structural model, as Jack Zipes argues in Breaking the Magic Spell , often reinforces patriarchal norms through reductive character functions and moral binaries. Marina Warner likewise critiques the fairy tale tradition in From the Beast to the Blonde for encoding female intellect as dangerous or grotesque. Yamazaki subverts this legacy by creating a heroine whose pursuit of knowledge reclaims the fairy tale as a feminist space of transformation. Johanna’s position as a culturally and intellectually marginalized figure also invites transnational reflection: Yamazaki’s use of a Japanese manga format to reinterpret a Western canonical myth subtly destabilizes Eurocentric assumptions about genius, knowledge, and cultural legitimacy. Ultimately, Johanna is not Goethe’s sovereign seeker of transcendental truth. She is a woman denied even the right to be curious—rendered monstrous for thinking. Her story is not one of romantic longing but of resistance. Through 314 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 her, Yamazaki offers a feminist, intersectional, and transnational intervention into the Faust mythos, one that insists knowledge is not a neutral pursuit, but a contested terrain shaped by gender, class, and cultural power. While Goethe’s Mephistopheles operates as a sardonic guide through moral ambiguity and existential longing, Yamazaki’s demon in Frau Faust reframes the pact not as seduction, but as a recognition of intellectual agency - disrupting traditional associations between temptation, gender, and knowledge. In Goethe’s version, Mephistopheles plays a complex, ironic role, guiding Faust through earthly pleasures and eventual damnation or salvation, depending on the reading. In Frau Faust , the demon remains unnamed, referred to only as “the demon,” and his interactions with Johanna foreground not corruption but recognition. He refers to her simply as “Faust the curious” (Yamazaki 2: 9), omitting her gendered first name and thereby emphasizing her intellect over her identity. “Demons are drawn to brilliance” (2: 17), he declares, collapsing the traditional moral judgment surrounding the pursuit of knowledge and instead aligning himself with Johanna’s intellectual longing. This stands in sharp contrast to the ways in which human characters in the manga address her. A trader calls her “little Fräulein” (2: 8), a term that diminishes her by invoking her gender, age, and marital status. The English translation offers a parenthetical gloss - “Fräulein = German title for young, unmarried women (Miss)” - but stops short of acknowledging the term’s patronizing or infantilizing connotations, especially when paired with “little.” The disparity between how the demon and society refer to Johanna reflects a deeper gendered hierarchy: where the demon names her through intellectual recognition, human society labels her through gendered constraints and social expectations. This linguistic divide exposes the epistemic exclusion Johanna faces. Her desire to dissect animals, trade furs for books, and pursue forbidden knowledge is labeled “creepy” and unnatural by male peers and townspeople alike. The tension between how she is named by others and how she understands herself becomes a central conflict. Her pact with the demon is therefore not a fall from grace but an assertion of agency - a refusal to accept the limitations imposed on her intellect by a patriarchal and classist society. Johanna’s metamorphosis in Frau Faust functions not merely as a visual or narrative device but as a sustained critique of binary gender logics and the epistemic structures that enforce them. Her transitions across gendered embodiments - and her eventual return to what the text codes as a female-presenting form - reinforce this resistance. Importantly, her shifting appearance is not framed as disguise but as transformation, mirroring the fluid and unstable nature of identi- Faustine in a Fairy Tale 315 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 ty itself. Rather than assigning Johanna a fixed gender identity, the manga resists rigid categorization, offering instead a dynamic portrayal of subjectivity in flux. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (179), Yamazaki’s depiction of Johanna does not illustrate essential gender traits but visually enacts gender as a contextual, social, and aesthetic process. Her gender is performed, negotiated, and visualized - never biologically fixed, but constructed within relational and narrative frameworks. These metamorphoses echo Joan Gould’s observation that fairy tales often trace “shifts in consciousness as well as biology that propel women from one level of being to another” (xvi). Johanna’s transformation, then, is not just about passing or survival - it becomes a metaphor for the intellectual, emotional, and political transitions that mark female and queer development. Her mutable identity reflects a rejection of essentialist gender categories and instead affirms fluidity, liminality, and self-authorship. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust queers Goethe’s narrative not through simple substitution but through structural, ideological, and visual transformation. Johanna’s refusal to settle into any singular role - woman, man, scholar, sinner, or savior - disrupts the traditional logic of redemptive or punitive narrative arcs. Unlike Gretchen, whose suffering exists to redeem Goethe’s male protagonist, Johanna exists for herself. Her narrative is not one of allegorical punishment but one of resistance. She is neither destroyed nor saved - she simply continues. In this, Yamazaki constructs a subject not defined by her relationship to male figures or by moral archetypes, but by her insistence on self-authorship. This act of narrative continuation places her in alignment with Hélène Cixous’s notion of the “subject-in-process,” a woman writing herself into being in defiance of tradition (“The Laugh” 875—893). Johanna’s temporary adoption of a male scholarly identity further enacts Butler’s theory of performativity but also resonates with Luce Irigaray’s concept of mimicry, which posits that women may strategically imitate masculine forms to expose and critique the patriarchal systems that exclude them ( This Sex Which is Not One ). Johanna’s mimicry gains her temporary access to intellectual authority, but her eventual return to a female form - while retaining that authority - undermines the assumption that power must be gendered male. Her rejection of masculine coding after mastering it exposes the arbitrary foundations of patriarchal legitimacy and affirms a redefinition of power on feminist terms. This redefinition also answers Adrienne Rich’s call for feminist “re-vision” - the imperative to reinterpret and rewrite dominant narratives from the perspective of those historically excluded from them (35). Yamazaki enacts this re-visioning through both content and form. The cyclical nature of Johanna’s journey - seeking fragmented remnants of her demon companion while contending with the consequences of her knowledge - resists the teleological structures typical of 316 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 canonical myths. Her story is not a moral lesson but a challenge to closure itself. It refuses the familiar trajectories of sin and salvation, instead centering the tension, strength, and ambiguity of a woman who dares to know. In doing so, Yamazaki not only queers the Faustian myth, but offers a blueprint for narrative futures shaped by fluidity, complexity, and self-authored resistance. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust is not merely a retelling of Goethe’s myth but a radical rewriting that reconfigures the ideological core of the original, using feminist, queer, and visual strategies to interrogate narrative authority and reclaim intellectual agency. This feminist reworking of Faust thus serves multiple critical functions. It interrogates the historical exclusion of women from intellectual life, critiques the gendered foundations of narrative power, and reclaims knowledge-seeking as a feminist act. The visual grammar of manga - its emphasis on emotional expression, symbolic layering, and narrative fragmentation - further enhances this feminist vision. Through Johanna’s story, Yamazaki shows that the pursuit of knowledge, far from being a masculine ambition, can serve as a site of gender resistance and queer self-creation. Building on its role as a feminist and queer rewriting, Frau Faust exemplifies how rewriting functions not simply to retell, but to deconstruct and reconfigure the ideological and narrative foundations of canonical texts. While a retelling typically preserves the narrative structure and ideological core of the original text, a rewriting actively reconfigures those foundations, often to critique or subvert them (Zipes Breaking the Magic ). In Yamazaki’s adaptation of Goethe’s Faust , the familiar architecture of the Faustian pact remains, but its meaning is fundamentally transformed. By merging feminist theory, fairy tale logic, and the formal expressiveness of manga, Yamazaki reshapes one of Western literature’s most canonical texts into a narrative of fluidity, refusal, and ongoing transformation. Fairy tale motifs - long associated with instability and symbolic excess - play a key role in this disruption. As Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Matrix note, fairy tales resist closure and often destabilize fixed identity categories (82). Johanna does not seek salvation, nor is her journey framed around redemption or moral judgment. Instead, her power lies in her refusal to be defined by patriarchal expectations of resolution, sacrifice, or closure. The story she inhabits resists the teleological arc of the original Faust - there is no tragic downfall, no triumphant transcendence, but rather an enduring process of questioning, becoming, and resisting. This open-endedness aligns closely with Hélène Cixous’ theory of écriture féminine , which values fragmentation, multiplicity, and nonlinear expression as forms of resistance to patriarchal narrative structures (“Medusa” 875—893). Through this, Frau Faust functions as a feminist rewriting: Faustine in a Fairy Tale 317 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 not simply inserting a female protagonist into a male narrative, but fundamentally altering the terms of knowledge, agency, and narrative logic itself. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust reimagines the legendary Faust figure as a gender-fluid protagonist, offering a distinctly queer intervention into one of Western literature’s most canonical myths. By incorporating fairy tale characteristics and reversing Faust’s traditionally male gender, Yamazaki opens a space to deconstruct the essentialist male-female binary. The decision to gender-swap the Faust figure disrupts conventional gender roles typically associated with the narrative, allowing Frau Faust to challenge and expose the performative nature of gender itself. As Johanna shifts between male and female embodiments - never fully occupying either category in a stable or final form - she becomes a polyvalent subject whose identity unfolds through transformation, ambiguity, and relational becoming. This resistance to fixed identity invites further analysis through the lens of queer theory, which emphasizes mobility, ambiguity, and the disruption of normative categories. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust explores gender not as a fixed identity but as a site of fluid possibility, aligning closely with queer theoretical frameworks that resist categorization. These fluid gender possibilities are best understood through queer theory, particularly as articulated by Diane Richard, who defines queer theory as “a fluid, mobile, non-specific zone of inquiry that is resistant to being ‘fixed’” (20). Yamazaki’s portrayal of Johanna - sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine, often androgynous - resists easy classification and instead aligns with Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative: not an innate essence, but a series of stylized acts, repeated and adapted in response to cultural pressures. Johanna’s body and behavior become sites of symbolic resistance, foregrounding ambiguity over stability and emphasizing performance over essence. Julie Nagoshi and Stephan Brzuzy similarly argue that feminizing the male sex disrupts the cultural hierarchy that privileges masculinity, destabilizing the authority traditionally granted to male bodies and roles (“Transgender” 431—43). Yamazaki extends this logic: by presenting a female Faust who once passed as male—and who ultimately refuses both redemption and punishment - the text collapses not only gendered binaries but also the binary structures of narrative resolution. Johanna is neither Goethe’s Faust, who seeks transcendence through intellectual striving, nor Gretchen, who redeems him through moral virtue. Instead, she exists outside these archetypes entirely, queering not only gender identity but the very structure and moral logic of the Faustian myth. Yamazaki’s Frau Faust concludes not by resolving the Faustian myth, but by radically reimagining its narrative and ideological possibilities through a queer and feminist lens. Fairy tale motifs amplify this queerness. These stories, as Zipes ( Breaking the Spell ) and Greenhill/ Matrix ( Fairy Tale Films ) argue, are inherently 318 Kyung Lee Gagum DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 transformative and often resistant to fixity. Yamazaki draws on this inherent instability by embedding Frau Faust within a fairy tale framework, activating the genre’s capacity for metamorphosis, contradiction, and symbolic excess. Turner and Greenhill describe fairy tales as “queer” in their refusal of stability - an idea Yamazaki takes up to construct a narrative that resists closure, coherence, and binary logic (3). Johanna’s immortality, the result of a demonic pact, is not portrayed as reward or punishment but as an ongoing condition of becoming, displacement, and transformation. Her journey does not follow the redemptive arc of Goethe’s Faust, who is ultimately saved through divine grace or feminine intercession; instead, Johanna remains unredeemed and uncontained, suspended in an unresolved pursuit of fragmented identity. This open-endedness aligns with Hélène Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine , a mode of expression that embraces fragmentation, multiplicity, and nonlinear movement (“Medusa” 875—893). Johanna’s story unfolds through ruptures, reversals, and deferrals, rejecting patriarchal expectations of narrative resolution and gender fixity. Her refusal to conform to gendered roles, and her destabilizing presence, echoes what Nagoshi and Brzuzy (2010) argue about feminizing the male subject: it does not invert the gender hierarchy but dissolves the binary altogether (“Transgender” 431—43). In this way, Frau Faust resists the ideological structures that underpin both gender and narrative form, embodying Cixous’s vision of writing that privileges the unresolved, the fluid, and the radically multiple. In this sense, Yamazaki’s Frau Faust is not simply a gender-swapped iteration of the legendary male scholar, nor a rewritten Gretchen reimagined to redeem or resolve the original narrative. Johanna emerges instead as a subject formed through and against the very binaries - male/ female, sinner/ saved, reason/ emotion - that the Faust myth traditionally reinforces. Her journey offers not closure, but disruption: a refusal to be categorized, resolved, or morally stabilized. In doing so, she exemplifies queer theory’s radical potential to expose the constructedness of identity, resist disciplinary containment, and imagine alternative narratives of subjectivity and power beyond binary logics. Simultaneously, Yamazaki continues the legacy of manga artists like Osamu Tezuka, who reworked Western literary canons to assert manga’s intellectual and aesthetic legitimacy. Yet while Tezuka emphasized universalist humanism 5 , Yamazaki leans into cultural specificity and ideological subversion. By fusing fairy tale motifs, the expressive visual grammar of manga, and the disruptive energies of feminist and queer theory, she creates a narrative that is both global and local - rooted in Japanese visual culture yet in dialogue with Western literary traditions. In Frau Faust , Yamazaki does not merely reinterpret a canonical Western myth; she reclaims and reorients it, transforming it into a dynamic site of feminist critique, queer possibility, and transnational reimagination. Faustine in a Fairy Tale 319 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0019 Notes 1 See Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (1972—73), Chiho Saito’s Revolutionary Girl Utena (1996—97), and Bisco Hatori’s Ouran High School Host Club (2002—10) for prominent examples of gender-bending narratives in shōjo manga. These works have been widely discussed in queer manga studies for their treatment of gender performativity and subversion of heteronormative expectations. 2 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet . 3 In Frau Faust , vol. 2, Yamazaki reveals in Afterword 2 that she based Frau Faust loosely on medieval Europe, particularly the German region. 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