Although Goethe's work is subtitled The Tragedy, we should not assume that we are obliged to understand the work according to Aristotle's description in the Poetics. Certainly, among European literatures and in the late seventeenth century, tragedies were generally understood in this way, a definition widely interpreted by neoclassical theorists. The term therefore immediately evokes a series of categories still in common use today; (hero, innocent, suffering, destiny, tragic flaw, guilt and repentance, reversal, catastrophe). Even where these specific categories may seem inapplicable, neo-Aristotelian theory has left a substratum of hypotheses about the nature of drama and in particular tragedy, i.e. that it deals with individuals facing profound moral, emotional and psychological questions and is this psychological coherence that is necessary to make a drama “credible”. However, it is only with this new psychological focus that love emerges as the great subject of tragedy. Faust contains, without a doubt, such a tragedy of passion in the Gretchen sequence. From the perspective of the late eighteenth century, neoclassicism had substantially narrowed the meaning of tragedy, as at least in Germany and England throughout the seventeenth century it referred to any drama with an unhappy outcome. This recent change in meaning suggests that tragedy is present in the title not as a term to be taken for granted but as one that must be questioned and defined by the work. Goethe proposes the genre of his work in the two prologues. At the end of the "Prelude on the stage" the director invites his people to travel the entire circle of creation on the "narrow" stage to move from heaven through the world to hell. This is a call to “work… middle of paper… end,” it places its conflicts in terms of morality, its underlying subtext praising the supremacy of virtue and morality and punishing carnal sin. In the story the woman suffers, but through her travails she obtains salvation and forgiveness: in Faust, Goethe introduces the woman who sacrifices herself, the "eternal woman", "la femme eterne" or "ewige webliche, the feminine ideal that it finally consumed the nineteenth century. German romantics of the century. Therefore, Gretchen's story is Goethe's most famous addition to the Faust legend. Here we find the oldest core of the work, the most coherent sequence of scenes, realism, accurate psychology, a delicate understanding of social issues: in short, the culmination of the 18th century love tradition and the great tragic love story of the 19th. century. The «Gretchen episode» in Goethe's autobiography allows us to understand Goethe's life more clearly.