Theory and Practice of Sublime Vulnerability in the Works of Friedrich Schiller

Abstract

Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) dramatic and poetic figures share the struggle to establish agency in tyrannical, chauvinistic contexts. The present dissertation applies Schiller’s own aesthetic theory to close readings of his most disenfranchised literary figures to demonstrate that the Schillerian concept of the sublime is also a theory of the vulnerable. Across his oeuvre, vulnerable figures are central to Schiller’s particular aesthetic program––an anthropologically informed, pragmatic commitment to portraying society’s most oppressed as they face manifold systems of constraints enforced by the privileged. In Schiller’s literary worlds, as in German-speaking Europe around 1800, the most vulnerable members of society are often––though not exclusively––women. Central to Schiller’s earliest articulations of his aesthetic theory is his belief in the edifying potential of “der höchste Kampf,” the idea that the greater the degree one must labor to act in contradiction to one’s inclination, the more evident the display of free will. This concept comes into much fuller and more mature expression in the form of Schiller’s tragic theory of the sublime, which, far from being the purview of exclusively male heroes, is constructed with female and similarly disenfranchised figures in mind. The Schillerian figures treated in the present dissertation must negotiate agency amidst psychological, physical, and, above all, sexual violence. In theory and literary practice, Schiller’s vulnerable figures demonstrate their unique resistance to the patriarchal paradigm of performed masculine invulnerability through the awareness and embrace of their vulnerability. Furthermore, the dissertation demonstrates the insidious ways that the most privileged depend on the abuse of others––and how the oppressors themselves must perpetually reckon with the frailty and inessentiality of the framework that empowers them. When the vulnerable act in self-defense, the framework collapses.