The Lionel-Scene in Schiller's Jungfrau von Orleans: A Psychological Interpretation

Abstract

Thus summarizes August von Platen with characteristic malevolence and epigrammatic succinctness the main artistic weakness which he, like Kotzebue and Tieck before him and nearly every nineteenthcentury critic after him, felt undermined the structural unity of Schiller's romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. It was not so much the alteration of historical fact in the figure of Schiller's Johanna which caused such distress among the critics; rather it seemed that in creating for aesthetic purposes a dramatic character whose existence lay outside the realm of historical fact Schiller had violated certain psychological laws basic to mankind, particularly in the Lionelscene, thus rendering the entire work, despite the author's intentions to the contrary, artistically ineffective. Platen and his contemporaries could perceive no motivation for Johanna's sudden love for the English field commander, and saw in the tragic flaw which brings about Johanna's downfall little more than an angedichtete Schwiiche. If such were the case, they argued, Johanna's guilt would then be spurious as well, for it would arise from a flaw which was not in itself a genuine one. Otto Ludwig, perhaps the most relentless and uncompromising of Schiller's censurers among the Poetic Realists, states his objections in the following way: