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Mesmerism in Die Jungfrau von Orleans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

David B. Richards
David B. Richards*
Affiliation:
Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana
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Abstract

Schiller, far from regarding the story of Joan of Arc as a web of medieval superstition, found a rational explanation for her peculiar behavior in Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism. It can be shown that Johanna starts out in a somnambulistic trance, is awakened gradually to normal consciousness by her encounters with Montgomery, the Black Knight, and Lionel, and finally regains a trance state in her apotheosis. The source of Johanna's control over persons and events is her possession of “active” (hypnotic) vision. Her enjoyment of this power coincides with her trance states, and she is bereft of it when conscious. This radical break between somnambulism and consciousness symbolizes the unbridgeable gulf between the aims and values of human life (represented by Thibault, Charles, and Agnes Sorel) and the exigencies of the historical and political process.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 856 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 George Bernard Shaw managed to give a natural explanation for Joan of Arc's “miraculous” career. One wonders why Schiller was incapable of such latter-day euhemerism.

2 That Schiller had touched a popular chord is evident from the fact that Der Geisterseher, now almost completely ignored, was one of the best selling of all his works.

3 Darnton See Robert, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken, 1970), pp. 3–45. Hereafter cited as Darnton.

4 Surely an allusion to Cagliostro, a native of Palermo. The unmasking of the Sicilian as simply one of the Armenian's minions must have struck the contemporary public as piquant. Was there, then, a magus even more powerful and mysterious than the great Cagliostro?

5 Schiller Friedrich, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, 5th ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1975), v, 62-63. Hereafter cited as SW.

6 Gmelin (1751-1809) was the author of two studies of mesmerism, Ueber den Thierischen Magnetismus; in einem Brief . . . 2 Stück (Tübingen, 1787) and Neue Untersuchungen über den thierischen Magnetismus (Tübingen, 1789), neither of which mention Mesmer's name.

7 Schillers Gespräche, ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal, Dietrich Germann, and Eberhard Haufe, Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, xlii (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1967), 166. Hereafter cited as NA.

8 See Schiller's letter to Gmelin, 7 March 1794, in Schillers Briefe, ed. Fritz Jonas (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, n.d.), iii, 425-26.

9 See Schiller's letter to Körner, 27 Aug. 1793, in Jonas, iii, 352.

10 A noteworthy exception is Frank M. Fowler, “Sight and Insight in Schiller's ‘Die Jungfrau von Orleans,‘ ” Modern Language Review, 68 (1973), 371.

11 All references are to Sämtliche Werke, ii, mentioned above. All further line references, and page references for stage directions, will be cited in the text. When English translations are supplied, they are taken, with some minor changes, from Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans: Two Historical Plays, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Ungar, 1965).

12 That Johanna is acting under the power of suggestion is emphasized by the impersonal constructions and the use of the accusative case in reference to herself. The iron touches her, courage inflames her, “it” drags and drives her, etc. She has become an object with no will of her own. Even her use of rhyme suggests that she is delivering a set speech rather than “expressing” herself.

13 Note that the stage direction says “in Begeisterung” (p. 698), not simply “mit Begeisterung.”

14 Goldsmith Margaret, Franz Anton Mesmer: A History of Mesmerism (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), p. 164.

15 Schiller and the Changing Past (London: Heinemann, 1957), pp. 97–102.

16 Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, 1966), pp. 242–43.

17 Frey John R., “Schillers Schwarzer Ritter,” German Quarterly, 32 (1959), 311.

18 The discursive iambic pentameter lines resemble recitative, the more emotive trochaic tetrameters the aria.

19 Snell Bruno, “Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape,” The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), rpt. in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Steele Commager (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 14.

20 Perhaps Charles's nostalgia for the world of courtly love is a jibe at the Romantics on Schiller's part. Even the people of the late Middle Ages, so envied by the early Romantics, looked back with longing to a period some centuries earlier. By implication, then, these more fortunate mortals were nostalgic for an even more distant past and so on ad infinitum.