Strange example of female vengeance

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Friedrich Schiller (1794)

A remarkable example of female revenge is the title of a translation by Friedrich Schiller . He published it in 1785 in the journal Rheinische Thalia, which he edited, and two years later with the added subtitle Extracted from a manuscript by the late Diderot in Thalia .

Schiller selected an episode from the as yet unpublished novel Jacques the Fatalist and his Lord by Denis Diderot and created an independent narrative from it. It is about a marquise who wants to take revenge on her former lover through a cleverly designed intrigue . Carried away by the beauty and feigned modesty of a young lady, he marries her after a long advertisement and learns about her past as a prostitute the next day .

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Mrs. von P *** (the Marquise ), a “rich widow of class, full of wisdom, politeness and world, but proud and of high spirit”, after a long, “fruitless resistance”, has a relationship with the Marquis von A *** someone who thinks “so so of female virtue”.

After a few years, she feels neglected and fears that his feelings may have evaporated. To check this, she pretends that her love has died, which leads him to admit: "I was the first one she stopped." In the course of the forced conversation, she pretends that her original "love is tenderest." To want to transform friendship ”, which he lets himself into and already announces the return of his feelings.

In fact, she is deeply hurt and decides to take revenge on him - "to the horror of men who indulge in betraying a woman of honor ..." She meets a former acquaintance from the province, Mme. Duquenoi, who is after a lost process has fallen into economic hardship and with her daughter, a very beautiful and accomplished young woman, for ten years at an inn one under the name Madame and Mademoiselle Aisnon, Paris House of Pleasure operates. In order to be able to give up the reluctantly practiced, "shameful (e) craft" and to advance socially, she agrees to the plan of the Marquise to move at their expense to another part of the city, to lead a pious and humble life there, to follow her instructions and inform them of all events.

After a few months, Frau von P *** arranged a seemingly chance meeting of the two women in the royal garden with the Marquis von A ***, with whom she still met and treated him kindly as if nothing had happened. As expected, he is fascinated by the daughter and does everything he can to get to know her better. In the months that followed, he kept asking about the two of them, had them watched and found out that they regularly go to church and seem to lead a godly life. He confesses his passion for the marquise, which goes so far as to follow the women in the masses : "Her friend's daughter - she has made a deep impact on my heart."

Many attempts to win them over with gifts fail because of the bigoted attitude of the two, and even the bribed confessor can through his speeches and whisperings - whether she can dare to oppose the "passion of a man", yes him “To let them die” - and a love letter sent does nothing. When the desperate marquis promises a lot of money and sends a box with precious jewels , the women are ready to enter into the bargain. But Ms. von P *** threatens to collapse the building of lies if her instructions are not followed and forces the two of them to send the valuable jewelry back. They even have to turn down half of his fortune and a life annuity after a heated discussion. At last the marquis is ready to marry the beloved . His girlfriend feigns concern, but submits the proposal, and the marriage is concluded two weeks later.

The next day, Frau von P *** ordered the Marquis to come and see him, shocked him with his wife's past and let him look into her soul: "A noble woman has given herself completely to you - you did not know how to receive her - I am this woman; but she has repaid, traitor, and bound you forever with one who is worthy of you. "

Contrary to the Marquise's expectations, however, the mesalliance does not bring misery to her former lover. Although he is horrified at first, pushes his wife away and curses her, but forgives her after a fourteen-day trip when he sees her deep remorse for the intrigue. She tells him her sad fate and gives him credible assurance that her heart was not poisoned by the trade that was imposed on her. On the other hand, he banishes his mother-in-law to a monastery, where she dies soon after. He learns to appreciate his wife and spends three years with her on his property outside Paris "- the happiest couple of their time."

The narrator finally defends the marquise against the presumed indignation of the reader. The intrigue is an understandable reaction to the insult of the wife of P ***: He likes to "hate and fear" her, but not "despise" her, she has made many sacrifices because of the capricious man, and has "slavishly paid homage to his taste" and gambled away her reputation as a model of virtue by "falling down to the common bunch" because of him.

In an afterword, Schiller considers this defense to be ineffective: Diderot “will still hardly disgust the disgust that this unnatural act must necessarily arouse.” However, he praises “the bold novelty of this intrigue”.

Origin and background

After Diderot's death, a copy of his novel came into the possession of Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg , the artistic director of the Mannheim National Theater , to whom Schiller had turned several times about further projects after the premiere of his drama The Robbers . He handed the text to Schiller with the request to translate it. As he wrote in the epilogue, he was so fascinated by the “bold novelty of this intrigue, the unmistakable truth of the description, the unadorned elegance of the description” that he could not resist the temptation could translate them.

The first French edition of the novel was not published until twelve years after the author's death in Paris and thus after Schiller's partial translation into German. Schiller's German version, in turn, was translated back into French in 1793 and published independently. Fifteen years later, Schiller revisited Diderot and revised the stories The Nun and The New Pamela , which his wife Charlotte had translated from French and which were published in Flora magazine in March and May 1800 .

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Denis Diderot, painting by Louis-Michel van Loo , 1767

In his novel, Diderot sends the two protagonists , Jacques and his noble lord, through France and lets them chat about all kinds of amorous adventures, while the omniscient narrator often interferes with comments and reflections. The resulting seemingly disordered plot structure reveals the influence of the novel Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne .

The episode picked up by Schiller is about Madame de La Pommeraye's revenge on her former lover, the Marquis des Arcis, who conquers her and drops her after a few years. In its transmission it deviated from the original in several ways. He stressed the frame story, gave up the I-shape and the countless interruptions and remarks of the narrator, the staff but retained (from Madame de La Pommeraye he made woman of P *** ) and accelerated the progress of the development.

Schiller tried to find a catchy diction and also used colloquial idioms. In order to please the German readers, he refrained from adopting the courtly and gallant formulas of the original, which Diderot, however, are ironically broken. As Peter-André Alt explains, Schiller renounced the differentiated presentation of aristocratic expressions because there was no uniform language culture in Germany comparable to France to which he could refer. So he avoided adopting Catholic formulas of piety, which play a role in Madame de La Pommeraye's instructions to the two “fallen women” for their role as decent bourgeois women and which Diderot had also ironically portrayed.

filming

In 1987 the material was filmed under this title by GDR television. Directed by Bodo Fürneisen , Michael Gwisdek , Annekathrin Bürger and Zuzana Tlučková played the main roles .

literature

  • Peter-André Alt : On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling. In: Schiller. Life - work - time. A biography. Volume I, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, pp. 480-481
  • Helga Meise: Strange example of female revenge. Drawn from a manuscript by the late Diderot (1785). In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (Hrsg.): Schiller manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 302-305

Web links

Wikisource: Strange Example of Female Revenge  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Helga Meise: Strange example of female revenge. Drawn from a manuscript by the late Diderot (1785) . In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 302
  2. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 458
  3. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 461
  4. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 463
  5. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 475
  6. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 480
  7. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 486
  8. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 490
  9. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 490
  10. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . ( Wikisource )
  11. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, Notes, p. 1188
  12. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: Strange example of a female revenge . In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works . Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations . Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 492
  13. ↑ Peter-André Alt : On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling . In: Schiller. Life - work - time, a biography . Volume I. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 480
  14. ↑ Peter-André Alt: On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling . In: Schiller. Life - work - time, a biography . Volume I. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 480
  15. ↑ Jörg Drews : Jacques le fataliste et son maître . In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Volume 4, p. 671
  16. ↑ Helga Meise: Strange example of female revenge. Drawn from a manuscript by the late Diderot (1785) . In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 302
  17. ↑ Peter-André Alt: On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling . In: Schiller. Life - work - time, a biography . Volume I. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 480
  18. ↑ Peter-André Alt: On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling. In: Schiller. Life - work - time. A biography. Volume I, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 481
  19. ↑ Peter-André Alt: On the historical location of Schiller's storytelling. In: Schiller. Life - work - time. A biography. Volume I, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 481
  20. ↑ remarkable example of a female revenge in the Internet Movie Database (English)