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  • The Great Cover-Up: The Double Containment of Woman in Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart
  • Rebecca Steele

Queen Elisabeth’s jealous rage over a man functions as the perfect cover-up for the politically motivated execution of her rival in Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart. As one of the many changes Schiller made to his historical source, covering up the political necessity of Maria’s execution with reasons of fabricated personal revenge is one strategy to contain the politically active and thus transgressive woman. This attempt to contain Elisabeth through a mythologizing gesture as the frigid, jealous prude has proved to be fairly successful as is evident in literary scholarship that condemns her actions and juxtaposes her with the positively depicted Maria. The “myth of Maria” is engineered through a temporal confusion of the senses. Because we are told in her absence how she will appear, her actual presence conveys no pertinent information. Enshrined within a myth, the transgressive Maria is removed from any possibility of action. This containment strategy also appears to be successful: decades of literary critics can see only the myth of Maria, as evidenced by analyses which conclude that the Queen of Scots either reaches a sublime state or can be considered a schöne Seele.

Some scholars read in the shift of motivation encased in the figure of Elisabeth that Schiller “makes clear his didactic message that female nature is biologically determined and cannot be overcome simply by adopting a male role in society and that negative consequences result when female inclination is given political power” (Calkin 101). In other words, Schiller’s Maria Stuart demonstrates that women are naturally disinclined to be effective rulers (Leistner 175).1 In my opinion, this argument does not go far enough. By shifting Queen Elisabeth’s motivation for signing the death warrant from political necessity (the public sphere) to personal revenge (the private sphere) as well as by containing the political and sexual Maria (public sphere) in a myth of the sublime or schöne Seele (private sphere), Schiller’s text enters the debate on women’s emancipation at the turn of the nineteenth century. To be sure, the male political actors in Maria Stuart are also not represented in a wholly positive light (with the possible [End Page 365] exception of Shrewsbury). Yet the fact that Schiller chooses this particular source material, which centres on two female rulers with men playing subordinate roles, against the backdrop of the French Revolution when women first began to demand equality, suggests that a gendered political reading is warranted. At the same time, the Reign of Terror looms in the background of Schiller’s text (Alt; Pleschka; Johnston). Both queens are aligned with the excess and violence of the French Revolution. Through the bloody event of regicide, the text aligns Elisabeth’s personal motivation with the violence of revolution, suggesting the possible violence to society through women who dare to demand a place on the public stage.

The following discussion of Maria Stuart will deconstruct the myths that have arisen around these women through a close reading of the text and a discussion of the historical record. It will also consider the literary criticism that has – until recently – supported and contributed to these myths. Uncovering this “great cover-up” reveals that the danger to society that Schiller’s text suggests is inherent to women’s emancipation is equally a myth, and, thus, the containment of woman in the private sphere is ultimately unjustifiable.

In most scholarship to date, Elisabeth is evaluated harshly and generally juxtaposed with the “moral winner” in Schiller’s text, Maria. Elisabeth is considered the weak, indecisive (unattractive) ruler obsessed with appearances, Maria the honest, beautiful, reformed sinner who in her final “sublime” moment performs sweeping acts of forgiveness before she freely goes to her tragic death. Elisabeth has been called a tyrant and dictator (Wittkowski 406) and is accused of “unconquered moral convictions” (Pugh 112). While Harro Müller suggests that the English queen is simultaneously triumphant and conquered (238), Steven Martinson contends that the English queen’s entrapment is “self-imposed” by her “moral ineptitude” (222).

By contrast, Maria is held up as either an example...

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