Schiller's Tell and the Cause of Freedom

The play in fact offers in its first two and a half acts a paradigm of the abuse of vested power and a model of individual and collective resistance. Committed or imminent, the injustices of the civil authority range from confiscation of property (the oxen) or its destruction (Ruodi's hut), through deprivation of livelihood (Kuoni's herd) to rape (the threat against Baumgarten's wife), and culminate in savage mutilation. Yet the portrayal of oppression is neither distorted nor strident. Only the violence done to Melchthal's father may seem gratuitous or provocatively overstated, and even this brutality is not without historical parallel. Nor is it unrivalled in Schiller's own canon of fictional enormities, witness Robber Spiegelberg in the cloister or Schufterle throwing the child in the fire to keep it from freezing. The punitive blinding is merely the capstone of a graduated arch of evils; the lesser crimes serve to make the lesson verisimilar and inescapable: oppression is oppression; the world of the play is an allegory of our world, these crimes are a metonymy for all suppression of liberty

Art · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

• From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore

  Open Access•Elliott Oring, Alan Dundes•Western Folklore•1998

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