3 - Melancholy Titans and suffering women in Storm and Stress drama

Summary

THE CONTEXT OF STORM AND STRESS PSYCHOLOGY

A local phenomenon centred on Herder and Goethe in Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the Storm and Stress movement produced twenty or so plays that turned German literary aesthetics on its head and gave psychology a cultural prominence that it had not hitherto enjoyed. There was little new about the psychology of Storm and Stress drama. Some of its most striking characteristics – physicalism and the rehabilitation of the lower faculties, for instance – were already evident in, for example, Sulzer. The increased emphasis on the physical was prompted in part by the philosophical commitments of Herder and his friends and in part by the new aesthetics of the ‘original genius’ and the fashion for Sensibility imported from Britain. This saw creativity psychologically, as a product of the innate spontaneity of mind. Combined with Rousseau's critique of civilisation, it implied that the artist should reject convention. Poetry should itself be natural and represent nature as it was, not as our system of morality had distorted it. Goethe heralded Shakespeare's characters as ‘Nature! Nature! Nothing so much nature as Shakespeare's people.’ Naturalistic characterisation meant showing the human predicament as it is, whether in activity or affliction, whether taking arms against convention or suffering its slings and arrows. The two pre-eminent character types of Storm and Stress drama, the independent robust man of action (Kraftkerl) and the suffering woman (leidendes Weib), are products of this desire for naturalistic characterisation.