Abstract
This chapter argues for Friedrich Schiller’s influence on the aesthetic logic of Charlotte’s Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Jane’s development across the novel is traced through her learning of an attitude of patient anticipation towards her vital, vibrant world, most poignantly expressed in her appreciation of the rough Rochester. Schiller’s aesthetic theory celebrates the “Naturmenschen” as the natural man, responsive to the world and characterised by the quality of the “rohen” (raw or rough) as the privileged aesthetic of receptive sympathy. The rough, unfinished object in the world forestalls reason’s controlling impulse to impose order, demanding instead a patient response. Schiller’s and Brontë’s depictions of the educative powers of nature as vital to inter-human relationships reveal the importance of matter to the emotional life of humans.
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Notes
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Jacques Rancière (2002) takes up Schiller’s notion of the active and passive drives in order to identify the “aesthetic regime” in political terms. On Schiller’s influence on the Victorian novel, see Deborah Guth (2003) and Michael Vander Weele (2004), both of whom focus on Schiller as offering a psychological profile. Schiller’s translators offer an apologetic for Schiller’s materialism in their introduction (Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967).
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The collection by Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells (2008) is a prominent example of discussions of art and appreciation of Burkean beauty in the Brontës, including Jane Eyre. See also Douglas Mao (2003) on the relation between visual beauty and working-class labour. Both Margaret Kennedy (2017) and Anna Neill (2017) engage with Jane Eyre’s depiction of an active material world, Kennedy through consideration of miasma theory while Neill draws on the science of epigenetics (“the interpretive responses of organisms to environmental conditions”, 4).
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Carruthers, J. (2019). “The Impatient Anticipations of Our Reason”: Rough Sympathy in Friedrich Schiller and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_6
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