Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

The subject of Chapter 17, which Auerbach calls a “middle-class tragedy,” is the German play Luise Millerin, written by Friedrich Schiller in 1782-83. The characters, especially the husband, are represented as a middle-class couple might speak, using “flavorful and hearty petty-bourgeois colloquialisms” (436). Since the conflict is, as Auerbach explains, bourgeois, set within their realm, even characters of higher rank are not represented with “heroic exaltation” (437). Auerbach explains that middle-class novels and tragedies had developed long before this in England and France, but he notes that in Germany, after the long survival of Christian-creatural mixture of styles, middle-class realism “assumed exceptionally vigorous forms” (437). Many of these works were, he explains, “at once sentimental, narrowly mid-class, realistic, and revolutionary” (437). Politics and domestic life can be linked, and thus the novels delve further into the depths of society although the represented world is itself narrow, focusing on the middle-class domestic drama. In the story of the Miller family specifically, the middle-class drama is portrayed “tragically, realistically, and in terms of contemporary history,” and individual destiny begins to “echo the fullness of contemporary reality” (440). Even so, Auerbach deems the work political and claims it falls short of genuine reality.