Beloved Sisters

Beloved Sisters is a Romantic epic about the failure of Romanticism. It needs its 138-minute sweep because it’s a love story that parallels the sweep of modern history.

From our current perspective Romanticism is splendid in literature, exhorting readers to huge ambitions, untrammelled individualism, unleashed emotions and the full embrace of nature. You can’t complain about a movement that gave us Schiller, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, John Lennon. But off the page and stage it can be bloody brutal. The Romantic ideals of the French Revolution soured into the anarchy, mob violence and slaughter that ensued. German Romanticism bred nationalism and we know how many lives that cost the world in 20th Century Europe and around the globe still today. 

The story of Schiller’s passionate affair with two sisters replays those inevitable schisms on the domestic plane. In the ironic title, the sisters start out beloved — by Schiller but more importantly by each other — then end up antagonists. Their dying mother tries to reconcile them, to more disputatious result. Their passionate triangle left several marriages in ruin, even if they remained apparently intact.  

     The girls take a roaring waterfall as the emblem of their anti-conventional wills. Though Schiller   can’t swim he saves a little girl from drowning in a tamer current, but he has to be saved by one of the sisters and warmed back to life by both. The scene proves prophetic because all three lovers fail to navigate the tumultuous current of their pledged manage a trois. Our emotions don't always prove servant to our will.
     Nice place to visit, Romanticism, but  it’s hard to live there. Our need for social order and responsibility and our variable feelings won’t accommodate it.