Spirited Women Heroes: Major Female Characters in the Dramas of Goethe, Schiller and Kleist

The paradigms of conflict for spirited women in drama often differ from those of comparable male heroes. As a character active in determining her own fate, the spirited woman must choose between self-realization in the private sphere, the traditional stronghold or prison of women, and the public sphere, an area of particular peril for women. In either case the hero's identity is established largely by resistence to or direct defiance of the behavioral norms for her sex.