The Marquise of O and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist Read Free Book Online Page B

an association between music, cryptography, magic spells and ‘terrible spirits’: ‘She gazed at the unknown magical signs, with which some terrible spirit seemed to be marking out its mysterious sphere…’ The theme of the sinister and fatal fascination of music was one that also attracted E. T. A. Hoffmann, and it was to be given its fullest elaboration by another of Kleist’s twentieth-century admirers, Thomas Mann, in his novel about the composer whose art symbolizes the black magic of Dr Faustus.
    The Betrothal in Santo Domingo
to some extent resembles
The Earthquake in Chile
: both are stories about the tragic fate of two young lovers whose relationship is set against a background of disaster and violent social upheaval. Unlike Jerónimo and Josefa, however, Gustav and Toni perish not, in the last resort, because of external circumstances and the wickedness of other people, but because of a flaw in their own relationship. The essential theme here is not the cruelty of man to man (though, as usual, Kleist well illustrates this), nor even the unaccountable operations of God or nature or fate, but – as in
The Duel
and at least three of the plays – that of love being put on trial. The lover is confronted with an ambiguity of appearances, with ambiguous behaviour on the part of his beloved, which in the present case misleads him into a fatal misunderstanding, with tragic results. As in
The Duel
Kleist seems to construct the whole rather complicated story deliberately round this point, which becomes explicit in the girl’s dying words, ‘You should not have mistrusted me’. He subtly uses the archetypal symbolic equation of black with evil and white with good to reinforce the ambiguity which leads to this mistrust. The circumstances of the tragedy are based on actual historicalfact, namely the war between the French settlers on the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti) and their former negro slaves, emancipated by a decree of the National Convention in 1794. The blacks have turned with murderous savagery on their white oppressors, and in 1803 the French have fallen back on Port-au-Prince where they are making a last stand against the advancing negro army led by General Dessalines. Into this situation Kleist inserts his fictitious story of Toni, the daughter of a mulatto woman and a white man, who lives with her mother on a plantation occupied by a band of negroes under the leadership of the brutal and ferocious Congo Hoango. He and his men have murdered the former white owners of the property and are now taking part in the campaign to exterminate all Europeans left on the island. If any white man seeks refuge in the house during his absence, Babekan and Toni are under Hoango’s orders to detain him with feigned hospitality until the negroes return and kill him. Toni is for this purpose cast in the role of the sexually attractive decoy, to which she is well suited since as a quadroon or ‘mestiza’ she has almost white skin. The young Swiss officer Gustav von der Ried, whom she and Babekan receive as a fugitive, is with good reason suspicious of their motives, and in particular the behaviour of Toni presents itself to him in an ambiguous light. As if to underline and polarize this ambiguity, already symbolized by Toni’s complexion, Kleist makes him in the course of the evening’s conversation tell two contrasting stories, one about a treacherous and vindictive negress who ensnared a white man and deliberately infected him with yellow fever, and the other about a virtuous and loving European girl to whom he had become engaged while living in France at the time of the Revolution, and who had sacrificed her life on the guillotine in order to save his. Toni is moved to tears by this second story, which he tells her while she is alone with him in his bedroom acting on her mother’s guileful instructions. She falls into his arms andhe seduces her, partly on an