Anmut's Gender: The "Marionettentheater" and Kleist's Revision of "Anmut und Würde"

Schiller's famous essay "Über Anmut und Würde" establishes Anmut or Grazie as a feminine quality. Kleist, who seems to be parodying Schillerian argumentation on several levels, reduces Schiller's idealism to material terms by rupturing the link between Geist and Grazie, but he also cancels its association with women—de-humanizing and de-feminizing grace. By taking the arch-feminine virtue of Anmut and appropriating it to mindless or mechanized beings who are specifically gendered male, Kleist reinforces the exclusivity of the male homosocial bonds being developed between the narrator and Herr C... . (GKH)