Reading Race in Kleist's "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo"

I. Race Relations between Characters, Author, and Critics

Heinrich von Kleist's "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" is a unique literary work both within the context of early nineteenth-century literature and Kleist's own body of work. On the one hand it displays many thematic and stylistic elements which are typical of Kleist's other Erzählungen, such as its dark, mysterious mood, thematization of violence and sexuality, and emphasis on language and (mis)communication. However, the unique central issue implicitly informing the historical subject and explicitly effecting the structure of actions within the piece is race. One glance at recent scholarship on "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" as represented in various scholarly journals clearly reveals a debate on the centrality and meaning of race for understanding this piece of Kleist's work.¹ Indeed the importance of this issue bears upon the greater context of "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" within the author's collected works, as well as raising implications for the assessment of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial texts in German literature.

The secondary literature on this disputed novella² can be split into two main categories, those that attempt to view it within the context of Kleist's other stories, establishing structural and stylistic similarities, and those which deal specifically with the question of race that is so prominent in the piece. Authors within the first category tend to investigate some overarching theme or characteristic in the works of Kleist, which they feel is typical or essential to understanding his works. Typically, such studies are conducted in lengthier analyses of multiple works from Kleist in the same genre. Although these approaches explicate important facets of Kleist's writing style and narrative techniques, they ignore or reduce the centrality of race as a constitutive element of "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo."³ For example, many critics view Kleist's works within the complex of language as communicative means and the "Verlobung" has been characterized as exemplary because of the recurring motif of miscommunication in the ruses and betrayals. ⁴ Others have employed the framework of the "Kant-Krise" to characterize the novella's sudden plot reversals as indicative of an author who posits the limits of knowledge as a source of tragic developments.⁵ On a completely different track, the novella has also been viewed as only apparently concerned with race or class distinctions, treating it primarily as a love story.⁶ These are merely a few examples of the many approaches to Kleist's "Verlobung" which do not explicitly address the issue of race.

The other category of secondary literature on "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" is composed of analyses which tend to use outside sources, frequently Kleist's letters, to refer to a philosophical, social or literary discourse of race that they then seek to substantiate through textual evidence. Such studies often focus on the historical background of racial strife as it applies to the theme of trust, prevalent in earlier studies.⁷ This vein of criticism began in earlier, more comprehensive studies of Kleist's works that made specific references to "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo," primarily emphasizing (and unconsciously reinforcing) the stereotypical, racist characterization of the superiority of white civilization opposed to the barbarousness of blacks. Peter Horn's influential study, "Hatte Kleist Rassenvorurteile?" in 1975 opens the door to analyses of previous scholars' criticism in an attempt to reveal affirmations of racist assumptions, which are often conflated with the position of the author.⁸ In the same year Sander Gilman, focusing on almost the same group of critics, argues instead that Kleist is mainly concerned with resisting contemporary philosophies of aesthetics, esp. Burke, Hume and Kant, which posit blackness as opposed to or oblivious of the category of the sublime and beautiful.⁹ What followed then after Horn and Gilman is a reaction, occurring mainly in the seventies and again in the nineties, in several critical journal articles that reevaluated how race was dealt with both in the actual text and in the criticism of the novella.¹⁰

This second category which deals with race...