Birth as Metaphor in Kleist's Das Erdbeben in Chili: A Comparison of Critical Methodologies

This essay compares a semiotic and a feminist interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist's Das Erdbeben in Chili with particular emphasis on one theme in the story: birth. The story shows a tendency toward abstraction that marks much of Kleist's work and bespeaks a disturbed relationship to the material world. The same tendency is evident in the semiotic treatment of the story, and both can be seen as a function of the traditional patriarchal privileging of the abstract that has been increasingly denaturalized and challenged by certain currents in feminist and gender studies. (M.G.)