Patriarchy's Fragile Boundaries under Siege: Three Stories of Heinrich von Kleist

The works of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) mirror the deep anxieties of his age in the face of challenges to Enlightenment values, but, unlike those of his contemporaries, they dwell at morbid length on the threats to order, rather than constructing ideological antidotes to them. In these works, it is particularly women and their sexuality who embody the threat to one of patriarchy's foundational gestures: the drawing of boundaries that allow all that is Self to cohere by constituting an Other that is purged, at whatever level—the individual, the gender, the family, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, etc. Even the apparently most objective political upheavals—e.g., the French and Haitian revolutions—are thus filtered through this Kleistian lens of the embattled subject. (MG)