Taking by Storm": The Discourse of Spontaneity in Kleist's "Die Marquise von O..."

Abstract

Featuring, as it does, a character who has become pregnant without knowing how or by whom, Heinrich von Kleist's novella Die Marquise von 0... scandalized readers when it first appeared the journal Phobus 1808: Nur die Fabel derselben angeben, heist schon, sie aus den gesitteten Zirkeln verbannen. [...] Ist dies ein Sujet, das einem Journale fur die Kunst Stelle verdient? (qtd. Sembdner 193; cf. Sembdner 216). The story continues to disturb its readers, albeit for quite different reasons; modern critics worry not, as did the contemporary reviewer quoted above, about the appropriateness of the subject for art, but rather about the appropriate reading of, among other things, that most pregnant graphic sign (Cohn 129) — the dash near the end of the novella's second paragraph — and the conspicuously detailed reconciliation between father and daughter, which its explicitness, as scholars have noted, contrasts markedly with the equally difficult, but reticent, dash (Politzer 114; Ellis 23-24; Dietrick, Immaculate 327; Mortimer 300). Does one consistently name the pivotal event marked by the dash a rape, or is it possible, as a variety of critics have done, also to speak of it other terms, as, for instance, an erotic happening (Cohn 133), eine sexuelle Vereinigung (Hoverland 143), [eine] Umarmung (Politzer 114), even an instance of romantic transport (McGlathery 83)? How does one interpret the passage which the father of the Marquise, in unsaglicher Lust, lange, heise und lechzende Kusse [...] auf ihren Mund druckte: gerade wie ein Verliebter!;' what kind of love scene is this? (Swales 134; Mortimer 300) Studies of Kleist's story have not always dealt explicitly with these problems,