The Amazon State in Kleist's Penthesilea: Revolutionary Republic of Female Liberation or Anti-individualistic Totalitarianism?

Abstract

Relating the Amazon state to the contemporary political and intellectual contexts, this essay argues that Kleist's presentation of this state suggests he saw it as a model turning into a warning. The essay investigates firstly whether this deterioration is presented as occurring necessarily, i.e. due to laws of human nature, or avoidably, i.e. due to (corrigible) human ineptitude, and secondly how the presentation of the dialectic between the state's liberating and revolutionary origin and the rule-ridden anti-individualism of its conservative phase is presented within the text. By examining the relationship between freedom and moral coercion the analysis investigates the continuities and discontinuities between the Amazon state and the regime it topples, and the relationship between the sexual and political discourses of the play. In conclusion the essay argues that Kleist's text suggests that human attempts at social and cultural progress are inevitably foiled by anarchic or illiberal desires. But the text refuses to confirm whether (human) nature or culture is to blame for this, because notions of progress, solution and synthesis are repeatedly, and in equal measure, proposed and denied. This plasticity of the possibility and value of progress is achieved through the choice of vehicle, sexual relations, in which the political discourse is embedded and which in contemporary intellectual discourse are dominated by notions of immutable natural laws.