Transgression and Identity in Kleist's Penthesilea and Wolf's Cassandra.

Feminist readers have increasingly been drawn to the work of Heinrich von Kleist, and in particular to his play Penthesilea. Authors such as Helene Cixous and Christa Wolf have not shied away from this notoriously "unperformable" drama, but have engaged with precisely that feature of the work most responsible for its reputation as impossible to stage: the transgressive "acting out" of the protagonist. My intertextual reading focuses on Wolf's staging of Penthesilea in her re-visionary project Cassandra. Wolf's narrative borrows to significant effect not only the figure of the Amazon queen, but also a provocative dramaturgy, whose development I trace back to Kleist's re-vision of Homer. (JW)

The works of Heinrich von Kleist have recently been studied as remarkably revealing sites of anxiety about the instability of gender, class, and racial identities. While his works are seen to "mirror the deep anxieties of his age in the face of challenges to Enlightenment values," their subversive nature has not gone unrecognized; they differ noticeably from works by Goethe and other contemporaries in focusing on the threats to social order, "rather than constructing ideological antidotes to those threats" (Gelus 59-60). Feminists in particular increasingly have been drawn to Kleist's writing, and above all to his play Penthesilea (1808), a forbidding work, often judged impossible to stage, and for this reason reputedly "the most feared drama in the German language" (Sibylle Wirsing, qtd. in Reeve 97). Although its author once commented that Penthesilea appeared overall to be made "less for women than for men,"(1) the play has emerged as a central text for feminist critical engagements with Kleist (Hermand 43). It has even been identified as preferred reading material within the larger constituency of the German women's movement--"das Lieblingslesedrama der Frauenbewegung" (Hellmuth Karasek, qtd. in Reeve 201n42)--the qualification "lese" betraying, however, a notable dearth of feminist stagings of the play.(2) Indeed, the challenges to traditional notions of identity reflected in Kleist's play have been taken up not primarily by theatre practitioners, but by feminist theorists, critics, and writers of fiction. Certain preoccupations of the notoriously "unperformable" dramatic work (Reeve 78) are, significantly, played out not on the stage, but in the writings of authors such as Helene Cixous and Christa Wolf. Cixous's meditations in The Newly Born Woman (1975) not only display a fearless attitude toward the dreaded play and the instabilities of gender identity it presents, but actually revel in the possibilities opened up by such disruption. This paper focuses on Wolf's very different, although equally fearless, engagement with the transgressive in Penthesilea and the monstrous "acting out" of its protagonist.(3) Wolf's fascination with Kleist's Romantic "re-vision" of the myth of Penthesilea is evident both in her afterword to a 1983 edition of the play and in her own re-visionary work Cassandra, published in German in the same year. However, critical discussions of Cassandra have largely neglected Wolf's reading of Penthesilea, treating instead her more general "re-vision" (Rich 35) of texts of ancient Greek mythology. I am concerned to address this omission,(4) for not only the figure of the Amazon queen, but also elements of Kleist's dramaturgy are borrowed to significant effect in Wolf's narrative. This particular approach opens up the specific workings of intertextual relations in Cassandra. At the same time, it shows how assumptions about the unperformability of Kleist's play might be contested. Such notions, which isolate the play as simply impossible to stage, disallow its more serious provocations and relevance to issues of feminist identity, politics, and performance.

The transgressive features of Penthesilea have disturbed readers ever since Goethe, established man of letters and director of the Weimar theatre at the time the play was written, pronounced its strangeness. It is not surprising that this member of the literary establishment found himself unable to "make friends" with Kleist's protagonist, whom he regarded as wholly other, singular, and alien.(5) More telling is the unease expressed by the man of the theatre; even someone so open to the stage and to the transformative potential of performance backs away from what he casts as a frightfully misguided project. Goethe's views were echoed in the opinions of contemporaries such as Tieck, who, despite great admiration for Kleist, recoiled at "this strange monster" ("dieses seltsame Ungeheuer," Tieck qtd. in Reeve 79), a description of the incomprehensible and threatening protagonist that could and would be applied to the work as a whole. Conventional wisdom about the unperformability of Penthesilea thus dates back to these immediate reactions, and in particular to Goethe's patronizing dismissal of Kleist as an unfortunate playwright waiting for "some theatre yet to come."(6) We would appear still to be waiting for such a stage, as critical consensus forms around notions of the practical impossibility of both Kleist's play and its central figure.

It is hard to argue with the generally accepted view, voiced, for instance, by Jost Hermand, that Kleist's works count among the most enigmatic in German literature, and that Penthesilea stands out as undoubtedly "the most puzzling" of all (34). However, even though such statements about the challenges presented by Penthesilea seem straightforward and uncontroversial, the particular language of criticism here, which emphasizes the work's riddling nature, should give us pause. Such a focus on bafflement recalls not only the bewilderment expressed by a long line of readers following the lead of Goethe and Tieck,(7) but also the critical position of certain characters within the play, who regard the Amazon queen as a "riddling sphinx"(8) they cannot comprehend. As many commentators have observed, the refusal of the Amazons to ally themselves with either the Trojans or the Greeks puzzles characters such as Odysseus and his men, who, with their binary logic, fail to understand what these women want. Such a refusal to declare herself friend or foe--"What else? She has no other choice" (168)--clearly defies the naturalized social order. Consequently, Penthesilea is deemed perverse, her rage "unnatural" (171), her identity transgressive of boundaries that delimit the human.

In this play so preoccupied with questions of identity, the protagonist's formulaic announcement, "I am Penthesilea, / Queen of the Amazons" (169), appears conspicuously inadequate. The simplistic name-calling of the Greeks, however, betrays an even greater insufficiency, as the men attempt to distance themselves from the threat they denounce as a "centaur queen" (170), a "rav'ning she-wolf" (171), a "raging fury" (178). Gendered imagery predominates in this "othering" of Penthesilea, facilitating a slippage of general charges of unnaturalness into specific accusations about the "unwomanly" (228) woman. Trevelyan's translation at certain points rehearses such a move. For instance, "Seht die Hyane, die blind-wutende!" (SW 1: 332; literally, "Look at the hyena in a blind rage") becomes "A foaming-jawed hyena! 'Tis no woman!" (176). As if the blatant suggestion of madness in "foaming-jawed" were not enough, the addition of "`Tis no woman!" cements the monstrous otherness of the Amazon queen. Such interpretive decisions place the translator unmistakably within a history of reception that originates with Goethe. Particularly unsettling about this tradition of reading Penthesilea is the fact that its antecedents lie clearly in normative reactions to threats to social order within the play itself.

Such normative attitudes frame the play, beginning with Odysseus's stress on the need for boundaries to be established, for dividing lines to be drawn, for the armies of the Greeks and the Amazons to be separated. The latter are locked in what Odysseus perceives as an unnatural conflict that has disrupted the orderly business of warring relations: "Each force in Nature creates its opposite / And fights with this; no room for any third" (170). In setting upon both Trojan and Greek, refusing to "seek her friends on this side or on that" (168), Penthesilea exhibits a dangerous promiscuity that assails Achilles, the inviolate hero: "With ev'ry thund'ring hoofbeat / She swallows down some portion of the space / That still divides her from great Peleus' son" (179). In the simile at the end of the first scene, Odysseus speaks most tellingly of the crossings and entanglements(9) that threaten them all. Achilles is compared to the hound flushing its prey (Penthesilea, the stag, "such noble game"); but not only is the hound, "die Dogg," grammatically feminine, while the stag, "der Hirsch," is masculine (SW 1: 328-29), the huntsman is described as being fearful for the preying hound, as she, "teeth firm closed in the shaggy throat" of the stag, "Is dragged through streams, o'er mountains, clinging still, / Into the deepest forest's gloom" (173). The threat of destabilized identity continues in scene 2, with its description of Penthesilea's fierce attempts to seize her prey by scaling the sheer rock wall that separates her from Achilles. The sexual connotations of the imagery used to depict this assault are hardly subtle, and there is no mistaking the danger that Penthesilea's onslaught poses to the Greek hero's masculinity. Suddenly brought down "from giddy height" before a gaping chasm, Achilles suffers a spectacular collapse:

 
   And now in chaos of tangled harness lie 
   Chariot and steeds, a sprawling, huddled mass, 
   And with them in the wreck Achilles' self, 
   Powerless as lion in the hunter's snare (174).