Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  In 1802, Goethe was visited by a young man whose life seemed to be one long crisis. At twenty-five, Heinrich von Kleist was a restless and troubled writer. The oldest son of a Prussian officer, he had served in the Prussian army, and hated it; started on a university education, and stopped; got engaged, and un-engaged in order (he said) to seek Knowledge, Virtue and Happiness; and worked as a junior official in the Finance Ministry in Berlin, but left to travel. Later, after his Weimar visit, he came to think that acquiring knowledge was impossible. Life was nothing but absurdity and blind chance. Enduring pessimism seized him, a ‘brokenhearted fascination with the depth and unilluminable darkness of the human soul’.40 Unfortunately for his career, this was the force that drove him to write. Fortunately for posterity, he wrote like a dream.

  In 1808, Goethe received a strange, apparently deferential letter from Kleist. ‘Honourable Sir! Esteemed Privy Councillor!’ He enclosed the first issue of his new journal, Pböbus, in which was printed a fragment of his new play, Penthesilea. ‘It is on “the knees of my heart” that I thus appear before you.’ It is the sort of letter that makes a director’s heart sink. It was a fragment, Kleist continued, not yet edited, not yet ready for the stage, but still he hoped for it to be put on, even if no stage would take him seriously and he would have to ‘look toward the future’.

  Beside all that, the play might have been designed to antagonize the great man. His own play, Iphigenia on Tauris, was an expression of classic Hellenism: love, truth, modesty and beauty intertwined. Penthesilea is a figure of demonic lust and rage, a Sturm und Drang figure taken to an extreme of passion. Her enemy, Achilles, is the focus of that passion, and she of his. They are both amok with bloodlust and desire.

  It’s an extreme taken to further extremities. Penthesilea, in traditional terms, lacks a breast. Kleist turns the mutilation into a metaphor that runs through the whole play, remoulding the myth to suit his own purposes. In the climax, Penthesilea kills Achilles, not the other way around. She loves him, but must prove herself superior. She shoots him, then in a fit of passion gores him to death alongside her dogs. The scene is relayed by a priestess in classical mode, not shown on stage for obvious reasons:

  Into his ivory breast she sinks her teeth

  She and her savage dogs in competition

  Oxus and Sphinx chewing into his right breast,

  And she into his left.

  Kleist invented the idea of the ‘invulnerable’ Achilles becoming a victim, but he did not invent this horrific form of death. It derives from a supposed Ancient Greek ritual in which the followers of the wine god Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans) go wild in an orgy of drink and bloodlust, and tear apart an animal and/or a human being in a ritual known as sparagmos (‘tearing apart’). And there was a recent precedent in the way women acted during the French Revolution, portrayed by Friedrich von Schiller – a frequent visitor in Weimar, friend of Goethe, acquaintance of Kleist – as part of a long poem, ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ (‘The Song of the Bell’), written in 1798 and already hugely popular: ‘Then women become hyenas, and make a plaything out of terror – with panther’s teeth they tear out the enemy’s still-twitching heart.’

  The next scene has Penthesilea a catatonic blank, all memory of her act repressed. As consciousness returns, she thinks she has defeated Achilles and is happy. Achilles’s body is on stage under a red carpet. When, in exchanges with her appalled priestesses, she realizes it’s him, she wants to see him, thinking he lives, and will stand and submit after his defeat. Nothing happens. Doubt seizes her. ‘Speak, women, did I strike too close?’ She lifts the carpet, sees the mutilated corpse and demands in horror to know who did this. Her women tell her. She begins to remember, coming out with a line widely reviled for being ludicrous, tasteless or just plain weird. ‘Did I kiss him to death?’ she asks. ‘No? Didn’t kiss him? Really tore him apart?’

  Then comes her explanation. Biting and kissing are easily confused:

  A kiss, a bite,

  The two should rhyme, for one who truly loves

  With all her heart can easily mistake them.41

  When Goethe read it, he was appalled. This was the opposite of everything that was meant by the word ‘feminine’ in the Enlightenment. By nature restrained and polite, his reply to Kleist was about as rude as he ever got. ‘As for Penthesilea, I have not yet been able to warm up to her. She is of so wondrous a race and moves in such an alien region that I shall need time to get accustomed to both.’ Also, he added, it pained him to see a young man of intelligence and talent ‘waiting for a theatre that has yet to come.’ In so many words he said: ‘The theatre is alive and well! It’s your play that’s the problem!’

  Goethe, who recognized Kleist’s literary skills, put on the young man’s play Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug). It was a disaster. The play was supposed to be done with no interval. Goethe divided it into three acts with two intervals. After almost four hours, the audience was catatonic. It seemed to Kleist like a deliberate act of destruction, on top of Goethe’s failure to recognize the genius of Penthesilea. He never forgave him for the double slight.

  And yet Kleist was in some ways ahead of him. Der zerbrochene Krug became an enduring success and is still done today. And Penthesilea foreshadows something that was very much yet to come. Freud, writing a century in the future, might have used the play as a case history. It is like a door into the unconscious, Kleist’s and ours.

  Ours because it is fine raw material for psychological analysis. Love is, after all, a consuming passion. To heighten reality (which he did well in other plays), Kleist makes it literally consuming, and with a very specific target. It is the right breast that Penthesilea lacks, as do all the Amazons on stage, as did their ancestral figure Tanais, who tore off her right breast when founding her nation – or so Kleist has Penthesilea say, though Tanais was a city and a river (the Don), not an Amazonian founder. She goes for Achilles’s left breast.

  A psychoanalyst might continue:

  Penthesilea is an incomplete woman and that drives her to seek completion. The desires and conflicts strip her of adult reactions and turn her into a child, who cannot engage with the other. She vacillates, now feeling all-powerful, now utterly worthless, a conflict that reduces her to silence, even unconsciousness. She sees Achilles not as an individual but as an extension of herself – an extension over which she has no control. She expects him to share her feelings even before meeting him, to understand her aggression as courting, so that when he fells her, her sense of rejection and incomprehension inspires wild rage. As one psychoanalytical paper puts it, ‘Through the course of the play, she regresses to ever more archaic mental and psychic levels, finally and tragically to a level that is pre-verbal, oral, and so primitive that it no longer knows the distinctions of up and down, bite and kiss, self and other.’42 If only she can incorporate Achilles, she will make herself whole again. When she thinks Achilles will be hers, she becomes rapturous:

  Oh, let this heart

  Dive under, like a sullied child, and bathe

  Two minutes in this stream of limpid joy!

  With every stroke beneath its bounteous waves

  A blemish from my breast is washed away.

  Achilles, too, is reduced to childishness by his passion. In one scene, when he thinks he has killed Penthesilea, he is so appalled that he throws off his armour, makes himself vulnerable and so virtually guarantees his own death.

  The play also casts a light on Kleist’s unconscious. He had a very odd attitude towards women, indeed towards gender generally, his own included. He didn’t much like women. Yes, as a product of the Enlightenment he accepted they were supposed to exercise restraint over men by being gentle and submissive, but: ‘Their demands for decency and morality destroy the whole nature of the drama.’ In a word, he was conflicted, especially about his sister Ulrike, who liked to dress as a man, and whom he thought as coolheaded as a man, while he himself was a prey to intense ‘feminine’ emotions. He envied h
er, and disapproved of her at the same time. ‘Amphibian,’ he asked of her in a new year’s wish for 1800, ‘you who inhabit two elements always, waiver no longer, choose a definite gender at last.’

  He suffered from similar ambiguities, as he made explicit in a letter to his friend Ernst von Pfuel, future Prussian general, war minister and prime minister. The two were old friends from their army days. Pfuel was a good swimmer. In 1802–3, Kleist was living on an island, now named after him, in the River Aare, Switzerland, writing his first plays. Pfuel came to visit and the two went swimming in Lake Thun. Three years later, with Europe convulsed by the Napoleonic Wars, Kleist wrote to him, recalling that happy time:

  Why can I no longer venerate you, whom I still love above all, as my master? How we rushed into one another’s arms a year ago in Dresden! What we loved in one another then were the highest qualities of mankind . . . We felt – or at least I did – the délightful enthusiasm of friendship! You brought back the times of ancient Greece to my heart, I could have slept with you, dear boy; thus all my soul embraces you. Often, as you rose before my eyes in the Lake of Thun, I would gaze at your beautiful body with truly girlish feelings . . . Were I an artist, it might perhaps have inspired me with an idea for a god. Your small, curly head set on a sturdy neck, two wide shoulders, a sinewy body: the whole a model of strength, as though you had been designed after the fairest young bull ever sacrificed to Zeus. All the laws of Lycurgus, as well as his concept of the love of youths, have become clear to me through the feelings you awakened in me. Come to me! . . . I will never marry, be a wife, children and grandchildren to me.

  Was this a recollection of a gay affair? Many think so. Lycurgus was the legendary founder of Sparta, who not only established the system of young men training together, but also laid down many other laws on which Sparta rose to dominance. Sex seems to be explicit. If it’s not, it was surely in Kleist’s mind as a possibility, a thought – a wish – a memory that lay behind the conflicts revealed in Penthesilea.

  Goethe, the poet, knew Kleist was wonderful with language. Penthesilea is certainly brilliantly poetic. But as a play? He could not see it. You can have violence and gore, but it ‘verges on comedy’, he said to a friend, to have a one-breasted heroine on stage assuring the audience that her female feelings are not diminished, because they have all been focused into the other breast. This is really not funny, but he had a point: as theatre, it’s very hard to take seriously. Most modern directors, actors and producers agree. It’s much studied, but hardly ever put on.

  Kleist never heard about Goethe’s private opinion. He was dead before it saw the light of day. After the quarrel with Goethe, there followed three years of intense creativity – a collection of short stories and several plays, which made him a reputation and would eventually ensure him a place as one of Germany’s finest writers. But Kleist, now aged thirty-three, had convinced himself that death was the only answer to the miseries of his life. He contacted a friend, Henriette Vogel, who had terminal cancer and knew she had not long to live. This is what happened next, as reported by the London Times:

  Madame Vogel, it is said, had suffered long under an incurable disorder; her physicians had declared her death inevitable; she herself formed a resolution to put a period to her existence. M. Kleist, the poet, and a friend of her family, had also long determined to kill himself. These two unhappy beings having confidentially communicated to each other their horrible resolution, resolved to carry it into effect at the same time. They repaired to the Inn at Wilhelmstadt, between Berlin and Potsdam, on the border of the Sacred Lake [Kleiner Wannsee]. For one night and one day they were preparing themselves for death, by putting up prayers, singing, drinking a number of bottles of wine and rum, and last of all by taking about sixteen cups of coffee. They wrote a letter to M. Vogel [Henriette’s father], to announce to him the resolution they had taken, and to beg him to come as speedily as possible, for the purpose of seeing their remains interred. The letter was sent to Berlin by express. This done, they repaired to the banks of the Sacred Lake, where they sat down opposite to each other. M. Kleist took a loaded pistol, and shot Madame Vogel through the heart, who fell back dead; he then re-loaded the pistol, and shot himself through the head.

  Today, nearby, in a pretty grove of ivy-covered trees, an austere block of stone is their memorial. You can hire headphones to hear the story of what happened.

  34 Given that the sources were Roman (both classical and recent), writers then and now favour the Roman version of his name.

  35 Histoire des Amazones anciennes et modernes, Paris, 1740.

  36 Obituary of Anne-Marie du Boccage, Monthly Magazine and British Register, 1 October 1804.

  37 Monthly Magazine and British Register, 1 October 1804.

  38 The phenomenon of copycat suicides is now termed the ‘Werther Effect’. Copycat suicides are a reality. How real the original Werther Effect was is unknown. It may all have been rumour.

  39 Here is George Steiner summarizing Goethe’s genius in a review of the second volume of Nicholas Boyle’s masterly biography: ‘Often Goethe dictated in a week what would constitute very nearly the collected writings of lesser spirits. He did so while travelling, while helping to govern a duchy, while directing its theatre and opera, investigating its agricultural and mineral resources, accompanying its ruler to war, begetting a family and entering on erotic relationships almost each of which generated poetry of a classic force.’

  40 Joel Agee in the introduction to his translation of Penthesilea, from which the quotes in this chapter are taken.

  41 It works better in German, but not much: Küsse, Bisse, das reimt sich.

  42 Ursula Mahlendorf, ‘The Wounded Self’. See Bibliography.

  10

  THE AMAZONS OF ‘BLACK SPARTA’

  FROM ALL THE LEGENDARY NONSENSE, A LITTLE SENSE emerges. Yes, there were many individual Amazons, warrior women who fought with their men, and sometimes led them. No, there was never anywhere a nation of Amazons. But there was once a regiment of women warriors, some 6,000 of them. For 150 years, they served the king of the West African state of Dahomey, in today’s Benin. Locally, they were abosi, the ‘king’s wives’, but when European explorers came across these tough, disciplined, brave and extremely scary fighters in the 1840s, they drew on their own traditions and called them Amazons. The name is spurious, imposed by English and French imperialists, but it stuck. Today, everyone refers to them as Amazons, including the museum in Abomey, Dahomey’s former capital.

  The regiment is interesting enough. Even more intriguing is the way these Amazons reflected the role of women in Dahomean society. They formed a shadow administration, in which women were doubles of the male officials, looking over their shoulders, checking up on what they were doing, providing solid foundations for a fiercely militaristic kingdom – a ‘black Sparta’ as it has been called – that would otherwise have been as unstable as most others in an unstable continent. This system, unmatched before or since, vanished in 1892, blown into oblivion by French guns.

  The origins of Dahomey’s Amazons were in the eighteenth century, in pre-literate times, when every ruler, petty or powerful, rivalled every other in the capture of slaves and their delivery to European coastal forts for the stinking and often fatal voyage to the Americas. Dahomey, the nationstate of the Fon people, rose to power after conquering two lesser kingdoms in the 1720s. Other kingdoms had armed female guards at their courts, but the Dahomean king, Agaja, put together a unique force. Since he would allow no men to sleep within the walls of his palace in the capital, Abomey, he had to rely on women, plus a few eunuchs. In 1772, an English trader, Robert Norris, noted that the palace guard house had forty women armed with muskets and cutlasses. By the end of the century, there were several hundred women bodyguards. Sometimes they fought, especially in disputes over the succession. Norris recorded 285 women killed after the death of a king in 1774. Another visitor, Archibald Dalzel, said 595 of them were killed after the next royal death f
ifteen years later.

  It was Dahomey’s ninth king, Gezo (1818–58), who turned his female guards into soldiers. He was eager to resist adjacent states, in particular to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the rival Oyo empire of the Yoruba people in neighbouring Nigeria. Also he was preparing to oppose the British-led campaign to end the slave trade on which his economy depended. He could do with all the warriors he could get. In 1845, a Scottish explorer, John Duncan, watched the annual display of military might which included (he estimated) 6–8,000 women, who had fought against Mahi, a rival kingdom to the north (the Mahi are still an important group in central Benin). Five years later, a naval officer, Frederick Forbes, said that there were 5,000 women – out of a total force of 12,000 – and that they had fought against Atakpamé, a mini-state to the west (now a city in Togo).