by John Man
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.fn8
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.’fn9 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 her, 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 delightful 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 be
g 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.
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 ahosi, 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 nation-state 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 fifteen 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).
There was never any doubting how formidable these women were. They formed teams of hunters known as gbeto, and would eagerly attack elephants and crocodiles (some wore caps with a crocodile logo to prove their success). ‘Their appearance is more martial than the generality of the men,’ wrote John Duncan. ‘If undertaking a campaign, I should prefer the females to the male soldiers.’ In the opinion of a naval office, Arthur Wilmott: ‘They are far superior to the men in everything – in appearance, in dress, in figure, in activity, in their performance as soldiers, and in bravery.’ The men fired their muskets wildly from the hip, and reloaded on average in fifty seconds; the women fired from the shoulder and took thirty seconds to reload.
They could not, however, guarantee victory in warfare. In 1851, 6,000 women, with another 10,000 men, attacked Abeokuta, in today’s south-west Nigeria. They lost, disastrously, and this became the defeat that had to be avenged. A story told later in Abeokuta claimed that the use of women warriors helped the defenders, because when they attempted to castrate one of their attackers, they discovered they were fighting women and were so ashamed by the possibility of defeat by women that they redoubled their efforts and won a stunning victory. According to the disputed estimates, Dahomey’s Amazons lost 2,000 in that battle.
The most vivid portrait of these warrior women came from that most colourful of Victorian personalities, Richard Burton. Into his forty years he had already crammed lifetimes of adventure, travel and scholarship. A youth spent back and forth in France and Italy, with various tutors, taught him French, Italian, Neapolitan, Latin and also (rumour had it) Romany, the result of a love-affair with a gypsy. A genius at languages, he was an outsider, with broad interests and little respect for convention. At Oxford he studied Arabic, took up fencing and falconry, and got expelled for attending a steeplechase, which was against college rules. Fit for nothing but to be shot at (as he said), he joined the East India Company and was posted to Gujarat, where he learned another six Indian languages – Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Marathi and Persian – seven if you count Saraiki as a language rather than a dialect of Punjabi. Never had any outsider gone quite so native.
Turning his dark, smouldering good looks and bushy, drooping moustache to advantage, Burton took on the persona of a Persian named Mirza Abdullah and was put to undercover work. His research included the brothels of Karachi, which employed boy prostitutes, a subject on which he wrote in rather too much detail for some. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was given leave to go on the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – in disguise, of course, because if discovered he risked death. He prepared by having himself circumcised. Claiming to be a Pashtun to explain his accent, he displayed a convincing knowledge of Islamic traditions, kept meticulous notes and survived to tell the tale, which, when published, made him famous.
Back with the political department of the East India Company and supported by the Royal Geographical Society, he headed into the East African interior – becoming the first European to enter Harar in Ethiopia – an expedition that ended in an attack by Somalis, which left one member dead, the co-leader John Hanning Speke severely wounded and Burton with a spear through his cheek. More books followed. A later expedition with Speke was supposed to check out the possibilities for trade, but a hidden agenda was to find the source of the Nile, which had become one of the greatest issues of the day. Many diseases later, they found Lake Tanganyika. Burton was too ill to continue and Speke, half blind, went on without him, to find Lake Victoria, which is very nearly the Nile’s source. Back in London, claim and counter-claim led to a violent quarrel between the two. They were in the midst of arguing the matter in public when Speke walked out. Later that day he went hunting and in a bizarre accident, never properly explained, apparently shot himself while climbing a stile. Later expeditions under Grant, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley would confirm the Nile’s real source, ending the second greatest controversy of the century, at least in England (the greatest being the one swirling around Darwin’s Origin of Species).
Meanwhile, Burton, eager for a post that would allow for his scholarly interests, had been appointed consul in West Africa, based in Port Clarence on the island of Fernando Po. He arrived at a crucial moment. For over 200 years, the West African coast had been both a treasure trove and a malarial death-trap for slavers. In the words of a well-known couplet:
Beware and tak
e heed of the Bight of Benin,
Where few go out and many go in.
Though ships still slipped through to Cuba and Brazil, the trade was virtually over, thanks to the British navy. Coastal forts were closing, the interior opening, turning West Africa, indeed all Africa, into a free-for-all. Europeans and others – French, Dutch, English, Spanish, Brazilians – were beginning what would later be called the Scramble for Africa, carving up tribes and cultures and ecologies with lines on empty maps. No one knew much about the interior, but as quinine brought relief to the scourge of malaria, explorers began to trace the great rivers, traders sought new products and missionaries dreamed of converts by the uncounted million, all of these elements dragging government in their wake. In West Africa, with kings determined to control the coast, returned slaves threatening upheaval and middlemen wanting their cut of exports – in particular of palm oil – European nations, Britain being the main one, sought to impose law and order.
Dahomey, though, was not easily reached. Quite a few had been there – missionaries, naval officers, consuls, traders – most trying to get King Gezo on side. These efforts had achieved little when Gezo was killed by a Yoruba sniper in 1858. In 1860, with a new king, Glele, in place, events took an uglier turn. From Lagos the consul and the Church Missionary Society reported that Dahomey was about to attack Abeokuta again. That would ruin decades of trade and missionary work. The government considered sending in troops, then reconsidered, and annexed Lagos. The Foreign Office decided on diplomacy. They sent a naval mission to Abomey to persuade King Glele to sign a treaty: slavery should stop, human sacrifices should stop, there should be peace with Abeokuta. To these demands Glele said no, no and no. Foreigners could not just come in and change centuries of tradition; his country had been invaded four times by Oyo. The navy, with better things to do than argue the British case, withdrew.