Die Verlobung in St. Domingo
process of moralizing skin colour is fundamentally incorrect. 9 Gustav, as we have seen, trusts Babekan based on her mulatto identity yet misses clear clues as to her vengeful motivation, as exemplified in his response to the bitterness of her story of physical and emotional shaming by white men simply with ‘Verlegenheit’ (13). The opposite is true with Toni, who, given her ‘dangerous’ mestiza identity, he doubts at the first sign of uncertainty – namely her apparent betrayal of Gustav to Hoango and Babekan – and kills, despite her remaining ‘der treuen Toni’ (42) . Thus, in deconstructing this notion of ‘scientific’ aesthetic -moral racism, Kleist undermines a key logical tenet in the hierarchy of colonial attitude and provides a seemingly robust critique of European colonialism. Thus far, we have focussed primarily on the portrayal of the colonizer, yet for a fuller picture of Die Verlobung ’s critique of colonialism, we must take a closer look at the portrayal of the colonized. Ostensibly, as we have seen, the text takes a dismissively prejudiced reading of the black colonized population, with Susanne Kord even asserting that the stratified portrayal of ‘moral’ race represents ‘the text’s inability to perceive blacks as humans’ . 10 While this may apply to the narrator and Gustav’s appreciation of race, her labelling this as the dominant notion within the text as a whole is limited. Indeed, it seems rather that Die Verlobung emphasizes the universality of humanity in its ambivalent portrayal of the flaws and ugly tenets to the parallel attitudes of colonizer and colonized. Michael Perraudin favours an amoral reading to see the psychological and social likenesses that seem to anchor our understating of a universal humanity within the characters. 11 Likenesses between colonizer and colonized are manifested, for examp le, in a ‘capacity for warlike ferocity, in the urge for personal dominion and control, also in the creation of family ties and structures’. 12 This sense of need for ‘personal dominion and control’ is paralleled even between the most oppositional figures, as Hoango instils utter loyalty in Babekan to himself, as she frequently bases actions ‘seinem Befehl gemäß’ (24), while Gustav uses physical and dialectical manipulation to instil the same in Toni, as she would ‘eher zehnfachen Todes sterben’ (23) than le tting him be harmed. Although Perraudin asserts an amoral reading, an exploration of the moral systems themselves of both groups reveals further similarities. One sees this remarkable equivalence, for example, in the imposition of moral systems over others, as both Babekan and Gustav’s immediately vitriolic association of Toni’s apparently being a racial ‘Verräterin’ (38) with a sexual promiscuity – as Babekan calls her a ‘Spitzbübin’ (30), and Gustav, after shooting her, deplores Toni as a ‘Hure’ (39) – su ggests. Toni’s rapid switch from the colonized moral system to that of the colonizer, as suggested by her calling Babekan’s machinations ‘schändlich und niederträchtig’ (22) before later declaring ‘ich bin eine Weiße’(27) , further suggests their paradoxical symmetry. 13 Kleist has thus neither asserted white/colonizing violence and moral systems over black/colonized as the narrator does, nor vice versa, as Peter Horn does. 14 Yet, it is in the very equivalence of psychologies and social (and to an extent moral) systems, that Kleist offers a radical critique of the stratifications and hierarchies of colonialism and colonial attitude.
9 For further discussion, as well as detail on the influential discussion of Kant’s aesthetics, see: Zantop, p. 203 -204. 10 Kord, p. 105. 11 Perraudin, pp. 102-103.
12 ibid. pp. 100-101. 13 ibid. pp. 101-102. 14 Peter Horn, as quoted in Perraudin, p. 85-86.
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