7 - “Die Marquise von O…”: The Marriage Contract

Summary

Hermann Davidts Has Correctly Observed that three separate threads run throughout the story of “Die Marquise von O…”: the story of the Marquise’s pregnancy (which is told in the manner of a detective story with an unknown perpetrator whose identity is revealed in the course of the narration), the issue of Graf F…’s proposal of marriage, and the conflict within the Kommandant’s family, which centers on the question of the Marquise’s relationship to her father (NK, 63). Each of these narrative threads is expressly linked to a form of writing that, as writing, registers the disturbed nature of communication in the story. Thus in the first instance, the Marquise advertises the mysterious circumstances of her pregnancy in the local newspaper at the outset of the story in quest of the child’s father; in the second instance, the Graf F … must resort to despatching letters to the Marquise when his proposal of marriage is not directly answered and then must renounce all conventional conjugal rights to his spouse when he signs the contract of marriage at the end of the story; finally, the emblem of the Kommandant’s disturbed relationship with his daughter is the dictated letter by which he, upon learning of her pregnancy, instructs the Marquise to leave the parental home. The story is therefore fashioned around these three narrative threads and the written forms of communication that characterize them: respectively the newspaper advertisement, the marriage contract, and the dictated letter. What this written communication signifies is that each relationship is subject to a process of testing. The Marquise, for example, observes of Graf F…’s proposal of marriage, “es tut mir leid, daß meine Dankbarkeit auf eine so harte Probe gestellt wird” (2:117), and her communication with her society via the newspaper advertisement indicates the extent to which her reputation as “eine Dame von vortrefflichem Ruf’ (2:104) is threatened. Similarly, Graf F…’s signing of the marriage contract is but further testimony of his feelings for the Marquise and in fact merely preliminary to a lengthy demonstration of exemplary behavior undertaken in atonement for his original transgression against her. Even the doctor who examines the Marquise must retort, “daß er seine Aussage vor Gericht beschworen könne” (2:120). Thus written forms of communication in “Die Marquise von O…