“The Beggarwoman of Locarno” (original: “Das Bettelweib von Locarno”) was written by Heinrich von Kleist and first appeared in Berliner Abendblätter (Oct. 11, 1810). Kleist (1777-1811) was a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and is an important figure in the German Romantic movement.

There used to be a castle near the city of Locarno, at the foot of the Alps in northern Italy. In the story’s present it is in ruins, but years ago it was a magnificent structure owned by a Marquis. One day a sick old woman came begging at the door of the castle, and the Marquise, the mistress of the house, taking pity on her, made a bed of straw for her. When the Marquis returned from hunting he was in a bad mood, and when he found the old woman in the room he told her to move from the corner in which she lay to a place behind the stove. As the woman stood she slipped on the polished floor; the fall so badly injured her spine that she was only able to rise again with an immense effort, and she died, groaning and sighing, as soon as she lay down behind the stove. Years later, after wars and bad harvests had reduced the Marquis’ fortune, a knight came to the castle, interested in buying it. But when the knight stayed in the unoccupied room where the old woman had died, he had a bad experience and told the Marquis and his wife that the room was haunted: “something invisible to the eye, he said, had got up from the corner with a rustling sound, as if from a bed of straw, audibly crossed the room with slow and feeble steps, and collapsed, groaning and sighing, behind the stove.”¹ The knight stayed the rest of the night in a chair in the Marquis’ bedroom and left the following morning. Others heard of this incident and refused to consider buying the castle, and soon enough even the servants in the castle whispered that a ghost walked the room at midnight. The Marquis stayed the night in the room and heard the same noises that the knight had. The next evening the Marquis and his wife and a faithful servant decided to stay in the room together, to find the source of the noise. They took a watchdog with them. They heard the noise at midnight, as usual; the dog backed away as if something was walking toward it, the Marquise fled from the room, and the Marquis grabbed his sword and slashed the air in all directions, shouting “Who’s there?” The Marquise took a coach from the castle, and on her way to town saw the castle go up in flames. The Marquis, “unhinged by his terror, weary of his life, had taken a candle and set the place, paneled throughout with wood, alight at all four corners.”² The Marquis died in the fire, and the castle was ruined. “His white bones, gathered together by the country people, still lie in the corner of the room from which he had told the beggarwoman of Locarno to get up.”³

“The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is in some ways a straightforward ghost story and standard tale of supernatural vengeance: the beggarwoman, treated badly by the Marquis, haunts him and drives him mad. But the story, which was beloved by E.T.A. Hoffmann (see: “Mademoiselle de Scudéry,” “The Sandman”) and highly praised by Thomas Mann, is interesting not just for the droll and understated way in which Kleist tells the story but also for the underlying morality of the story. Most stories of supernatural revenge have roughly balanced moral scales–that is, is, the punishment generally fits the crime. This is not always the case, of course; the revenge in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Eveline’s Visitant” is hardly balanced or just. But usually, in stories of supernatural revenge, there is a proportion to the revenge. In the case of “Locarno,” however, there is not, and in fact is wildly disproportionate. The Marquis was rude and disrespectful to the beggarwoman, but her death was an accident. Her response, as a ghost, was to hound him to insanity and death.

More broadly, as Lilian R. Furst writes, “In The Beggarwoman of Locarno Kleist has taken the trite features of a ghost story, and instilled into them an entirely new dimension. The physical phenomenon of the haunting has been invested with a moral, indeed metaphysical undercurrent.”⁴ The “moral, indeed metaphysical” element is the extremity of the beggarwoman’s retaliation against the Marquis; but beyond that, the ambiguity of the physical descriptions—“near Locarno”—and the inexplicability of characters’ motivations—why does the Marquis order the beggarwoman to move?—leave “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” as a radically incomplete story, one with unfilled and unfillable gaps. Kleist tells the story in laconic and understated fashion, similar to the horror works and kunstmärchen of his German contemporaries, but “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is no fairy tale. It can be described as a Gothic story, but its ambiguities and gaps in description and motivation are not aspects of the Gothic. No, “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is sui generis for its time period and anticipates the twentieth century approach to telling horror stories.

Print: Heinrich von Kleist and David Constantine, Selected Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001903385 (in German; there are no English translations of “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” available online).

¹ Heinrich von Kleist and David Constantine, “The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” in Heinrich von Kleist and David Constantine, Selected Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 351.

² Kleist and Constantine, “The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” 353.

³ Kleist and Constantine, “The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” 353.

⁴ Lilian R. Furst, “Begging an Answer: Kleist’s The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” in Raymond Adolph Prier, ed., Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1992), 111.