Racial and National Identity

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Victor Hugo and Heinrich von Kleist pose the question of an individual's shaky sense of racial, national and personal identity in both the texts of "Burg-Jargal" and "Michael Kohlhaas". It looks at how the authors trace notions of personal identity directly to societal causes, influences and forms of societal oppression, but identity is always something immutable and true in the minds of their main characters. It evaluates how rather than psychological explanation being the key to either novel, the notion of identity emerges as a kind of litmus test for the relative justice of a particular element society.

From the Paper:

"Burg-Jargal by Victor Hugo deals with the Haitian Revolution of the author's day. Thus, it may, on the surface, seem quite separate from issues of identity that would plague the French author. However, this also means that identity plays a crucial element in the text, for in any revolution of independence, what constitutes the nature of independence and of national identity is called into question. Hugo uses the events that transpire to show the hypocrisy of a society based on slavery that ignores the needs of its ordinary people because of their race. The love that the slave Pierrot feels for Marie becomes a symbol of a world that is split between slave and free. Identity becomes related to one's physical and social status in an unjust way, in a way that even love cannot fully extricate."

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