The Black Spider

A great favourite of Thomas Mann's, The Black Spider (1842) is, on the surface, an allegory of the mediaeval plague as divine punishment through the instrument of toxic femininity. Its author was Albert Bitzius, a Swiss pastor who attained literary success under the prophetic pen-name Jeremias Gotthelf, which was also the name of his first novel's protagonist. Intended as one episode in an extensive Balzacian tapestry of which only a few parts were eventually completed, The Black Spider was less popular in its time than the author's many novels of peasant life.

In fact, the novella opens with a bucolic idyll surrounding a christening ceremony, which introduces the major motif of baptism. Gotthelf came of reduced patrician stock, and depicts his prosperous contemporary peasants with amused contempt (the godmother hasn't been told the baby's name; she may have to whisper it to the priest, and she isn't allowed to ask anyone - oh, what larks); but the bulk of the story, related by one of the older men between courses at the celebration feast, is told in deadly earnest. It treats of a bargain with the devil, undertaken in mediaeval days when the Lord's mercy placed a proud and brutal landlord over the community. In accordance with Christian ideas of truth, the landlord is given the name of a real historical figure whose generous reputation earned him a memorial stained-glass window in the local church.

Disaster is visited upon two separate generations through the actions of two venerable Christian hate-figures: a disobedient woman and a weak man who lets women rule over him. In the first case, which takes up most of the story, the devil offers to aid the peasants in the impossible task their overlord has set them; the men equivocate, but the outsider and virago Christine completes the bargain, which the fiend seals with a peck on her cheek. When the community tries to avoid paying over the agreed fee of an unbaptised child, Christine develops a stinging facial blemish which eventually grows into a malignant black spider. A pseudo-baptism with holy water causes her to become completely absorbed into the monster, which roams the district delivering painful death to master and peasant alike until defeated by the willing self-sacrifice of a pious priest and a virtuous mother.

Like many actions which in other contexts might be considered indiscreet, human sacrifice is virtuous enough when conducted in the proper spirit; and these two agonised deaths propitiate the Almighty enough that He allows the community to prosper a while, although His infinite wisdom does not stretch to dispensing sufficient grace to resist for long the temptations of worldly wealth. Eventually the imprisoned spider is released for another rampage, which is ended only by the sacrifice of Christine's mirror image, a gentle but ineffectual male. Though fatal, Christen's punishment is noticeably milder than those of the foreign shrew and her fellow harridans. Finally the storyteller returns to the post-christening party, where he reveals that the spider is still imprisoned in the house, ready to be loosed upon the district whenever people forget their place.

If the readability of The Black Spider has worn rather well into the present, that may be partly because the misogynistic piety on display can be attributed to its elderly peasant narrator, and thus viewed with the same patronising irony that marks the opening section. A sterner and presumably unintended irony emerges in the concluding sentence, which undercuts the storyteller's moralising with a reminder of Who it was that gave the monster strength while depriving human beings of the power to resist it.