Evil Always Awaits: The Black Spider
While I was reviewing a book entry in the catalog of the New York Public Library, the platform displayed a short list of suggested titles drawn from subject headings and other metadata. Curious to learn if this feature had surmised my reading habits, I scanned the displayed cover images of the various books. One title immediately caught my attention: The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf.
First published in 1842 in Switzerland, The Black Spider begins with a joyous family event–the christening of a newborn–in a rural valley hamlet. After a sumptuous meal celebrating the ceremony, a guest notices an ancient blackened piece of wood incorporated into a new window frame. Questioned about this peculiar choice of a building material, the grandfather reluctantly shares a story of cruelty, desperation, and evil.
Six hundred prior to the novel’s opening narrative, the peasants of the valley lived under the despotic rule of a group of Teutonic Knights. The feudal lord orders the serfs to complete an impossible task in a short period of time: they must transplant beech trees from a distant mountain and replant them on his estate to create an avenue of shade trees for his and his fellow knights pleasure. This occurs amid the harvest season, ensuring even further hardship among the peasants and their families.
While attempting to move the initial batch of trees, the villagers encounter a hunter promising assistance in their task and guaranteeing its speedy conclusion. As payment, he asks for an unbaptized child. Everyone realizes that the hunter is no man: he is the Devil himself. Eventually, the pact is settled through the bargaining of a farmer’s wife, Christine, a native from a neighboring valley. The peasants’ attempt to hoodwink the Devil ignite a cycle of devastation and death–the details of which are best left for readers themselves to encounter and absorb. An allegorical novel in the purest sense, The Black Spider offers a clear warning for our forgetful world: evil always awaits and it always return.
Author Jeremias Gotthelf was the nom de plume of Swiss educational reformer and pastor, Albert Bitzius (1797-1854). Bitzius adopted the name of the titular character of his first novel, The Peasants’ Mirror; or The Life History of Jeremias Gotthelf, for his writing life. Gotthelf’s fiction largely explores the tension between traditional agricultural life and the ascendant industrial revolution and it captures the culture and geography of a fading rural landscape. These moralistic works–his peasant novels–made Gotthelf one of the more popular and higher earning authors in the German-speaking world. Today, The Black Spider stands as Gotthelf’s most read and influential tale, but it remained overlooked by critics and scholars until the twentieth century. Since its rediscovery, composers, dramatists, and filmmakers have adapted it for their respective mediums. Unfortunately, the recent cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts guarantees that the fewer works such as The Black Spider will be translated for American audiences.
With Halloween drawing ever near, many a reader is building a menu of books and films to nourish their own personal spooky season. The Black Spider promises a satisfying, yet unsettling meal for the imagination. When closing this book’s cover, one might wonder and worry when the Devil will appear before them. As the novel’s contemporary translator Susan Bernofsky reflected, The Black Spider “makes it hard for you to push aside your terror.”