SOURCE: Keller, R. E. “Language and Style in Jeremias Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne.” German Life and Letters 10 (1956): 2-13.

In the following essay, Keller provides an analysis of “The Black Spider,” focusing on Gotthelf's use of language and metaphor in the story.

It is the use of dialect which has denied Gotthelf's work the international recognition as great epic writing which the profundity of his thought and his broad, creative understanding of human life and behaviour would undoubtedly have assured. In his native Switzerland it is his language in particular which has endeared Gotthelf to a wide public—not because his work is written in dialect, as is sometimes believed, for it is not, and in spite of the fact that mixing dialect with standard as Gotthelf does is otherwise generally condemned and ridiculed.¹ That Gotthelf's language is, paradoxically, nevertheless one of the main reasons for his rising fame...