Illness and health as strategies of resistance and identity formation in the letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz.

In her extensive correspondence, Liselotte von der Pfalz provided vivid and blunt descriptions of the court of Louis XIV. The article investigates how Liselotte employs "illness" and "health" as metaphors both of resistance to the court's exploitation of the royal consort and the development of an identity apart from the French court. On the one hand, health allowed Liselotte to define herself as different from the French court, i.e., healthy and German. On the other hand, illness, in the shape of melancholy, became the very reason for Liselotte's literary creativity. Through writing about her melancholy, Liselotte was able to create an analysis of her role at the French court. (KB)

Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess d'Orleans (1652-1722), more commonly known as Liselotte von der Pfalz, has often been called a dissident voice at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King (Brandes 53). A pawn in her father's ambitious political plans, she found herself married against her own convictions (1) to the brother of the Sun King. As Madame, Duchess d'Orleans, she was second in rank only to the queen of France. In spite of her rank and the nobility of her birth, Liselotte--as woman, foreigner, and outsider--was increasingly excluded from decision making at the court. Bitter and disappointed, she retreated, physically into her private quarters and mentally into melancholia. This separation from court enabled the German princess to create a body of about 60,000 letters, of which 5,000 have survived. (2)

The letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz abound with both descriptions of her robust physical health and complaints of melancholy. In these carefully crafted artifacts, Liselotte employed the rhetoric of health and illness to develop subjectivity and exert authority in the Franco-German discourse she sought to shape. One the one hand, the letters elevate the maintenance of health to a strategy of survival at a court hostile to her. On the other hand, representing herself as melancholic allows Liselotte to articulate her alienation, and, ultimately, to develop her artistic creativity.

By accentuating her excellent physical health, Liselotte defined herself as different from her French relatives, i.e., healthy and German. She argued that, based on her physical superiority, she had no need for French physicians and remedies. This strategy allowed her to maintain a certain distance from the court and its medical representatives. Her insistence on being robust and strong can be seen as a strategy of cultural resistance to the rarefied court of Louis XIV that viewed her as culturally inferior and expendable.

Despite Liselotte's self-representation as healthy, she fell ill from time to time. She ascribed the symptoms of her various ailments to the melancholia she had been experiencing since coming to France in 1672. For Liselotte, physical and mental health were intimately related, and she remained convinced that the anguish inflicted on her by court intrigue and the devastation of her native Palatinate through French soldiers in 1674 and 1689 manifested itself in the fevers she experienced.

Employing a discourse of melancholia in her letters served several purposes for Liselotte. To begin with, it allowed her to maintain claims of physical superiority over her French relatives. Indeed, she made her extended stay in France responsible for any sickness she experienced. Secondly, it enabled her to portray her various bouts of illness as evidence of the wretched life she led at the French court. In this context, melancholia serves as a metaphor of displacement and exile that draws attention to her alienation from the French court, in particular after 1680. In addition, it offered a way to display her dissatisfaction with her position at court and to participate in ongoing discourses that questioned the stratification of power at the court of Louis XIV. Finally, with this strategy she was able to retreat from some of the expected representational functions of the French court to the "private," (3) intimate, and, above all, "German" counter-world of her letters. Melancholy comes to serve as the very reason for writing and artistic creation.

The discourse on health and pathology in Liselotte's letters must be viewed both as an actual description of her physical condition and as a cultural paradigm that enabled her to develop subjectivity as a woman and as a writer. A close reading of these letters shows that she used both her melancholia and her robust physical health to draw attention to her role as the unwelcome foreign consort.