Suffering, silence, and the female voice in German fiction around 1800.

I investigate the link between the silence, self-expression, and illness of female characters in five German novels in the context of medical writing. Is the frequent reticence of sickly heroines a rejection of language in favor of a more authentic, physical means of expression, or should it be read as a patriarchal silencing of the female voice? And what of the verbal and written outpourings of emotion to which the wasting heroine is also given? I conclude that while the majority of the novels reinforce a traditional understanding of women's relationship to language, in her novel Luise (1796) Therese Huber puts forward an unconventional view. (AR)

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To be silent, modern feminist criticism has taught us, is not necessarily to withhold communication. If, in the past, women have had their voices suppressed, ignored, or belittled, they have also chosen to say nothing as a means of expression or a strategy for resistance. Feminist literary critics have read the gaps and absences in texts by women or the reticence of their female characters as a protest against patriarchal language, as a sign of integrity, or as the expression of an "alternative" truth. (1) Such recognition of the potentially positive value of silence has been tempered, however, by timely reminders from critics such as Elaine Showalter and Susan Bordo of the patriarchal origin of its association with the female sex. Bordo asks us not to forget that, although it may express a protest, "at the same time.... muteness is the condition of the silent, uncomplaining woman--an ideal of patriarchal culture" (99). Showalter insists that, in the past, women "have been forced into silence" rather than choosing it freely, and that the blanks and holes in texts are therefore "not the spaces where female consciousness reveals itself, but the blinds of a `prison-house of language'" (255-56).

Both collusion and resistance, a symptom of gender stereotyping and the expression of a female point of view in a patriarchal world: feminist theorists' evaluation of women's silence has much in common with recent debates about that other historical phenomenon often associated with the female sex, illness. The work of medical historians such as Esther Fischer-Homberger, Claudia Honegger, and Lorna Duffin has illuminated the ways in which patriarchal society, particularly from the late eighteenth century onwards, has "pathologized" the female sex. First, they argue, "healthy" female physiological processes and states, because different from male, have been judged deviant. Second, the restrictive conditions, both physical and psychological, imposed on women have promoted a higher incidence of actual illness among them. Just as they have reclaimed the silence imposed on women as an expression of protest, however, feminist critics have suggested that women's illness could also be a way to resist a traditionally female role, by allowing women to escape duties such as housework and childbirth, for example. Literary critics such as Birgit Wagenbaur and Lilo Weber have interpreted the representation of women's illness in the fiction of German authors, including Fanny Tarnow (1779-1862) and Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), in this way.

Female silence and female sickness are often found together in literary and medical texts. Ill women, that is, often stop speaking, and reticent women often become ill. Critical opinion on the link between the two, as on each separately, has been divided. On the one hand, Bordo suggests that the loss of voice that has often accompanied women's nervous diseases testifies to the female body's inscription with patriarchy's "ideological construction of femininity" (93). In The Gendering of Melancholia (1992), a psychoanalytical feminist study of literary representations of grief in the Renaissance period, Juliana Scheisari similarly interprets the fact that sickness lends eloquence to male characters, but typically silences female characters (15) as a symptomatic of patriarchy's privileging of male creativity and suppression of the female voice (7-8). Other feminist critics view the link more positively, however, arguing that silence and illness are often found together because women use physical symptoms to express that which lies outside the symbolic linguistic order. They have argued that Freud's often mute hysterical patients, for example, reject language in favor of a more authentic, corporeal means of communication. (2)

In this essay, I want to investigate the nature of the link between the silence, the self-expression, and the illness of female literary characters in five German novels from around 1800, by both male and female authors. What effect does illness have on the female voice, and vice versa? The feminist theories discussed above will be important in my analysis, but it will become clear that an examination of the literary texts in the light of medical and popular thinking on women of the time offers the most insight into the significance of the heroines' speaking or their silence. I therefore draw extensively on medical history, on medical works, and on popular writing on women from the period. In the main part of my essay, I deal with four texts that, although very different, all put forward a largely conventional view of women: Johann Martin Miller's Siegwart: Eine Klostergeschichte (Siegwart: A Monastic Tale, 1776), Friedrich Holderlin's Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, 1797-1799), and Johanna Schopenhauer's two novels Gabriele (1819-1820) and Die Tante (The Aunt, 1823). In conclusion, I analyze in greater depth a novel by an author whose portrayal of the relationship between female suffering and the female voice is more unusual: Therese Huber's Luise: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Konvenienz (Luise: A Contribution to the History of the Marriage of Convenience, 1796).

These five novels were published during a period when gender roles were both the subject of intense discussion and more immutable than they had ever been. Between 1770 and 1830, hundreds of medical, philosophical, literary, anthropological, and "moral" works redefined the female sex as the direct opposite of, rather than the complement to, the male. (3) Women's physical role in reproduction was interpreted as purely receptive and taken as a model, not only for female physiology, but for female "nature" in general. It was widely accepted that, while men were active and rational, women were passive and guided by their emotions; that, while it was for men to act upon the world, women should remain in the domestic sphere. They were naturally imbued with the modesty, propriety, and selflessness that were essential to the well-being of the family and the nation in general, and their weaker bodies and minds and tendency to ill-health were the necessary concomitants of these qualities.