Suffering, Silence, and the Female Voice in German Fiction around 1800

Abstract

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.