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From Aesthetic to Pathology: Reading Literary Case Studies of Melancholy, 1775-1830

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From Aesthetic to Pathology: Reading Literary Case Studies of Melancholy, 1775-1830 FROM AESTHETIC TO PATHOLOGY: READING LITERARY CASE STUDIES OF MELANCHOLY, 1775-1830 A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German By Noelle B. Rettig, M.A. Washington, DC August 20, 2019 Copyright 2019 by Noelle B. Rettig All Rights Reserved ii FROM AESTHETIC TO PATHOLOGY: READING LITERARY CASE STUDIES OF MELANCHOLY, 1775-1830 Noelle B. Rettig, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Mary Helen Dupree, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This dissertation contributes to the ongoing discussion of the narrative representation of mental illness in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, at a time when the nascent discipline of psychology began to come into its own, and the discourses of mind and body were renegotiated under advances in the medical sciences; I attempt, in other words, to examine how mental illness was conceptualized long before diagnoses such as depression, bipolarity, or schizophrenia made their way into mainstream scientific discourse. Even though “melancholy” continued to function during this time period as a blanket term for any number of mental, physical, and spiritual illnesses, thereby connoting a pathological state, it also began to take on a specifically “poetic” meaning, involving the subjective and transitory mood of the modern individual. As a focal point for this inquiry, I have chosen four primary texts: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785- 1790), and Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836) – works which all represent melancholy at the interstices of science and subjectivity, reason and passion. My major arguments are as follows: 1) with the publication of Goethe’s Werther in 1774, there was a shift toward pathological representations of melancholy in literature; 2) there are distinct parallels between the Melancholie of the eighteenth century and psychiatric diagnoses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; 3) the popularity of my primary sources helped to establish a language for mental anguish in the late eighteenth century, even as this discourse functions at times via inarticulability; 4) the move toward pathology occurs as the literary subject becomes more psychologically developed and treated as a form of case study. In its entirety, the study investigates how multivalent images of melancholy are deployed in order to individuate characters and their respective psychologies, emotions, and affects. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without a generous grant from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies over the 2017-2018 academic year. Thank you especially to Karin, and to all the fellows who saw me through the long, dark Berlin winter. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to my doctoral advisor, Dr. Mary Helen Dupree: this project owes so much to your continued patience, encouragement, and guidance. Additionally, I want to thank those close friends who saw me through the past six years. To Julia, Doria, Forrest, Stas, and Greg: thank you for reminding me how to laugh. To Dad: none of this would have been possible without you, and now we’re both Dr. Rettig(!). And, finally, to Al: you are my light in dark places, when all other lights fail. Love and gratitude, Noelle iv Table of Contents Introduction: “A Most Humorous Sadness” .................................................................................1 Defining Melancholy ..............................................................................................................6 Overview of the Dissertation ................................................................................................12 Chapter 1 | Feeling on the Edge: The Representative Transformation of Melancholy in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) ...............................................18 A Physicalized Psychology: Aestheticized and Greek Melancholy .....................................25 Love as Fixation: Lotte .........................................................................................................38 Reasonless Passion, Passionless Reason...............................................................................46 “I have of late…” ..................................................................................................................54 Chapter 2 | Extraordinary Affects: Titanic Melancholy in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781) ..........................................................................................................................................60 Affect and Emotion: Then and Now .....................................................................................64 A Note on Method ................................................................................................................72 Affective Melting: Karl von Moor ........................................................................................75 Smoke and Flame ..................................................................................................................85 “Traure mit mir, Natur” ........................................................................................................88 Affective Combustion: Franz von Moor ...............................................................................90 An Affective Hangover: Melancholy as Mood of the Play ................................................100 Chapter 3 | Approaching the Psyche: De-somatizing Melancholy in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser: Ein Psychologischer Roman (1785-1790) ....................................................................104 Melancholy Between Body and Mind – Mind Between Soul and Cerebrum.....................107 The Imagination Medicalized .............................................................................................115 A Childhood Trauma ..........................................................................................................122 Shame and Self-negation ....................................................................................................136 Privation and (Dis)affection ................................................................................................140 ‘Bricolaged’ Sadness ..........................................................................................................149 v Chapter 4 | To Walk on His Head: Writing Madness and the Experience of Melancholy in Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836) ..............................................................................................................156 A Phenomenology of Melancholy ......................................................................................159 Büchner’s Lenz and the Melancholic Experience of Spatiality ..........................................171 The Melancholic’s Life and Death of Speech.....................................................................182 Stop Making Sense: Fall to Apostasy .................................................................................186 The Nihilistic Un-world ......................................................................................................191 Conclusion: Mental Illness and Suicide in 2019.......................................................................197 Chapter Conclusions ..........................................................................................................198 Suggestions for Future Research .......................................................................................201 Concluding Remarks .........................................................................................................204 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................209 vi INTRODUCTION “A MOST HUMOROUS SADNESS” In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the character of melancholy Jacques offers the infamous description of his malaise: “I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical, nor the courtier’s, which is proud…”1 Nor does Jacques suffer the same melancholy as the soldier, the lawyer, the lady, or the lover. Instead, “it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”2 Jacques’ continues to be one of the most quoted musings on melancholy, perhaps because Shakespeare manages, with these few lines, to capture its puzzling, multifaceted, and indeed contradictory nature, speaking to the popular fascination with a term that, for centuries leading up to and including much of the eighteenth century, encompassed a multiude of symptoms, symbolisms, and explanations. This dissertation contributes to the ongoing discussion of the narrative representation of mental illness by providing a historicized interrogation of literary depictions of melancholy. In other words, this project seeks to examine how mental illness was conceptualized long before diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, bipolarity, or schizophrenia made their way into mainstream medical discourse, at a time when “melancholy” and “hypochondria” functioned as blanket terms, or open signifiers, to refer to any number of physical, spiritual,
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