Hypochondria, Sentimental Friendship, and Same-Sex Desire in Anton Reiser

Summary

Abstract: Karl Philipp Moritz's novel Anton Reiser depicts its eponymous protagonist in a detailed pathography of a hypochondriac. Eighteenthand early nineteenth-century medical writers considered hypochondria a physical disease with mental and emotional components. Medical and literary writers used the disease metaphorically to pathologize nonnormative behaviors, thereby promoting a moral agenda under the guise of inoculating their readers against disease. Anton Reiser is, however, quite innovative in its depiction of this disease. Despite contemporary medical writers’ concerns about nonnormative gender roles and sexual behaviors and their relation to hypochondria, Anton's intense, emotional, same-sex friendships do not seem to contribute to his disease in the novel. Instead, the intense male friendships that he cultivates are based on homoerotic desire, but they are not pathologized. Though not depicted as curative, they are shown in a positive light. This article provides a detailed close reading of hypochondria in the novel and reads Moritz's text against the background of contemporary medical discourses on hypochondria and modern criticism on the novel.

Keywords: Anton Reiser, Karl Philipp Moritz, hypochondria, illness in literature, friendship, homoeroticism, same-sex desire

Introduction

KARL PHILIPP MORITZ's (1756–93) novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) innovatively connects eighteenth-century conceptions of the disease hypochondria with sentimental male friendship grounded in homoeroticism. Hypochondria was a diagnosis that loomed large in the cultural imagination of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, playing a significant role in the literary and medical writings of this period. Hypochondria was understood as a physical ailment with mental and emotional components, and it was used by medical writers as a means of promoting healthy behaviors and disparaging behaviors believed to be unhealthy. Additionally, hypochondria fulfilled a metaphorical function, as it allowed not only medical writers but also literary writers to medicalize socially “undesirable” behaviors, thereby promoting a moral agenda under the guise of inoculating readers against disease. Writing in 1767, the physician Johann Ulrich Bilguer discussed the dangers of excessive scholarly thinking and provides a lengthy list of possible causes of hypochondria that are related to “undesirable” behaviors, including but not limited to preoccupation with luxury, overindulgence in food and drink, smoking, contracting sexually transmitted disease, overstraining emotional or mental faculties, and engaging in excessive sentimentalism. Later, in 1805, the physician Ludwig Storr discussed the relevance of nonnormative sexual activity for the development of hypochondria, including not only onanism, nymphomania, and erotomania, but also excessive abstinence from sexual activity.