Kranke Frauen Hypochondriac Women in Comedies by C. F. Gellert and L. A. V. Gottsched

Hypochondria in literature serves as a metaphoric means of negotiating norms relating to gender roles and marriage. Mideighteenth-century physicians understood hypochondria as a physical disease with emotional and mental components with a broad spectrum of possible causes. At the same time, comedic dramatists such as Luise Adelgunde Victoria Gottsched (17131762) and Christian Furchtegott Gellert (1715-1769) thematized the ailment in their comedies, most particularly in Die ungleiche Heirath (1743) and Das Testament (1745) by Gottsched and in Das Loos in der Lotterie (1747) and Die kranke Frau (1747) by Gellert. These mid-eighteenth-century literary constructions of hypochondria invest the disease with potent metaphorical meaning, and they provide a valuable perspective on the topic of hypochondria as it relates to women and marriage, in that three of these texts depict married women as hypochondriacs and one of them depicts a widow using disease in order to bring about her own second marriage. Although hypochondria is ridiculed in these comedies, it functions as a strategy for negotiating and resisting the patriarchal power structures of marriage, for the hypochondria of these middle-class and aristocratic female characters empowers them by serving as a means of acquiring and maintaining control and authority within the confines of marriage.