Shades of melancholy in Gabriele!Reuter's 'Aus Guter Familie'

This article contends that Gabriele Reuter's 1895 novel, From a Good Family, engages with three different understandings of melancholy: the notion of melancholy as an artistic temperament, late-nineteenth-century psychiatry's understanding of melancholy as a clinical illness, and Freud's psychodynamic account of melancholy. By engaging with the multiple, often-conflicting meanings of melancholy in circulation around 1900, Aus guter Familie explores both the redemptive and the pathological aspects of sadness and loss as experienced by middle-class women in Wilhelminian Germany. In so doing, the novel attends to contemporary scientific discourses without accepting their implied determinism, and it posits the potential for women's artistic sensibility and talent while investigating those factors that stood in the way of their development.