Healthy Families: Medicine, Patriarchy, and Heterosexuality in 18th-Century German Novels

This essay provides a  brief overview of eighteenth-century German medical thought on family, gender and sexuality before looking at the ways in which medical discourses are used to bolster heterosexual discourses in three important bildungsromane: Wieland’s Agathon, Moritz’s Anton Reiser, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

“Healthy Families:  Medicine, Patriarchy, and Heterosexuality in 18th-Century German Novels,” Impure Reason:  Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, ed. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit:  Wayne State UP, 1993) 242-59.