Doctor's Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought (review)

Robert D. Tobin. Doctor's Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought.Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 255 pp. $41.50 (0-8387-5466-X).

The seemingly endless fascination with Goethe and his times has led in the twentieth century to books on Goethe and gardening, as well as Goethe and the bicycle. Robert Tobin's book is of quite a different nature from these hagiographic exercises. Rather than using medical science as a means of illustrating how central Goethe was to the world of then as well as now, he has turned to Goethe and his fictions as case studies in how medical knowledge and fantasy are intertwined in Goethe's own day.

Tobin's proof text is the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. It is a novel in which models of madness, of pathology, of dietetics are used as metaphors as well as context for the shaping of the characters and the plot. But there are also moments, as Tobin elegantly and intelligently shows, in which the medical model is present because of the very concepts that Goethe is trying to express. The roles that theater "mania" and "lovesickness" have in the novel mirror but also mask the problems of narcissism and of homosexuality that are unspoken and yet haunt the text. That Goethe could not imagine these categories beyond a world of pathology is an indicator of how "modern" his novel was. It had an extraordinary force in shaping the discourses of madness and sexuality in nineteenth-century fiction. Yet we also must ask, how often did the literary model of such texts provide a vocabulary through which individuals shaped their own identity?

Tobin shows that in this novel Goethe was in complex ways debating with the models of medicine that dominated his own world. It is clear that as a scientist—and he stressed his own scientific credentials often enough—he was opposed to many of the accepted theories of his day. His work in comparative anatomy and color vision placed him in the forefront of both "serious" and "crank" science. In every case he knew the debates that his fictions reflected, whether about body-mind relationships or about the models of "Romantic" versus the newly evolving "material" nature of mind and mind illness.

Goethe was also quite well informed about the debate over the role played by social context in healing mental illness, and the new discourse of homosexuality as part of a dichotomy between "normal" and "abnormal" behavior. Tobin's chapter on lovesickness and homosexuality is by far the most innovative and surprising in his book. That Goethe was fascinated by and perhaps even engaged in homosexual practices has been the suspicion of scholars (including myself) for the past twenty years. Tobin shows how the existing models of the homosexual, homoerotic, and homosocial are all folded into Wilhelm Meister's world in the classifications of the healthy and the sick. Here Tobin adds substance both to the reading of the fiction and to the manner in which the very nature of homosexuality is incorporated into late-eighteenth-century worldviews. Goethe was in this case certainly not unique, but his text, which had an immediate resonance around the educated world, certainly provided models for nineteenth-century thinkers about the relationship between illness, deviancy, and sexual practice. Tobin makes these debates transparent and shows how Goethe was often able to present them in ways that preserved the ambiguity of his fictions while highlighting the science that he advocated. As shown also in The Elective Affinities, a text often referred to in this regard, Goethe is the master of using science but not relying on it to resolve the conflicts in his fictional world. In this he foreshadows one of his most devoted British disciples of the nineteenth century, George Eliot.

Tobin's well-researched book is an important addition to the extensive literature...