Writing the Gefühl

An Early Science of Emotions in Sophie von La Roche’s Epistolary Novel

Abstract

When considering the impact of women’s writing on the development of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century, the importance of Sophie von La Roche emerges. She was a German woman of letters who had a particular influence on the intellectual context of her time through a literary salon she founded but, above all, through her writing activity. In this perspective, the present contribution intends to analyse the epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771), in which the writer inscribes an early science of emotions, expressing the spirit of her time giving voice in an avant-garde and realistic manner to that Gefühl – feeling – that runs indistinctly through the mind and body, guiding every action. More specifically, this article intends to prove how accurate introspection and knowledge of the inner motions that characterise human nature are linked to the textual genre of intimate and autobiographical writing. This genre proved to be a fertile ground in the eighteenth century for expressing and investigating all those hitherto silenced or at least underestimated emotional phenomena that started to interest the most diverse fields of knowledge, united around the question of the so-called commercium mentis et corporis. In this sense, the main aim is to show how, among the pages of La Roche’s epistolary novel, an early physiology of emotions is inscribed that reverberates in the thoughts and writings of her contemporaries, opening the door to the modernity of literature and anticipating in a surprisingly precise way the most recent acquisitions of today’s neuroscience.