BETWEEN HYSTERIA AND ‘HEIMWEH’: HEIDI'S HOMESICKNESS

In his 1688 dissertation, which first coined the word ‘nostalgia’, the physician Johannes Hofer noted that this ‘Swiss’ sickness (‘Schweizerkrankheit’) is often triggered in soldiers by sounds such as the ringing of cowbells. During her stay in Frankfurt nearly two hundred years later, Johanna Spyri's Heidi is similarly stricken by homesickness, brought on by her acoustic hallucinations about her Swiss Heimat. Heidi's ‘Heimweh’ is treated by her physician as a form of ‘hysteria’, raising the question: to what extent does homesickness manifest itself as a gendered disease? Focusing on the interrelationship between gender and her status as an orphan, I argue that the absence of trauma surrounding the early loss of Heidi's parents becomes spatialised into a kind of intense, somatised homesickness. Building on the arguments of Sigmund Freud and Peter Blickle, I suggest that signifiers like Heimat and ‘Heimweh’ function as ways for Heidi to skirt more salient issues about her past, identity, and psychological development. The novel's discourse around ‘Heimweh’ and Heimat, I conclude, becomes a coded way for Heidi to articulate the unspeakable trauma of losing her parents, a trauma that is never explicitly discussed in the text.