Introduction
In an essay on disability studies and the environmental imagination, Elizabeth A. Wheeler observes: “Mountains and disabled people have something in common: they both get stereotyped as inspirational” (553). Nowhere does this parallel play out more literally than in the nineteenth-century children’s novel Heidi (1880-81) by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, a tale of mountaintop living and physical disability. In the story of Heidi, fresh Alpine air and an active lifestyle improve the health and happiness of all who partake in them, even helping child regain the ability to walk. For this reason—and perhaps for others—Spyri’s text is often referenced by scholars and public intellectuals as a prototypical example of the inspirational disability narrative, promulgating the myth of the fantasy cure. But does the novel deserve this reputation? Or are we perhaps finding only what we expect to see? Contemporary readers, after all, may not realize what we are missing in a text steeped in the medical understandings of a different era.
Heidi yields several features of interest to disability scholarship, including an insight into our own gaps and biases. Its reach alone could justify deeper investigation: few literary depictions of disability can claim the longevity and global prominence of Heidi. It has been translated from the original German into upwards of fifty languages, remains in print a century and a half after publication, and ranks as one of the world’s best-selling works of fiction (Lowne; Pfeiffer 300).1 The tale is now treated as a single novel—often reprinted in lines of childhood classics with a subtitle like “A Story for Girls” (Stan 1). However, it was first published in two volumes: Heidis Lehr-und Wanderjahre (Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning, 1880) and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (Heidi: How She Used What She Learned, 1881). Together, the volumes tell the story of a young orphan who is first left by her aunt in the reluctant care of her grandfather, a misanthrope known as the Alm Uncle.2 Heidi is then taken from his rustic Alpine home to live in Frankfurt as companion to a girl named Klara, the wealthy Sesemann family’s “only…daughter, who was ill, and obliged to remain all the time in a rolling-chair, because she was paralyzed on one side” (Her 138). Eventually, Heidi returns to her beloved mountains, where she helps her grandfather reenter community life. The story closes with Klara visiting Heidi in the Alps and achieving a physical rehabilitation.
The role that nature can play in improved health—no matter how believable when found in modern medical and psychological studies—seems to strike critics as fantastical piffle when found in a spiritual Victorian-era children’s novel marketed to girls. Such characterizations of Spyri’s text proliferate in the taxonomies of common narrative devices relating to disability that various theorists have published in the past few decades. Most such lists include a trope often called “kill-or-cure”: to facilitate a happy ending, “a disabled character will either have to be ‘killed or cured’ by the end of any movie or novel in which they appear” (Dolmage 39). A subset of this trope is the “miracle cure,” reinforcing that “society views disability as something that must be eradicated,” no matter how fancifully this must be achieved (39). Some critics cite Klara’s recovery of the ability to walk at the end of the novel as the archetypal miracle cure, much as Dickens’s Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol has become a byword for people with disabilities portrayed as objects of pity and charity (Dolmage 39; see also Brenna 10, Martin 40).
Spyri’s engagement with disability is more multifarious than this casual shorthand implies. For one thing, Klara’s “cure” as presented on the page is neither as magical nor as momentous as our collective memory of the text would have it; I will address this point in detail below. More crucially, Klara’s is not the only portrayal of disability in the book, despite its dominance in the critical discourse. Disability theory has long questioned the idealization of cures in cultural narratives. Positing a cure as the only desirable outcome for any disabled person runs counter to an identity model of disability.3 While Klara’s cure is thus potentially problematic, it is complicated by the presence of characters who remain alive, with disabilities “uncured,” at the end of the novel.
The foremost concern of this essay is the potentially disabled status of Heidi herself. In the portion of the story set in Frankfurt, Heidi sickens and pines, eventually becoming so dangerously ill in the judgment of a doctor that she has to be sent back to the mountains to save her life. In this essay, therefore, I will focus principally on Spyri’s representation of a disabling condition that has been largely overlooked by modern scholars of disability in literature, due to both its invisibility and twenty-first-century readers’ distance from Heidi’s cultural context. That condition is homesickness, also called nostalgia.
In what follows I begin by exploring the medico-social history of nostalgia, drawing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western journalism and diagnostic works. Based on this context, I contend that readers are meant to perceive what Heidi experiences in the novel as a disability and to take it seriously as such. Even though doctors would not diagnose Heidi as disabled were she a real person today, we may usefully examine a character through the lens of the author and her contemporaries, so long as we are attentive to the structures of power involved in diagnosis and categorization. I then turn to Spyri’s broader health advocacy, which provided the impetus for the novel’s creation. Through a close reading of Heidi’s illness, I will show that Spyri’s text is as much about trusting children’s own account of their bodies and needs as it is about trusting God or nature. Anglophone criticism often overlooks this point because many scholars view childhood texts marketed to girls through a sentimental and nostalgic—in the modern sense—lens. With the novel’s complex treatment of disability established, I revisit Klara’s so-called miracle cure in order to show how it aligns with Spyri’s prioritization of children’s bodily autonomy and agency. I close by placing my reading of Heidi within a wider recovery project, encouraging us to critically revisit fiction that rewards deeper attention but has historically been seen as unserious due to an association with both childhood and femininity.
Nostalgia in Context
The belief “that disability is a knowable, obvious, and unchanging category,” Ellen Samuels argues, has become “the overmastering fantasy of modern disability identification” (84). Texts like Heidi unsettle this fantasy. The embodiment of nearly all the major characters could potentially be read through a disability lens—Klara, most obviously, but also Heidi, Peter the goatherd, and his unnamed grandmother. Yet only the blindness of Peter’s grandmother would be described in the same terms by both Heidi’s original readers and scholars today. Attitudes toward blindness change, but the condition itself remains legible across historical periods. The depiction of the grandmother (as the text calls her) is sentimental and reinforces the idea that disability makes a person pitiable. However, it is worth noting that the grandmother neither dies nor is cured, as might be stereotypically expected. Klara is mainly described as “delicate” and “weak” (Spyri, Her 139; 165)—loose terms that frustrate the modern impulse to name, quantify, and certify disability. Peter is a candidate for an anachronistic diagnosis; his struggle with letters would likely evoke the idea of a learning disability for most readers today. He is eleven at the start of the novel, but has never learned to read, finding it “too hard” and “no good” trying (97). This is not pathologized in the text, but entices “back-diagnosis.” (I use this term to describe the scholarly penchant for applying diagnostic labels to literary maladies. Back-diagnoses are perennially popular,4 and a tempting mental exercise when reading works written before the later twentieth century, in which the language around health not only emerges from a different cultural context but is often deliberately vague.) Such a reading of Peter may have uses for the critical history of conditions like dyslexia, but it projects our understanding of disability backward. By contrast, as potentially applied to Heidi’s condition, “nostalgia” no longer falls within a medicalized framework in the present day. Yet in 1880, it did.
Heidi’s malady raises fascinating questions for the literary study of disability. Most notably, it asks us to consider how best to approach literary representations of disabilities that are no longer legible to contemporary Western readers. True, the field has long acknowledged that both medical and social understandings of disability are fluid, impermanent, and contested. We as scholars know that medical authority may conflict with a person’s self-identification or relationship to a disabling social system. We recognize that all of these factors are contextual, depending in large part on ideological frameworks of identity developed in the later twentieth century. Still, it is difficult to find disability scholarship that delves into these points in regards to a character like the aforementioned Tiny Tim. He is, perhaps, easily read. His use of a crutch marks him as disabled in both historically and presently recognized ways, and physical/perceptible disabilities remain better recognized in medical, critical, and activist spaces. By contrast, Spyri’s portrayal of a chronic impairment no longer recognized as such (by modern readers or medical authority) offers a productive challenge.
Homesickness was not merely an emotion in nineteenth-century Europe, but according to the medical profession of the period, an actual disease.5 The word was coined in the 1750s as an English translation of “nostalgia,” itself coined in 1688 by the Swiss scholar Johannes Hofer. Today, “nostalgia” refers to something pleasant: “reminiscing about fond memories…a past-oriented, self-conscious (i.e., personally meaningful), keenly social, and bittersweet, albeit predominantly positive, emotion” (Sedikides et al. 200-201). This positive valence is, however, historically recent. The root lies in two Greek words: nostos (return home) and algia (pain). Medical experts of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries believed that a nostalgia sufferer would experience dire bodily symptoms if removed from the location of their upbringing. Nostalgia emerged as a diagnosis at a time when the interpenetration of body and mind was conceptualized differently—in some ways akin to Margaret Price’s term “bodyminds,” invented to instruct twenty-first-century thinkers that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (269). How body and mind are thought to interlink is always historically and geographically specific, and as Sami Schalk reminds us, always impacted by oppression where minoritized groups are concerned (Bodyminds Reimagined). While the term “nostalgia” is not used for Heidi’s diagnosis in the original English translation of the novel, it seems highly probable that readers would have recognized it in her doctor’s words: “She is suffering from homesickness so that she is reduced almost to a skeleton, and soon will be one, if this goes on” (Spyri, Her 319). The novel’s origin and Heidi’s nationality would have further affirmed this reading; Swiss people were such famous sufferers of nostalgia in this era that dangerous homesickness was popularly termed mal du Suisse—the Swiss malady (Sedikides et al. 192).
While some aspects of what was called “nostalgia” take other diagnostic labels today, we are far enough removed from a time when it was considered a specific condition to impede readerly recognition of it as such.6 However, what Heidi experiences can aptly be called a disability if one applies a current definition of disability to the nineteenth-century way of understanding nostalgia and its effects. A medico-legal definition of disability such as the one in the Americans with Disabilities Act (“a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”) applies to Heidi’s condition as it was then perceived. People of the time recognized nostalgia as a lifelong, albeit environmentally triggered impairment and one that limited major life activities—not unlike Klara’s unspecified condition requiring the use of a wheelchair. Although Heidi “recovers,” she is unable to survive in Frankfurt and must return to the Alps. However, while critics have discussed Heidi’s homesickness (see especially Brauer), they have not generally read it as a disability. In fact, nostalgia is so illegible as a disability in this century that in a 2009 interview on disability in literature for children, blind author Jean Little specifically names Heidi as nondisabled and an inspiration for her to write similar stories about children with disabilities (Brenna 4).
Cultural notions about homesickness are not what they used to be. As Susan J. Matt points out in her study Homesickness: An American History (2014), it is extraordinary that the words “homesickness” and “nostalgia” did not exist in English before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Equally remarkable is how drastically their usage has changed over the past hundred or so years. According to Matt, “The phenomenon of homesickness [was] widespread during the antebellum period” in America and Europe, conceived of as a disease (14). Hofer, who coined the term nostalgia, highlighted a case study of a man from Bern, Switzerland who suffered from fever, depression, and increasingly severe symptoms while away in another city, but recovered from almost the point of death the moment he was brought home (Matt 31). Doctors saw cases of nostalgia as warranting urgent medical attention, believing their patients’ lives were in danger (Matt 14). Svetlana Boym cites “leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, [and] opium” as treatment alternatives to an immediate return home—though she does not report how successful these were (4). The seriousness with which nostalgia was treated at the time is revealed by another of Matt’s anecdotes. Not only did Union doctors during the American Civil War diagnose over than five thousand soldiers with nostalgia, but seventy-four of these patients actually “succumbed to the condition” (14). Armies prohibited their bands from playing “Home, Sweet Home” out of fear that the soldiers might contract this deadly illness from hearing the song (14-15).
Other nineteenth-century reports link particular musical compositions to dangerous outbreaks of nostalgia; for instance, the same fears led armies that employed Swiss mercenaries to forbid the playing of the Ranz des Vaches, a traditional Alpine herder’s tune (Wood). In a speech given at the Manchester Athenaeum, reported in the Times of London on 13 December 1881, the Duke of Edinburgh attempted to prove “the influence of music on mankind…[and] the large share which music has in some of the greatest crises of life” by citing “the remarkable effects of music on the inhabitants of mountainous countries” (“Royal Visit”):
Certain tunes are, I believe, prohibited in the Highland regiments, because of the intense longing for home which they produce in the men on foreign service. The same is the case with the Swiss, and this desperate desire for home, excited and aggravated by the national music of the country, has even been classified as a distinct disease under the name of nostalgia. (“Royal Visit”)
Other newspaper articles from around the period of Heidi’s publication reference sailors, Italian soldiers, and Turkish prisoners as sufferers of the disease, making it clear there was nothing childlike or feminized about the ailment at the time.7 Those associations were to come later.
The depiction of a Swiss child with nostalgia in a popular novel like Heidi would have been instantly recognizable to many readers and might also have reinforced, for a new generation, the well-established association between this ailment and Alpine dwellers. Observers came up with several theories about the especial tendency of the Swiss and certain other nationalities to the disease: perhaps the change in altitude, perhaps some weakness inherent to that nationality (Sedikides et al. 192). One correspondent of the Times evinced such a bias in an 1873 travel column, describing the “countries most productive of nostalgia” as “somewhat backward” and asserting that: “It is evident that what it is agreed to call civilization in no way contributes to the development of that nervous sensibility of which nostalgia is a morbid offshoot” (“Paris Nostalgia”). Such judgments foreshadowed how, several decades later, people in general would begin to write off nostalgia as a trivial condition affecting immigrants and the so-called “weak.”
Importantly for a contextualized reading of Heidi, nineteenth-century doctors recognized nostalgia as a disease affecting both the emotions and the nervous system of the patient. Symptoms could include “despondency, bouts of weeping, fainting, indigestion, stomach pain, anorexia, high fever, cardiac palpitations, and suicidal ideation or even death” (Sedikides et al. 192). The mind-body divisions of the current Western medical system were not in place at the time, so surgeons autopsied victims of nostalgia looking for physical evidence. Bucknill and Tuke offer this lengthy description of a brain autopsy performed in 1820 on a soldier of the Swiss Royal Guard, serving in Moscow, who had stabbed himself in the heart due to nostalgia:
on sawing open the skull, M. Larrey was surprised to find a layer of lymph and purulent matter between the dura mater and the pia mater, which covered the entire circumference of the brain, and involved also the arachnoid membrane. On the cortical substance of the brain, especially towards the anterior lobes, and at the superior edges of the hemispheres, many points of suppuration were observed. (Bucknill and Tuke 167)
The surgeon recorded these unusual findings as proof of the condition.
Hofer himself put the disease down to the fact that a person’s “living spirits” were “occupied much for a long time around the arousing of one idea in the mind” and so became “wearied or exhausted,” so that the person “could not attend to other bodily needs, functions, or ideas” (Matt 31-32). Hofer’s description of the patients’ maladaptive tendencies is not altogether dissimilar from how doctors now understand chronic stress to weaken autoimmune functions. Prior to the twentieth century, however, people considered nostalgia a more acute illness than we consider chronic stress. For Spyri, a medical condition tied to place that could slay a soldier in his tracks was the perfect vehicle for the messages she most wanted to convey: redress the societal wounds of war, trust children, and trust the power of recuperation in a natural environment.
Heidi’s Medical History
Heidi was, from its inception, a novel more about medicine than miracles. Spyri turned to writing for children in midlife, after the deaths of her husband and son. The inspiration for her new career was not financial necessity but local events: the founding of the Red Cross in Geneva and the suffering of displaced people that she witnessed after the Franco-Prussian war (Eayrs 529). As Catherine Eayrs notes, Spyri chose to write fiction in order to raise funds for the wounded soldiers and war orphans then entering Switzerland and also to draw attention to the bad conditions that orphans lived under (529). Thus, the novel explicitly emerges from a discourse of health and illness that foregrounds financial support and public advocacy. Advocacy does not preclude the use of inspirational tropes that devalue or infantilize people with disabilities, as instances such as telethons prove. To effectively fundraise, however, the miraculous must be linked to human action. Spyri’s purpose would be undermined by making miraculous intervention the sole agent of health and wellness.
In the novel it is clear to see that the author loved the Alps and passionately believed in their health-giving and life-affirming properties. The townspeople who live on the mountainside are astonished to see Heidi rosy and thriving after months of living on the mountaintop with only her grandfather early in the story, but the narrator frequently reasserts Heidi’s excellent health. Spyri depicts only Heidi’s education and religious training as suffering from a lack of social contact with the villagers (Her 149). Heidi’s grandfather at one point teaches her that the eagle who flies over the mountain shrieks with an angry sound because it dislikes seeing densely populated areas. While this is clearly the sentiment of a hermit, Heidi echoes it herself after moving to the city: “if the eagle was to fly over Frankfort [sic], he would scream a good deal louder to see so many people living close together, and making each other wicked, instead of living on the mountain, and being happy” (229-30).8 The trajectory of the novel supports her observation.
In fact, Maria Nikolajeva asserts that Heidi’s “chief appeal” to young readers “seems to be the affirmation of nature and a natural way of life…[over] the oppressive values of civilization” (68). She reads Heidi’s illness as an ideological objection to urban life writ on the body: “Sent away to a big city, she withers like a bird in a cage” (69). Similarly, Phyllis Bixler Koppes writes that “Heidi ultimately reveals herself a genuine ‘Alpine rose’ which, like the flowers she had earlier brought home in her apron, dies when cut from its roots in the mountain soil” (65). Reading through the lens of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis, we can interpret access to the restorative properties of nature as a key part of Spyri’s formula for health—not just for rosy little children but for any body.
While physical and cognitive disability can exist in the Alps, Spyri portrays Frankfurt as a location where thriving health is all but impossible: a dense, smoggy, smothering contrast to the towering crags and goat-strewn meadows of home. Heidi finds herself shut up in the Sesemann house “as if she were in a cage” or “as if she were in prison” (Her 176). Nothing can be seen through the windows but other houses, and their own windows are too heavy: “You cannot open them, nor can I help you,” Klara sadly informs her (Her 181). Klara never leaves the house because she is “delicate” (139). Heidi wanders out in search of a tower to climb, assuming she will see mountains and fields beyond the close-packed buildings around her. Even from a height, though, Heidi can see nothing but city rooftops. The tower keeper meets her disappointed reaction with the dismissive remark: “How could such a little girl understand about a view?” (201). Not only is she disappointed, she is thereafter confined to the house. Yet it is the tower keeper who does not understand. For Heidi and for all the characters, as Spyri implies, a view is an essential factor of physical and moral wellbeing. Spyri’s postwar recovery and caretaking aims may be embedded here too. Suffering is produced when people lose touch with nature, but also when, despite being closely clustered, they ironically fail to see the needs of the community around them.
Very soon, nostalgia begins to take its toll on Heidi’s bodymind. She asks to go home, but although the aunt who brought her to the city promised that she could leave at any time, Heidi learns she is powerless to do so. This enforced helplessness transforms the lively girl who thrived on the mountain: “the child sat as still as a mouse, and did not stir, nor eat, nor drink” (Her 233). “At last there rose up in Heidi’s heart all that had been surging within her,” we are told, “and she broke out: ‘I must and will go home’” (229). The adult response is that Heidi has “gone crazy” (230). A self-willed child is interpreted as a malfunctioning one. She is admonished by the housekeeper, Miss Rottenmeier, never to reveal her true feelings on the subject or to cry, instead always showing a face of gratitude toward the Sesemanns lest they become angry. Heidi complies, but this self-repression comes at a tremendous physical cost. Because “she did not dare to tell any one of her longing,” “the burden within Heidi’s heart became heavier and still heavier,” leading her to lose strength and energy (269-70). She has trouble sleeping at night because she fears dreaming about the Alm (the Alpine pasture where her grandfather resides), only to wake to the horror that she is “far, far away from home, and she could not get back!” (271). This goes on for what Spyri describes as a “long time”—whether months or potentially years is unclear. Over an extended section of the book, we hear about how Heidi “lost her appetite, grew pale and thin…ate almost nothing…could not eat” and every night “cried herself to sleep for homesickness” (290). While modern readers might perceive her as depressed, readers familiar with nostalgia as a disease would be fearing for her life.
Before Heidi can be treated, her symptoms must be recognized by a competent adult who perceives a young girl as capable of experiencing real emotions and distress. Recall, nostalgia was stereotypically a soldier’s illness. She begins sleepwalking, and though the household believes a ghost is leaving the front door open every night, Mr. Sesemann and the family physician Dr. Classen eventually discover that it is Heidi. The doctor diagnoses her homesickness, deplores the “extremely excited state of her nerves,” and states: “An immediate remedy is necessary…. My prescription is that she must leave Frankfort tomorrow” (Her 318-19). Sesemann begs him to “take the little one in hand [and] cure her,” but Dr. Classen brings his up-to-date medical understanding to bear: “This condition is not an illness to be cured by pills and powders. The child is not of a naturally strong constitution, but if she is allowed to return to the strengthening mountain air which she is accustomed to, and which she needs, she will be perfectly strong again. Sesemann, you would not have her return to her grandfather incurably ill, or return no more?” (320). Mountain air is not magic in his perspective, but a medicine to prescribe. They follow his advice, and in keeping with the contemporary thinking on nostalgia, Heidi gets well the instant she returns home to the Alm. Intriguingly, though, her “cure” is conditional; she will presumably sicken again should she try to leave the mountain.
From this sequence emerges a central message of Heidi rarely touched on in the extant criticism: that it is dangerous to silence children on the subjects of their own bodies, needs, and desires. Heidi reaches death’s door because she is told repeatedly that she must never express unhappiness or unwellness to her hosts. Heidi’s own account of her bodymind is never sought or trusted, even in a context where nostalgia was viewed as a potentially fatal disease. Instead, she is constrained to perform an inspirational function in the household, obeying her elders and offering uncomplaining companionship to the privileged Klara. By finally “reading” the text of her bodymind with attention, Dr. Classen recognizes how others have simply been projecting their expectations onto Heidi. As canny scholars, we must strive for Classen’s perspicacity in our reading of children’s embodiment within in children’s texts. One of the core tactics of ableism is to cast people with disabilities as perpetual children, but alongside resisting this, the field of disability studies must also strive to recognize children themselves as complex subjects.9
Heidi’s chief antagonist, Miss Rottenmeier, writes off Heidi’s experience as a fanciful or “fake” disability because she is a child. A medico-historical reading of the novel asks us to wonder whether we, as contemporary readers, have been doing the same thing. While Klara’s “delicacy” receives attention in disability scholarship because of her use of a wheelchair, Heidi’s experience of environmental disability has been lost to view due to changes in how we understand nostalgia—changes with a troubling history. As mentioned above, even in the 1870s there was talk of clinical homesickness afflicting only the dwellers of “backward” countries (“Paris Nostalgia”). According to Susan Matt, as the era of eugenics took hold, nostalgia came to be read as an attribute of the unfit, a sign of a weak body and mind, tolerated only in children or sometimes women. Prior to the twentieth century, she notes, “homesickness was a widely acknowledged and discussed condition…. [People] were not fully accustomed to leaving home and did not find the process easy or natural. There was a trauma associated with migration, a trauma they did not shy away from expressing” (13). Later, however, especially in America, a focus on one’s duty to employer, institutions, and civic life came to unsettle the primacy of localized family networks. The modern worker should be ready to move at any time for the good of the company.
In the early twentieth century, the ideological connotations of homesickness changed as dominant Western culture came to negatively associate a close connection to the place of one’s origin with recent immigrants. Matt found evidence of this view among psychologists, writers influenced by Social Darwinist thought, and even charity workers, one of whom wrote in 1906 that “nostalgia…is the first and most effective aid to the natural selection of desirable immigrants” (qtd. in 14). Policymakers came to believe that those who could not adapt quickly to a new environment would fail to become productive citizens and perhaps die an early death (14-15). Observers maintained that a specific set of ethnic groups as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all races were unsuited to movement and independence because of their alleged vulnerability to homesickness. Gradually, people came to believe that movement to new places should be natural and unproblematic, rather than hard and stressful (13). Due to nostalgia’s association with women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups, it was delegitimized by the increasingly dominant patriarchal medical establishment of the early twentieth century and ultimately forgotten as an illness.
Even in the twenty-first century, Matt argues, “those who suffer from homesickness are considered immature and maladjusted” unless they are young children (13). While such views may have softened with the increase in work-from-home lifestyles since Matt wrote in 2014, there can still be shame around acknowledging homesickness as a factor that shapes a person’s life options. And how could this ideological recasting of homesickness as a trait of “the weak” not influence us to read what happens to Heidi as a sign of her young age and her innocent nature? These are not bad readings, per se, but they overshadow the fact that neither youth nor naiveté were necessary conditions for a nostalgia diagnosis at the time. When we interpret Heidi’s experience through a lens of disabled embodiment we recognize her disability as dependent on environmental factors, as many disabilities are. Rather than valorizing a medical model of disability that emphasizes treatment of the disabled body, Heidi’s nostalgia resists a “cure” reading. It exists, at the end of the text, in a Schrödinger’s box-like state of simultaneous absence and presence. What would happen if Heidi were forced to leave the Alps again—or chose to? Our uncertain answer pushes back against oversimplification.
Past readings of the text have raised the question of whether Heidi casts disability as a complex sociocultural and medical reality or as an extension of the novel’s moral thesis (often read as a religious message about placing one’s entire trust in God). I have addressed this point as regards Heidi herself, arguing that there is an earnest, non-metaphorical engagement with disability here. However, since she is not the best-remembered disabled figure in the novel, it is only fair to test whether my claim can be applied further.
Is There a Miracle Cure?
By unpacking Heidi’s depictions of disability, this paper seeks to point out how the discourse around tropes of disability in “classic” fiction sometimes relies on cultural memory and hazy simplifications, especially when addressing works marketed to children or perceived as sentimental. While wishing expand the disability reading of this text beyond Klara Sesemann and her wheelchair, their prominence in the scholarly literature makes them important to address. Heidi’s and Klara’s plotlines weave together as part of a larger commentary in the novel on where healing can and cannot be found. In this section I provide an overview of how disability scholarship has heretofore addressed Klara’s rehabilitation and offer a close reading of that section of the book. I then put forward my own argument about the role of religion and the miraculous in her healing, in dialogue with other children’s literature scholars and with an emphasis on historical context.
Klara and her wheelchair often receive cursory attention in disability scholarship. The common argument is that Klara is suddenly healed to give the story a stronger moral or a happy ending. For instance, Roshini and Rajasekaran write: “once Clara moves to the alps with Heidi, she is cured of her disability, not with surgeries or any medical interventions, but it is a ‘magical cure’…considered a mandate for a ‘happily ever after’ storyline” (553).10 To explain the cure, the authors assert that “morality and health were seen as two variables directly proportional to each other in the nineteenth century,” but they do not spell out what (im)morality has to do with Klara’s character (Roshini and Rajasekaran 553). Critics frame her cure as sudden; Mary Clare Martin, for example, writes: “When Clara,…who was confined to a wheelchair, came to visit, she started walking in a beautiful mountain pasture full of flowers” (40). Disability studies scholars also tend to bracket Heidi with another popular, though twentieth-century and British, children’s text: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). Robin Wilson writes: “Both Colin Craven and Klara Sesemann experience a ‘miracle cure,’ which allows them to overcome the limitations imposed on them by their ‘illnesses,’ and enables them to fulfil the social roles expected of upper-middle-class men and women” (1-2). Similarly, Daniela Fois writes: “It is a common misconception…[that] the disabled individual could overcome their problems by just being courageous and stop self-pitying themselves (as in the cases of Colin in The Secret Garden and Clara in Heidi)” (10). The jumble of implicit claims across these various scholarly statements—was Klara immoral before her cure? rebellious? whiny?—speaks to the way the text itself is often absent from critical claims about Heidi.
The film adaptation tradition has also muddied the waters. Jay Timothy Dolmage’s “Archive and Anatomy of Disability Myths” provides a rigorous toolkit for analyzing disability representations in pop culture, yet its reference to Heidi feels like a game of telephone. Citing Martin F. Norden’s The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Dolmage uses not the novel but the loose 1937 Shirley Temple adaptation (one of dozens of Heidi films in various languages) as the Heidi urtext. While Norden refers to Klara “walk[ing] a few halting steps” (135), Dolmage states that “Clara sheds her disability and jumps up and dances around at the end of the film” (39). Whether it is Shirley Temple leaving us convinced that Klara gets up to dance, or cocoa packaging giving us the impression Heidi has blonde braids instead of short black curls, narrative evolution is powerful and hard to resist. Yet both these critical texts would have benefitted by engaging with the novel directly. Norden only asserts in passing that the film’s “superficial treatment [of disability] is traceable…to the original Spyri text” (135). Unfortunately, placing too much emphasis on a transhistorical similarity between narratives (e.g. a trope) has the potential to become self-reinforcing. As Fuson Wang wisely cautions, the claim that “literature…allows only two polar ends for the disabled figure: eradication or prosthesis, death or cure” has guided “gripping readings of several literary examples, but the theory occasionally overdetermines the close reading” (2).
When we look in the text, we find that Klara’s “ultimate recovery” from paralysis—far from being framed as hopeless—is first mentioned by her doctor in Frankfurt as a possibility, albeit an unlikely one (How 10). And, while the doctor does not at first see this, the degree of her impairment is clearly contingent on her environment and her infantilization. At home, Klara is treated as fragile and helpless. Even her boredom with her sheltered existence is pathologized as a symptom: “If I once yawned outright, Miss Rottenmeier would say that I was weak, and would fetch the cod-liver oil at once,” she tells Heidi (Her 165). But when Dr. Classen visits Heidi and her grandfather on the mountain, he exclaims: “Yes, our Klara must come up here… She would gather new strength here; and should she eat for a while as I have done today, she would soon grow plump, and be sounder than she has ever been in her life” (How 40). Plump should be understood as a signifier of good health, encouraged by nineteenth-century doctors. Classen is offering a medical opinion that the mountain atmosphere could be conducive to recovery, in line with nineteenth-century beliefs about rest cures and health spas.
When Klara does eventually visit the Alm, Heidi’s grandfather recognizes the same potential as the doctor and, crucially, takes it upon himself to play the role of her nurse and physical therapist. While the gruff misanthrope’s nursing expertise may initially surprise the reader, the narrator explains that he gained these skills while caring for his army captain of former days, who was gravely injured during a battle in Sicily (How 138). The Alm Uncle gently insists that Klara make the effort to stand on her own for a short time every evening, believing her muscles have the potential to relearn movement. While this unquestionably falls into a cure model of disability, recovery from incomplete paralysis over time through a regimen of physical therapy is neither miraculous nor unsound by modern medical standards. There is one element that feels less grounded, however. What gives Klara’s rehabilitation the air of a “miracle cure” is how, after a slow and unpromising beginning, she suddenly makes rapid improvements after Peter, jealous and feeling neglected, pushes her wheelchair down the mountain, destroying it to prevent her from exploring the pastures. Counter to his intention, Peter’s action forces Klara to develop her own ambulatory powers in order to explore the beauty of the landscape as she longs to do.
It is interesting that Spyri makes Klara’s initial reaction to the loss of her wheelchair a clear product of her overprotection by her guardians in Frankfurt, despite her recent therapy and new strength. When it is destroyed, she responds in a helpless manner: “‘Oh, what a pity! Now we cannot go today, and perhaps never,’ lamented Klara” (185). Heidi, however, has “perfect confidence” that a solution can be found, and gets her grandfather to carry Klara up the mountainside (185). The girls are “unspeakably happy” there, and when Heidi discovers a field of blooming flowers, she first supports Klara on her arm and then encourages her to “just put your foot straight down once” and “do it again” until Klara finds herself able to take small steps, ultimately reaching the flowers (189, 199). There is a didactic message here about motivation and positive thinking, certainly, but there does not appear to be a miracle.
Like protagonist Heidi’s recovery, I argue, Klara’s rehabilitation stems from finally being allowed to take charge of her own body. Klara and Heidi are doubly disadvantaged as female children under patriarchy because the adults who control their fate are predisposed to dismiss their claims and they are conditioned to defer. We see this conditioning in Klara's reaction to the wheelchair’s destruction, and we see it strongly in an earlier incident where Dr. Classen (less perspicacious here than in Heidi’s case) initially scotches Mr. Sesemann’s plan to take Klara to the Alm, even though its anticipation “had sustained her [Klara] through long hours of pain” (How 13). Classen tells her father: “the only reasonable hope for your child’s ultimate recovery is through the most careful nursing and watchfulness” (10). The reader knows how little Klara’s health truly benefits from this watchfulness. Like Heidi, however, Klara represses herself as she has been carefully taught: “Klara choked down her tears, knowing well how the sight of them distressed her father, but she was almost overwhelmed with her sense of disappointment” (How 13). Only after Classen visits Heidi and her grandfather for himself can he believe that the trip will be good for Klara—though Klara could have told him had he been willing to listen.
Ultimately, the novel highlights multiple factors involved in Klara’s rehabilitation: God’s plan in bringing the two girls together, physical therapy from the experienced Alm Uncle, the psychological benefits of being in nature, the physical benefits of leaving a heavily polluted city, and the empowerment experienced by both girls without restrictive supervision. Most accounts of the text have focused on one or two factors at most, often emphasizing religion. To be clear, it is indeed a religious novel; Heidi learns about God during her Frankfurt ordeal and later brings her grandfather back to the church. Prayer and faith are emphasized as important ways of coping with difficulty. Yet it feels incomplete to read the story, like Koppes, as a series of miracles, that has “as much in common with a saint’s legend as with a realistic novel of child life” (66). This not only overlooks the medical realism of the novel by nineteenth-century standards, but overplays the perfection of the children.
Lois Keith’s 2001 volume Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, one of the few extended analyses of disability in girls’ fiction, argues that the power to abandon one’s wheelchair (referring to Burnett’s Colin and Spyri’s Klara together) comes down to a pair of factors: “faith in God as the ultimate source of power and goodness, but also faith in the self” (32). Keith continues:
These two apparently contradictory elements…were both important lessons…writers at the time felt children needed to learn. Children needed to believe in God but their faith should not make them too passive. They also needed to believe that with sufficient energy and will they had the power to make their own lives better. In stories at least, it is the combination of these beliefs that results in healing. (32)
I concur with Keith that in Burnett’s classic, both self-belief and a kind of spirituality are important to Colin, but it is difficult to apply this same reading to Heidi. Heidi emphatically does not, as we have seen, “ha[ve] the power to make [her] own life better”—as Keith puts it—in terms of her own untreated illness; she needs adults to recognize how her environment is disabling her. More relevant to Keith’s point, Klara’s healing does not seem predicated on an increase in religious faith, and rather than having strong self-belief, she relies on Heidi’s encouragement. Klara is not a point-of-view character or one with much interiority, so her emotional state is generally depicted as a reaction to her external circumstances.
Ann Dowker’s work on disability in children’s fiction offers a caution against putting too much stock in religious readings of cures like Klara’s. Critics tend to overlook complexity in how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century children’s literature depicts disability, Dowker argues, placing too much stock in the texts’ conventional use of religious language. In the predominantly Christian Europe of the nineteenth century, any kind of misfortune or difficulty might be framed as “providing spiritual discipline”; yet, even so, “disabled characters were not always completely transformed into stereotypical ‘saintly invalids’…[or] tamed headstrong girl[s]” (Dowker). Klara’s role in the story fits the common pattern, observed by Sami Schalk and others, of characters with disabilities playing a supporting role in the protagonist’s development (“BeForever?” 175). However, I argue that the absence of a personal growth arc for Klara is not such a bad thing. Her healing still falls loosely into the “kill-or-cure” stereotype, but not due to any increase in her virtue.
Instead, both “recoveries” in the story, Heidi’s conditional and Klara’s more permanent one, reinforce the idea that teaching children to be silent about their own needs does them an ultimate disservice. Spyri implies that adults should seek children’s views and take them seriously—a fairly uncommon message for late nineteenth-century children’s literature, which tended to elevate “uncomplaining” as a high virtue in young people, especially girls. There is an element of that in this text: both girls derive some benefit from delayed gratification (Heidi, for instance, comes to be thankful that she did not leave Frankfurt before learning to read). Spyri presents these as examples of God’s plans surpassing human understanding: “The good God has arranged everything far better than I could have done…I am thankful that he did not grant my prayer, when I begged and complained,” Heidi tells her grandfather (Her 377). However, the adults who deny children agency (especially Aunt Dete and Miss Rottenmeier) are not framed in a positive light. The overall implication is that children should be patient and resilient up to a point, but that taking this to an extreme can actually harm them.
Conclusion
An increased attention to historical context characterizes recent literary studies of disability. As a subset of this approach, I have here suggested that there is much intriguing historical recovery work to be done around conditions that have shifted dramatically over time in medical discourse, naming practice, or cultural coding—like nostalgia. Some promising work in this area exists already. One critic pursuing a comparable line of inquiry is Shawna Rushford-Spence, who explores another extinct diagnosis, neurasthenia, on its own terms in her article about the diary of Alice James (sister of the more famous William and Henry). What James’s condition “really” may have been is a non-issue; her bodymind was coded through a medicalized discourse of disability at the time, so Rushford-Spence makes this the basis for a persuasive argument that “James challenges assumptions about and attitudes toward women with disabilities, [and] disrupts the accepted narrative of disability as global incapacity.” Brandy Schillace’s work on moral insanity opens up similar questions about the gendered nature of diagnosis and the complex relation between gender, medicalization, and moral judgment. In the case of Heidi, what may be most interesting about nostalgia is the lack of gender- or age-based negative judgment implied in the diagnosis at the time of Spyri’s writing.
In tracing how reconceived or superseded diagnoses are treated in literary texts in particular, the question of genre also becomes significant. Pasquale S. Toscano has argued that “the historicizing impulse of many disability theorists, while necessary, is not enough.” Citing Susan J. Wolfson, Toscano urges scholars to turn their “attention to a text’s generic status, acknowledging of course that ‘formal choices and actions’ are also ‘enmeshed in networks of social and historical conditions.’” Toscano’s question of why “certain…genres demand particular kinds of disability portrayal” is an intriguing one for Heidi, where the novel’s reception as a wholesome family classic and later, a book “for girls,” has mediated and perhaps overdetermined readings of disability within it. Like most texts of its genre, Heidi operates on different levels for the child and the adult reader. Whereas adults may concern themselves primarily with the novel’s ending and its message about perseverance and spiritual or natural healing, children could read the ending through a more agentic lens. Heidi not only attains her wish of returning to the mountains but is able to make the changes she long wished to see in her Alpine environment: bringing Klara to the Alm, providing comforts for Peter’s grandmother, and convincing her grandfather to engage with the village community. Alternatively, children might relate most to Heidi’s long experience of suffering in Frankfurt and feel the injustice of her lack of agency in that space. The context of Spyri’s writing—her explicit aim to raise public consciousness about war orphans—suggests that the formal choice of setting so much of the novel in Frankfurt was no accident, although popular memory of the text has selectively emphasized the portions that occur in the Alps.
As Wang maintains, “Literary disability studies must simultaneously value both text and disability; just as disability is irreducible to narrative’s often lazy symbolism, texts are similarly irreducible to insular politics” (3). The reduction of Heidi to a “miracle cure” not only defangs the text of its potential critique of the suppression of children’s authority over their bodies, but ignores the complex cultural coding of Heidi’s nostalgia. We may partly attribute this lacuna in criticism to the strong influence of film adaptations. However, Western scholars should also acknowledge that the sexist and anti-immigrant connotations attributed to nostalgia in the twentieth century must our inevitably color our readings of homesickness in nineteenth-century fiction. The reasoning has faded from cultural awareness, but the perception remains that to suffer greatly from missing home is weakness. Present-day Western readers may not consciously write off Heidi’s condition as a mark of ethnic “unfitness,” yet our culture still tends to dismiss girls’ and women’s pain and their judgments about their own bodies. Both Heidi’s experience within the text, and the text itself, are in danger of being written off as feminine, infantile, and unserious.
In making the argument that nostalgia has been overlooked as a historical disability because of its later association with children and the feminized Other, I have no wish to contend for its critical importance by reasserting its connection to masculinity and adulthood. We can attend to the way that culturally feminized and infantilized conditions often receive less thoughtful treatment without validating this attitude. If we return to the text, Heidi stands as an argument for resisting the easy interpretation of children, children’s books, and stories about people with disabilities as mere sources of inspiration.
Not only does Heidi offer insight into a form of embodiment and affect little remembered today, it also has something specific to teach about the enactment of public health strategy through sentimental children’s fiction. The novel began life as an attempt to redress a problem that affected thousands: the physical toll of the Franco-Prussian War. Spyri chose to support a structural solution: the establishment of the International Red Cross in Geneva (Eayrs 529). Through the money its sales raised for wounded soldiers and war orphans entering Switzerland as refugees, Heidi had a real impact on unnumbered historical bodies, something relatively few fictional texts can claim. Today, the same narrative occupies cultural memory as a metonym for a miracle cure. As such, it may even worsen the lives of children with disabilities by perpetuating a stereotype that privileges eradication over inclusion, individual transcendence over structural change. The transformation of this text’s perceived relationship to disability over time was clearly not for the better, suggesting a critical goal for future disability scholarship: to recover more historical meanings so as not to replicate “nostalgic” mistakes.
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