Neurasthenic Subjects and the Bourgeois Interior

This article examines neurasthenia (or “nervous exhaustion”) as a signifier for cultural practices and formations embedded in, and shaping, late 19th-century discursive and material spaces. Neurasthenia and its putative “cure”—in the production of a domestic interior protecting its inhabitants from the shocks of modernity—were linked to late 19th-century concerns and fears over the impact of economic and social transformations on the new subjects of urban life. The bourgeois interior relied on the construction of a (male) subject, privatized and turned inward; reading the domestic discourse of neurasthenia through Walter Benjamin’s analyses of the bourgeois interior, this article explores the ways in which this space served to construct its subjects at the same moment that it represented them to themselves, producing and affirming a myth of home at the very moment of its disappearance from the stage of history.