The fictive insane, male and female, are stock characters in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings across the literary spectrum from highbrow to lowbrow. Goethe's depictions of insanity in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Torquato Tasso join forces with less exalted (but still notable) works such as Christian Heinrich Spiess's Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (Biographies of the Insane) and downright trashy (but influential) “Gothick” novels populated by Bedlamites galore, many of them inspired by Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis's spine-tingler Ambrosio, or, The Monk. History was cooperating mightily with the trend, since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars gave Europeans ample opportunity to survey madness writ large over the landscape, and so too was science, which generated an outpouring of hysteria theory and re-conceptualizations of madness during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Novelists and poets, opera librettists and playwrights, all took note, among them Mörike, whose character Agnes in Maler Nolten represents certain early nineteenth-century notions of female hysteria leading to madness. That Mörike both subscribed to certain misogynistic characterizations of women and yet understood that women were trapped by the ignorance imposed on them, with terrible consequences for everyone, adds to the novel's complexity.

En route to her death, Agnes sings, and she does so in part because Goethe had made doomed young women sing before her.