What is the purpose of all this labeling? Foucault writes that the category of madness was created through the gesture of confinement, in the so-called classical age, with the new hierarchy of reason. Initially a subject was labeled insane so as to be disciplined, criminalized, physically put away, and then brought to “reason.” Derrida’s binary of opposites (nature/society, insane/ sane, criminal/citizen, woman/man, emotion/reason).
I use the term “madness” here to describe these women’s alienation, because I see their breakdowns as a philosophical experience that is about the confinement, or even death, of the self. This gesture of confinement, of exclusion, occurs when we speak of and name the figures of literary modernism: Us versus Them. The mentally ill ones versus the geniuses. But who gets to decide?
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway confounds this separation — all the characters are at risk of slipping on that slippery surface of sanity, some are able to prevent the fall, to keep themselves upright. The most privileged characters of the novel are less likely to be viewed as mad, even if they have dark nights of the soul. The traditional wife and the soldier of the lower class are the most susceptible to being pathologized.
I roll this around in my mouth — adjustment disorder. A woman is supposed to adjust, to go with her husband. To be brought to reason. Zelda’s reeducation program she underwent at the Swiss asylum. She needed to learn her role, to go back to being the good wife, the good mother. And twice as many women are diagnosed with these vague adjustment disorders. I realize this therapist has probably never read Deleuze, or Foucault, or Elaine Showalter, I remember I am against psychiatry, I do not return.
I order up books in bulk from the university library (my romance novels I check out from our local public). The student workers always part annoyed and agog, that anyone could want to read so many books. I carry them home in grocery bags and surround myself with them in bed.
These library books are my culture here. I keep company with the women inside these pages. Women who often are also, somehow, prevented from writing. These women who existed inside the bed, the room, trapped inside the house. I attempt to resuscitate their lives.
Sometimes for fun I reread Freud’s case studies of the hysterics. Like Hélène Cixous, I too read them like fiction. Well, they are fictions. They were made into fictions. These girls, like characters in a novel, were renamed, alienated from their former selves, mythologized. Bertha Pappenheim who Josef Breuer renamed Anna O. and later collaborated with Freud on her case study. Bertha Pappenheim, who later became an author and activist. But as the character Anna O., as the young girl, she still wrote, weaving her own fairytales, her own “private theatre,” as the doctors observed. She narrated her life in different languages, English, French, or Italian, refusing her native tongue of German, babbling polyglottal and glorious. Her repetition: tormenting, tormenting.
Yet none of HER text survives. The hysteric is a writer who ultimately could not be. She nonetheless told stories.
That’s what I need to do here. Tell their stories.
The pauses and gaps of Freud’s hysterics. Anna O.’s aphonia. Perhaps the silence of the hysteric was a form of rebellion, of refusing to be raw material. The narrative must be coaxed out by her father-doctor-Master-Inquisitor, she must confess, this is the talking cure Anna O. herself named. The voice unedited, wild, wanting. The verbosity of Freud’s madman Schreber (the author is the one who writes the case notes, coopting or contradicting the subject’s intent).
She speaks the language of the unconscious — he translates her depths. A channeling, this doctor-patient relationship, like the medieval mystic who narrates her tale to her father-confessor (her words, he pins them down, edits them). Her disordered mind, her disordered talk. Freud focused on the fragmented and discontinuous narrative of Dora and the others, attempting to give her speech order, coherence. He writes a novel on her, she is his character: a case study. Converting a monologue of madness into one of reason, as Foucault writes of the history of psychiatry.
The hysterics were Freud’s ventriloquist acts. They were his miraculous girls sawed in half, broken, needing to be put back together again.
A rhythm of silence undercut by fervent utterings.
André Breton and Louis Aragon as medical students working with shellshocked soldiers, named hysteria the “greatest poetic discovery of the late 19th century.”
Yet both the Surrealist aesthetic of automatic writing, as well as the theories of fiction that came out of modernism, seem to suggest that the woman’s radical spoken utterances are not art or writing in and of themselves, rather that an author is needed to edit and repeat, to shape and discipline.
I am struck by how many feminist critics, in their theories of radical writing, have drawn on male, modernist, precursors, as opposed to the more neglected women writers of that same period, without much to say about the women vampirized within these texts. (Perhaps because there is something dangerous about resurrecting the figure of the woman from his manuscript, placing her in a context of history, memoir, that goes against so many theories of fiction, theories that HE wrote.) Julia Kristeva with her theory of the semiotic, which draws on Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, Hélène Cixous who reads Molly Bloom’s monologue as an exemplar of her theories of l’écriture féminine.
L’écriture féminine, which has such a close link aesthetically to automatic writing — writing of and through the body, privileging the raw and emotional over masculine logic, and more than anything defined by VOICE. Speech—Parole. The criminal text. What Cixous calls La Genet, her name for the feminine outlaw writer, after the famous French writer and criminal, who wrote of social outlaws and misfits. Also a play on words, for La Jeune Née, the newly born woman. Yet whose voice? Whose body? For weren’t these figures before they were fictionalized, vampirized, alive in some other material way?
Cixous sees Molly the character as writing on her body, an ecstatic jouissance that she reads as feminine, but she ignores the materiality underneath the text, the real, raw lives lived, bodies that suffered, were ultimately confined (the hysteric or wife’s half-confinement, the madwoman’s prison sentence). And yet she identifies with the character not the author in Freud’s case study. She sees the hysterics as her sisters, but does not announce a sororal status with Molly Bloom. Molly Bloom who some say was inspired by Joyce’s wife, Nora. (Nora, like in Ibsen’s “A Doll House,” the ultimate wife, “I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald,” Nora becomes Dora, they, silenced explorers.)