On Hysterical Narrative

Author(s): Elaine Showalter

Source: Narrative , Jan., 1993, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 24-35
Published by: Ohio State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20106990

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 Elaine Showalter

On Hysterical Narrative

During the past decade, the concept of "hysterical narrative" has become
one of the most popular formulations in literary criticism. It has developed at
the busy crossroad where psychoanalytic theory, narratology, feminist criticism,
and the history of medicine intersect, drawing both on the vogue of Freud's case
studies, especially the canonical Dora, and the recent recognition that not just
psychoanalysis, but all medical practice, depends on narrative, the "doctor's
story," which both shapes the formal case study and determines practical treat
ment. As Oliver Sacks explains, "There's a part of me that almost has to orga
nize clinical perceptions into a narrative, as well as theoretically. . . . Subse
quently, I think, the patient comes to share the story, and the story gets
modified" (45). Feminist critics, among others, drew attention to the ways that
doctors' stories tended to dominate medical discourse, while patients' stories
were modified; and the decline of "hysteria" as a medical phenomenon can be
partly attributed to the understanding of its construction as a narrative.
Yet while the protean symptoms of classic hysteria are now rarely diag
nosed in the consulting room, hysterical narrative has become the waste-basket
term of literary criticism, applied to a wide and diffuse range of textual tech
niques, and, most alarmingly, taken as a synonym for women's writing and the
woman's novel. Sometimes referring to all fictional texts by women, sometimes
to writing about hysterical women, sometimes to writing that is fragmented,
evasive, and ambiguous, hysterical narrative has taken on disturbing connec
tions with femininity. In an influential essay, Julia Kristeva argues that the wom
an's novel is a hysterical genre: "Freud's statement 'the hysteric suffers from
reminiscences' sums up the large majority of novels produced by women"
(166). Juliet Mitchell, defending the idea that the women's literary tradition
is the "discourse of the hysteric," maintains that "the woman novelist must be
an hysteric," since her fictional stance is as someone who simultaneously ac

Elaine Showalter is Professor and Chair of English at Princeton University. Her recent books
include Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Si?cle and Sister's Choice: Tradition
and Change in American Women's Writing.
Copyright 1992 by Elaine Showalter.

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 On Hysterical Narrative 25

cepts and refuses "the organization of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism"

(289-90).
Can the stigmatizing terminology of hysteria be redefined and appropriated
in the interests of feminism? Can Freudian insights about the ways hysterics tell
stories help us understand the sources and techniques of modernist fiction?
What kinds of knowledge do critics need in order to apply medical and clinical
concepts to literary texts?
Hysterical narrative raises all these questions. In considering them, it's im
portant, first of all, to acknowledge that hysterical narrative has a history that
pre-dates Freud. By the time Freud described it in his case studies, hysterical
narrative had already acquired a negative meaning for fin-de-si?cle readers, a
meaning associated with effeminacy and deceitfulness. In his widely-read po
lemic, Degeneration, Max Nordau had castigated the elements of fantasy in
contemporary writing as decadent and hysterical: "The hysterical subject does
not consciously lie. He believes in the truth of his craziest inventions. The
morbid mobility of his mind, the excessive excitability of his imagination, con
veys to his consciousness all sorts of queer and senseless ideas .... A result
of the susceptibility of the hysterical subject to suggestion is his irresistible
passion for imitation, and the eagerness with which he yields to all the sugges
tions of writers and artists" (25-6). Following Nordau, many writers had ex
plored the idea of "hysteria" as the mental disorder responsible for literary ex
perimentation. These terms were rigidly gendered; "hysterical" writing was
unmanly and incoherent. Thus Walter Pater writes in an essay on "Plato's Es
thetics," "Manliness in art . . . [has to do with] tenacity of intuition and of
consequent purpose, the spirit of construction as opposed to what is literally
incoherent or ready to fall to pieces, and in opposition to what is hysteric or
works at random" (280-1). New Women writers in the 1890s, such as George
Egerton, Olive Schreiner, Victoria Cross, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Rach
ilde, often used the term "hysteria" to describe the consciousness of heroines
expressing their repressed desires in stories they called "fantasies," "fragments,"
or "dreams."
Freud may have had such texts in mind when he noted the resemblance
between his case histories of hysteria and fin de si?cle short stories. At the
beginning of his first full-length case study, Elisabeth von R., he comments that:
"It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short
stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must
console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently
responsible for this, without any preference of my own. The fact is that local
diagnosis and electric reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, where a
detailed description of mental processes such as we are now accustomed to find
in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psycho
logical formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that
affection" (160-1).
In Freud's view, the nature of the story, rather than the predilections of the
story-teller, dictated the form. As he explained, hysterics were unable to tell a

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 26 Elaine Showalter

complete, "smooth and exact" story about themselves. They left out, distorted
and rearranged information because of sexual repression. And this incapacity to
give an "ordered history of their life" was not simply characteristic of hysterics;
it was the meaning of hysteria. The stories of hysterical girls were initially like
"an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock
and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks" (Dora 30).
Their volubility about one period of their lives was sure to be followed "by
another period in which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled,
and riddles unanswered" (Dora 30).
If the hysteric could be brought to remember what was repressed and come
to possess "an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history" (Dora 32),
she would be cured. Thus, the therapist's role was to suggest, edit, or construct
such a narrative for the patient. Freud was confident that, no matter how elusive
and enigmatic the hysteric's story, the analyst could reconstruct a logical, scien
tific, and complete narrative. "Once we have discovered the concealed mo
tives," he wrote, "which have often remained unconscious, and have taken them
into account, nothing that is puzzling or contrary to rule remains in hysterical
connections of thought, any more than in normal ones" (SE 2:254).
He compared this process to the archeologist restoring the mutilated frag
ments and objects of buried civilizations: "I had no choice but to follow the
example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of
day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity"
(Dora 27). Indeed in his consulting room Freud surrounded himself with a vast
collection of mutilated antiquities which seemed illustrative of his self-image as
one who collected and repaired broken stories and broken selves.
Freud perfected his definition of hysterical narrative in the case of Ida
Bauer, or "Dora." While his colleague Josef Breuer, in the earlier case of Anna
O., had commented on the broken language and multilingual nature of the hys
teric's speech, Freud drew attention to the fragmentary and discontinuous nature
of the hysteric's narrative and to the physician's responsibility for reorganizing
it into a coherent whole. In doing so, moreover, he had not only to fill in the
gaps in the hysteric's own story, but also to overcome her resistance to his
narrative interpretations. In order for the therapy to work, the hysteric had to
accept and believe the analyst's story. In his later papers on psychoanalytic tech
nique, Freud described the process as one of combat in which "the patient
brings out of the armory of the past the weapons with which he defends himself
against the progress of the treatment?weapons which we must wrest from him
one by one" (SE 1: 151). The analyst, Freud insisted in "The Dynamics of
Transference," must win "the victory whose expression is the permanent cure
of the neurosis" (108).
Dora, however, was quite uncooperative in this regard. She flatly denied
Freud's narrative embellishments of her story, would not accept his version of
her activities and feelings, and either contradicted him or fell into stubborn
silence. Finally she walked out on Freud by refusing to continue with therapy
at all, an act which he regarded as the problem of her transference. Dora, he

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 On Hysterical Narrative 27

argued, had projected on to him her feelings of erotic attraction for her father
and Herr K. and was punishing him with her rejection.
If Freud is a reliable narrator, what happened in his exchange with Dora
was that he succeeded in penetrating the mystery of her hysterical symptoms.
In his terminology, he unlocked her case and exposed her sexual secrets. Unable
to face the truth, Dora ran away from her therapy and remained sick for the rest
of her life. But if Freud is an unreliable narrator, a very different plot emerges.
In this case, Dora is a victim of Freud's unconscious erotic feelings about her
that affected his need to dominate and control her. Dora has no voice in Freud's
text; we hear nothing of her direct dialog, and her historical and Jewish identity
are both suppressed. He never understands her story at all and simply tries to
bully her into accepting his version of events. His interpretations of her problem
reflect his own obsessions with masturbation, adultery, and homosexuality. Thus
the "hysterical narrative" reflects Freud's hysteria rather than Dora's. She never
becomes a subject, only the object of Freud's narrative.
Literary critics have drawn attention to the correspondences between
Freud's case studies of hysterical women and the forms of late nineteenth cen
tury and early twentieth-century fiction. In an essay first published in the Parti
san Review in 1974, Steven Marcus drew attention to the modernist aspects of
Dora, which he described as a "great work of literature." Among the resem
blances to a modern experimental novel which he discerned in the text were its
"plastic, involuted and heterogeneous" organization, its use of what looked like
fictional framing devices in Freud's preface and postscript, and its proliferation
of such novelistic conventions as "thematic analogies, double plots, reversals,
inversions, variations, and betrayals" (79). Marcus compared Dora to Ibsen's
plays of the 1880s and 1890s, and suggested connections between Dora and
Nora in A Doll House. In a subsequent essay, Neil Hertz extended the connec
tion to modernism by comparing Dora to James's What Maisie Knew. Peter
Brooks too describes Dora as a "failed Victorian novel" (282). Thus, the delib
erate gaps and ambiguities of Freud's hysterical narrative reflected the emergent
narrative conventions of a new era.
Feminist critics have emphasized different correspondences between
Freud's case studies and nineteenth-century fiction. Susan Katz points out that
literary critics need to be cautious in using the case-study as a scientific back
ground against which to assess fictional characters and constructs because so
many of Freud's conventions came from fiction to begin with. As she reminds
us, "What remains troubling about the literary form of the case history as a
synthesis of clinical observations and fictional devices is that the 'heroines'
disguised for anonymity's sake behind pseudonyms and altered circumstances
were real women; and Freud was trying to direct the course of their lives with
his personal and literary values" (299.) Katz argues that Freud adopted some of
the narrative conventions of the nineteenth-century novel in constructing his
case histories, especially their dependence upon marriage for closure. If Dora
reads like a failed Victorian novel, it may be that it invokes obsolete narrative
conventions. The conclusion of Dora echoes the marriage plot closure of many

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 28 Elaine Showalter

Victorian novels about women: "Years have gone by since her visit. In the
meantime the girl has married. . . . [She] had been reclaimed once more by the
realities of life" (144).
Whereas Marcus, Hertz, Katz, and Brooks emphasized the literary quali
ties of Freud's case studies, more recently critics have emphasized the "hyster
ical" qualities of literary texts. While the Dora case can be read as an early
modernist novella, Claire Kahane argues that "a good many late nineteenth
century texts can profitably be called . . . hysterical." They are "symptomatic
narratives" which "articulate the problematics of sexual difference." As Kahane
sees it, these texts react to the emergence of the New Woman in the fin de si?cle,
and the gender crisis she precipitated: "Menaced by a vision of cultural apoca
lypse, and yet also exhilarated by the possibilities, turn-of-the-century writers,
both male and female, represented their ambivalence in fictional forms that
begin as hysterical articulations of their own labile sexuality and become for
malized later as the tenets of literary modernism" (286-88).
Finally, while the fin de si?cle produced the widespread medical hysteriza
tion of women's bodies, the end of the twentieth century has produced a wide
spread critical hysterization of women's texts. Many feminist theorists have ac
cepted the idea that women's writing is a form of hysterical narrative. This
argument is sometimes staged at the level of language. Both the traditional
medical accounts of hysteria and Freud's case histories foregrounded such
symptoms of blocked speech and communication as the globus hystericus, or
sense of choking; the tussis nervosa, or nervous chronic cough; aphasia, or
inability to use words, and aphonia, or loss of voice. Anna O., for example,
became unable to speak her native German and instead spoke either Yiddish,
which she called "the woman's German," or a jumble of English, Italian, and
French. All of these symptoms could be read symbolically as the repression of
women's language or its impossibility within patriarchal discourse. In Anna O.'s
case, "speaking German meant integration into a cultural identity [she] wished
to reject," the patriarchy in which she was an immobilized daughter (Hunter
467-68).
Lacanian theorists have drawn attention to the connections between the
hysteric's silences, symptoms, and distorted speech, and the female imaginary,
semiotic,or pre-Oedipal linguistic register. As Martha Noel Evans explains,
"The French feminist critique of the place of women in psychoanalytic theory
thus had the effect of uncovering a stifled symbolic system in the symptoms of
hysterics. The feminist aim became to recover this lost language which would
reconnect their bodies and minds, and reconnect women to each other. Indeed,
the feminist effort to establish a female descendancy took the precise shape of
claiming their inheritance as speakers of an hysterical mother tongue" (290).
French feminist theorists maintained that hysteria was a female language with a
"privileged relation to the maternal body" (Rose 136).
"Hysterical" discourse is thus connected to the pre-Oedipal phase of femi
nine development in which the baby daughter takes the mother as her primary
object of desire. In his essay on "Female Sexuality," Freud wrote that "this

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 On Hysterical Narrative 29

phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the etiology

of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the
neurosis are characteristically feminine" (SE 21:227). In the writing of Julia
Kristeva particularly, the pre-Oedipal phase is assigned a specific linguistic reg
ister, including orality, rhythms, intonations and babble. Thus, the "body lan
guage" of hysteria is seen as both feminine and radical, outside of patriarchal
culture, a "Mother Tongue." In her manifesto on women's writing, "The Laugh
of the Medusa," H?l?ne Cixous called for a revolutionary language of women
writers that would articulate the silent discourse of the "admirable hysterics who
made Freud succumb to many voluptuous moments impossible to confess, bom
barding his Mosaic statue with their carnal and passionate body words, haunting
him with their inaudible and thundering denunciations" (1098).1
Secondly, the concept of "hysterical narrative," which began as a technical
term in narrative theory, has been taken over by feminist critics. Kristeva's
sweeping claim that the woman's novel is a "hysterical" discourse of reminis
cence?as if men's novels had nothing to do with autobiography or memory?
initiated a number of readings of classic fiction. Athena Vrettos claims that "we
can read Victorian culture through the symptoms and interpretations of its hys
terics" (578). She describes Lucy Snowe in Villette as "the hysteric first-person
narrator" whose "hysteria informs her acts of narration" and whose narration
"expresses and embodies her hysteria" (552) while Daniel Deronda "poses the
problem of hysteria as disruption of the text's formal voice" (553). The terms
have similarly been applied to Charlotte Bronte's The Professor and to the "in
cipiently hysterical" Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch.2 With regard to Ameri
can fiction, Gillian Brown claims that "the preeminent figure of immobility for
the nineteenth century is the hysteric, whose strange positions freeze normal
bodily motion and activity" (135). It is now common in feminist critical writing
to encounter such phrases as "hysterical utterance," "hysterical trope," "hyster
ical discourse," and "hysterical text." According to Ruth Johnston, a hysterical
text is "a text that interrogates the possibility of constructing a feminine subjec
tivity in realistic signifying practice" (353).
In Reading Woman, one of the most brilliant and influential works of fem
inist psychoanalytic criticism, Mary Jacobus asks whether "women's writing
[can] ever be anything other than hysterical?" (201). Jacobus links Freudian
hysteria with elements of the romantic, unconscious, and uncanny in women's
writing. Beginning with Freud's observation that the resemblance of his case
studies to short stories strikes him as "strange," Jacobus argues that their strange
literariness is "almost a form of hysterical utterance" (197). Her use of the
qualifier "almost" here signals the beginning of a rapid and increasingly dog
matic series of analogies and associations between hysteria and literature, but
particularly women's writing. In Jacobus's syllogistic reasoning, hysteria is a
metaphor for all that is unconscious; literature includes unconscious elements,
"the knowledge that knows more than it knows" (198); thus, the literary aspects
of psychoanalysis are its hysterical aspects as well. Furthermore, since science
rejects both hysteria and femininity as antithetical to its purpose, these must be

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 30 Elaine Showalter

the same thing. And realist literature cannot tolerate any irrational elements
either, according to Jacobus; "The hysteria that is femininity must be repressed
in the interests of a masculinist psychoanalystic theory; the uncanny that is
narrative must be repressed in order to sustain a realist view of fiction" (201).
In Jacobus's work, hysteria becomes a metaphor with only tangential rela
tion to historical, medical or psychiatric evidence, and this relentless metaphor
ization of hysteria leads her to some very strange conclusions about feminist
criticism. To Jacobus, the "feminist" reading is the one that invokes evidence to
question the belief that women are "basically unstable or hysterical" (239). But
from her perspective, this reading is rationalist, and masculinist, and therefore,
not really feminist at all. The true feminist reading is "hysterical reading," one
which acknowledges both the presence of the uncanny and which associates it
with the hysterical and feminine. Reading hysteria is a way of reading woman,
and reading "hysterically" is a form of women's reading.
The key text of what Jacobus and others mean by hysterical narrative is
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," which
Diane Price Herndl calls "the most famous narrative of hysteria" (68). Jacobus
sees it as a paradigmatic narrative of female hysteria; "The Yellow Wallpaper"
is one of "the short stories which Freud's case histories read like" (202). In
Jacobus's view, Gilman's heroine is "all body, an incarnation not only of hys
teria but of male fears about women"; the story is about the unspeakable repre
sentations of female sexuality, madness, and animality. Barbara Johnson com
pares "The Yellow Wallpaper" to Dora as two stories "of a failed cure" in which
"a female patient [is] subject to the therapeutic ambitions of a male doctor." The
story is thus "an allegory of psychoanalysis" (255, 258).
In terms of genre, Gilman's Gothic narrative is associated with hysteria
because, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the heroine of the Gothic can
be seen as a "classic hysteric" (vi). And because the story is written in a series
of brief paragraphs of one or two sentences and becomes increasingly incoher
ent, many feminist readers have seen it as exemplifying the fragmented and
hysterical story of femininity itself. Paula Treichler reads the text as a confron
tation with patriarchal language in which the image of the sinuous yellow wall
paper is "a metaphor for women's discourse," and challenges both the diagnostic
sentence of hysteria passed on the narrator and the "sentencing process" of the
patriarchal system whose "presumed representational power can sentence
women to isolation, deprivation, and alienation from their own sentencing pos
sibilities" (69). Finally, Gillian Brown reads Gilman's story as a hysterical nar
rative in which "hysteria ... the disease of the Victorian bourgeois family,
caricatures domesticity [and]. . . . [T]he hysteric suffers mainly from reminis
cences ofthat domesticity" (152, n. 3).
What feminist critics do not always make clear, however, is the distinction
between Gilman's representation of a metaphorical feminine "hysteria," and the
innately "hysterical" properties of her writing and of the Female Gothic as a
genre. To call the Gothic heroine a hysteric implies that she only imagines that
she is being threatened and that the menacing or seductive figures she describes
are only projections of her own repressed desires; however, Gothic narratives

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 On Hysterical Narrative 31

by women are invariably socially grounded in situations of real danger to wom

en's autonomy and safety. Furthermore, comparisons of the Gothic novel and
hysterical discourse are circular, since Dora?the "context"?can also be read
as a Gothic "text." In her analysis of women and the Gothic genre, for example,
Michelle Mass? notes that

The comparison of Dora and the heroine gives us a startling, if partial plot
similarity. A young girl who dotes on her father is much impressed in her
early reading about love. She is somewhat interested in a man, but is re
pelled when he reveals a sinister side to his character. She attempts to flee,
but time and again finds herself in an isolated setting with him. She locks
herself in a room, but the key is taken from her; she tries to get help by
telling someone what has happened to her, but she is told she imagined her
danger. Her mother is herself helpless, and the one woman she thought she
could trust betrays her. She suspects a dark secret in her family that curses
each generation and that would explain much of what has happened to her.
She refuses to do what her parents want and is brought, not to a cell to
contemplate her sins and the virtues of obedience, but to Freud to analyze
her own desire as precipitant for her story. (16)

Women writing about hysteria may be constructing fragmented narratives

or inventing a potent symbolism of Gothic spaces and images, but they are the
very opposite of the silenced hysterics compelled to express their protest or
desire through the body. Indeed, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of our clearest
examples of the antithesis of writing and hysteria. The heroine's hallucinations
are partly induced when she is deprived of the outlet of writing. Gilman herself
wrote the story as a protest against the rest cure which had restricted her intel
lectual and creative life. As Diane Price Herndl has argued, the story was Gil
man's "writing cure," for "in creating a narrative of her hysterical condition, she
no longer had to embody illness directly but could represent it in her text" (74).
A major problem in the critical application of hysterical narrative is its
clinical reductiveness. The vast medical literature on hysteria has been reduced
to a few canonical case studies of the great hysterical stars, chiefly Dora and
Anna O. The complex symptomatology of hysteria over the centuries is gener
ally disregarded, or treated as a metaphor. Thus novels like Villette and short
stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which heroines undergo prolonged ill
nesses explicitly described as hysteria in the text, are grouped with novels and
stories in which heroines are merely unhappy, histrionic, or rebellious.
Basing their theories on the famous case studies in which the hysteric is
invariably a woman and the doctor is always a man, literary critics then assume
an equation between "hysteria" and "femininity." When a male analyst/narrator
is retelling the story of a woman, however, the label of "hysteria" has significant
relations to power and credibility. How can Dora's narrative be seen as plausible
and coherent when Freud is so determined to reject it and when it is told in a
culture where women's plots are so limited? The "unreliability and incoherence"
of the hysteric's story, as Toril Moi points out, can be seen as a projection of

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32 Elaine Showalter

her social circumstances as a woman: "the reason why the neurotic fails to
produce coherence is that she lacks the power to impose her own connections
on her reader/listener" (92). Moreover, Moi notes, Freud was not a neutral lis
tener in the conversation but an adversary and antagonist who saw analysis as
"armed combat," a struggle between the analysts and the patient in which "what
is at stake in the narrative struggle is the right to claim one's own knowledge as
truth, and, as a corollary, the right to proclaim the guilt of one's defeated op
ponent" (82-3). Martha Noel Evans makes a similar point. "If the speech of
witches and hysterics was universally discounted as mendacious," she writes
". . . it is because women do not have the necessary real power to challenge the
word of their colonial masters." The inability of hysterics to tell Freud a satis
factory narrative is, thus, not "a mark of female pathology, but rather a result
of male denial of women as subjects of enunciation" (282).
While the classic case histories of hysterical women are structured like
Victorian novels with the endings of marriage, madness, or death, the case
histories of Freud's male patients, like the Wolf Man, read more like open
ended modernist fictions. Here, Susan Katz points out, these closed marriage
plots are significantly absent: "The forms of Freud's case histories reflect his
ideological positions toward women and men: the uni vocal, conventionally
4 Victorian' narratives of Freud's female patients become inadequate in the later
case histories because Freud does not want to cement his male patients into a
closed plot like that of marriage. Freud's male patients get more play in narra
tive because men get more play in life" (300).
Indeed, the experimental short stories of New Women writers in the 1890s
were designed precisely to avoid the tight formulas and conventional endings of
the Victorian novel. In these brief and impressionistic sketches, women writers
were attempting to break through the confining structures of the marriage plot,
to explore what George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) called "the terra in
cognita of herself as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her"
(58). In deliberate opposition to the techniques of Victorian domestic realism,
these writers employed dream sequences, hallucinations, reveries, allegories,
and episodes of erotic fantasy in stories that consciously wrote against the end
ings of the dominant literary models. From one point of view, then, what Freud
took as hysterical narrative and tried to reshape in terms of the women's plots
of his day may have been the unfamiliar voice of a more spontaneous but co
herent and normal female consciousness.
In addition, quite different models of hysterical narrative emerge when we
begin to look at case studies of male hysteria. At the very least, the equation of
hysteria and women's discourse or writing is severely undermined by the exis
tence of a large body of medical evidence on hysteria in male subjects.3 This
relatively unfamiliar material offers numerous examples of narratives composed
by male doctors about male patients, and, in the rarity of examples of narratives
about male patients by female doctors, emphasizes the intense cultural hostility
to the idea of the hysteric as male and the therapeutic authority as female. In an
important recent essay, the psychologist Lisa Gornick has discussed the poten
tial for a "new narrative" in the interaction of the woman therapist and the male

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 On Hysterical Narrative 33

patient. In this dyad, she suggests, "the impact of the gender of the participants
on the therapeutic dialogue becomes more salient" (259). But resistance to fe
male therapeutic authority is strong, as we see in films like Zelig, Spellbound,
and The Prince of Tides, where the woman therapist falls in love with her hys
terical male patient and takes over his symptoms. As Gornick points out, "these
male fantasies of psychotherapeutic treatment by a woman clinician as a love
cure . . . invert the reality about sexual contact between therapists and patients"
(278). In reality, about four times as many male therapists have sexual contact
with their patients as do women therapists. But in the case of the male hysteric
the fantasy of erotic contact undoes the woman analyst's authority and "re
store^] ... the man to the dominant position" (274). Gornick argues that the
master narratives of psychoanalysis, including hysterical narrative, should be
re-examined in the light of other gender configurations.
The Freudian vocabulary and the clinical history of hysteria have been so
negative for women that there is no way to rehabilitate their terminology in a
feminist critical context. To label women's writing "hysterical" is to denigrate
it as art, no matter how strenuously it is simultaneously valorized as "literary,"
"uncanny," "modernist," or "Gothic." Feminist critics should be especially
aware that labelling women's texts, and especially feminist texts, as "hysterical"
has long been a device of ridicule and trivialization. In a typical instance, Perry
Miller mocked the "hysterical level" of Margaret Fuller's writing in Woman in
the Nineteenth Century. As recently as 1983, a controversy erupted in the Times
Literary Supplement over Anne Stevenson's use of "hysterical" as a critical term
for the poetry of Sylvia Plath and other "man-hating" feminist poets. Defending
her position, Stevenson insisted that "hysteria is the very stuff of revolutions?
and not only female revolutions. ... [It is] a passionate single-minded psycho
logical condition which, immune to humour as to reason, fails to achieve the
detachment essential for self-criticism" (961b). Indeed, as Jacqueline Rose has
documented, "No writer more than Plath has been more clearly hystericized by
... a male literary tradition" (28). The representation of linguistic disorder and
the unconscious in women's writing as the helpless expression of feminine (or
feminist) neurosis, undermines its reception as artistic choice. If, as one critic
argues, "a hysteric is someone who cannot tell a story," calling women writers
hysterics can hardly be a compliment (1035).
The annals of medicine and the case histories of psychoanalysis offer liter
ary critics extraordinary insights into consciousness and story-telling. But to
make medical terminology a metaphor for literature entails risks and responsi
bilities as well as opportunities. If literary critics will avail themselves of the
wider understanding of hysteria now becoming available through the work of
medical historians and psychiatrists, the implications of hysteria for narrative,
and of narrative for hysteria, could become a major critical resource.

ENDNOTES
1. This identification has been a controversial topic within feminist criticism. Jacqueline Rose,
for example, insists that there can be no unmediated language of the maternal body: "The idea

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 34 Elaine Showalter

of an unmediated relation between the body and language is contrary to the linguistic defini
tion of a sign . . . [and] the concept of the feminine as outside discourse, etc.," (141).

2. See Ruth Johnston, Jill L. Matus, and Carole Stone articles listed on Works Cited page.

3. For discussions of the case studies, see the ground-breaking work of Mark Micale, especially
"Jean Martin Charcot and the idea of hysteria in the male." My essay "Hysteria and Gender"
touches on questions of male hysteria and narrative which will be more extensively addressed
in my book in progress, Hystories.

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