Charcot's Theatre of Hysteria

CHARCOT'S THEATRE OF HYSTERIA
Author(s): Barry Stephenson

Source: Journal of Ritual Studies , 2001, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2001), pp. 27-37
Published by: Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44368585
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Journal of Ritual Studies 15 (1) 2001
CHARCOT'S THEATRE OF HYSTERIA
Barry Stephenson
Independent Scholar
Abstract
This paper applies Victor Turner's social drama model to the study of Jean-Martin Charcot's theatricalization
of hysteria in late nineteenth-century France. Ritual and performance theory has yet to be applied to
Charcot's work in any sustained, systematic way. The theatricalization of hysteria in both the medical and
artistic avant gardes of late nineteenth-century France makes for a fecund case study for ritual and
performance theorists. This paper opens a door in each of these directions. Turner's model provides a useful
framework for thinking about social tensions and dynamics implicit in the theatricalization and ritualization
of hysteria under Charcot's direction.
1 Introduction
Jean-Martin Charcot's work on hysteria during his thirty years (1862-1893) as director of the Salpêtrière
Asylum in Paris has received a good deal of critical attention. Much of this work focuses on Charcot's
presentation of the (usually female) hysterical body as an object of public spectacle during highly
theatricalized lectures held at the Salpêtrière in the 1880s. Hysteria was the rage in Paris during the last
half of the nineteenth-century. A dramatic increase in hysteria as a diagnosis was paralleled by wider
cultural interest in the disease. Hysteria was discussed in salons and high society gatherings, influential in
theatre, opera and dance productions, written about in novels and medical journals.
Victor Turner's model of social drama offers a framework for analyzing Charcot's
theatricalization of hysteria. Turner's notion is that social conflict is dramatic, and he identifies four
phases in a social drama: breach, crisis, redress, reconciliation or irreparable breach (1982). According to
Turner a social drama unfolds when there is a breach of normative modes of social life that, if not sealed
off or addressed, can lead to a state of crisis capable of splitting the social fabric into two or more
contending groups. In response to this situation redressive action arises. In general, redress refers to any
action evoked in response to social crisis: political debate, legal procedures, and military action. But
Turner is particularly interested in the role of ritual and other genres of cultural performance as
instruments of redress. If successful, redressive action leads to reconciliation and reintegration. But
redressive action may also serve to fuel a crisis and lead to recognition of an irreparable breach, with a
radical restructuring of social relationships as the inevitable result. In either case, redress involves a
"clash between conserving and reforming parties'^ 1 982: 1 09).
Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria can be understood as a venue of redressive action. Though
it is not possible to point to a single, casual breach leading to Charcot's theatre of hysteria, the years
marking Charcot's directorship of the Salpêtrière were characterized by social conflict and cultural
change. In addition to the ongoing transfer of power from aristocratic and autocratic government to
bourgeois republicanism, a growing feminist movement and a strident anti-clerical attack by positivists
contributed to an atmosphere of social unrest. Both of these conflicts influenced Charcot's study of
hysteria. Charcot's work on hysteria was a front line in the political battle to divest the church of
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Journal of Ritual Studies
authority and institutional power. And Charcot's treatment of hysteria can be understood as a cultural
statement about gender and gender relations aimed, directly or indirectly, at feminist values and
aspirations.
2 Hysteria at the Salpêtrière
Charcot considered it his great achievement to have identified the archetypal form of hysteria (1987:104).
The archetypal form of grand hysteria could be observed, timed (a typical attack lasting 15 to 20
minutes), and demonstrated through the use of hypnosis. Various symptoms such as heart palpitations,
tightness in the throat, irregular breathing, impairment of vision, a buzzing in the ears, pounding in the
temples, and fainting indicated the onset of a hysterical attack. An attack of grand hysteria would then
proceed in four distinct phases:
In the hysterical attack, four periods follow one another with the regularity of a mechanism. These are: (1) tonic rigidity
[resembling an epileptic attack]; (2) 'grand movements' also called 'clownisme' because of the circus-like acrobatics produced;
(3) 'attitudes passionelles' or vivid representations of one or more emotional states such as terror, hatred, love; the patient
endowed with an acrobats ability in the second period, now displays the talents of a mime or dramatic actress; (4) a final
delirium marked by sobs, tears, and laughter, heralding a return to the real world (Goldstein 1987:326).
Photographs depicting the various positions in a hysterical attack were published by Charcot and his
colleagues in the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, published between 1 877 and 1 880, and
the New Iconography of the Salpêtrière, published from 1888 to 1918, a total of twenty eight volumes.
Charcot's colleague Paul Richer used many of these photographs to produce "a series of etchings that
were composite interpretations of the typical appearance of the subclassifications of the hysterical crisis"
(Gilman 1982:198). More than eighty specific postures were identified. The female body fainting
helplessly backwards in an arched position and supported by another person, and the arc-en-cercle, in
which the hysteric sharply arches the back leaving only the head and feet resting on the floor or bed, are
two of the more famous of the many postures and movements identified by Charcot and his colleagues.
Charcot referred to the Salpêtrière as a "living museum of pathology" (Gilman 1982:194) and its
living "artifacts" were rigorously recorded and labeled in the Iconographies. But the Salpêtrière was more
than this; it was also a theatre of pathology, particularly a theatre of hysteria. The performative, theatrical
nature of hysteria was appealing to a man who in his youth chose a career in medicine over art. Charcot
was a life-long patron of the literary and artistic avant garde in Paris and he brought his considerable
artistic and performative skills to bear on his study of hysteria.
Long before Charcot hysteria had been linked to dance. Charcot continued to speak of hysteria as
chorea, a term which emphasized the performative nature of the disease (McCarren 1995:750). In
Charcot's view such a performative disease required a stage, and so he had built a five- hundred- seat
lecture hall in which he and the Salpêtrière hysterics performed elaborate lecture-demonstrations. Stage
lighting, iconographie art, enlarged photographs and slide projection, and costuming were all used as both
teaching tools and to heighten the drama of hysterical performance (Justice-Malloy 1995:135). A
carnival like atmosphere surrounded Charcot's lectures, which were open to the public and drew such
notables as Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond de Goncourt, and Sigmund
Freud.
The lecture hall would typically be filled to capacity long before Charcot's arrival:
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Charcot entered at 10 A.M. often accompanied by an illustrious foreign visitor and a group of assistants who sat in the first rows.
Amidst the absolute silence of the audience, he started speaking in a low pitch and gradually raised his voice, giving sober
explanations that he illustrated with skillful colored chalk drawings on the blackboard. With an inborn acting talent, he imitated
the behavior, mimicry, gait, and voice of a patient afflicted with the disease he was talking about, after which the patient was
brought in (Ellenberger 1974:96).
Through the use of hypnosis, often induced by the ringing of large gongs or tuning forks, and other
methods such as electrical shock and pressure to hysterogenic points on the body (typically the ovaries),
Charcot would induce or relieve hysterical symptoms and attacks for all to see. Each Tuesday night
following the lectures Charcot hosted receptions in his home for the Parisian elite during which the finer
points of hysteria were discussed at length.
Though Charcot claimed he was nothing more than a camera recording what he observed- "in
truth, I stand here merely as a photographer, I write down what I see" (Schade 1995:510) - it is now clear
that the "archetypal" form of hysteria was constructed by Charcot, his colleagues, and patients (Gilman
1982; deMarneffe 1991; Ellenberger 1970). André Brouillet's painting Charcot at the Salpêtrière (1887)
depicts Charcot giving a lecture demonstration to a small group of doctors, with a hysterical patient
draped over his arm as the object of analysis. This painting, along with Tony Robert Fleury's Pinel
Liberating the Insane (1876) depicting Pinel, a one-time director of the Salpêtrière, having the chains
removed from a female patient, and Paul Richer' s painting of a hysteric in the famed arc de cercle
position all hung in the large lecture hall built by Charcot.
Whereas the visual field of the audience at Charcot's lectures was focused on Charcot and the
patient, the patient's visual field was framed by these three images depicting, and thereby encouraging,
appropriate hysterical behavior and gender relationships. Sander Gilman, in his study of the use of
iconography at the Salpêtrière, has shown how the photographic and artistic images that pervaded the
atmosphere of the asylum functioned as tools to teach "how to structure one's hysteria so as to make an
exemplary patient" (Gilman 1993:349). The massive effort to photograph hysterical symptoms and put
hysterics on stage had a sensational effect on the patients, making them competitors before the camera
and audience, and turning some women into better hysterics than others.
3 Hysteria as Social Drama
Turner recognizes that various types of ritualized actions and cultural performances arise in response to a
social crisis. Turner associates ritual (in a strict sense) with liminality, reflexivity, and a subjunctive
mood. "Liminality,' writes Turner, "can perhaps be described as a fhictile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a
storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and
structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating postliminal existence."
Ritual then is potentially transformative insofar as it allows the "the contents of group experiences [to be]
replicated, dismembered, remembered, refashioned, and mutely or vocally made meaningful" (1991:12-
13).
Ritualized action and performances, by enacting the social breach in a subjunctive space, display
the nature of the breach to the reflective eye, thereby providing a window through which problems can be
clearly recognized, while at the same time proposing creative solutions. Turner is well aware that a social
crisis also evokes reactionary responses that draw on normative forms of ritualized action; these actions
Turner refers to as ceremony. Ceremony functions to reinforce or reestablish normative social
relationships during times of crisis.
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A broad definition of ritual would include both ritual as liminal and potentially transformative
and ceremony as normative and conservative. Turner's distinguishing between ritual and ceremony is
partly a polemical move to highlight the potentially transformative aspects of ritual. Ritual, in Turner's
strict use of the term, generates cultural performances that don't simply seal off a breach in the social
fabric but rather push through normative structures and relationships with an aim towards reconciling and
reintegrating factions on either side of the breach. Turner is not always consistent in his usage of terms,
often using the term ritual to refer to both liminal and ceremonial performances. Turner's point, however,
is clear; ritual can function as an agent of redress in different ways: as a glue to maintain the status quo,
as a crowbar to leverage a group into a new social position, or as a generative "storehouse of
possibilities," an imaginative "striving after new forms and structures." All three of these functions can be
seen at work in Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria. The study and treatment of hysteria at the
Salpêtrière under Charcot can be understood as a ceremonial reaction to burgeoning feminist aspirations,
as a ritual vehicle for the positivists' anti-clerical attack, and as a liminal space generating critical and
imaginative cultural performances. Let us take each of these three in turn.
3. 1 Hysteria and Feminism
Charcot variously described hysterical women as impressionable, capricious, malleable, coquettish,

seductive, lazy, untruthful, recalcitrant, deceitful, vain and bad wives. "One is surprised at times," writes
Charcot, "to admire the ruse, sagacity, and the unyielding tenacity that especially the women, who are
under the influence of a severe neurosis, display in order to deceive... especially when the victim of the
deceit happens to be a [male] physician" (Evans 1991:31). In late nineteenth-century France female
hysterics were typically characterized as "being willful, troublemaking, unladylike, virile creatures whose
attempts at self-assertion were interpreted as resistance to the male authorities taking care of them"
(Evans 1991:40). Hysterics could not be trusted. Because they couldn't be trusted often the most extreme
measures-such as inserting a needle into a paralyzed arm- would be required to either prove hysterics
were faking, or to prove that they were not. In either case, the male physician would assume (or
reassume) a position of power. Charcot writes: "It is incontestable that, in a multitude of cases, they
[hysterics] have taken pleasure in distorting, by exaggerations, the principal circumstances of their
disorder, in order to make them appear extraordinary and wonderful" (Bronfen 1998:177).
The fact that many of the characteristics found by Charcot and his colleagues to be typical of
hysteria were also used in describing feminists and feminism implicitly served to label feminists as
hysterics. Hysteria served to delineate the boundaries of normal sexual identity. The hysteric and the
feminist alike were either hyperfeminine- vain, malleable, suggestible, seductive- or not feminine
enough- troublemaking, assertive, aggressive, and sagacious. "Through hysteria," argues Martha Noel
Evans,
femininity was defined as a disease which medical men were then exhorted to contain and "cure" through the use of drugs,
electric shocks, and confinement. Their malaise over changing gender roles thus soothed, medical men, in the name of science,
could overlook the actual conditions of their patients' lives- the sexual abuse, the debilitating working conditions, the social
dislocations, the lack of legal protections, the powerlessness and isolation- and remain 'masters of the situation' (1991:50).
In his essay, Political Witch Hunt Rituals, Albert Bergesen discusses how the state invents
deviance in order to stigmatize groups that are threatening to the state. He argues that social institutions
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function to define "deviant behavior and thereby to establish or reestablish the ever shifting symbolic
boundary separating the deviant from the normal... the community can, on its own, create deviance by
processing groups and individuals through its institutions of social control, thereby reaffirming the
character and definition of its own moral order" (1996:50). Charcot's theatre of hysteria seems to have
functioned along these lines. Though it would be difficult to make the case that Charcot consciously
aimed at discrediting the feminist movement- Charcot himself played a key role in opening the medical
profession to women-both hysterics and feminists were, by normative standards, considered deviant, and
the characterization of hysterics by Charcot paralleled contemporary ideas about feminists.
Elaine Combs-Schelling, in her study of Moroccan marriage rites (1996) and Robbie Davis-
Floyd, in her study of the ritualization of hospital birth (1996), have shown how societies use ritual to
inscribe their most fundamental values and assumptions into the body. "Culture," argues Combs-
Schelling, "can make its elaborations appear true by embedding them within the body's most basic
biological truths. The physical groundings - sexual intercourse, bloodspilling and birth - independently
and panhumanly exist, while the cultural elaborations do not (they are culture-specific). Once fused, they
are hard to pull apart" (114). We may safely add illness to Combs-Schelling' s list of the "physical
groundings" during which the body is especially susceptible to the ritual elaboration of cultural norms.
The institutional definition of hysterical characteristics as deviant, and the public presentation of this
deviance during Charcot's lectures were means to enculturate the body. Thus Charcot's treatment of
hysteria can be seen as "articulat[ing] a cultural malaise over changing gender roles whose aim was to
pathologize those aspects of femininity that fell outside normative rules" (Bronfen 1998:184).
3.2 The Anti-Clerical Movement
Another key element informing the use of iconography and public performance at the Salpêtrière was the
anticlerical movement. In an attempt to undermine religious authority, Charcot and his colleagues, as
Sander Gilman has shown, drew on depictions of demonic possession, exorcisms, and mystical ecstasy in
Western art in constructing the archetypal form of grand hysteria:
Jean-Martin Charcot (and his colleague Paul Richer) provide the reader (and viewer) of these late nineteenth- century images of
the hysteric with a set of antecedent images... In their study of the representation of the insane-specifically the hysteric in the art
of the West- they create their own history and concluded with a clinical chapter outlining their "universal" nosological categories
of hysteria... They offer sixty-seven illustrations, often in line form, to provide visual proof of the continuity between the images
of the Catholic mystic and the modem hysteric. Beginning with the fifth-century representation of possession in the Romanesque
mosaics of Ravenna to images of Saint Catherine of Sienna, Charcot and Richer begin to build their visual categories of
hysteria... The assumption is that there is an explicit continuity between Catholic religious experience, as represented by the
practitioners, and the neurological pathologies of nineteenth-century France. Thus the aesthetic representation of ecstasy
becomes a clinical sign of psychopathology (Gilman 1993:367).
Charcot and his colleagues were able to reduce mystical states to elements of a hysterical attack, as well
as critique the church's handling of cases of demonic possession and witchcraft, which were also
incorporated into the hysterical syndrome. The visions of Catherine of Sienna were reduced to hysterical
hallucination, and witches became hysterics who had simply been "given the wrong treatment by being
tortured" (Schade 1995:508). The public display and treatment of hysterical women alongside slides and
artwork of mystical raptures and exorcisms became a powerful tool in the anti-clerical attack. Emile
Zola's best selling novel, Lourdes, published in 1894, drew on Charcot's work in portraying the "shrine
[Lourdes] in the lurid colors of hysteria, suggestion and crowd madness" (Harris 1999:330). During the
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public lectures, Charcot and his colleagues used hysterical performance to critique religious
interpretations of possession and mystical ecstasy.
The phase of redressive action is a breeding ground for ritualizing, which Grimes defines as "the
act of cultivating or inventing rites" (1990:10). In the wake of enlightenment, rationalist, and
contemporary positivist attacks on the church, clerics found themselves very much in the situation
described by Turner as characteristic of redress: the "redressive agent and instruments" that the
"repositories and representatives of legitimacy " have at their disposal "have lost or are losing their
authority, legitimacy, or efficacy in the eyes of the group members." Under such conditions a window of
opportunity opens for a "group intent on altering or restructuring the social order in some decisive way"
(1982:108-09). Ritualizing emerges as a vehicle for this "restructuring," which in this case involved a
shift in social status and institutional power from clerics to doctors. In 1882 secular republicans appointed
Charcot to the chair of nervous disease, and he vigorously carried on with previous efforts to laicize
hospital staff (Harris 1999:327). The ritualization found in Charcot's public lectures was fundamental to
these efforts.
"Ritual, unlike theatre," writes Turner,
does not distinguish between audience and performers. Instead, there is a congregation whose leaders may be priests, party
officials, or other religious or secular ritual specialists, but all share formally and substantially the same set of beliefs and accept
the same system of practices, the same set of rituals or liturgical actions. A congregation is there to affirm the theological or
cosmological order, explicit or implicit, which all hold in common, to actualize it periodically for themselves and inculcate the
basic tenants of that order (1982:1 12).
Treating Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria as ritual in the sense described above by Turner is not
simply an overextended analogy. Charcot's lectures were far from a typical reading of a paper; indeed,
Charcot's lectures on hysteria embody most, if not all of the characteristics of ritual as identified by
Grimes (1990:14). The lectures were performed and gestural, patterened and rehearsed, formalized and
stylized, collective and institustionalized. The lectures were also repetitive; over the years the best of the
Salpêtrière hysterics performed thousands of times. The lectures were condensed, dramatic, symbolic and
paradigmatic. In spite of the invented nature of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, even qualities such as the
traditional, archaic and primordial were present insofar as Charcot's analysis of hysteria was a modem
understanding of age-old phenomena.
In his critique of the rhetorical use of the terms "ritual" and "religion" by Ivan Illich and Thomas
Szasz in their attacks on the medical and psychiatric professions, Grimes argues that it
is a mistake to assume that real ritual is only what happens in churches and synagogues... The rituals of which Szasz and Illich
speak are not only "like" rituals, they are serious competitors with the liturgies of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. It is a
methodological error to suppose that interaction ritual is merely ad hoc, powerless because of its low degree of formality...
Ritualization is every bit as serious as liturgy... (1990:151).
Positivists such as Charcot were intent on being serious competitors with the clerics. To be successful in
its bid, the anticlerical movement needed compelling ritual forms, and Charcot provided them.
3.3 The Question of Liminality
One of Turner's central points is that redressive action, insofar as it generates ritual and other cultural
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performances with liminal, subjunctive moods, carries with it transformative power capable of diffusing a
social crisis and mending the breach between disparate groups. Such performances are described by
Turner as reflexive; that is, they have the "ability to communicate about the communication system itself'
(1985:181). To what extent, if at all, was Charcot's theatre of hysteria liminal?
Though we speak of Charcot's theatre of hysteria, it was not simply his show. To be sure,
Charcot and his colleagues, though they "rejected the notion that their inclinations had anything to do
with the promotion of a disease" (Evans 1991:14), were major players in shaping the hysterical
syndrome. According to Drinka, after "being examined by physician after physician... they [the patients]
gradually collected ideas of how they should behave when having a fit or when hypnotized. Besides, they
watched each other and learned" (1984:89). But Ellenberger complicates this simple picture in describing
the Salpêtrière as a "peculiar atmosphere of mutual suggestion developed between Charcot, his
collaborators, and his patients" (1970:95). Many feminist writers have focused on the agency of
Charcot's patients in the construction of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, and their observations point to the
liminal qualities of hysteria.
Feminist interpretations of hysteria beginning in the 1960s, and working out of a psychoanalytic
and Lacanian framework, "offered a new perspective that decoded physical symptoms, psychotherapeutic
exchanges, and literary texts as the presentations of conflict over the meaning of femininity in a particular
historical context." As a result of this work, hysteria came to known as the "daughter's disease, a
syndrome of physical and linguistic protest against the social and symbolic laws of the Father" (Gilman
1993:288). Lacking a platform from which to speak and subject to the manipulative control of male
doctors, Salpêtrière hysterics nevertheless employed a somaticized language of resistance and protest.
This is the general conclusion of those involved in the production of the Dr. Charcot's Hysteria
Shows, a dance/movement-theatre piece that evolved into four separately produced versions between
September 1987 and December 1989. Created by Lenora Champagne, Judy Dworin, and Dianne Hunter,
the project "attempted to understand hysteria in a new way, not from the outside, as Charcot and his
associates had, but from the inside, from the point of view of the hysterics themselves." With the aid of
Labanotation analyst Brad Roth, the group literally "put themselves in the positions of the hysterics...
[hoping] to comprehend and to project for a twentieth-century public the political, psychological, and
sexual dynamics" involved in hysteria at the Salpêtrière (Hunter 1998:xiii). One conclusion to emerge
from these productions is that in spite of being the object of a powerful male gaze, Salpêtrière patients,
through their public performances of hysteria, were able to critique, accuse, and even subvert the medical,
voyeuristic gaze of the Salpêtrière staff and audience. "What Charcot classified as the 'passionate
attitudes' phase of hysteria," writes Hunter, "we interpreted as poses in an angry game miming a
contradictory drama of subversion, seduction, and retreat... As the sequence continued, we felt that the
figure withdrew, advanced, and then became frustratingly seductive, mocking the role of being the sexual
object of another's gaze"(3-4). The point here is that the performance of grand hysteria seems to have
involved more than just Charcot's ceremonial repudiation of feminist aspirations, or a means through
which he could attack the Church.
Thomas Szasz and Ivan Illich are to be commended for their critiques of the medical
establishment, but their rhetoric of "demythologizing" and "deritualizing" medicine "trivializes the
intricate texture of hysteria" (Gilman 1993:234). Ron Grimes is concerned that by using ritual as a label
to "expose other people's labels," Illich and Szasz present only a partial picture of ritual:
Implicitly following Durkheim, they consider ritual only a mirror and reinforcer of the status quo. Their view of ritual is
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unacceptable in the field of ritual studies, because they do not understand the critical and constructive capacities of ritual... Their
mistake lies, not in treating ritual as part of cultural illness (which it no doubt can be), but in their failure to see how necessary
ritual can be to both diagnosing and recovering from illnesses, including doctor made ones (1990:146-47).
One lesson to be learned from the work of Champagne, Dworin, and Hunter is that the "critical and
constructive capacities of ritual" were inherent in Charcot's theatre of hysteria because it wasn't simply
Charcot's show. Insofar as the Salpêtrière hysterics were able to "communicate about the communication
system itself' the theatre of hysteria can be thought of as liminal.
Caroline Walker Bynum challenges Turner's social drama model precisely on this question of
liminality. Bynum describes liminality as "a moment of suspension of normal rules and roles, a crossing
of boundaries and violating of norms, which enable us to understand those norms, even (or perhaps
especially) where they conflict, and move on either to incorporate them or to reject them" (1996:73). On
one hand, Charcot's public lectures do nothing of the sort. Rather than a suspension of roles and rules we
see an exaggeration of traditional, patriarchal gender relations. On the other hand, the sexualized,
manipulative power claimed by some commentators on behalf of the Salpêtrière hysterics certainly
crossed boundaries and violated norms of bourgeois propriety, making the features of that propriety more
easily recognizable. In her study of women's experiences in the late Middle Ages, Bynum argues that
women's stories and symbols, though often dramatic, do not entail the processual movement found in
men's stories. Turner's model is indebted to Arnold Van Gennep's work on rites of passage, which
focuses on how liminality serves to transform the social status of initiates. Bynum 's point is that women
in the late Middle Ages did not go anywhere. Though male biographers shaped women's lives "into the
traditional medieval narrative form of situation, rupture, resolution, women's dramas were [in fact]
incomplete" (78-9). By shaping women's stories in this way, women and women's experiences became
"fully liminal only to men" (81).
A similar dynamic was at work in the theatricalization of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, which in
spite of its liminal qualities, was hardly a liminal space for female hysterics. They were not part of a
liminal process that transported them from one social status to another-except perhaps for the fleeting
moments when they performed with a dramatic flair equal to that of Sarah Bernhardt. The Salpêtrière
hysterics were liminal objects for the liminal processes of others. Women in the middle ages, argues
Bynum, were not looked with, they were looked at. The same can be said of the hysterics at the
Salpêtrière, "where the voyeuristic impulse was institutionally legalized and tamed, so to speak, by
turning [the] patients into museum pieces" (Schade 1995:511). Hysteria at the Salpêtrière shows that the
presence of liminal qualities does not necessarily involve liminal process or function.
Redress produces all sorts of competing, conflictual actions and performances; these actions and
performances mean and suggest meaning in different ways to different groups. Turner speaks of ritual as
the progenitor of cultural performances such as theatre, in which the hints of subjunctive moods in
ritualized action are more fully developed. Turner states that some genres of performance seem "more
effective than others in giving birth to self-regulatory or self-critical works, which catch the attention, or
fire the imagination, of an entire society or even of an epoch" (1982:104). This seems to have been the
case with the performance of hysteria. Charcot's theatre of hysteria had enormous impact on "all levels of
the media... A scene entitled Leçon du Professeur Charcot was exhibited from one town fair to the next-
hypnotizing sessions also took place at town fairs... plays by various authors were written and produced in
imitation of insights from the Leçons du Mardi (Schade 1995:510). Sarah Bernhardt's stage performances
and opera divas throughout France and Germany were also greatly influenced by Charcot's work.
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Richard Schechner, in his work on performance theory, distinguishes between entertainment and
efficacy, which he sees as two poles of a continuum. Both ritual action and dramatic productions effect
and entertain, but Schechner associates ritual with efficacy and theatre with entertainment. "Whether one
calls a specific performance ritual or theatre depends on the degree to which the performance tends
toward efficacy or entertainment" (1977:75). Schechner speaks of performance as a "braided structure" of
efficacy and entertainment that is sometimes historically tight and other times loose. Scheduler's own
work in theatre aims at tightening the braid so that theatre is not simply entertainment, but also potentially
efficacious and transformative. The Dr. Charcot Hysteria Shows, for example, were a highly ritualized
series of theatre-dance productions, aiming almost entirely at efficacy rather than entertainment. The
cultural productions mentioned above that were fueled by Charcot's public lectures could similarly be
plotted on Scheduler's continuum. Turner's interest in Schechner's work is that it provides him with a
grammar and a model for talking about the importance of cultural performances for redressive action.
Schechner speaks of performance as "twice-behaved behavior," or "restored behavior." "Restored
behavior is 'out there,' distant from 'me.' It is separate and can be 'worked on,' changed, even though it
has 'already happened'" (1996:442). For Turner, the "doubleness of acting," means that performance
"cannot escape reflection and reflexivity. The proximity of theatre to life, while remaining at a distance
from it, makes of it the form best fitted to comment or 'meta-comment' on conflict" (1982:105). In our
case, Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria as a ritual response to social crisis was, in spite of the
presence of liminal, critical elements, not distanced enough from the social tensions and conflicts of
which it was an integral part. The treatment of hysterics at the Salpêtrière was more breach than redress.
The "reflexive and therapeutic character of theatre," writes Turner, "as essentially a child of the
redressive phase of social drama, has to draw on power sources often inhibited or at least constrained in
the cultural life of society's 'indicative' mood" (1991:12). Charcot's work on hysteria was a part of late
nineteenth-century France's indicative mood. Yet the suggestiveness of hysterical performances at the
Salpêtrière served to stimulate ideas and generate performances that worked to undo normative
assumptions.
The work of American dancer Loie Fuller, who spent much of her career in Paris, is a fine
example of Turner's notion of cultural performance as an agent of redress. One of the aims of the Dr.
Charcot's Hysteria Shows was to "move toward transcendence of... the twisted forms of creative
expression [perceived] in the poses" (Hunterl998:10). If the observations of poet Stéphane Mallarmé are
any indication, Loie Fuller was able to achieve precisely this. Fuller's career "took off with a serious
parody of the medical and paramedical vogue of hypnosis at the end of the century" (McCarren
1995:753). She was familiar with Charcot's work, and her dance can be said to have transformed (or
perhaps brought to completion) understandings of the way the body communicates through the
movements, signs, and symptoms typical at the Salpêtrière. In contrast to the voyeuristic gaze of the
Salpêtrière, Fuller's work, according to Mallarmé, "rather than provoking the usual mania for looking,
instead offer[ed] occasions for reflection-for insight, that is, rather than sight." Mallarmé speaks of
Fuller's movement as inviting "a transparent prolongation of the gaze through, rather than at its subject"
(751). Felicia McCarren notes that "Fuller's work confronts medical stereotypes of the hysterical body
and the cultural conception of femininity it subtends, putting its pathological nature into question. It
points to a different way of reading the body's language" (751-52). In this new reading the movements
associated with grand hysteria are understood not only as symptoms but also as inherently restorative and
curative. Turner speaks of theatre "at its height" producing a shiver down the back of the spine that for a
moment binds together performer and audience (1991:13). Fuller's dance released the body's potential to
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express in a self-reflexive way the cultural dynamics of which it was inherently a part-a potential that
was pressing for release in the twisted and paralyzed limbs of the Salpêtrière hysterics.
4 Conclusion
If the theoretical model proposed by Turner seems tightly linear and causal, his application of it to actu
case studies is more layered and looped. Grimes notes that "Turner's theoretical insistence on the linear,
temporal nature of social drama and ritual is not, in practice, as strict as it sometimes sounds... T
phases... seem to be repeatable, and they do not necessarily follow a single chronological order. They are
less a rigid scenario or plot structure and more akin to 'layers' of consciousness or of action" (1990:178).
The application of Turner's model to the case of hysteria at the Salpêtrière bears this observation out. It is
often difficult to know how to apply Turner's categories when there are more than two competing group
and more than one breach. In such a context redressive actions and cultural performances may function as
ceremony, ritual (in the strict sense), or both ceremony and ritual, all depending on which group is bei
considered. This is certainly the case with Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria. Moreover, Charco
work on hysteria could itself be considered as a breach generating cultural performances such as Lo
Fuller's dance and even the Dr. Charcot's Hysteria Shows a hundred years later. One contemporary
commentator accused Charcot in a medical journal of "a sort of vivisection of women under the pretens
of studying a disease for which he knows neither the cause nor the treatment" (Gilman 1993:311)
Hysteria at the Salpêtrière involved a complex mix of agendas and intentions.
While Charcot's theatricalization of hysteria embodies some of the characteristics of liminality,
is important to separate liminal features from function. A particular rite or performance may indeed b
liminal, but we need to ask, liminal for whom? Bynum's argument that women in the middle ages were
liminal objects for the transformative processes of men can be brought to bear on the case of hysteria
the Salpêtrière. Though the lecture-demonstrations were filled with behavior that crossed the boundarie
of social propriety, thus making those boundaries more visible to the astute observer, hysteric
performance was not a vehicle for women's liminal processes. The Salpêtrière hysterics did not ga
access to a new social status by virtue of their performances. Perhaps when applied to ritual an
performance in the modem and postmodem world the notion of liminality should be detached from the
classical, processual rite of passage and redefined in terms of a capacity to stimulate the imagination an
other cultural performances. In this latter sense the theatre of hysteria at the Salpêtrière was inde
liminal.
References
Bergesen, Albeit. 1996. "Political Witch Hunt Rituals." In Readings in Ritual Studies. Edited by Ronald L. Grimes. Upper
Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1998. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bynum, Caroline Walker Bynum. 1996. "Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner's Theory of
Liminality." In Readings in Ritual Studies. Edited by Ronald L. Grimes. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Charcot, Jean-Martin. 1987. Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons. Translated with a commentaiy by Christopher G.
Goetz, M.D. New York: Ravens Press.
Combs-Schelling, Elaine. 1996. "Etching Patriarchal Rule: Ritual Dye, Erotic Potency, and Moroccan Monarchy." In Readings
in Ritual Studies. Edited by Ronald L. Grimes. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Davis-Floyd, Robbie. 1996. "Ritual in the Hospital: Giving Birth the American Way. In Readings in Ritual Studies. Edited by
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Ronald L. Grimes. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

de Marneffe, Daphne. 1991. "Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud." Signs
17:1.
George F. Drinka. 1984. Birth of Neurosis: Myth , Malady, and the Victorians. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Ellenberger, Henri. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Evans, Martha Noel . 1991. Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gilman, Sander, et al. 1993. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkley: University of California Press.
Gilman, Sander. 1982. Seeing the Insane. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Grimes, Ronald L. 1990. Ritual Criticism. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Goldstein, Jan. 1987. Console and Classify. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, Ruth. 1999. Lourdes : Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Penguin.
Hunter, Dianne, ed. 1998. The Making of Dr. Charcot's Hysteria Show. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press.
Justice-Malloy, Rhona. 1995. "Charcot and the Theatre of Hysteria." Journal of Popular Culture 28:133-138.
McCarren, Felicia. 1995. "The 'Symptomatic Act' Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance." Critical Inquiry 21:748-
774.
Schade, Sigrid. 1995. "Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body." Art History 18:499-517.
Schechner, Richard. 1977. "From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad." In
Essays on Performance Theory, 1970- 1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists.
Schechner, Richard. 1996. "Restoration of Behaviour." In Readings in Ritual Studies. Edited by Ronald L. Grimes. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre : The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications.
Turner, Victor. 1985. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology As Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Turner, Victor. 1991. "Are There Universais of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?" In By Means of Performance:
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Press.
Biographical Sketch
The author holds an MA in Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, and conducts
research in the areas of ritual studies, religion and literature, and depth psychology. He is planning Ph.D.
work, applying ritual and performance theory to a study of Powwow in southern Alberta.
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Charcot's Theatre of Hysteria

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