The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-06-14 14:31:24 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1127915 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York, N.Y., U.S.A. Donor Roy Porter, Helen Nicholson and Bridget Bennett (eds), Women, Madness and Spiritualism, 3 vols (London and Elsewhere, first through Charcot’s work, and then in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, there were experiments with a more psychologically-oriented approach. In picturing hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the individual’s control, in beginning to take ‘women’s words and women’s lives seriously’, Showalter sees psychoanalysis as potentially a major advance: but one whose promise soon dissolved, as Freud’s increasing theoretical rigidity and obsessive ‘insistence on the sexual origins of hysteria blinded him to the social factors contributing to it’. In any event, Freud’s ideas met with a particularly hostile response from many English psychiatrists, notwithstanding, in Leonard Woolf’s words, the ‘desperately meagre ... primitive and chaotic’ state of English medical knowledge of insanity on the eve of the Great War.

The Female Malady: How have Cultural Ideas about Feminine

Showalter coined the term gynocriticism; which refers to the literary framework that is going to assess the works of female authors and focuses on critiquing their work without using terminologies used and developed by male critics and authors, as using that sets the women writers at a disadvantage

Mental health is quite a misnomer, in any case, for the most part of this book, for women were considered "mad" for the most innocuous of "offences". Suffice it to say that I wanted to set my own hair on fire while reading the travesties that women committed against society: the travesty of wanting dignity to raise their children out of poverty; the travesty of earning a decent wage for a profession of choice, and not relegated to the kitchen or the scrubhouse; the travesty of wanting a voice in how their bodies were treated; the travesty of wanting a say in society. All these were crimes for which at one time or other women were imprisoned in asylums for merely speaking their minds. Oh, and you'd definitely not want to speak your mind. That in itself is the worst travesty. Referred to by Showalter as the “new stage of self-awareness”; the most evolutionary phase of feminist criticism where women no longer imitate male writers’ styles, but also no longer only write to oppose authority; strive to celebrate the nature and essence of what constitute the female self (body, sexuality) She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focussed on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Elaine Showalter. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and

Our images of madness, she argues, are disproportionately female: ‘women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind.’ Romantic portraits of Crazy Jane, a poor servant girl seduced and abandoned by her lover; Lucia di Lammermoor with its picture of female sexuality as insane violence against men; Bertha Mason and Gothic madness – violent and hideous animality kept caged in Mr Rochester’s attic lest a ‘clothed hyena’ be let loose upon the world: in novels, in drama, in poetry, in painting, in popular ballads, in opera, it is women who stand as emblems and exemplars of irrationality. Mark S. Micale (ed.) , The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2004), esp chs 1-2. Showalter's writing is so engaging and her ideas are really compelling. Before reading, I thought I had the topic figured out - it seems quite evident if you've read anything about mental illness and feminism. But I was gladly mistaken - her arguments are very nuanced and focused and made me think about facets of the topic I hadn't previously. In addition, a historical scope like this can often make texts feel rushed, spending not enough time on each time period. This text never really felt like that. For my interests, I would have loved more time spent on the more recent years, but that would have made it unbalanced in treatment.

Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). (An excellent collection of essays; several of the essays challenge Showalter’s findings and emphasis on ‘gender’, see e.g. the articles of Wright, Levine-Clark and Michael but don’t ignore the rest.) e-book and several copies in library

The Female Malady: How have Cultural Ideas about Feminine The Female Malady: How have Cultural Ideas about Feminine

Showalter later taught at Rutgers and Princeton University (neither of which hired women when she began her teaching career) This is not a review by any means. Just some random thoughts. A review would require a thesis: and I'd be quoting more than half the book. Just read it. Showalter has such an engaging style, you'll be thinking you're reading just another gothic novel, but by the time you're through, you'll be scared to death. For real.Yet when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement. Until women break free for themselves, the chains that make madness a female malady, like Blake's "mind forged manacles," will simply forge themselves anew.”