Showalter, Page 1 - UCIspace

Showalter, Page 1

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

Questions:
1. overall patern of book, tripartite, things getting worse and worse as a narrative

structure
2. gender issues: use of evidence as "female"; resisting subject
3. use of Foucault, etc.

Intro
p. 3 female insanity as a wrong of women or as their essence
vs p. 5 historical study - how in cultural context, notions of gender influence the

definition and treatment of insane
book is feminist history of psychiatry and cultural history of madness as female

vs. p. 20 book is contribution to feminist revolution in psychiatric history - to let women
speak for themselves

p. 6 in order to do gender analysis need new documents
diaries, memoirs, novels
p.10 changing representations of ophelia
p.14 opera - madness as escape from feminine bondage

Part I Psychiatric Victorianism

Ch. 1: Domesticating Insantity: John Conolly & Moral Management
bases of Victorian psychiatric theory: moral insanity, moral management

(abolition of mechanical restraint) and moral architecture (control without force)
p.34 in the asylum - patients separated by category of gender and class and nature

of disorder - use of panopticon, thru use of cells and disciplined labor (begin in 1830s) - want to
control masturbation

p. 50 reformed asylum - remained in paternalist tradition, unlike factory, prison,
etc - but as they grew larger administrative techniques took over [problem of bureaucracy?]

Ch. 2: The Rise of the Victorian Madwoman
p.52 domestication of insanity coincides with feminization
after 1850 women more than men in asylums
p.61 women's texts: show insanity as a reaction to limitation of feminine role
Florence Nightingale's autobiographical novel Cassandra
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, Lady Audley's Secret
- these accounts are richer than the doctors' p. 72
- medical and political policies were reinforcing

Ch. 3: Managing Women's Minds
Dr. Brown's clitoridectomies
p. 97 photographs as control

Showalter, Page 2

p. 98 What confined women in the Victorian asylum was precisely the ladies'
chain of feminine propriety and the straitjacket of a weird but mandatory feminine gentility

Part II: Psychiatric Darwinism

Ch. 4: On the Borderland: Henry Maudsley and Psychiatric Darw-
inism
problem of large numbers - change from moral management to

disciplinary techniques - timetables, schedules - care goes from superintendent to assistant to
attendant - no familial relation

p. 104 psychiatrists introduce science - madness = heredity + vicious
habits - p. 106 an evolutionary regression

1870-80s - context of social conflict and economic downturn
Maudsley character p. 120 "the model for the psychiatrists of his age" - not

kindless but manliness, maturity, responsibility

Ch. 5: Nervous Women: Sex Roles and Sick Roles
p. 123 insanity through role transgression **
p. 128 the anorexic = self-sacrificing Victorian heroine
p. 130 the hysteric = seizure and choking
p. 132 longings for independence and mastery - doctors did not make this

connection - read - *** but saw them as morally repulsive and intractable
p. 137 - psychiatric treatment was "ruthless," " intended to establish the male

doctor's total authority" - "goal was to isolate the patient from her family support systems,
unmask her deceitful strategems, coerce her into surrendering her symptoms..."

p. 144 Alice James "I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an
interview with a doctor than from any human experience."

women of fin de siècle were "ravenous for a fuller life" "famished for the freedom to act
and to make real choices" - *** [is this the imposition of a revolutionary, rational subject in
relation to women????]

Ch. 6: Feminism and Hysteria: The Daughter's Disease
p.145 hysteria identified by doctors with rebellion
p. 147 for feminist analysis must ask not if rebels were
pathological but if pathology was supressed rebellion ***
Charcot - hysteria is female - use of photography [why?]
p. 151 "I am only the photographer, I register what I see"
p. 150 in Charcot's hospital hysteria was represented, presented and reproduced

- coaching of patients by assistants
- p. 154 he paid little attention to what they were saying
p. 156 Anna O. "her hysteria was a `creative' escape from the boredom and futility

of her daily life" - she rejects German, the patriarchal tongue
p. 158 Freud sees women's routines as causes of hysteria
Dora - Freud failed because he was too quick to impose his language - i.e.,

insistence on sexual origin of hysteria
p. 160 reason is father's reason

Showalter, Page 3

p. 161 feminism and hysteria - two ends of a continuum of resistance

Part III: Psychiatric Modernism

Ch. 7: Male Hysteria: W. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock
- WWI shell shock - emotionally incapacitated males
finally attributed to the extreme emotional conditions of the war - manliness

meant no complaints p. 172
war neurosis 4 times higher among officers than troops

- organic explanations destroyed by the war - men were put in the position
(helplessness) of women p. 190 ***

Ch. 8: Women and Psychiatric Modernism
after the war the female malady changes to schizophrenia
- but it is not predominantly female, unlike other disorders - but treatments

suggest feminization: shock, lobotomy - both recommended predominantly for women
women's narratives - shock treatment becomes punishment for intellectual

ambition, domestic defiance and sexual autonomy p.210
feeling they have no identity, women look to externals
p. 212 abyss opens between body and mind *** see paragraph
again, women's condition is seen as the context of disease

Ch. 9: Women, Madness and the Family: Laing and the Culture of Anti- Psychiatry
Laing listened to patients words and considered the context
p. 213 "What happens if we look at antipsychiatry from a feminist perspective?"

****
Showalter's metaphic language on Laing - anger in p. 229 "political carnival"
p. 231 patient is typically female, but anger toward husband is not taken into

account
p. 232 "exactly what is left out when the mad women's story is mediated through

the male voice"
Barnes complains of sex roles, but Laing leaves them out
p. 236 Laing sees it as adventure not mothering
p. 246 antipsychiatry was male dominated but did not recognize this

Epilogue

p. 250 "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