The modern world is obsessed with control. You are what you eat; practice makes perfect; if you don’t like something, change it. It convinces you that you can get whatever you want if you work hard enough. In truth, this is a facade. There are obvious forces, from the media to government, that influence the way we perceive the world and the possibilities it possesses. Gender roles are deliberately propagated, and certain stigmas are attached to the way they operate. One of these dilemmas was the neurosis encompassing nineteenth-century femininity.
The word ‘hysteria’ originates from a Greek term meaning ‘wandering uterus’. To put it simply, if a woman experienced a mid-life crisis at any point, it would most definitely be due to her unhealthy uterus. Plath called it the bell jar, and Moshfegh proclaimed it the antidote to delusion, but how accurately does this capture the sadistic inhumanity that possesses almost every woman at least once in her lifetime?
Interestingly, there were several speculations behind the causes of this disease. Some believed it was a product of repressed emotions, and the depravity that comes with the expectations of women fulfilling their assigned roles. Others thought it was a grand scheme aimed at discrediting the sacrifices society made to uplift women in the aforementioned roles. Freud measured this as a consequence of subduing sexual memories, giving birth to the doomed doctrine of guilt and its historic internalisation.
A curious perspective on this comes from Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, who argued that “the hysterical woman can be seen as both a product and indictment of her culture,”. By the time they reached adulthood, girls often struggled with abandonment and dependency issues, not having a fully formed sense of self. As they were discouraged from asserting mastery, strength, and skill, they struggled with a lack of ego development.
Reasonably well-known for their predisposed patriarchal inclinations, the French did not fall short in this area. These architects of impressionism believed that women fell victim to it due to their inherent domesticity, a by-product of the same values that created the foundation of their society. Greeks credited this to the womb, a blinding curse befallen upon the fates of these women and those around them (why of course, the witnessing of this disaster was a terrible circumstance in itself).
Through centuries, women have been subjected to an array of ammunitions in the name of curing this inborn disease. Doctors could not fathom accepting defeat; that their vastly under researched field of feminine health might actually prove their incompetence. If they were not healing these ‘lazy, vulnerable’ women who had ceased playing their part as dutiful mothers and wives, they were part of the problem. And so they did what any guy would do when his masculinity is threatened: pass on responsibility. Some burnt them as witches with androcentric dread, while others labelled them with slurs, the evolution of which has been the prime criterion of man’s stone stepping into the twenty-first age.
The exploration of female hysteria in American literature provides significant food for thought. In Marta Caminero Santangelo’s The Madwoman, we see how the question of subversion arises for a gender that has been systematically dismembered. Is there such a thing as power for a body that has always been on the opposite end of the dichotomy? And who is the effective perpetrator behind this dichotomy? Is the question of struggle as simple as being disintegrated into two distinguishable poles amidst the complexity of radicalism shaping how we see things?
When Esther suffered from the inability to align herself as the protagonist of her story, and when the year of rest and relaxation became so much more than a sojourn of finding authenticity, both fell into the same place: the merciless hands of loneliness. They were pushed to choose mental illness as a response to the conflicting expectations placed upon them.
To be able to see the world for its oppressive, strategic, misconstrued jargon, and rebel against its normality, to set it on fire and watch yourself burning amid flames, is a terribly lonely business. Emotional deprivation, a posterity of no control, and the rooted obligation of guilt make one stagger. Rethink Camus’ outsider with a Bjork-esque narrative. Let the enormity of the world swallow you whole.
No one will truly understand what it’s like to be a woman; to stab your heart for its sensitivity and make sure it doesn’t stop beating, carrying the carcass of a cultural beast, pulling it along one hysteria at a time.
By Ariba Ashraf
Writer (Team 2023-2024)
Note: the views expressed in the article solely belong to the writer and do not reflect TLC.