"When You Go Mad ... Somebody Else Comes In" "When You Go Mad
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
"WHEN YOU GO MAD ... SOMEBODY ELSE COMES IN" "WHEN YOU GO MAD ... SOMEBODY ELSE COMES IN": THE ARCHlYAL HYSTERIC IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE SET IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ONTARlO By KATRINE RAYMOND, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University ©Copyright by Katrine Raymond, January 2011 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2011) McMaster University (English and Cultural Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: "When you go mad ... somebody else comes in": The Archival Hysteric in Twentieth-Century Literature Set in Nineteenth-Century Ontario AUTHOR: Katrine Raymond, M.A. SUPERVISOR: Professor L. York NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 209 11 ABSTRACT This project reconsiders nineteenth-century hysteria and recovery in selected works of 1990s historiographical Canadian fiction. Using a material feminist perspective, I develop an understanding of the "archival hysteric": a figure whose permeable mindbody reacts in eccentric ways to her environment. The material mindbody becomes a physiological archive of intersubjective interactions, social expectations, and past traumas. Expanding the concept of the archive to include the human subject, the family home, and the landscape, the fictions provide models for personal and social change. Chapter One explores the eccentric nature of the female body as viewed in nineteenth century documents and in Alice Munro's "Meneseteung." This chapter focuses its analysis on the hysteric's eccentric mindbody as the site of partial recovery. I propose that moving from hysteria to sanity involves a transformation to health of the mindbody that can occur through the ethical relationship and an acknowledgement of the permeable nature of intersubjective boundaries. The nineteenth-century concept of female flow is replaced by a model of viscous porosity. Chapter Two explores how the archive functions as a metaphor for hysterical subjectivity. Following Kelly Oliver's theory of witnessing, I show how the act of shared witnessing reveals the permeable boundaries between researcher and research subject. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace provides a case study of an archival hysteric that illustrates the ways in which shared witnessing can lead to both illness (reactivity) and health (response ability). Chapter Three explores Away, in which Jane Urquhart mobilizes the figure of the love mad hysteric in postcolonial and environmental contexts. The archival hysteric here represents permeability not only between human subjects, but also between human and non-human subjects. The archival hysteric illustrates human subjects' unfixed positions in the world: relying upon the binary of mental health and illness, diagnostic labels therefore misrepresent the complexity of states of being. 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Sean Smith, Senior Reference Archivist, at the Archives of Ontario for his help in locating useful material and to the librarians at the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Thank you to Margaret Atwood's office for permission accessing her unpublished material. And thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their generous funding. A heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Lorraine York, for her ongoing patience, constant faith in the project, and generous feedback, and to Dr. Grace Kehler and Dr. David Wright for their thoughtful and constructive advice along the way. Also thanks to Dr. Roger Hyman for joining my committee during the important last stages. This thesis is written for both the women and the men of my family who have suffered mental breakdown and disease, in addition to joy and well-being. This thesis has been part of a personal and familial journey. A special thanks to Writers' Group (especially Erin Aspenlieder), Charmaine Cadeau, my parents, siblings, and friends, grandparents, in-laws, and health and wellness providers who have helped us along our journeys. Finally, thank you to sweet Nora for keeping me on my toes with sleepless nights and to Andrew for making room for long discussions about hysteria and for unending wisdom and love. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1. "Deep, deep into the river ofher mind": Recovering the Eccentric Body in Alice Munro's "Meneseteung" 43 2. Envisioning the Archival Hysteric in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace 89 3. Being Away: Hysteria and the Female Settler-Invader Subject 137 Afterward 183 Bibliography 199 v Vl Introduction In her 2001 review of Peter Melville Logan's Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History ofHysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose, Donelle Ruwe writes, "Always a sexy topic in literary criticism, the discussion of hysteria and nervous disorders has recently shifted from psychoanalytic discourse to cultural and historical approaches" (425). 1 Why is hysteria, a diagnosis that disappeared in the early years of the twentieth century (Hacking MT 61 ), considered a perennially "sexy topic" in literary criticism and contemporary literature? Studied by a range of scholars including historians, feminists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and ethnologists, hysteria is defmed primarily by its protean and varied symptoms, which included headaches, dysmenorrhoea, alterations in mood, pain, non-organic paralysis, and general weakness that resembled symptoms of other, more fully understood, diseases. According to Canadian historian Wendy Mitchinson, hysterics also suffered from the nebulous symptoms of violent emotions and attention- seeking behaviour (285). All of these symptoms could be explained by hysteria's defining characteristic: a "lack of control over the emotions," which most doctors perceived as a predominantly female problem (Mitchinson 280). Many nineteenth-century hysterical The culturally and historically inclined critical texts to which Ruwe refers include Roy Porter's Social History ofMadness: Stories ofthe Insane (1987), Elaine Showalter's Hystories (1997), and Sally Shuttleworth's Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (2005). Ph.D. thesis- K. Raymond McMaster- English & Cultural Studies sufferers and their families turned to the medical profession for help (Mitchinson 281 ). Yet the causes of nineteenth-century hysteria were, and remain, difficult to delineate. Despite developments in psychiatric medicine, the causes of many mental illnesses including hysteria remain complex and contentious, and the cures elusive and often temporary; hysteria, one of the slipperiest illnesses of the mind, continues to invoke fear, curiosity, and the desire for interpretive mastery.2 This thesis is particularly interested in the mutual exchange between literature and medicine. In both late twentieth- century literature and nineteenth-century medical discourses, minds and bodies interact in complex and non-hierarchical ways. Despite its death as an official diagnostic category, the term hysteria is still used in medical literature. A search on the term "hysteria" in PubMed3 returns five hundred and three results from 2000 onwards. The American Psychiatric Association changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" to "conversion disorder" in 1980. In the 1987 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders DSM III- R, the American Psychiatric Association's official catalogue of disorders, hysteria exists as an alternate term. The term no longer exists in the DSM-IV published in 1994. But the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the psychological assessment tool most commonly used by mental health practitioners, lists hysteria as one of its ten clinical 2 V arlo us disciplines continue to study the defunct condition of female hysteria, and a large group of diverse critics under the unofficial school of"new hysteria studies" have, over the last 35 years, pursued historical studies of the condition (Micale 5-6). Writers under the rubric of"new hysteria studies" include George Randolph Wesley, Etienne Trillat, Giuseppe Roccatagliata, Jan Godderis, Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, George S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalters, among many more. 3 PubMed is the National Library ofMedicine and the National Institutes ofHealth's main bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, preclinical science, dentistry, nursing, veterinary medicine, and the health care system (Accessed 5 May 2010). 2 Ph.D. thesis- K. Raymond McMaster- English & Cultural Studies scales that also include paranoia, schizophrenia, social introversion, and depression. The "hysteria" scale in this case indicates reactions to stressful situations; those who score highly tend to include female, well-educated participants, and those with higher socioeconomic status. While there is controversy about the accuracy and universality of such a test, it is widely used for legal and clinical purposes.4 While the diagnosis may be officially defunct, the language of hysteria is still used in popular, cultural, literary, and scientific discourses. Some articles suggest that aspects of nineteenth-century hysteria such as gender-typing are still perpetuated in contemporary psychiatric discourse and practice (Metzl; Kraan). According to Statistics Canada (2003), 341 126 Canadians were diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a diagnosis frequently compared to hysteria. Edward Shorter shows how one of hysteria's main symptoms, paralysis, which reached its peak in the late nineteenth century, has been replaced by the symptoms of pain and fatigue, now acceptable in the symptom pool of late twentieth