The following excerpt from DisPossession by Marlene Goldman discusses the social constructs of hysteria and its portrayal in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for uterus, and the disorders that went by this name were understood by the Egyptians to stem from the wandering movement of the womb. These ancient Egyptian beliefs, in turn, provided the foundation for classical Greek medical and philosophical accounts of hysteria. The Greeks adopted “the notion of the migratory uterus and embroidered upon the connection ... between hysteria and an unsatisfactory sexual life.”
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For the purposes of this study, it is important to recognize that wandering, haunting, and possession figure prominently in the earliest accounts of the disease. Whereas early scholars believed that the uterus pathologically “possessed” women and drove them to distraction, the concept of extrinsic, diabolical possession gained momentum with the arrival of Christianity in the Latin West. From the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, biological or “naturalist pagan” constructions of the disease were increasingly displaced by “supernatural formulations”. With its shifting and highly dramatic symptomatology, hysteria was viewed as a sign of possession by the devil.
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One of the strengths of Atwood’s novel lies in its refusal to label Grace as “mad” and “bad.” In contrast to healers and physicians from antiquity who adopted the hysteria diagnosis to account for women’s supposedly pathological minds and bodies, Atwood’s representation of Grace’s hysteria, in keeping with feminist analyses of the disorder, suggests that hysteria had more to do with women’s social roles and the unequal relations of power associated with these roles than with any innate gendered or racial aetiology. Contemporary medical historians now acknowledge that in the early 1800s women’s madness typically resulted neither from a wandering uterus nor from lesions of the nervous system – signs of degeneration – but, instead, from what was referred to in 1820 as “domestic affliction,” traumatic experiences including physical and sexual abuse, death of loved ones, and bereavement that were often exacerbated by alcoholism and poverty. In Atwood’s novel, Grace’s early account of her stay at the newly opened Toronto Asylum explicitly addresses the role played by “domestic affliction” in instigating madness. As Grace explains,
"[A] good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle ... One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue ... and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum ... But some were not pretending. One poor Irishwoman had all her family dead, half of them starving in the great famine and the other half of the cholera on the boat coming over ... "
Meet the author at the DisPossession book launch:
Friday, March 30th, 2012
5 pm to 7 pm
L'Espresso Bar Mercurio
321 Bloor St West
Toronto, ON
To learn more about DisPossession, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
A Critical Sociology of Genocide
