“Named a lunatic after a saint! Well, perhaps they are much the same. The idiot, the mystic…”
She listens at the door, biting her fingernails. She needs to know what they want from her so that she can perform when asked. She has to know how mad she’s supposed to be. Satisfied, she goes back to her room where she dreams of blood and fire. Faces hidden behind shrouds. Dead men.
Gather a group of teenage girls suffering from “excessive femininity,” house them in an asylum for the insane among epileptics, bribe them with positive attention to act out specific “symptoms” (or else return to the depths of the madhouse), coach them, hypnotise them, electroshock them, “manipulate their genitals,” invite an audience, project your fantasies onto them, ritualize the process and photograph the resulting “living theatre of female pathology,” obsessively.
Stir.
And the result?
A terrific new medical condition that lets you grope and poke and hose women which the Surrealists will eventually hail as the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, saying “it should be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression.”
Pictured at top, w/cherries, is the 15 year old “Augustine,” Jean-Martin Charcot’s favorite little starlet, who went on to be the so-called “pin-up girl” of the surrealists “convulsive beauty.”
For more:
hystero-epilepsy at skepdic.com
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtriere, 1878
Invention of Hysteria at MIT Press
On Invention of Hysteria at the American Psychological Association
Jean-Martin Charcot’s works available at Google books
The legacy of Jean-Martin Charcot by Venita Jay
Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot & The Theater of Medicine at the Waring Library
Hysteria and the helio-trope: on bodies, gender and the photograph by Dore Bowen
Nervous Dramaturgy: Pain, Performance and Excess in the Work of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot by Jonathan Marshall
Freud, Charcot and hysteria: lost in the labyrinth by Richard Webster
Scientific Surrealism by Shannon Schmiedke
The Haunted Self Chapter 2, “Seductions of Hysteria,” by David Lomas
On Surrealism and Freud by Jean-Michael Rabaté
Seeking Convulsive Beauty at The Nation
Representations of Femininity throughout Surrealism, at Trent University
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