Victorianism MA 7 Hysteria and Gender

Madness: binary oppositions normal / abnormal; sanity / insanity; reason / emotion; rational / irrational; (self­)control / lack of control, uncontrolability; mind / out of mind; intellect / passion

Women and invalidism/ity “Every woman is … always more or less an invalid.” James McGrigor Allen: Woman Suffrage Wrong in Principle and Practice: An Essay (London: Remington and Co., 1890) “Only that mental energy is normally feminine which can coexist with the production and nursing of the due number of healthy children.” Herbert Spencer, 1873–74 “There is mixed up with the woman’s movement much mental disorder; with half a million excess women in Britain ‘physiological emergencies’ motivated the behaviour of the militant suffragists” Sir Almouth Wright, bacteriologist, 1913 “It is a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age” Henry James, 1886 “the quintessential female malady, assum[ing] a peculiarly central role in psychiatric discourse, and in definitions of femininity and female sexuality […] and stood for all extremes of emotionality” (Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady 129).

“The queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad wicked folly of Women’s Rights, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor and feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.” (Queen Victoria) Frances Power Cobbe: Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors (1869) (Victorian Women Writers Project - website)