Chapter Eleven
Dazeland

The forces of sex and madness have historically been linked together in a multitude of ways. Notoriously, psychodynamic theories of mental disturbance, particularly those of a Freudian provenance, have accorded pride of place to sexuality in accounting for the etiology of mental disturbance. The more organically inclined, not to be outdone, have provided their own accounts of the linkage, ranging from neurological portraits of females as possessed of nervous systems of greater refinement and delicacy (and hence more susceptible to breakdown) to gynecological theorizing about peculiarly intimate ties between a woman's brain and her reproductive organs.^[1] Correspondingly, one encounters insistent claims that there exist differential diagnostic practices and criteria for men and women, along with evidence that treatment itself may vary sharply by gender.^[2]Social Research recently devoted an entire issue to a

[1] See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, "The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America," Journal of American History 60 (1973): 332–56; and Andrew Scull and Diane Favreau, "The Clitoridectomy Craze," Social Research 53 (1986): 243–60.

[2] On surgery directed at the female reproductive organs in an attempt to cure madness, see Andrew Scull and Diane Favreau, " 'A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure': Sexual Surgery for Psychosis in Three Nineteenth Century Societies," in Research in Law, Deviance, and Social Control, vol. 8, ed. Steven Spitzer and Andrew Scull (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1986), 3–39. For some discussion of the differential susceptibility of women to certain other forms of therapeutic intervention, see Carol Warren, "Electroconvulsive Therapy: 'New' Treatment of the 1980s," in the same volume, 41–55; Jack David Pressman, "Uncertain Promise: Psychosurgery and the Development of Scientific Psychiatry in America, 1935 to 1955" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 157; and Andrew Scull, "Desperate Remedies: A Gothic Tale of Madness and Modern Medicine," Psychological Medicine 17 ( 1987): 561–77.

series of essays examining some of these interrelationships in historical and comparative perspective.^[3] And Elaine Showalter has given more sustained and systematic attention to this whole range of issues, through an examination of English psychiatric practices over the past two centuries.^[4]

The London Review of Books asked that I write an essay-review of Professor Showalter's book, and what follows is an expanded version of that piece. As I hope my discussion makes clear, no one should harbor any illusions that either folk beliefs about madness or psychiatric theorizing and practice are somehow gender-neutral. To the contrary, both our stereotypical images of madness and professional explanations and treatments for mental disorder are clearly saturated with overt and subliminal sexual references and assumptions.

It follows that there is an obvious temptation to place the psychiatric enterprise in a critical double-bind over this issue. I have in mind here the simultaneous assertion that women are disproportionately victimized by a male-defined double standard of mental health, which unwarrantably assigns them to the highly stigmatizing status of the psychiatric patient (most especially if they behave in ways that challenge masculine stereotypes of female propriety); and that the oppressions, constrictions, and limitations of the female role in a patriarchical society are so damaging and stressful as to drive a disproportionate share of women mad. For feminists, embracing a pair of such ideologically attractive positions makes it easy to view the psychiatric arena as simply another and particularly lurid set of illustrations of the baneful effects of the patriarchical oppression of women.

But, as always, there is a price to be paid for the polemical pleasure of "having one's cake in the form of stress theory as well as eating it in the substance of labelling or antipsychiatry theory."^[5] It obviously would make little sense to claim that the same people are driven mad by intolerable social pressures and also are inappropriately and improperly labelled mad by those bent on repressing rebellion and nonconformity. One can rescue both assertions by claiming that they apply to different subgroups within the overall population of the mentally disordered, and anecdotal evidence can certainly be found to demonstrate that neither category is empirically empty. But anecdote does not suffice to establish significance. Indeed, it is necessarily silent on the crucial issue of the degree to which women's presence among the ranks of the mentally disturbed can be attributed to each of these processes, as opposed to whatever it is that accounts for the alienation of men. In the absence of firm

[3] Social Research 53 (Summer 1986).

[4] Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985; London: Virago, 1987).

[5] Peter Sedgwick, Psychopolitics (London: Pluto Press; New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 237.

evidence on this point, and given the broadly equal representation of men and women among the ranks of the mentally disordered, one must be circumspect about claims that "women, by definition . . . are viewed as psychiatrically impaired"^[6] and that mental illness is "the female malady."

Dazeland

In the first place, an insane woman is no more a member of the body-politic than a criminal; second, her death is always a relief to her dearest friends; third, even in the case of her recovery from her mental disease, she is liable to transmit the taint of insanity to her children's children for many generations.
—WILLIAM GOODELL,
"Clinical Notes on the Extirpation of the Ovaries for Insanity," Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania 13 (1881)

Most recent work on the history of psychiatry has tended to focus on the history of institutions, of ideas, and of the psychiatric profession itself, and to ignore those for whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily puts it, "like the histories of colonial wars[: it tells] us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the 'third world' of the mental patients themselves."^[1] Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady^[2] is thus doubly valuable, as an exploration of popular and professional discourse about the relationships between women and madness and as an analysis of how the profession of psychiatry has treated somewhat more than half of those who fall within its territory.

On examination, in the psychiatric domain, as in the more conventionally defined Third World, the position and treatment of women consistently turn out to be even less enviable than those endured by men. Can this justify, though, a move to label madness the female malady?^[3] Not in any straightforward statistical fashion, contrary to what Showalter sometimes implies. One may plausibly contend that, for much of the past two or three centuries, women have outnumbered men in the ranks of the mentally disturbed. Still, for the most part, this imbalance has not been in such gross disproportion that one could sensibly call the disorder

[6] Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 108.

[1] David Ingleby, "Mental Health and Social Order," in Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays, ed. Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 142.

[2] Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985; London: Virago, 1987).

[3] Ibid.

a preeminently feminine one; and there have even been occasions when men have constituted a substantial majority of those officially identified as mad.

For example, against the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the seventeenth-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women,^[4] one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century madhouses.^[5] It was only after the middle of the nineteenth century, when the madhouses of the Gothic novelists had supposedly been transformed into the domestic retreats favored by the Victorian lunacy reformers, that women began gradually to outnumber men among those legally designated as mad—first among the pauper residuum who contributed the bulk of the rapid rise in the ranks of mad folk, and not till the end of the century among their genteel and affluent cousins. Nor, among the institutionalized insane, did the imbalance ever amount to more than a few percent, itself quite possibly attributable to the greater longevity of the "weaker" sex and to the disposition of the asylum authorities to keep female lunatics institutionalized longer than their male counterparts. And from the late 1960s to the present, men have formed the clear majority of mental hospital populations in the United States,^[6] while the best modern research can find no consistent differences by sex in the prevalence of psychotic symptoms or in rates of schizophrenic breakdown.^[7]

Taking a more expansive view of what constitutes mental illness, the idea that women are more frequently troubled in mind is perhaps more supportable. If women were only marginally overrepresented among the "Bedlam mad," the rise of a nonasylum psychiatry, ministering to the neurotic, the neurasthenic, and the hysteric, quickly found itself catering to a more heavily female clientele. On the late-nineteenth-century borderlands of insanity,^[8] women were disproportionately represented among the clientele of rest homes, water cure establishments, mesmeric salons, and the mind cures of the Christian Scientists. And in the pres-

[4] See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 36–40.

[5] John Thurnam, Observations and Essays on the Statistics of Insanity (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1845).

[6] National Institute of Mental Health, "Changes in the Age, Sex, and Diagnostic Composition of the Resident Population of State and County Mental Hospitals, United States 1965–1975," Mental Health Statistical Note, no. 146 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1978).

[7] Bruce P. Dohrenwend and Barbara S. Dohrenwend, "Sex Differences and Psychiatric Disorders," American Journal of Sociology 81 ( 1976): 1447–54.

[8] Andrew Wynter, The Borderlands of Insanity (London: Hardwicke, 1875).

ent, women are consistently found to be more prone to neurosis and manic-depressive symptoms and are much more likely to be taking psychoactive drugs.

Yet these figures, too, demand to be treated with some caution. For alongside the greater reported frequency of symptoms of mental illness among women and their more extensive utilization of psychiatric facilities, one must note that an identical pattern holds for physical illness and the use of nonpsychiatric physicians and hospital services. Puzzlingly, women consistently exhibit higher rates of morbidity and lower rates of mortality than men of comparable age and social circumstances.^[9]

Still, if the statistical evidence is at best rather ambiguous, the assertion that our culture somehow equates madness and the female of the species is not without foundation; and our organized responses to these maladies repeatedly turn out to be influenced, in ways both gross and subtle, by questions of sexuality and gender. One welcomes, then, an attempt to explore what is distinctive about the female experience of madness. Drawing on an extraordinary array of sources (literary and pictorial representations of the mad, in painting, photography, and film; asylum records; the recollections of ex-patients; the words and practices of their physicians; and the private papers of eminent women who did not become psychiatric casualties—materials that provide eloquent testimony about the tensions and tribulations faced even by exceptionally talented, privileged, and apparently successful women trapped within the confines of a patriarchal social order), Showalter's book constructs a compelling (if at times overdrawn) portrait of the contributions of psychiatry to the wrongs of women.

Our images of madness, she argues, are overwhelmingly female: "Women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind."^[10] Romantic portraits of Crazy Jane, a poor servant girl seduced and abandoned by her lover;^[11]Lucia di Lammermoor and a picture

[9] Constance A. Nathanson, "Illness and the Feminine Role: A Theoretical Review," Social Science and Medicine 9 (1975): 57–62.

[10] Ibid., 3–4. Cf. a late Victorian medical version of these notions: A woman's "mental characteristics . . . offer a marked contrast with [those] of a male. Her physical organization is not fully developed, and . . . she is . . . more like a child in disposition and also anatomically . . . in a general way . . . women are less intellectual than men, less original in thought, less capable of continuity and logic of thought, and hence they have been called more childlike in their mental characteristics, and in this respect resemble rather the primitive races" (Alexander Skene, Medical Gynecology [New York, Appleton, 1895], 80).

[11] The mythical "Crazy Jane" or "Crazy Kate" was the subject of numerous ballads, melodramas, and portraits by artists as diverse as George Shepheard anti Richard Dadd, and constituted one of the most popular romantic images of madness.

of female sexuality as insane violence against men;^[12] Bertha Mason and Gothic madness, violent and hideous animality kept caged in Mr. Rochester's attic lest a "clothed hyena" be let loose upon the world:^[13] in novels, in drama, in poetry, in painting, in popular ballads, in opera, it is women who stand as emblems and exemplars of irrationality.

Moreover, there has been much traffic between these cultural images and psychiatric ideologies. Notwithstanding the nearly equal propensity of the two sexes to go mad, Victorian alienists developed different explanations of why men and women became deranged, elaborate accounts of women's greater vulnerability to insanity, and even speculations about their tendency to experience madness in peculiarly feminine ways. In keeping with their professional preference for somatic accounts of the etiology of mental imbalance,^[14] mad-doctors increasingly emphasized the biological and ignored or were indifferent to the social and the psychological sources of their patients' distress. Indeed, in reductionist fashion, woman's "natural" place in society—her capacities, her roles, her behavior—was held to be ineluctably derived from and controlled by the existence and functioning of her reproductive organs.^[15] As an organism dominated by her uterus and ovaries, and hence by crisis and periodicity, a woman necessarily possessed greater capacities for affection and aptitude for child rearing, a preference for the domestic hearth, and a "natural" purity and moral sensibility; but she was also inescapably a creature in whom the emotional predominated over the rational, someone whose physiological equipment was of surpassing delicacy and fragility, at any moment liable to give way under the strains of modern life or the unavoidably perilous passage through puberty, pregnancy, par-

[12] The frenzied madness of Sir Walter Scott's heroine, Lucy Ashton, the reluctant bride of Lammermoor, who celebrated her wedding night by stabbing her spouse, was regularly reproduced on stage in the most popular of Donizetti's operas.

[13] Jane Eyre, her prospective marriage to Mr. Rochester halted at the last possible moment, is taken to see the dark secret lurking in his attic: "In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950], 300).

[14] See Chapter 6. See also Michael Clark, "The Data of Alienism: Evolutionary Neurology, Physiological Psychiatry, and the Reconstruction of British Psychiatric Theory, c. 1850–c. 1900" (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1982); idem, "The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in Late-Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatry," in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, ed. Andrew Scull (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; London: Athlone Press, 1981 ), 271–312; Steven Jacyna, "Somatic Theories of Mind and the Interests of Medicine in Britain, 1850–1879," Medical History 26 (1982): 233–58.

[15] For a comparative view, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, "The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America," Journal of American History 60 (1973): 332–56.

turition, lactation, menstruation, and the menopause. The constriction of women's lives, their legal powerlessness, and their economic marginality, which were the central features of existing social relations between the sexes, thus received the sanction of science. And confronting such weak and fragile vessels, "Victorian psychiatry defined its task with respect to women as the preservation of brain stability in the face of almost overwhelming physical odds."^[16]

Theories of a differential, gender-based etiology for mental disturbance corresponded, in some important respects, to differential expectations and treatments for men and women. The early Victorian period saw the creation of a whole new network of public asylums, coupled with a system of national inspection of receptacles for the mad by the lunacy commissioners.^[17] Such changes reflected a revulsion against earlier methods of managing the mad and an astonishing (and in the event sadly misplaced) optimism about the therapeutic effects of the new system of moral management. In institutions containing several hundred, even a thousand or more, inmates, alienists struggled to produce a simulacrum of the domestic scene, in the process revealing and reproducing "structures of class and gender that were 'moral,' that is, 'normal,' by their own standards."^[18] Classification was quite central to the production of a docile and harmonious community (essential, in the words of the Scottish alienist, W. A. F. Browne, if one were "to inspire that respect for order and tranquility which is the basis of all sanity and serenity of mind"); ^[19] and rigid segregation of the sexes was quite central to their classificatory schemes.^[20] The lunacy commissioners even objected to the mingling of male and female corpses in the deadhouse at the Cambridgeshire County Asylum!^[21]

Kept constantly separated from their male counterparts, save at the carefully stage-managed asylum balls that were a weekly demonstration of the powers of moral management over the sexual passions, women endured an even more passive and circumscribed existence than could

[16] Showalter, Female Malady, 74.

[17] See Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979); Kathleen Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience, 1744–1845 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).

[18] Showalter, Female Malady, 34.

[19] William Alexander Francis Browne, quoted in Journal of Mental Science 5 (1859): 203.

[20] "It would appear as though it were an offense in asylum life for men and women to meet together. . . . How can we wonder that the female patients we pass in the long galleries are eaten up by utter vacuity and dreariness; or that the men a stone's throw off herd hopelessly together?" ("Non-restraint in the Treatment of the Insane," Edinburgh Review 131 [1870]: 222).

[21] Commissioners in Lunacy, Twenty-fifth Annual Report (1871), 131.

be found on the men's wards. The idle monotony of their daily round was relieved only by work at quintessentially feminine tasks: the cleaning, laundry, and sewing that were vital to the upkeep of these ever-larger museums of madness. And their improvement was measured, as often as not, by their ability to manage their dress and their appearance. In a striking analysis of the work of Hugh Diamond, the pioneer of psychiatric photography in England,^[22] Showalter points out how it allows us to see the moral management of female insanity; how the supposedly objective lens of the photographer instead reveals, in the choice, the posing, the staging of its subjects, the imposition of cultural stereotypes of femininity and female insanity, a capturing of the madwoman in the straitjacket of her keeper's gaze. In image after image, "women were given props that symbolized, often with pathetic futility, the asylum superintendent's hope of making them conform to Victorian ideals of feminine decorum."^[23] Humanitarianism had, as its hidden face, new forms of paternalistic domination.

As the hopes of the asylums' founders dimmed, and their institutions silted up with the chronically crazy, "the waifs and strays, the weak and wayward of our race,"^[24] so cracks began to appear in the facade they presented to the world, providing glimpses of a moribund system, overcrowded, inefficient, ever more demoralized. Showalter adopts Veida Skultans' term, "psychiatric Darwinism,"^[25] to describe the parallel evolution of medical theories of insanity, towards a grim determinism that emphasized madness as the product of a process of mental and physical degeneration. In the words of Henry Maudsley, the dominant figure of fin-de-siècle English psychiatry, the madman "is the necessary organic consequent of certain organic antecedents: and it is impossible he should escape the tyranny of his organization."^[26] The physical signs of physiological decay were written particularly plainly on the bodies of women, and given the hopelessness of curative efforts and the vital significance of healthy offspring for the future of the race, prospective husbands were urged to inspect the merchandise carefully, searching for "physical signs . . . which betray degeneracy of stock . . . any malformations of the head, face, mouth, teeth and ears. Outward defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults which will have their influence in breeding."^[27]

[22] Sander Gilman, ed., The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origins of Psychiatric Photography (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1976).

[23] Showalter, Female Malady, 87.

[24] W. A. F. Browne, Annual Report of the Crichton Royal Asylum, (1857), quoted in Journal of Mental Science 4 (1858): 201.

[25] Veida Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity, 1580–1890 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

[26] Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind (London: Macmillan, 1879), 88.

[27] Ibid. (1895 ed.), 536, quoted in Showalter, Female Malady, 107.

Such rigid somaticism coincided with a barely disguised contempt for the mad and appeared to leave but little scope for expert intervention. In response, the leading alienists sought to widen the scope of their authority, to move outside the asylum walls, and to obtain a mandate to patrol the mental frontiers of society on the lookout for "incipient lunatics" whose disorders, hidden from less trained eyes, threatened future trouble and a further dangerous dilution of the quality of the breeding population. It was these shadowy inhabitants of what Mortimer Granville dubbed Mazeland, Dazeland, and Driftland^[28] who now drew the attention of the most eminent mental specialists of the day—provided, of course, that their families possessed sufficient resources to pay for such expert attention. And in most instances, these mental cripples and invalids turned out to be women. Some were diagnosed as neurasthenics or anorexic (a condition recognized for the first time in 1873); but the most common diagnosis was unquestionably hysteria.

In two central chapters, Showalter examines the relationship between hysteria and women's lives and the nature of the psychiatric response to this protean, puzzling, infuriating, recalcitrant condition—a syndrome the prominent American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell preferred to call "mysteria."^[29] With its associations with capricious physical symptoms and emotional lability, here was a disorder that epitomized feminine fickleness. Its very name associated it with female sexuality, and English alienists characteristically attributed it to some combination of sexual inhibition, enforced passivity, and thwarted maternal drives, allied to faulty heredity and the biological crises of the female reproductive system and exacerbated by any attempt to transgress the "natural" limits on women's participation in society.^[30] Too much education was a particularly dangerous thing.^[31] Adolescent girls needed all their mental and physical energies to negotiate the treacherous shoals of puberty. Add mental strain, and one could expect, warned Maudsley, "the degeneration of the reproductive capacity, beginning with the atrophy of the breasts and ending with a total loss of 'pelvic power' "—not to mention the prospect of epilepsy, chorea, or mental breakdown.^[32]

Showalter rightly notes the persistent blindness of even the most sym-

[28] J. Mortimer Granville, in Andrew Wynter, The Borderlands of Insanity, 2d ed. (London: Renshaw, 1877).

[29] Silas Weir Mitchell, quoted in Barbara Sicherman, "The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia," Journal of the History of Medicine 32 (1977): 41.

[30] See the useful discussion of late-nineteenth-century British views on the etiology and treatment of hysteria in Michael Clark, "The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in Late Nineteenth Century British Psychiatry," in Madhouses. Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, ed. Scull, esp. 293–300.

[31] See, in particular, Henry Maudsley, "Sex in Mind and in Education," Fortnightly Review 15 (1874): 466–83.

[32] Ibid., quoted in Showalter, Female Malady, 125.

pathetic male physicians to the connections between psychosomatic disorders and constricted and powerless lives, "women's intellectual frustration, lack of mobility, or needs for autonomy and control."^[33] In the impassioned words of Florence Nightingale:

To have no food for our heads, no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how we do cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the "Times," Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads or hearts, by the indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of consequence.^[34]

But if hysteria was hidden protest, a rebellion against the stifling demands of a patriarchal social order, it was a feeble and ineffectual form of resistance. The secondary gains—"the sympathy of the family, the attention of the physician"—were quite incommensurate with the far more extensive primary losses, "the costs in powerlessness and silence."^[35] In the words of the French feminist theorist Helene Cixous, "Silence: silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech . . . their tongues are cut off and what talks isn't heard because it's the body that talks and man doesn't hear the body."^[36]

Nor was this the only price paid by the female hysteric. For English psychiatrists "found their hysterical patients personally and morally repulsive,"^[37] and their treatment of them was suitably ruthless, uncompromising, even brutal. Viewing their patients as a cowardly, histrionic, deceitful, and morally wretched lot, many responded in kind, advising "observant neglect" or even active intimidation, blackmail, and threats. "Ridicule," noted F. C. Skey, "is a powerful weapon . . . but there is no emotion equal to fear and the threat of personal chastisement."^[38] And for some, threats might give way to action: stopping the patient's breathing, pouring water on her head, slapping her with wet towels, exercising pressure "on some tender area." All too frequently to no avail. In the understanding and treatment of hysteria, as with psychosis, English psychiatry found itself at an impasse.

Elsewhere, first through Charcot's work, and then in Freud and

[33] Showalter, Female Malady, 132.

[34] Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979), 41–42, quoted in Showalter, Female Malady, 128.

[35] Showalter, Female Malady, 161.

[36] Quoted in ibid., 160–61.

[37] Ibid., 133.

[38] F.C. Skey, Hysteria, 2d ed. (London: Longmans et al., 1867), 60, quoted in ibid., 138.

Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, there were experiments with a more psychologically oriented approach. In picturing hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the individual's control, in beginning to take "women's words and women's lives seriously,"^[39] Showalter sees psychoanalysis as potentially a major advance, but one whose promise soon dissolved as Freud's increasing theoretical rigidity and obsessive "insistence on the sexual origins of hysteria blinded him to the social factors contributing to it."^[40] In any event, Freud's ideas met with a particularly hostile response from many English psychiatrists, notwithstanding, in Leonard Woolf's words, the "desperately meagre . . . primitive and chaotic" state of English medical knowledge of insanity on the eve of the Great War.^[41]

The final, and in some ways the least successful section of The English Malady, deals with developments from World War I through the demise of Laingian antipsychiatry in the late 1970s, a period Showalter labels the era of psychiatric modernism. Her analysis opens promisingly enough, with a harrowing comparison of the treatment of shellshock by Lewis Yealland and by W. H. R. Rivers. The epidemic of war neurosis among the British troops was a wholly unexpected development. First interpreted as quite literally the product of the physical or chemical effects of a shell bursting at close range and assumed to have a physical cause,^[42] it gradually came to be seen as the product of emotional disturbance, a male form of hysterical conversion. In effect, as Showalter puts it, "when all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and where alternatives to combat—pacifism, conscientious objection, desertion, even suicide—were viewed as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and forced, like women, to express their conflicts through the body."^[43]

Men's unconscious resistance provoked some of the same negative reactions as greeted their hysterical sisters—made harsher by the "unmanliness" of those who failed to fight. Many took a harshly moralistic view of the emotionally incapacitated, suggesting that shell-shock cases should be court-martialed and shot for malingering or cowardice. Yealland's "disciplinary therapy" gave barely disguised expression to these feelings, stressing "quick cures, shaming, and physical re-education,

[39] Showalter, Female Malady, 158.

[40] Ibid., 160.

[41] Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), 76, quoted in ibid., 164.

[42] Charles S. Myers, Shellshock in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). See also the discussion in Martin Stone, "Shellshock and the Psychiatrists," in The Anatomy of Madness, vol. 2, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985), 242–71; and idem, "The Military and Industrial Roots of Clinical Psychology in Britain, 1900–1945" (Ph.D. dissertation, London School of Economics, 1985).

[43] Showalter, Female Malady, 171.

which often involved the infliction of pain,"^[44] and extending to the use of cigarette burns, "hot plates" thrust into the mouth, and the application of painful electrical shocks to the neck and throat. But war neurosis was four times more common among officers than among enlisted men, and for the most part, there was reluctance to treat gentlemen in such overtly harsh and brutal ways. Instead, the treatment of officers brought the first breach in English psychiatry's commitment to organicism. Siegfried Sassoon's "Soldier's Declaration," for example, a forthright denunciation of the war, could have brought him a court-martial and imprisonment. Instead, he was diagnosed as neurasthenic and shipped off to be "treated" by W. H. R. Rivers at Craiglockhart Military Hospital. Here, as Showalter points out, the treatment was kindly and gentle, and the surroundings luxurious (though in the outcome, Sassoon's political protest was invalidated by redefining it as a nervous breakdown, and he was manipulated into resuming his role at the front as "an officer and a gentleman").

The world fit for heroes now saw a bifurcated psychiatry: psychotherapy (usually some variant of psychoanalysis) for well-to-do outpatients; and a renewed commitment to organicism for the multitudes who continued to be packed off to the asylum. Psychoanalysis, notwithstanding its sizable cohort of female therapists, "hardened into a discourse that devalued women."^[45] Meanwhile, in a veritable paroxysm of inventiveness, asylum psychiatry experimented with malarial therapy, metrazol-induced seizures, insulin comas, electroshock treatment, lobotomies, and finally ataraxic drugs, most notably Largactil, the "mighty drug" that was to be our culture's magic potion against the ravages of schizophrenia.^[46] A number of these therapies, Showalter argues, reduced patients treated with them to a state of passivity and dependence that constitute extremes of typical female experiences; and incomplete evidence suggests that women were disproportionately the beneficiaries of lobotomies and shock treatments.

Both here and in the parallel discussion of literary representations of female madness, much of what Showalter has to say is apt and insightful. But there are also passages that strike me as too glib and simplistic, passages that violate her insistence earlier in the book that one must not romanticize madness. It may be that women's autobiographical novels "transform the experiences of shock, psychosurgery, and chemotherapy into symbolic episodes of punishment for intellectual ambition, domestic

[44] Ibid., 176.

[45] Ibid., 197.

[46] The history of the use of somatic treatments for mental illness is the focus of my current research, to be published by the University of California Press and by Polity Press as Desperate Remedies . See also my paper "Desperate Remedies: A Gothic Tale of Madness and Modern Medicine," Psychological Medicine 17 (1987): 561–77.

defiance, and sexual autonomy,"^[47] but this is surely too crude and self-serving a portrait to accept at face value. Or to take another example, to assert that "during the postwar period, the female malady, no longer linked to hysteria, assumed a new clinical form: schizophrenia"^[48] is to damage one's own case by engaging in polemical excess. Though Showalter briefly acknowledges that the incidence of schizophrenia is "about equal in women and men,"^[49] the whole thrust of the discussion that follows is to emphasize the "parallels" between "schizophrenic symptoms of passivity, depersonalization, disembodiment, and fragmentation" and "the social situation of women;"^[50] to present, apparently approvingly, accounts of "schizophrenia as a protest against the feminine mystique" and portraits of "mental institutions as environments in which deviants from conventional feminine roles were forced to conform."^[51]

By now, the antipsychiatric follies of R. D. Laing and his epigones are rather thoroughly discredited. The intellectual vapidity of Laing's later work, the transparent hucksterism and political opportunism he paraded as his star began to set, and the disastrous track record of Laingian therapy have all combined to make him a yesterday's man. But it is with Laing that Showalter brings her story to a conclusion. As she points out, feminists had once seen in his notion of "ontological insecurity" and in his analysis of the effects of the double bind on female adolescents "important new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between madness and femininity."^[52] But having reviewed the whole sorry episode, down to the dotty view of schizophrenia as religious vision and spiritual quest, and the pathetic story of Mary Barnes, she concedes that "in retrospect, it seems clear that despite vivid representations of women's suffering, antipsychiatry had no coherent analysis to offer women"^[53] —or, one might add, members of the opposite sex either. (Unless, of course, one sees David Cooper's advocacy of "bed therapy," that is, sex with David Cooper, as a contribution to the cure of schizophrenia in women.)^[54]

In a brief epilogue, Showalter suggests, with considerable rhetorical flourish but without sustained argument or elaboration, that hopes for the future must now be invested in the new feminist therapy movement. Perhaps—though for those of us who are skeptical, it would help if she had spelled out just who these therapists are, what their therapeutic innovations have been, and why one should accept that their activities have radically transformed the prospects for coping with, even curing, the deranged. For my part, I fear that the miseries of madness (female and male), and the horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of its treatment, will not be so readily or rapidly vanquished.

[47] Showalter, Female Malady, 210.

[48] Ibid., 203.

[49] Ibid., 204.

[50] Ibid., 213.

[51] Ibid., 216 and 215.

[52] Ibid., 222.

[53] Ibid., 246.

[54] See David Cooper, The Grammar of Living (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).