XII

Hysteria thus came of age in the openness of the Enlightenment, more specifically in the sunlight of the Newtonian Enlightenment. Virtually no important doctor in the first half of the eighteenth century placed the root of hysteria in the uterus, and this fact tells us as much about the patients of the epoch as its mostly male physicians. The modernization proved anatomically liberating, while also helping to discredit the theory based on the misogynistic sexual stigma of the voracious womb.^[247] The new emplacement of hysteria in the world of Cheyne and his "nerve doctor" colleagues moreover skirted vulgar reductionism. Its unmistak-

able language of the nerves—amounting to the heart of its linguistic discourse—pointed toward the mutual interplay of consciousness and body through the brain and the (often) still perplexing animal spirits as the primary nervous medium.^[248]

This new linguistic footing, which had been developing since the days of Willis and Mandeville, had profound cultural and gender-based implications: cultural because society itself was growing "nervous" in ways no one had anticipated, and gender-based as a consequence of this new nervous model of mankind mandating a weaker nervous constitution for women than men. The desexualization of hysteria was, of course, one part of a movement during the Enlightenment that demystified the entire body.^[249] This process included the reproductive organs and the newly privileged mind over matter, as in Hume's examples and (especially under the weight of Linnaean taxonomy) the rule of species over gender. With demystification also came the shedding of much of the shame of hysteria. Its sufferers at mid-century were now seen as the victims of an interestingly delicate nervous system buckling under the pressures of civilization, typically the thorn in the flesh of elites moving in flashy, fast-lane society.^[250] This was the essence of Cheyne's message in his best-selling book, The English Malady .

But the cultural reasons for this "delicate nervous constitution" were to remain hidden and elusive for some time. Its personal effects, especially for patients, were described ad infinitem; the other effects, the larger images of those living an affluent life, could be seen in the new image the emerging Georgians held of themselves. At home, in the bedroom, this might entail paralysis, fear of the dark, as well as dread of the incubus and succubus, as evidenced by sleepwalking and amnesia.^[251] (If the weekly and monthly magazines can be considered reliable, amnesia was more common than we might think.) These were the standard images of the somnambulant melancholic or insomniac hysteric in the caricatures of the time, as the accompanying plate demonstrates. More locally still, within the context of a now desexualized female hysteria, the suggestion was that coquetry verged on hysteria.^[252] To the vulgar, as Pope had suggested in The Rape of the Lock , hysteria might signify nothing more than coquetry itself. But these examples, medical and literary, signified something more deeply ingrained in the world of the Georgians than has been thought: namely, the nervous self-fashioning of Augustan society.

Stephen Greenblatt and others among the New Historicists have written about such self-fashioning in the Renaissance.^[253] Yet the latter period of the Enlightenment is even more revealing of the great personal ten-

"Madwoman in Terror," ca. 1775, Mezzotint by W. Dickinson, after a 
painting by Robert Edge Pine. Engraving in the Wellcome Institute in 
London. The portrait illuminates the early female iconography of hysteria, 
in this instance a mad young woman of perhaps twenty or so whose wild 
hair is strung with straw, and whose eyeballs flash with terror and fear. 
A bandana is wrapped around her head; in fury she has torn the garment 
from her breast, which now lies bare. A feathery or animal garment clings 
loosely around her, and she is chained and roped, evidence that she poses 
a threat to others and is dangerous to herself. Window high up in the left 
corner makes clear that this is a cell for lunatics where she has been 
incarcerated.

sions it raised between the sexes in a milieu of increasing desexualization in which women continued to enjoy greater freedom and equality than they had before. The Augustan wits—the Addisons and Swifts, virtually all the Scriblerians—encouraged us to believe that logic, wit and intelligence—all part of the realm of the mind—were the sine qua nons of polite society then. But the tension between men and women revolved around more than matching wits, competing intellects, wit and wit-would-be, even in a "republic of letters" governed by an obsessive commitment to refinement and politeness, manners and etiquette. In addition, and most important, there was the unrelenting search for personal identity and self-fulfillment. This need is what the novel and drama of the period capture par excellence, and nothing reflects the mood of the epoch better than its great imaginative literature.^[254]

All these cults of sensibility—as I have called them elsewhere^[255] —demanded rising standards of behavioral achievement and necessarily called attention to their opposites: the realms of pathology and abnormality. This is why the medicine of the day, especially its theory based on bodily signs and symptoms, the semiology and pathology of illness, cannot be dismissed as so much esoterica.^[256] We have devoted two generations of study to the literary language of the Georgians; their ideas of body would well repay half that attention. The Lady Marys and Duchess of Portlands were hardly norms capable of emulation, yet in their bodily motions were codified the brilliant new urbanity of the age. Their sophisticated postures swirled round in rarefied atmospheres of courtliness and polite town society, abiding by a code of language and gesture in which the body was always required to be disciplined and drilled, coy and controlled; always mannered, as we see everywhere from the roles of dancing masters, acting teachers, tutors, governesses, and gymnasts of the age.^[257] Even so, new inner sensibilities had to find expression through refined and often subtly veiled bodily codes: one's bearing around the tea table, in the salon, at the assembly and pumproom, in town and country, at home and abroad, paradoxically revealing yet concealing at the same time, in actions, gestures, and movements that spoke louder than words.^[258]

This was the source of tension now superimposed on the gender pressures spawned in the Restoration under the weight of urban sprawl and new sociopolitical arrangements. In England at least, the gender rearrangements of the Restoration were elevated to exponential highs in the ages of Anne and the Georges. Isn't this a principal reason why the drama from Etherege and Congreve to Gay and Goldsmith assumes its particular trajectory vis-ÿ-vis the sexes and gender arrangements?

Urban sprawl, new forms of consumer consumption, gender rearrangements, interpersonal tensions, crime and violence, class mobility, the transfer of money and goods into a process of unprecedented consumption: the phrases appear to describe our vexed world. This was, however, the eighteenth century, consuming itself in newly found nationalism and wealth and basking in its accompanying leisure time, especially in food and drink.^[259] The lingua franca of such expression-repression-expression lay in the refined codes of nervousness: a new body language, ultraflexible, nuanced yet thoroughly poised within ambivalence. The essence of the code lay in these bodily gestures of recognition—whether blushing or weeping, fainting or swooning—which could act as sorting-out devices in times of doubt, certainly when love and marriage were involved. The comic drama from approximately 1730 onward demonstrates what heightened requirements the code placed on actors who tried to reflect it; our lack of recognition of the code itself results, in part, from the rarity with which any of these plays is now performed. Words were also tokens of recognition for the sensible and sensitive: sorting-out devices too. Under duress and at great expense, the language (of gestures and words) could be learned, but even among the rich and great, the smart and chic, it was acquired at the cost of great personal risk and self-doubt.

Risk lay everywhere in the new social arrangements represented—almost mimetically—in the proliferating idioms of nervous sensibility. The sheer number of the idioms then available has prevented us from seeing deeply (and some might say darkly) into the risks involved. Upon occasion we have even denied that the idioms existed. Readers today may well wonder: What cults of nervous sensibility? And why nervous ?^[260] Want of nerve , for example, betrayed a clear effeminacy, unacceptable in all classes from the highest rakes and fops to the lowest laborers. Paradoxically, want of nerves , exposed a rustic dullness, a latent tedium, a resulting boredom odious to the British for all sorts of reasons and feared among the highest ranking of both genders. Yet florid, volatile nervousness—in both men and women—betrayed excess and confusion: symptoms that could result in hysterical crisis. And hysteria, no matter what appellation it was given and no matter how culturally positive in the popular semiotics of that world, was a refuge of last resort. It was the cry of the person (usually female) unable to cope with the sharp cultural dislocations and social norms that had occurred in such a relatively short time. Within this taxonomy of disease, then, hysteria was the final limit beyond which no condition was more baffling, none capable of producing stranger somatic consequences. The semiotics of the nerves,

leading to understanding of hysteria, is therefore a way of knowing, and thereby decoding, the infirmity of excess, in much the same way that Foucault's hysteria is an understanding derived through comprehension of the female's inner spaces. And it was through this semiotics of the nerves that Foucault made the grandest claim of all: "It was in these diseases of the nerves and in those hysterias [of the period 1680-1780], which would soon provoke its irony, that psychiatry took its origin."^[261]

The quest was rather for a golden mean filtered by decorum—the same variegated decorum extolled by the age. But decorum had its snares too; it was easier to conceptualize or verbalize than to put into practice, as weepy heroine upon heroine lamented, usually to her detriment, in the fictions of the age. The snare was the retention of one's individuality within this bodily and verbal control. In practice, the act resembled treading on a tightrope, the walker forever balancing over the abyss. This was the beginning of a way of life—as Cheyne above all others in his age seems to have recognized—where the participants lived on the edge and in the fast lane. Richard Sennett, the American sociologist, has located the origins of modern individualism within this fast-paced eighteenth-century culture.^[262] More precisely, we might counterargue, individualism was created out of nervous tension and ambivalence over the self: the accommodation between the hyper-visible, narcissistic individual and a society that had craved it (i.e., the individualism), while at the same time demanding conformity to the civilizing process. This was the self-fashioning of the urbane Augustans, the codes on which the sexual politics of the new hysteria of the eighteenth century depended, and it would not have come about without the prior hypostases of the great nerve doctors—the Sydenhams and Willises, the Mandevilles and Cheynes—which resulted in the nervous codes that elevated sensibility to a new pinnacle.^[263]

Here then was a different route to the golden age of hysteria, a different dualism than the old Cartesian saw about mind and body. This Georgian self was less a divided Cartesian self—the now unisex woman or man riveted by conventional mind and body—than a creature part public, part private, often hidden behind a mask (sometimes a literal vizard) that curtailed self-expression as well as permitted it to flourish. Here, in this passionate sexual ambivalence, was the heart (one might as well claim the stomach and liver for the visceral effect it had on lives then) of the cults of nervous sensibility. It imbued Augustan and Georgian culture; eventually it made inroads in Holland, France, Italy, all Europe. And it left its mark on the best philosophers: the Voltaires and Hailers and Humes without whom an eighteenth-century "Enlight-

enment" is unthinkable.^[264] It energized the Diderots and Sternes, the Casanovas and Rousseaus, as well as the fictional Clarissas and Evelinas, the Tristram Shandys and other noted "gentlemen"—and gentlewomen—of feeling. How then could nervous sensibility have been born without a medical agenda that demystified the body and a subsequent Newtonian revolution that concretized its best hypotheses?^[265]

In the intellectual domain, this nervous tension surfaced as a Sphinxian riddle of psyche-soma affinities, and spurred, in part, the literally hundreds of works on mind and body we have heard about for so long.^[266] But in more familiar corners—at home and in church, in the theater and public garden, everywhere in polite society—it also appeared in subtle ways: in bodily motion, gait, affectation, gesture, even in the simple blush or tear, and in the most private thought that now could be read by another. Nervous tension was thus domesticized for the first time in modern history. Viewed from another perspective, it was also being mechanized for the first time, as manners themselves coagulated into an abstract code-language of mechanical philosophy: on the surface a loose application of Newtonian mechanics to the body's gait and gestures, but an application nevertheless.^[267]

The self-fashioning of nerves was thus significantly expanded: from mechanical philosophy it was medicalized, familiarized, domesticated, and eventually transformed into the métier of polite self-fashioning and even world-fashioning, in the sense that its code was eventually adopted as a universal sine qua non for those aspiring to succeed in the beau monde. The consequences for human sexuality and social intercourse were incalculable because passion and the imagination were implicated to such an extraordinary degree, as were the links between hysteria and the imagination. As soon as the imagination was aroused or disturbed, even in the most imperceptible way, somatic change was indicated. Of this sequence, the physicians had been certain from the mid-eighteenth century, if not earlier. "It appears almost incredible," Peter Shaw, His Majesty George II's Physician Extraordinary and the English champion of chemical applications in medicine, wrote in The Reflector: Representing Human Affairs, As They Are: and may be improved (1750, number 228), "what great Effects the Imagination has upon Patients." Later on the point was reiterated by William Heberden, another noted clinician in the tradition of Boerhaave whose life spanned nearly the whole of the eighteenth century and of whom Samuel Johnson said that he was "ultimus Romanorum , the last of our great physicians." Heberden was as much a product of this "nerve culture" as anyone else. After years of clinical experience he found that the indication of hysteria usually be-

gan "with some uneasiness of the stomach or bowels."^[268] He listed the symptoms: "Hypochondriac men and hysteric women suffer accidities, wind, choking, leading to giddiness, confusion, stupidity, inattention, forgetfulness, and irresolution." The symptoms were diverse, perhaps too diverse; a powerful and wild imagination lay at their base. But when Heberden pronounced on the root cause of hysteria, he could only say that the condition was fundamentally nervous , that is, fundamentally real or nonimaginary; in his words, "for I doubt not their arising from as real a cause as any other distemper."^[269]

Such nervous self-fashioning lay at the base of the social cults and linguistic idioms of Enlightenment sensibility, and were as influential as any other force in generating the theory of hysteria that we see reflected in the writings of the nerve doctors and their students.^[270] The process would not be reversible. The doctors did not impose their vision of society on their culture; it was life with its tensions that drew even the doctors into its orbit and caused their theories utterly to reflect this new society.

Just as important, nerves in the new culture precluded moral blame, because there could be no censure in a social, almost Zeitgeist , disease. Enlightenment swoons and their subsequent numbness in both women and men came from the act of buckling under the pressures of civilization, especially for the elite who moved within the fast lane of society. The new violence and the threat of its omnipresence enhanced the panic, as John Gay and the early novelists observed. Amelia's strange disorder is described by Captain Booth in Fielding's Amelia in terms that make clear the price she has paid for living in the new fast lane. Booth knows not what to call her "disease," but eventually lands on "the hysterics," which seems as accurate to him as any other appellations. Fielding's case history is not very different from the one Jane Austen will narrate with laser precision in Sense and Sensibility ; its Marianne Dashwood, with her swoons and sighs, is another "hysteric" whose case has not yet been discussed in the detail it deserves, meticulously recounted as it is in that novel from the first onset of fits and starts to the patient's near demise and eventual recovery. In all these cases, real and imagined, panic stemmed not merely from male violence but from a new type of female as well, and society's fears were substantiated almost daily by the culprits and vagabonds apprehended and brought into the courts of law.^[271] Life in the fast lane then, at least for the new urban rich, entailed high living, conspicuous consumption, reckless spending, more travel than previously (especially to the developing seaside resorts), late nights, and new gender arrangements, all combining to set off the beau monde from the other ranks of society. Neurological chaos in the body merely

mirrored the social disorder of the time. Though the comparison may not have struck the average aristocrat, these forms of disorder never stood apart, nor did the hysteria of its women and men.

But did a delicate nervous organization predispose one to the buckling under, or did the buckling under alter the body's nervous organization? The question is hard but cannot be overlooked or swept away. The approach to the answers taken by the nerve doctors was not, as Veith has suggested, sterile; they recognized the psychogenic burdens of their patients and the role played by mind and imagination, even though the doctors grounded virtually all their diseases in nervous structures. This monolithic attribution remains the difficult aspect of their "hysteria diagnosis" for us. Even so, the doctors often failed (almost always) to see the sociological roots of numbness and its radical enmeshment in language and its representations.^[272]

This is a revelatory indication of the degree to which the new nervous culture of the eighteenth century had made inroads into the philosophy, psychology, and medicine of the time. In brief, Cheyne and his colleagues scientized hysteria by radically neuralizing it. They did not invalidate consciousness in human life or reduce mind to body. Theirs was rather a crusade against duplicitous disease, campaigned for in the sunny light and quasi-blind optimism of high Enlightenment science. Not even hysteria could hide from them or prove elusive. If the Enlightenment nerve doctors came back today—heyne recidivus —they could not agree with our contemporary Dr. Alan Krohn about hysteria as "the elusive neurosis." To them, hysteria was fundamentally knowable: a neurology of solids, an iatromathematics of forces, a neural web of nerves, spirits, and fibers.