1. Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street," in Great Short Works of Herman Melville , ed. Warner Berthoff (New York, 1969), 39-40. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses in the essay.

2. For an account of the icons of home and mother in popular nineteenth-century discourse see Mary Ryan's discussion of the 1850s rhetoric of domestic isolation and rest in The Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York, 1982), 97-115.

The invalid, housebound Alice James, who welcomed the "divine cessation " (her emphasis) of death, represents in extremis the ethic of immobility recommended by the nineteenth-century American cult of true womanhood; The Diary of Alice James , ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1964), 232. The resemblance between female invalidism and the domestic ideal of woman at home is explored in Jean Strouse, Alice James (New York, 1979); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley, 1981).

3. The images of hysterical postures became publicly available with the publication of Désiré M. Bourneville and Paul Reynard's Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière , 3 vols. (Paris, 1877-80). On the discourse of hysteria in America, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century America," Social Research 39 (Winter 1972): 652-78, reprinted in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 197-216. While paralysis represented only one symptom in the multivarious symptomology of hysteria that includes aphonia, depression, fatigue, nervousness, numbness, and epilepticlike seizures, it is preeminently emblematic of hysteria, I am suggesting, because of its continuity with domestic prescriptions. Hysteria in nineteenth-century America, in Smith-Rosenberg's words the disease of the Victorian bourgeois family, caricatures domesticity; in the sociological account of hysteria developed by American doctors and recently politicized by feminist investigators such as Smith-Rosenberg, the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences of that domesticity. While current feminist reformulations of hysteria, such as the provocative rereadings of Dora collected in In Dora's Case: Freud/Hysteria/Feminism , ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), identify hysteric gestures as a female language, I am more interested in how the visibility of hysteria historically underscores what is already visible about woman: her removal from the public sphere. In this exposition, the dynamics of motion and stasis in the photographs of hysterical seizures and poses elaborate the antinomy between movement and repose upheld by nineteenth-century domestic ideology. break

4. William James, The Principles of psychology , 2 vols. (1890; reprint ed., New York, 1950), 2:421-22.

5. Dr. D. C. Westphal coined the term in an article discussing a case of fear of open places; Journal of Mental Sciences 19 (1873): 456. An earlier version of this article appeared in Germany in Archiv für Psychiatrie 1 (1871).

6. William A. Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity (1883; reprint ed., New York, 1973), 419-22.

7. Charles Bossut, ed., Préface aux oeuvres de Blaise Pascal (Paris, 1819), xxxii; and Louis-Françisque Lelut, L'Amulette de Pascal (Paris, 1846), quoted in Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity .

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 2: 146.

9. George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences (New York, 1881), 96-129.

10. Hammond, A Treatise on Insanity , 422.

11. S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked (1887; reprint ed., New York, 1973), 63.

12. See George Frederick Drinka's chapter on railway neuroses in The Birth of Neurosis (New York, 1984), 108-22.

13. For example, the popular domestic architect Andrew Jackson Downing declared "the true home" a "counterpoise to the great tendency toward constant changes" in American social and economic life. His house and landscape designs accordingly stressed privacy and isolation, the home as a retreat from the world; The Architecture of Country Houses (1852, reprint ed., Cambridge, 1972).

14. S. Weir Mitchell, "The Evolution of the Rest Cure," Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1904): 368-73. On the sexual politics of the rest cure, see Ann Douglas's pioneering essay "The Fashionable Diseases: Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (Summer 1973): 25-52; and Ellen L. Bassuk, "The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women's Conflicts?" in The Female Body in Western Culture , ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 139-51.

15. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1973). Subsequent references to this text are cited within parentheses in the essay. Gilman recorded her nervous illness and unsuccessful experience of Mitchell's rest cure in her autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935; reprint ed., New York, 1963), 90-106. Walter Benn Michaels offers an intriguing analysis of the relations between "The Yellow Wallpaper," hysteria, and selfhood in a market economy in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley, 1987), 3-28.

16. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the rebellion implicit in Charlotte Brontë's madwoman-in-the-attic figure, feminist historians similarly trace a history of feminism from the subversive or protofeminist features within domesticity. See, for example, Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism; The Woman and the City (New York, 1980); Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981).

17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898; reprint ed., New York, 1966); The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York, 1910).

18. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; reprint ed., New York, 1977), 268-97. Beecher and Gilman's contributions to architectural history are described in continue

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, 1981).

19. In nineteenth-century sentimental literature, Nina Baym writes, "Domesticity is set forth as a value scheme for ordering all of life, in competition with the ethos of money and exploitation that is perceived to prevail in American society"; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 27.

20. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book , February 1852, 88.

21. Ibid. For an informative analysis of biological models invoked by late nineteenth-century antifeminism, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982).

20. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book , February 1852, 88.

21. Ibid. For an informative analysis of biological models invoked by late nineteenth-century antifeminism, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982).

22. Hale, "Editor's Table," 88.

23. Ibid.

22. Hale, "Editor's Table," 88.

23. Ibid.

24. By a Retired Merchant, "My Wife and the Market Street Phantom," Godey's Lady's Book , September 1870, 339-42.

25. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York, 1982), 130-39. In The Bon Marché (Princeton, N.J., 1984), Michael Miller interestingly treats the emergence of kleptomania as an effect of the department store's display of abundant goods; in "selling consumption," the department store seemed to incite theft by offering "apéritifs du crime." Cases of kleptomania escalated with the emergence of the great store, and the store itself became the most common site of kleptomaniac thefts. I am stressing a similar complementarity between agoraphobia and the escalation of consumerism; both agoraphobia and kleptomania might be considered as diseases of sentimentalism: conditions arising from desires in a sense invented and institutionalized by market capitalism, conditions linked to woman and her sphere, the repository of selfhood within consumerist culture.

In focusing on the association of agoraphobia with consumerism, I do not mean to suggest a market determinism, but rather to trace one internalization of market capitalism that is neither simply a commodity nor a site of resistance to commodification. The agoraphobic imagination both produces and is produced by capitalism. Like any commodity, it might also serve other purposes--such as feminist resistance to domesticity.

26. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899). On the transformation of housekeepers into consumers, see Susan Strasser's indispensable study of housework, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 243-62; Julie Matthaei, An Economic History of Woman in America: Women's Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983).

27. Philip Fisher brilliantly elaborates the features of this "conspicuousness" in late-nineteenth-century American culture in "The Life History of Objects: The Naturalist Novel and the City," in Hard Facts (New York, 1985), 128-78.

28. Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses: Panic and Protest in Agoraphobia (New York, 1983), 22-30; Alexandra Symonds, "Phobias After Marriage: Women's Declaration of Independence," Psychoanalysis and Women , ed. Jean Baker Miller (New York, 1978), 288-303.

These studies of agoraphobia depart from standard psychoanalytic accounts that, following Freud's analysis of Little Hans, view agoraphobia as a form of castration anxiety. According to Freudian analyses, agoraphobia in women also signifies an unresolved Oedipus complex--the anxiety of repressed libido manifest as "promiscuous continue

urges in the street." The traffic and publicity of streets evoke in the agoraphobic her fears of her illicit incestuous desire. Helene Deutsch notes in female agoraphobics a "dread of parturition"--a dread of being "away from home and outside in the world" that masks a dread of defloration or parturition. More recently, Julia Kristeva rereads psychoanalysis and the case of Little Hans, viewing Hans's anxiety as the surfacing of the fear underlying castration anxiety: "the frailty of the subject's signifying system." Kristeva is critiquing and redefining the meaning of castration in the Freudian formulation of the subject, identifying castration anxiety as representative of an everpresent threat to the symbolic order from the unconscious. She characterizes the unconscious as pre-Oedipal and maternal. It is thus a relation to the primacy of the mother that castration, or agoraphobia, marks.

See Sigmund Freud, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" (1909), in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1974), 47-184; Milton Miller, "On Street Fear," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 392-411; Helene Deutsch, "The Genesis of Agoraphobia," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 51-69; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, 1982).

In both traditional and revisionary psychoanalytic accounts, agoraphobia involves a particular association with the mother, the prototypical woman. I am concentrating on the relation between agoraphobia and a nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood. The account of agoraphobia I am developing in this essay (from the imagery of public and private space recurring through psychoanalytic as well as pre- and post-psychoanalytic representations of agoraphobia) locates agoraphobia in the social rather than psychic register; I am not exploring agoraphobia as a disease but as an organization of specific social anxieties, as the structure of domestic ideology, and thus as the structure of selfhood in a market economy. In this account, the psychoanalytic exegesis of agoraphobia, staking out a psychic territory, would be another instance of how the agoraphobic imagination works--a denial of the agora in agoraphobia to advance a radically privatized model of self.

29. Seidenberg and DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses , 47-48.

30. The self-sustaining female culture of Gilman's 1915 Herland is also the goal of earlier feminist elaborations of domesticity such as Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's vision of "the Christian Neighborhood" in their popular manual The American Woman's Home (New York, 1869).

31. Elizabeth Hardwick, "Bartleby in Manhattan," in Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (New York, 1984), 217-31. Another interesting aspect of "Bartleby" as an urban tale is its contemporaneous appearance with articles describing the emerging phenomenon of the urban poor and homeless. I am indebted to Hans Bergmann for this point.

32. For a different interpretation of Bartleby's feminine position in the tale, see Patricia Barber, "What If Bartleby Were a Woman?" in The Authority of Experience , ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards (Amherst, Mass., 1977), 212-23. The possibilities of a "what if" school of literary criticism are limitless; I am suggesting that nineteenth-century culture defines the scrivener's mode as feminine. Bartleby's femininity, insistently encamped in the public sphere, draws attention to the public performance of the domestic. That Bartleby is a man makes his discontent with Wall Street an especially strong critique of both the market and domesticity. That is, though free to be in the world, Bartleby prefers not to. "The Yellow Wallpaper" suggests that if Bartleby were a woman, she would prefer to be in her own world, where she would circulate. Whereas Bartleby imagines pure domesticity, the woman in Gilman's story welcomes continue

its ultimate transformation. This is the difference between Bartleby's borrowed femininity and a nineteenth-century woman's given femininity.

33. Another reading of the lawyer-copyist relationship particularly suggestive to my own is Michael Rogin's interpretation of the tale as an exposé of false familial claims of employers of wage labor. In Rogin's reading, Bartleby attacks the lawyer's attempt to establish worker-employer bonds; Bartleby resists the boundaries of a sham familial relationship. In my reading, Bartleby redresses the falsity of the family not because he is "boundaryless and insatiable" as Rogin characterizes him but because the family, like the economy, is voracious and irrespective of boundaries. Bartleby insists upon the set boundaries and self-sufficiency associated with an ideal domestic economy. See Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York, 1983), 192-201.

34. Ira L. Mintz, "Psychoanalytic Therapy of Severe Anorexia: The Case of Jeanette," in Fear of Being Fat: The Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia , ed. C. Philip Wilson et al. (New York, 1983), 217-44.

35. Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 75-77.

36. The anorexic case against the coda of conventional femininity is persuasively presented by Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York, 1981); Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (New York, 1978), and Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age (New York, 1986); Seidenberg and DeCrow, Women Who Marry Houses , 88-97; John Sours, Starving to Death in a Sea of Objects (New York, 1980).

37. Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders (New York, 1973), 211-25. Before William Gull and Charles Lasegue introduced the nomenclature anorexia nervosa to eating disorders in 1873, Gull had recorded cases of female refusals to eat in 1868. Reports of similar cases date back to medieval times; Rudolph Bell and Caroline Bynum have identified anorexic behavior in the fasting of saints. See Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985); Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast, Feast, and Flesh," Representations 11 (Summer 1985): 1-25; and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).

38. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, 1979), 5-41, 60-62.

39. Sandra Gilbert treats the literary representation of the feminist politics of anorexia in "Hunger Pains," University Publishing , Fall 1979. Two more recent feminist analyses link anorexia to the problematics of female identity following from mother-daughter relations. In Starving Women: A Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (Dallas, 1983), analyst Angelyn Spignesi characterizes the anorexic as "our twentieth-century carrier" of the repressed female psyche. In denying the "principles of matter . . . she enacts in her disease the interpenetration of the imaginal and physical realms." This lack of demarcation between body and psyche, self and others, returns her to "the realm of the mother." Similarly focusing on the relation of the anorexic to the maternal, Kim Chernin reads anorexia as matricidal act, "a bitter warfare against the mother," enacted on the daughter's body; The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (New York, 1985). Taking the anorexic as protagonist in a history of female experience, or placing anorexia in a maternal tradition, in a chronology of the constitution of identity and difference, suggests a fundamental relationship between maternity, anxiety, and the definition of bodily borders. My purpose here is not to dispute or advance the claim of archetypal female anxiety but rather to demonstrate how a nineteenth-century cult of motherhood and domestic mythology shaped particular discourses of border anx- soft

iety: the nullifications of Bartleby, the negotiations of agoraphobia, and the negations of anorexia.

40. Ann Douglas has aptly termed this sentimental cult of death "the domestication of death" and characterized it as a gesture by which women claimed a real estate society denied them; The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977), 240-72.

41. Job 3.11-16. break

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the help I received from friends and colleagues at various stages of writing this article. Michael Fried first alerted me to the existence of the monotypes. Steve Nichols invited me to present my Degas work at an MLA divisional session. As mentioned below, Susan Suleiman's acute reading made clear the necessity for further interpretative work. Bill Warner wrote a careful, sophisticated, and challenging critique of an early draft, which helped me sharpen and extend my argument. Eunice Lipton and Carol Armstrong reassured me that specialists in the field did not find my readings aberrant. (Unfortunately, Eunice Lipton's book, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life [Berkeley, 1986], was published too late for me to be able to take its findings into account.) Susanna Barrows offered useful suggestions from the historian's point of view. Audiences at Louisiana State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Boston University, and New York University forced me to confront the bewildering diversity of viewers' responses to the monotypes.