Art Criticism - The State University of New York

From Diagnoses to Decadence:
A Brief History of Hysteria
Kristen Oelrich
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most doctors and
physicians attributed the disease of hysteria almost exclusively to the female
sex. This linkage between women and hysteria is a tradition thousands of
years old. Women were, and often still are, seen stereotypically as more vulnerable
both mentally and physically to hysteria. The term hysteria is derived from
the Greek hystera meaning womb. Hysteria's medical definition was taken to
mean literally, "wandering womb," as doctors attributed the effects of hysteria
to the womb wandering throughout the female body. Hysteria, or "wandering
womb" was often diagnosed in women who were experiencing trouble talking
or breathing. What today we would call "having a lump in one's throat" was at
one time thought to be the woman's uterus trapped near her vocal cords,
thereby inhibiting vocal communication. I
Many female patients who were diagnosed as hysterics in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were unwilling to conform to the conventions
of marriage, tended to be interested in community and suffrage movements,
and were seen as more independent and assertive than "normal" women? Our
contemporary notion of independent women was diagnosed as hysteria by
most doctors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, knowledge
of hysteria is heavily influenced by key figures who studied the malady at
the end of nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The major focus of this paper will be on these figures and how they
have contributed to the study of hysteria through scientific, psychological,
sociological, and literary discourse. Hysteria as a malady will be looked at as a
psychological component contributing to what figures like Max Nordau have
called the decadent or degenerate personality.' Nordau has also argued that
the increased presence or awareness of hysteria within a community or group
is indicative of mounting societal decadence. I would like to argue that in the
twentieth century fin-de-siecle, hysteria, although no longer employed as a
diagnostic term, was and still is manifest - in fact rampant - within American
society. Thisfin-de-siecle hysteria of the twentieth century has ties to Gustave
Le Bon's theories of the crowd and these connections will be demonstrated.
Although expressed under the guise of new names, hysteria has not disappeared
from a contemporary society if that society is at all within the clutches
of decadence.
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Art Criticism