Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations

McCarren, Felicia M "Book Review: Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations"
Configurations - Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 1996, pp. 125-129
The Johns Hopkins University Press


Excerpt



Ventriloquized Bodies is two books in one: a welcome feminist rereading of nineteenth-century French novels (including the less-read work of women writers Louise Colet and Rachilde) in relation to the contemporary history of gynecology, and a more problematic presentation of medical texts that influenced and absorbed them. Beizer notes in her introduction that this book both is and is not about hysteria: although she understands the medical and cultural slipperiness of the term, she focuses exclusively on the "uterine theory," which connects hysteria to the womb from Hippocrates through the nineteenth century. Using anatomy as the model for all nineteenth-century medical science (Foucault oblige!), Beizer critiques the essentialism and misogyny of the medical establishment--caricaturing Charcot, for example (in a misreading of a late remark), for his attribution of hysteria to "la chose génitale." The qualifying "dans des cas pareils" ("in such cases")--Charcot was referring to a particular case of frigidity in marriage--escapes Beizer's usually sharp eye. The misreading is telling.

Beizer is at her best when tracing the metaphoric and metonymic links, in fiction, between hysteria, the female sex, reproduction, fluids, fetish, voice, and irony. Hysteria is thought to be provoked by, and expressed as, a pathological femininity. It is a "ventriloquized" discourse in which the hysteric's body is separated from her voice, and dubbed by a male narrator. Focusing on the aestheticization of hysteria in the novels of the age, which she calls "hystericization," Beizer finds that distinctions between fiction and medical texts disappear. She [End Page 125] argues that narrative developments in French writing of the period, in particular the impersonal "free indirection" of Flaubert, find support in the ventriloquism embodied by the hysteric. Narrative and medical texts resemble one another as both express a pervasive ideology