Hysteria: Potential Dramaturgies Toward a Portrait of Ambiguity

This work asks the question, primarily: what kind of performance is the hysterical attack? And what is the nature of hysteria in and as performance, as it occurred at the Salpêtrière in the nineteenth-century? The Salpêtrière hysteria project was a medical one, but also a theatrical one. The hysteric’s public appearance was a continual ethical provocation, pointing not only to the vulnerability of her person, but the unstable position of her spectator. The hysteric points to the fraught and exciting nature of theatrical representation, continually drawing out dilemmas and unexpected dynamics of witnessing the suffering of others. In the Salpêtrière documents, the gravity of institutional violence committed against female patients at the level of representation is undeniable. This thesis works to express the overt and subtle damages done to hysterical women in Charcot’s hospital: public and private bodily harm, sexual violation, dismissal, objectification, use, exposure, reduction. Simultaneously, the chapters seek to draw attention to the hysteric’s resistance to these phenomena. So often, it is simply by being herself that the hysteric points to the inherent weaknesses in these systemic modes of violence. Photographers were forced to new levels of technical innovation and flexibility in order to capture the hysteric’s fiercely mobile body. Terminology spun out an anxious series of words to try to negotiate her dynamism. The excessive exposure of her emotional, intellectual and sexual life in the Iconographie and on stage, framed by equally excessive empirical constraints, under scrutiny, ultimately reveals the uncontainable remainder of the hysteric’s personhood that slips from view, bringing the inadequacy of positivist and misogynist spectacle into relief. Charcot created a unique mixture of drama and science in his transmission of his findings about hysteria. The hysteric made the medium express beyond expectation.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0