Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that Victorian patriarchs disposed of their women by making myths of them; but then as now social mythology had an unpredictable life of its own, slyly empowering the subjects it seemed to reduce. It also penetrated unexpected sanctuaries. If we examine the unsettling impact upon Sigmund Freud of a popular mythic configuration of the 1890s, we witness a rich, covert collaboration between documents of romance and the romance of science. Fueling this entanglement between the clinician's proud objectivity and the compelling images of popular belief is the imaginative power of that much-loved, much-feared, and much-lied-about creature, the Victorian woman. Until recently, feminist criticism has depreciated this interaction between myths of womanhood, science, and history, seeing in social mythology only a male mystification which dehumanizes women: the myth of womanhood was thought to be no more than manufactured fantasies about woman's nature (inferior brain weight, educated women's tendency to brain fever, a ubiquitous maternal instinct, raging hormonal imbalance) meant to shackle female experience to male convenience.1 As feminist criticism gains authority, however, its new sense