Opening the biscuit tin: Piecing together the fragments in two cases of hysteria

Abstract

Luce Irigaray contends that patriarchy is founded on symbolic matricide, and that this has had devastating consequences, particularly for women. Therefore, she argues, ‘we need to find, rediscover, invent’ a maternal genealogy. For many feminists, the marginalised figure of the madwoman has represented a discursive gap, through which they might do just that. ‘Dora’, in particular, as the beguiling subject of Freud's ‘fragmented’ study of hysteria has fascinated feminist theorists and artists for decades. This paper reconsiders this fascination, in conjunction with stories told in my family about my great-grandmother Alice, a woman diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ in north Queensland some 20 years after Freud published ‘Dora’. I take up Barthes’ work on mythology, to explore the way both constructions of hysteria, the public and the private, have functioned as mythic practices, enabling women to re-construct their selves. In the case of my great-grandmother, generations of women have re-construed her story from the old photographs, bits of cloth and jewellery that Alice's daughter kept in an old Arnott's biscuit tin. Reflecting on these practices via Barthes, I suggest that the more threadbare our mother-stories are, the more they offer those who care to rework them.