Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France Ilza Veith Janet Beizer. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 295 pp. Ill. $44.95. This is a book of stories, which the author has categorized as “medical,” “epistolary,” and “literary.” All illustrate the changing views of hysteria in a particular place and time. In the author’s words, “The move from a consideration of hysteria as diagnosis of a female malady to a reconsideration of the female malady as a broader-based cultural symptom describes the path of this book” (p. 3). It is a path that some may find rough going. We encounter sentences like the following: “The dermographic tableau framed by Charetie’s text contains within it, however, a blind spot that opens a possibility for the semiotic process to elude authorial control, subverting classic paradigms and metaphoric structures” (p. 26). Beyond this mixed metaphor and dangling participle, even the title of the book requires considerable effort to decipher. Dermography receives particular attention, and the author has included five superb photographs of men and women with this immune reaction whose bodies have been inscribed in various ways by their physicians. Hysterics were considered more “expressive” than nonhysterics, and this practice of writing on the body becomes “an allegory of the narrative appropriation of hysteria” (p. 22). Unfortunately, the term “hysteria” has now disappeared entirely as a psychiatric diagnosis: the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has replaced “hysteria” with “histrionic personality disorder.” To my mind, this new terminology lacks clarity and specificity. It surely lacks the richness of meaning that “hysteria” acquired from its use by Charcot and Freud. For those historians of medicine who have an especial interest in hysteria as viewed through the lenses of literary criticism and feminist studies, this book may offer valuable interpretations of an altered disorder. Ilza Veith Tiburon, California Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press