To browse Academia. 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.
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 iii 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.
No one writes alone. This work was achieved through the support of and in conversation with many heroic people. To my thesis committee, Stephen Johnson, Pascal Michelucci and Tamara Trojanowska, for their continued support and generous engagement. Thank you. Scholarly work is always haunted by past teachers, and in this case, in particular, I have written alongside the good ghosts of Veronica Hollinger and Ihor Junyk. To LB for letting me read chapters of long books aloud.
