The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980

Product Information

And their improvement was measured, as often as not, by their ability to manage their dress and their appearance. Not, surely (and contrary to what Showalter sometimes seems to suggest), in any straightforward statistical fashion. I think had I been around in the late Victorian period I would have been institutionalised and certifiably mad. It was only after the middle of the 19th century, when the madhouses of the Gothic novelists had supposedly been transformed into the domestic retreats favoured by the Victorian lunacy reformers, that women began gradually to outnumber men among those legally designated as mad – first among the pauper residuum who contributed the bulk of the rapid rise in the ranks of mad folk, and not till the end of the century among their genteel and affluent cousins. In particular, her focus on literature and her small survey of texts on mental illness is absolutely excellent and really relevant to me.

The Female Malady) - Goodreads Elaine Showalter Quotes (Author of The Female Malady) - Goodreads

None the less, many medical treatises, as well as novels and plays of the eighteenth century, depicted how social expectations inflamed or frustrated the fairer sex, and led to mental breakdown – unrequited love, inappropriate romances, the difficulties of matrimony or failure to marry at all, inability to conceive, or the sadness of being left a widow. Here she mentioned schizophrenia, which despite being a disease that was equally split between men and women she said was seen as feminising because of the treatments such as ECT and lobotomies.

Thrilling and scholarly, this book from the 80s shines the light on the link between oppression of women and ways their mental troubles were treated in England. All these were crimes for which at one time or other women were imprisoned in asylums for merely speaking their minds. Kept constantly separated from their male counterparts, save at the carefully stage-managed asylum balls that were a weekly demonstration of the powers of moral management over the sexual passions, women endured an even more passive and circumscribed existence than could be found on the men’s wards. In the end, “it is easy to see how a wartime society accustomed to harsh treatment of hysterical women would become much more violent when confronting soldiers apparently unmanned by the experience of the front” (Showalter 178). She uses literary examples throughout, with mentions of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The Female Malady - Google Books

Showalter has been very influential - her work is a delight to read - but try to develop a critical approach to her approach and conclusions. We will home in on some of those 'critical periods' as well as exploring ideas about the impact of women's lives and social condition on their mental wellbeing. Therefore, the concept of ‘hysteria’ illustrates the medical inequality women have faced, a discriminatory and outdated concept that is still apparent today. It was a very good look at the gender stereotypes of the time, however by analysing from a 20th century perspective she didn't really fit these generalisations in context. Complaining that women's treatment in Victorian psychiatry silenced women (98) didn't really differ from the treatment of non-mad women in normal society.For my interests, I would have loved more time spent on the more recent years, but that would have made it unbalanced in treatment. Since ancient times, hysteria has been recognized as a woman’s uterine lesion or a disease related to the possession of evil spirits.

The female malady by Elaine Showalter | Open Library The female malady by Elaine Showalter | Open Library

I picked up this book after its' chapter on shell shock in male combat veterans was referenced in another historical text. Hilary Marland, ‘At Home with Puerperal Mania: The Domestic Treatment of the Insanity of Childbirth in the Nineteenth Century’, in Outside the Walls of the Asylum, pp.Whether much has changed since the 30-odd years that Showalter wrote this book, I wouldn't begin to guess. In keeping with their professional preference for somatic accounts of the aetiology of mental imbalance, mad-doctors increasingly emphasised the biological, and ignored or were indifferent to the social and the psychological sources of their patients’ distress.