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

Product Information

The Picture of Madness–Visual Narratives of Female Mental Illness in Contemporary Children’s Literature This is not a review by any means. Just some random thoughts. A review would require a thesis: and I'd be quoting more than half the book. Just read it. Showalter has such an engaging style, you'll be thinking you're reading just another gothic novel, but by the time you're through, you'll be scared to death. For real. Portrait of Mad Margery, a young woman driven mad and living in the fields, possibly taken from a popular song ‘Poor Mad Margery’ c.1790-1800. By James John Hill c.1830-70.

Women and Madness - The University of Warwick Women and Madness - The University of Warwick

Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), ch. 6 ‘Mad Women’. Multiple copies in library The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1979-80), 157-81, duplicated in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, pp. 313-36. Victorian Studies is an e-journal Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-11-16 16:01:39 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40763007 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierMarijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds), Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam and Atlanta, if you want an insight into the imbalance between genders and how they were treated for mental health related issues in the not-so-distant past then this is the read for you. surprisingly easy to dip in and out of, and not as dense as i was expecting. Showalter later taught at Rutgers and Princeton University (neither of which hired women when she began her teaching career) Nancy M. Theriot, ‘Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19 (1993), 1-31. e-journal Louise Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890-1914 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). e-book

The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter | Waterstones The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter | Waterstones

Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). (An excellent collection of essays; several of the essays challenge Showalter’s findings and emphasis on ‘gender’, see e.g. the articles of Wright, Levine-Clark and Michael but don’t ignore the rest.) e-book and several copies in library Mental health is quite a misnomer, in any case, for the most part of this book, for women were considered "mad" for the most innocuous of "offences". Suffice it to say that I wanted to set my own hair on fire while reading the travesties that women committed against society: the travesty of wanting dignity to raise their children out of poverty; the travesty of earning a decent wage for a profession of choice, and not relegated to the kitchen or the scrubhouse; the travesty of wanting a voice in how their bodies were treated; the travesty of wanting a say in society. All these were crimes for which at one time or other women were imprisoned in asylums for merely speaking their minds. Oh, and you'd definitely not want to speak your mind. That in itself is the worst travesty. Religious obsession, physical illness, tragic events, or love affairs were all stated causes of madness for women in this period. From 1858, some women were even incarcerated for asking for a divorce! And for pauper women, without home or money, there was often no escape from the asylum. Many women remained there until death. Arguments continue over statistics as to whether there were truly more women in Victorian asylums than men. However, in March 1879, Middlesex’s County Asylum at Hanwell housed a mere 728 males, in contrast to 1098 females (LMA ref. MJ/SP/1879/01/059). Spark asks whether men or women are in the driver's seat and whether the power to choose one's destroyer is women's only form of self-assertion.”

Sign in

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics. Showalter coined the term gynocriticism; which refers to the literary framework that is going to assess the works of female authors and focuses on critiquing their work without using terminologies used and developed by male critics and authors, as using that sets the women writers at a disadvantage To have no food for our heads, no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how we do cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads or hearts, by the indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of consequence. Most recent work on the history of psychiatry has tended to focus on the history of institutions, of ideas, and of the psychiatric profession itself, and to ignore those for whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is to be welcomed, for its primary focus is upon this neglected group – for the most part, on female patients. Showalter’s next book The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture was a historical examination of women and the practice of psychiatry

The female malady : women, madness, and English culture, 1830

Explained in Showalter’s work A Literature of Their Own (1977); this is the phase of female writers (Jane Austen, Bronte Sisters, and other Victorian writers that struggled to have their voice heard due to male dominance and oppressive values/concepts put forth by males Reclaiming Australia Day: The terrible history of the 26th of January and those seeking to abolish it, by Jenna Helms Elsewhere, first through Charcot’s work, and then in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, there were experiments with a more psychologically-oriented approach. In picturing hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the individual’s control, in beginning to take ‘women’s words and women’s lives seriously’, Showalter sees psychoanalysis as potentially a major advance: but one whose promise soon dissolved, as Freud’s increasing theoretical rigidity and obsessive ‘insistence on the sexual origins of hysteria blinded him to the social factors contributing to it’. In any event, Freud’s ideas met with a particularly hostile response from many English psychiatrists, notwithstanding, in Leonard Woolf’s words, the ‘desperately meagre ... primitive and chaotic’ state of English medical knowledge of insanity on the eve of the Great War.

My Book Notes

David G. Schuster, ‘Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870-