Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria

Evelyne Ender’s Sexing the Mind is a richly nuanced inquiry into nineteenth-century discourse on sexual difference in order to demonstrate its production of a gendered consciousness. Clearly indebted to Freud and Foucault, Ender’s study examines both medical and literary discourses, but focuses primarily on the latter, and through a subtle juxtaposition of texts by Flaubert and Henry James, George Sand and George Eliot, traces the construction and regulation of a gendered subject through discursive representations of hysteria.

Ender begins with an extended reading of medical commentaries on hysteria that under the rubric of science construct a familiar gender fable: a division between the sexes whereby woman is defined as affect, passion, emotion, and sensitivity. Denied mind, a property of the masculine subject, woman is allowed the virtue of modesty, or “pudor” as Ender terms it. But as Ender notes, if la pudeur, hiding behind a veil before a sexually charged male gaze, is a figure meant to restrain and contain woman’s profligate susceptibilities, pudor soon becomes itself a gesture of seduction that opens modesty to desire, producing precisely the sexual drama it would suppress. Thus, modesty leads to a proliferating rhetoric of veils and secrets in nineteenth-century discourse that functions ultimately to pathologize women. Even more, the field of secrets to which woman is confined sustains the social prohibition on her knowing, promoting “a whole edifice of exclusion which prohibits women’s curiosity in other domains” (20).

Having developed the overdetermined connections between hysteria and pudor promoted by medical discourse, in subsequent chapters Ender shows how this chiasmic structure determines nineteenth-century literary representations of feminine consciousness. Her touchstone figure is initially Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and the legal controversy over censorship it provoked over what of the woman, and of the subject, can be properly unveiled. With Flaubert’s overdetermined relation to Emma as prototype, Ender stages a provocative encounter among Henry James, George Sand, Freud, and George Eliot, making them the protagonists in a nineteenth-century drama about sexing the mind through their ambivalence toward what can be shown, what can be known, of woman. Thus, for example, she traces the shift in James’s critical writings on George Sand, from his early enthusiasm for the passion found in her writings to his later hysterical response to the scenarios of passion attributed to her person, to the George Sand who actively defied gender laws, who dared to blur difference and confuse passion in life with passion in writing. Attributing James’s violent rejection of Sand to his own precarious sexual identity, Ender uses his hysteria to reflect more generally on the relation between gender and knowledge circulating in and through nineteenth-century discourse. In the context of hysteria, masculinity is revealed as a response to the repression of the feminine, its scopophilic economy predictably gendered, its attempts to master sexual difference inevitably leading to an aporia that produces not knowledge but a symptomatic acting out of the impossibility of difference.

Having established hysteria as a conflictual relation to knowledge, the argument turns to a critique of the male epistemological appropriation of the female subject and posits an alternative epistemology deriving from the relation between women. Juxtaposing James’s relation to his female fictional figures with Freud’s case history of Dora, Ender attends to the ways in which the woman’s mind is consistently framed by and incorporated within the male consciousness as a figure of his subjectivity, extending the implications of Flaubert’s statement, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” As Ender puts it:

The nineteenth-century project of writing . . . which aims at defining subjectivity in its inner manifestations but focuses on the female subject . . . participates in a process of partitioning and an allocation of knowledge that constantly replays the stakes of sexual difference.

(139)

Developing the stakes of this difference as the gap between mind and body, Ender points to James’s Milly Theale, a late avatar of the hysteric who embodies the relation between what one wants...