Madness, Masculinity, and Magic in Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business: A Tale of Hysteria; or, ‘the Suffocation of the Mother’

Fifth Business is obsessed with straying wits, wandering women, female and male tramps, and boys who run off to the war and to the circus. Tramps and tramping threaten to destabilize the gender roles that secure settled bourgeois life in the fictional Ontario town of Deptford. These crises of mobility are often aligned with madness and, more specifically, with the disease of hysteria, the latter having been identified since antiquity with aberrant sexuality, pathological wandering, and sex-role conflict. With its portrayals of hysterical wandering, sex-role conflict, role-playing, and hypnosis, the novel recalls nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conceptions of hysteria. But, as well as presenting familiar images of female hysteria, Davies, in his portrayal of his protagonist, also sheds light on the lesser-known form of male hysteria. Showing Davies’ debt to Freud and to hysteria studies, and presenting homosexual and lesbian alternatives, the narrative ultimately conveys the message that male mental health and masculinity can be secured only by the performance of heterosexuality.