Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (review)

In her analysis of the hitherto unknown case history of Nanette Leroux, a young woman suffering from acute hysteria following a sexual assault near the Savoie spa town of Aix-les-Bains in the early 1820s, Jan Goldstein sets out to exploit fully the text's potential to serve as the basis of 'a microhistory that illuminates a larger history' (p. 5). Her reading of the extensive case notes, a meticulously researched translation of which constitutes the second section of the volume, combines Freudian and Foucauldian approaches with detailed historical contextualization, taking account of a wide range of factors that, she argues, had a bearing on the case. These factors include the emergence of the spa town and the rise of consumer culture, developments in the realms of science in general and psychiatric medicine in particular, and legal and social changes occurring as a result of the Restoration backlash, intended to obliterate the 'secular individualism of the revolution' and to revive 'Catholic piety in all strata of society' (pp. 32-33), which, the author proposes, had a particularly repressive effect on women in politically and morally conservative Savoie. Through the skilful interweaving of these multiple threads, Goldstein reconstructs a picture of the (probably) pseudonymously designated 'Nanette' and the key players in her drama, offering valuable insights not merely into the early nineteenth-century's medical perspectives on the emerging figure of the hysteric, but also into the prejudices and preconceptions to which all women of child-bearing age were, at this time, typically subject. Drawing first on Freud, to illuminate 'the role of erotic feeling in the inner life of the apparently virginal Nanette' (p. 99), Goldstein goes on to argue that 'the puzzling nonrecognition of the sexual' (p. 102) in her case upholds Foucault's proposal in Histoire de la sexualité that 'sexuality' did not fully emerge as a discursive object until around 1830. Part of the case history's importance thus derives from its epitomization of 'a transitional moment, on the threshold of Foucauldian sexuality' (p. 104). Its further importance is, however, rooted in Goldstein's sympathetic yet incisive portrayal of Nanette as a troubled adolescent exerting her own subtle campaign of resistance against both the inexorable transition into womanhood and male authority, whether in the guise of the garde champêtre believed to have assaulted her or that of the medical professionals who sought to 'cure' her with a fashionable combination of hypnotism and public cold showers. Her somewhat subversive participation in her own recovery is, Goldstein argues, indicative of 'a desire probably adumbrated for her by the revolutionary ideal of gender equality and by the imagined lives for herself that adhered to the commodities she encountered daily' (p. 124). Richly detailed and engagingly presented, this study is an important addition to the growing body of work examining medical perspectives on the condition of women and gender relations in the nineteenth century; only the absence of a full Bibliography is to be regretted.