Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (review)

Ventriloquized Bodies is two books in one: a welcome feminist rereading of nineteenth-century French novels (including the less-read work of women writers Louise Colet and Rachilde) in relation to the contemporary history of gynecology, and a more problematic presentation of medical texts that influenced and absorbed them. Beizer notes in her introduction that this book both is and is not about hysteria: although she understands the medical and cultural slipperiness of the term, she focuses exclusively on the “uterine theory,” which connects hysteria to the womb from Hippocrates through the nineteenth century. Using anatomy as the model for all nineteenth-century medical science (Foucault oblige!), Beizer critiques the essentialism and misogyny of the medical establishment—caricaturing Charcot, for example (in a misreading of a late remark), for his attribution of hysteria to “la chose génitale.” The qualifying “dans des cas pareils” (“in such cases”)—Charcot was referring to a particular case of frigidity in marriage—escapes Beizer’s usually sharp eye. The misreading is telling.

Beizer is at her best when tracing the metaphoric and metonymic links, in fiction, between hysteria, the female sex, reproduction, fluids, fetish, voice, and irony. Hysteria is thought to be provoked by, and expressed as, a pathological femininity. It is a “ventriloquized” discourse in which the hysteric’s body is separated from her voice, and dubbed by a male narrator. Focusing on the aestheticization of hysteria in the novels of the age, which she calls “hystericization,” Beizer finds that distinctions between fiction and medical texts disappear. She argues that narrative developments in French writing of the period, in particular the impersonal “free indirection” of Flaubert, find support in the ventriloquism embodied by the hysteric. Narrative and medical texts resemble one another as both express a pervasive ideology located in an invisible but all-controlling narrator.

The book’s focus on the connection between body and discourse in the writing of hysteria is both its most original and its most limiting factor. Beizer’s intriguing move from anatomy to discourse could be fleshed out: her argument about the overlapping of female genitalia and the larynx in the cultural imagination relies heavily on the visual resemblance between them in one anatomical drawing published in 1865. No contemporary medical illustration of the genitalia is offered for comparison, and there is no discussion of the problem of visual resemblance in medical representations of the period. Many of the medical illustrations from this period that I have seen—for example, in the pages of Le progrès médical, the journal of the Paris École de Médecine—looked like something else. The connections Beizer is making between medicine, culture, and image need to be explored further.

Rather than attributing meaning to the hysteric’s silent semiosis of gesture and symptom (as did “surrealists and doctors”), Beizer believes the nineteenth-century hysterical body is the mute mouthpiece of male-dominated culture and medicine. But if the “hyperbolically loquacious” hysterics are silenced in Beizer’s text, it is partly because she has chosen neither to include interviews and testimony of Salpêtrière patients, nor to valorize as a language their somatic code, and the way in which medicine, itself a science of interpretation, attempted its decoding. The crucial question here—who validates hysterical expression and why—is unfortunately relegated to a footnote: whose hand turns the faucet through which hysterical discourse pours? “This is admittedly not an easy hand to find. Does it represent language? Culture? Power? Are all three the same thing?” (p. 54). This is at the very heart of Beizer’s investigation, and yet her book ultimately says little about the confluence of language, culture, and power in medicine; nor about the practices, instruments, and institutions that make it, in Bruno Latour’s term, a...