The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (review)

The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. By Elisabeth Bronfen (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998) 469 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

Bronfen's study brings the disciplinary perspective of a literature scholar with the sensibilities of a feminist and the insights of Jacques Lacan to bear on the medical problem of hysteria understood in cultural and historical context. It is a heady mix, but anything less complicated would probably fail to de-mystify the subject. "The hysteric," Bronfen says, "uses her body to articulate the difference at the heart of the bourgeois family, and in her refusal to undertake the so-called normal Oedipal journey, engages with the paternal metaphor, supporting the father's desire, even as she makes what is latent manifest, namely the violence, sacrifice, and incest on which the bourgeois family is founded" (277).

The argument of the book is that early trauma in the life of girls creates a "snarled knot of memory traces" that come to haunt the psyche. Bronfen makes much of the "sign" of the navel point of the body, where the knotted themes metaphorically converge. Her point is to locate a concrete symbol in the body that connects the traditional image of a wandering womb with the more contemporary notion of the fluidity of trauma. The navel sign also de-sexualizes hysteria. It is the traumatic more than the specifically sexual that interests Bronfen.

Bronfen explores her topic in great depth. She returns to Sigmund Freud's early work on the etiology of hysteria and his own personal psychology. She has some wonderful chapters on the extensive writings of nineteenth-century French psychiatrists about hysteria, especially those of Jean-Martin Charcot. Finally, Bronfen uses certain paradigmatic works--from Radcliff, The Romance of the Forest, and Sexton, "To Bedlam and Part Way Back," to films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg--to extend her inquiry from the clinic to the world. ¹

At times the book is itself knotted in the obscurity of postmodern language--with a little Lacan here on "extimacy," or Michel Foucault there on collapsing Cartesian dualities, or her own confusions (what, pray tell, is the "libido of vulnerability" [33-34]). Bronfen is also not the first to note that hysteria is the special way women rebelled within the tight confines of Victorian (and earlier) forms of patriarchy. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's Disorderly Conduct (Oxford, 1985), in this regard, deserves more than a mere listing in the bibliography. Bronfen's interesting effort to disentangle hysteria from the sexual context, especially incest, is not completely convincing, though there can be no certainties in such a question. Her forays into literature can also be tedious. Those (long) parts of the book are a distraction from what would be a much more valuable exploration of hysteria's place in the culture now. Has it transmogrified into psychosomatic helplessness? Has Prozac dulled it? Is it the fate of women in patriarchy? How does hysteria relate to sexual abuse? In other words, Bronfen has begun an inquiry that needs much further work.

Charles B. Strozier
City University of New York

Note

1. Ann Radcliff, The Romance of the Forest (Oxford, 1986; orig. pub. 1791); Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston, 1981), 1-46.

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