Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850–1920 by Susannah Wilson (review)

Wilson’s meticulously documented and often engrossing study examines the lives of Hersilie Rouy, Marie Esquiron, Pauline Lair Lamotte, and Camille Claudel in order to demonstrate that psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth was “a socially coercive form of treatment that functioned […] as a medico-legal arm of a misogynistic society” against which psychiatric memoirs serve as “rare and compelling surviving voices of resistance” (2). Wilson departs from those who have worked on female hysterics to focus instead on women who would likely be diagnosed today with psychosis or personality disorder; she reads their delusional narratives as meaningful utterances. In the thirty-two years following the passage, in 1838, of the loi des aliénés, which established a definition of madness “as both a pathological state requiring treatment by medical professionals and a danger to society necessitating the incarceration of those afflicted” (2), the number of women held in psychiatric institutions doubled. Women were more likely than men to be labelled “mad,” Wilson explains, because “the boundaries between normality and madness were more blurred in the case of women, and the pathological considered closer to the essence of femininity” (21–22).

Rouy wrote what would later be published as Mémoires d’une aliénée on scraps of paper, sometimes in her own blood. She claimed to have a connection to the popular legend that had the duchesse de Berry giving birth to a girl who was replaced by a boy so as to ensure a Bourbon heir. Of the four women under scrutiny here, Rouy is the only one who succeeded in convincing others that her detainment was a mistake, her “rhetorical energy […] subvert[ing] and undermin[ing] the hegemony of the authoritative discourse of psychiatry” (52).

Esquiron believed herself to be the victim of a plot concocted by her father and husband aimed at getting hold of her personal fortune. Wilson includes the complete text of two opposing narratives—Esquiron’s and her doctors’—laid out in two columns on the page, allowing readers to see firsthand how Esquiron responded point by point to the claims made in her psychiatric record, “attack[ing] from within the system that oppresses her […]” (105).

Lamotte’s quasi-mystical writings were published in a treatise written by her doctor, Pierre Janet, who followed her for twenty-two years. While she had in common with Rouy and Esquiron the goal of convincing an authority figure of the veracity of her ideas, her situation differed markedly from theirs: she had more freedom to come and go, and more access, thanks to her close relationship with Janet, to treatment of some therapeutic value. Of particular interest here is the blatantly sexual nature of the relationship she maintained with her God, not to mention her plan to make a pilgrimage to Rome on tiptoes to meet with the Pope. Lamotte’s text is at once truthful and delusional: “in good faith, it describes inner experiences mistaken for the shared reality of the sane world” (182).

Claudel, resurrected in the 1980s as a key figure in the history of French sculpture, spent an astonishing thirty years institutionalized. While she does not come across as “sane” in her letters, there is “a metaphorical level of truth in the delusional claims she makes” (215). She may even, Wilson contends, “speak on behalf of a generation of women artists who struggled to be accepted and whose achievements were limited by the inequitable social conditions imposed upon them” (212).

Wilson is at her best when engaged in close readings of these texts which have rarely, if ever, undergone such analysis, teasing out such stylistic features as Rouy’s exclamations, suspension points, interrogatives, and italics; Esquiron’s future tense and “Si … c’est …” construction; Lamotte’s si clauses and deixis; Claudel’s exclamation and question marks, which give way, in one letter, to no...