Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, on Hysteria 2019052769, 2019052770, 9781138389359, 9781138389366, 9780429423956

Citation preview

Performing Nerves

Academic interest in hysteria has burgeoned in recent decades. The topic has been probed by feminist theorists, cultural studies specialists, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, medical and art historians, as well as novelists. The hysteric is construed as a powerless, voiceless subject, marginalised by the forces of the patriarchy that have been the root cause of their distress, dissembling, and disablement. In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse interweaves her artistic and academic practice, drawing on her own performance texts to explore four different versions of debilitating hysteric suffering. Each text is extensively annotated, revealing the dramaturgical logic and, in turn, the historical, medical, and cultural contexts behind their protagonists’ illnesses, which are argued as environmentally caused in each case. This unique, reflective insight into a playwright and director’s craft offers not only an account of how mental suffering can manifest in different contexts and times, from the 19th century to today, but also a breadth of access to the ideas that can motivate creative research. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of theatre studies, performance studies, dramaturgy, 20th-century history, gender studies, and medical humanities. Anna Furse is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is Co-Director of the Centre of the Body and Director of the MA in Performance Making. A veteran award-winning theatre artist, she writes and produces her own works internationally, through commissions and co-productions. She is a published author of plays and theoretical writing; a frequent speaker at international conferences; and Artistic Director of her own production company, Athletes of the Heart: www.athletesoftheheart.org.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylora ndfra ncis.com

Performing Nerves Four Plays Four Essays On Hysteria

Anna Furse with a foreword by Elaine Showalter

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Anna Furse The right of Anna Furse to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Furse, Anna, author. Title: Performing nerves : four plays, four essays, on hysteria / Anna Furse; with a foreword by Elaine Showlater. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019052769 (print) | LCCN 2019052770 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138389359 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138389366 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429423956 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hysteria—Drama. | Hysteria in literature. | Psychoanalysis and literature. | Drama—Technique. Classification: LCC PR6056.U75 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PR6056.U75 (ebook) | DDC 822/.9208—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052769 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052770 ISBN: 978-1-138-38935-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-38936-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42395-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Foreword by Elaine Showalter Preface Acknowledgements 1

Making a drama out of a crisis: Augustine (Big Hysteria)

vi viii xi xxi

1

2

What she wants: Sea/Woman

78

3

The duty to run mad: Shocks

111

4

Shapeshifting: Gorgeous

163

Conclusion Index

207 211

List of figures

0.1

Jean Béraud, Dans les Coulisses, 1889. Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris xiii 0.2 Jean Béraud, La Proposition, 1885–1890. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris xiv 0.3 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture (Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh xvii 1.1 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: État Normal (Hystero-Epilepsy: Normal Condition). IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 2

1.4

Augustine, Léthargie: Hyperexcitabilité Musculaire (Lethargy: Muscular Hyperexcitability). IPS Vol. 3, 1879–1880. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 12 1.6

2.1 2.2 3.1

Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture (Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). Photo: Paul Régnard. IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Maja Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse, 2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija Maja Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse, 2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018

23 103 110 112

List of figures  vii 4.1

Vissey Safavi in Gorgeous by Furse, directed by Rosamunde Hutt. Photo: Timothy Nunn, 1999

188

Foreword

Hysteria and the theatre have been linked since the age of Greek tragedy, and metaphors of the histrionic have long influenced clinical discussion of patients, especially women, who were seen by male doctors as actresses seeking attention through imaginary physical symptoms. In the 19th century, Paris became the capital of hysterical theatre, with Dr Jean-Martin Charcot acting as the producer and director of a grand clinical theatre at his hospital La Salpêtrière. There, young female patients were brought to perform every Friday for an audience of fashionable Parisians, including writers, actresses, cabaret performers, and dancers, to demonstrate their symptoms of grande hystérie and to respond on cue to the doctor’s commands. In Vienna, Freud’s office became the set for “the talking cure,” an intimate dialogue between doctor and patient, a theatrical two-hander. By 1977, in their book Hysterical Personality, psychiatrists Kay H. Lacher and Joe P. Tupin suggested that acting would be the ideal career choice for the hysterical woman, who might find a life in the theatre to be a way to satisfy “her exhibitionistic needs.” While the notion of an “acting cure” reflects hostility towards hysterics, women, and actresses, the history and representation of hysteria have been the subjects of numerous plays and performances in the theatre, cinema, television, and dance. In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse presents four of her theatrical works based on hysteria and its cultural history. She contextualises these dramatic pieces in a rich, erudite, and complex analysis of the relationship between gender, mental illness, hysterical body language, and social pressures. In her view, subjects of these traumas are people communicating extreme strain and distress through a “coded monodrama, expressed in their transformative bodies.” Chapter 1, “Making a drama out of a crisis: Augustine (Big Hysteria),” is centred on her play Augustine (Big Hysteria), first produced in April 1991 at the Plymouth Theater Royal and then at theatres in the UK, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada, and the USA. Augustine was a pioneering work in the new feminist theatre of hysteria in the 1990s. Furse imagines that

Foreword  ix the young Sigmund Freud, who had studied with Charcot in 1886, was the analyst of Augustine, the star of Charcot’s hysterical theatre. Her performances in the stylised body poses which Charcot titled as her “Attitudes Passionelles” were recorded in drawings by his assistant, the artist Paul Richer, and multiple photographs taken at the photographic atelier of the hospital by Albert Londe. Responding to these pictures reproduced in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, the Surrealists celebrated Augustine as the “perfect archetype” of their imaginary erotic hysterical muse. By bringing Charcot into the play, as the ringmaster of a fantastic circus, Furse dramatises the triangular private theatre of the unconscious, staged by the “hysterical” woman patient, the male doctor/director, and the male observer or recorder. Chapter 2, “What she wants: Sea/Woman,” reexamines and reimagines Ibsen’s late play Lady from the Sea (1888) as a “therapeutic journey” comparable to the cases of female hysteria in Freud and Joseph Breuer’s classic Studies in Hysteria. In Sea/ Woman Furse compares Ibsen’s heroine Ellida to Bertha Pappenheim, whom Breuer called “Anna O” in the most controversial case study of a 19th-century “hysterical” woman. She also brings the contemporary problems of ecological crisis to the performance piece, which was conceived in collaboration with the Serbian actress Maja Mitić. Chapter 3, “The duty to run mad: Shocks,” contains Furse’s most recent and most ambitious play, Shocks: A Theatrical Requiem, a disturbing and moving recreation of the painful saga of shellshock in the First World War; its initial demonisation as malingering or cowardice; and its ultimate understanding as a language of protest, grief, and despair. In the early years of the war, treatment was epitomised by doctors like Arthur Hurst at the Netley Military Hospital in Devon, who employed a range of electric shocks and physical punishments to force soldiers to give up their symptoms. Near the end of the war, the patients and medical staff were filmed as Netley War Neuroses (1917), a propaganda film choreographed by Hurst to show the success of his methods, although it is now seen as evidence of another ritual theatre. The play is based on the work of the great British neurologist, psychiatrist, and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who was assigned during the war to serve as medical supervisor at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, a disused “hydro,” or asylum for wealthy neurotics treated with water cures of various sorts, which was re-purposed as a hospital for shellshocked officers. There Rivers worked out a Freudian theory of shellshock, coming to understand it as a form of male hysteria, a specifically gendered response to an impossible set of conflicts and commands. He was able to experiment with a compassionate version

x Foreword of the talking cure, possible because officers tended to have anxiety symptoms, while mutism was one of the most frequent symptoms of private soldiers. Furse’s version uses songs; patriotic poems; and the anguished protest poems of Wilfred Owen, a patient at Craiglockhart, to emphasise the themes of masculinity, duty, and patriotism which encouraged young men to enlist and the training which prepared them to kill. Shocks was performed on 18 November 2018 at the Craiglockhart Chapel of Edinburgh Napier University. Now, war neurosis is understood and respected as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Furse points out in her rewarding discussion of gender, culture, and mental illness that today the British military establishment recruits very differently: “Killing isn’t mentioned, nor is manliness too explicitly, although it is implied in ideas of valour and bravery.” The final chapter, “Shapeshifting: Gorgeous,” applies the concept of hysteria to the case of anorexia, a language like all hysterias. Conceived during Furse’s sabbatical residency at Princeton University in the 1990s, Gorgeous was first performed in 1999. Unlike the highly controlled hysterics of the other plays, Alice the Anorexic actively uses her body to protest against her social circumstances as a young woman. Through this “family of texts,” Furse shows us the kind of social and political forces that have broken men and women psychologically in the past, and offers the dramas of “performing nerves” as empowering scripts of resistance and change. Elaine Showalter, Washington, July 2019

Preface

This book is about mental illness. It is about what drives people mad. It is about those individuals whose coping mechanisms collapse under intolerable pressures from how they are expected to behave in their specific environments and circumstances. In my plays, three (cis) women and one man, each within their own historical time and situation, suffer the exigencies of gender normality under extreme duress. They each feel violated by the burden of conforming to given life scripts, roles, and scenarios. They break down, break away, break through – if they’re lucky. They are people not only living on but performing – in that they present their psychophysical conditions to others – their nerves. Cultural/historical reading informed my four works, produced internationally in theatres, schools, and sites, for audiences fifteen years and older, since 1991. Neither definitive nor exhaustive, contextual writing distils ideas that have influenced and inspired me, extended now by post-production research. I have drawn on political and medical history, psychoanalysis, and cultural and feminist theories. I have sought to bring my original thinking up to date as some pieces precede key developments that have occurred since, such as the influence of the internet on Eating Disorders (EDs). I address pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian eras, overarching 150 years. A topic-based chronology offers a temporal arc by which to understand some of the features of mutable hysterical conditions, and some insight, I hope, into the specifically affecting situations in which each protagonist is (dys)functioning. I present these now as a ‘family’ of texts. Hysteria has never actually left our society. In this sense, each voice belongs to what Elaine Showalter calls Hystories (Showalter, 1997). Each hystory here is performed as coded monodrama, expressed through transformative bodies. To my knowledge, there has not been scientific research that supports the theory of a congenital predisposition to the conditions of my protagonists. I am considering, rather, how lived histories can bend psyches out of shape and the performativity of somatised trauma. My interest remains in the mind, not the brain, and in

xii Preface how cultural and political forces can take and break a person, and how ‘going mad’ can constitute revolt. Prima facie: at the Royal Ballet School in the 1960s I studied the ‘Mad Scene’ in the Romantic ballet Giselle.1 In heart-broken bewilderment at having been duped, Giselle, a peasant girl, listlessly performs decomposing memories of happiness when in love with Albrecht, whom she has just discovered is a two-timing Prince-disguised-as-peasant. After a revelation scene in which she loosens her hair – a prevalent sign of madwomen in the 19th century – before her mother; her community; and Albrecht’s entourage, including his fiancée, she drops dead of a broken heart. My later feminist interpretation of this narrative found resonance with McCarren’s findings, which corroborate my conviction that the professionalised ballet dancer was akin to prostitute, offering male spectators the female body for their delectation and mutely contorting and incarnating the ‘eternal feminine,’2 and this before any backstage sexual exchange culture.3 McCarren unearths venereal disease records evidencing that late 19th-century Opéra dancers doubled as working girls. In fact, the Opéra pimped them (McCarren, 1998). Hippolyte Taine, critic and historian, pronounced, “The ballet is vile. It is a display of girls for sale” (Taine, 1868, p.11). Ballet remains a barely camouflaged erotic art form, appealing to scopophilia. Its dramaturgies offer/ed publics narratives of passionate transgressions. The physical pain involved is masked by rictus smiles. Ballet dancing is an exquisite pain, Margot Fonteyn once remarked, “as cruel as bullfights” (Money, 1976). Ballet’s Romantic agony connects to the 19th-century hysteric condition. Giselle shapeshifts from joyous girl to deadly Wili,4 the vengeful jilted spirit of German myth and folklore. Somnambular creatures, Wilis resurrect from their graves at midnight asif-hypnotised, their heartless alter egos converting victimhood to pitiless revenge: they dance their feckless lovers to death.5 Male spectators enjoying such intense scenes, and frequenting the city’s many prostitutes, were the same breed as those frequenting the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot’s public Leçons de Mardi on hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the second half of the century. Witnessing women in the throes of madness doubtlessly offered frisson. Hair loose, clothes slipping off her bosom, thrashing about in undomesticated fashion, the hysteric delivered dramatic fare of flesh and tears. Among intellectuals and artists, we know that the Goncourt brothers attended the Salpêtrière, as did Sarah Bernhardt, researching her rendition of Hamlet, though the asylum’s girls might have been more apt models for Ophelia.6 According to her biographer, ‘The Divine Sarah’ experienced feelings of “distaste, almost fear” from the experience (Brandon, 1991, p.97). This period marks the birth of a male dance gaze. The ballerina’s burlesque alter ego was kicking the can-can at the Folies Bergères.7

Preface  xiii Legs flew up to offer the fleeting glimpse of upper thigh and frilled pudenda. There was plenty of feminine carnality to ogle in Paris at this time, manifest in paintings depicting women performing in the sexual underworld as well as in theatrical and cabaret circles. Painters’ mobility in commuting between the art and sex worlds was made explicit in a 2015 Paris exhibition:8 over forty canvasses represented scenes of working girls soliciting on streets and performing in clubs, cabaret, bedroom – and ballet (Figure 0.1). That these artists had access to such intimate scenes is remarkable, that women were such willing subjects signifies their subjection to the acceptable face of pornography through figurative art.9 Jean Béraud vividly portrayed the moral overlaps between women who danced and women who sold sex for a living (Figure 0.2). He depicted the Opéra – auditorium and backstage – and urban solicitation: scenes of leering punters, the ubiquitous top-hatted bourgeois (Figures 0.1 and 0.2). It is in this Paris, flowering as the Belle Époque of the Third Republic, an age of prosperity and creativity as well as of dire misery, when ‘Le Tout Paris’ – the social and intellectual elite as well as the nouveau riche – mingled with the poorer women of the demimonde in brothel, cabaret, and hospital, that Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) is set (Figure 0.3). On discovering the case of Augustine, I experienced an intense punctum.10 Researching in the Salpêtrière archives, her photographed poses struck a familiar chord: they evoked Giselle! I was

Figure 0.1 Jean Béraud, Dans les Coulisses, 1889. Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.

xiv Preface

Figure 0.2 Jean Béraud, La Proposition, 1885–1890. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

struck by the fact that Charcot insisted on proving that the hysterical ‘Chorée’ (from the Greek ‘khoreia’: ‘dance’) respected a symphonic structure, a classical dance indeed, with four distinct phases that repeated over and over as if proving a consistent archetype. During attacks, hysterics would enact fantasies or re-enact memories in gestures strikingly similar to theatrical stills of the day, narratives perhaps drawn from romance plots published in the popular press. Charcot wasn’t interested in the content of these disclosures. Towards the end of his career he did acknowledge the underlying sexual roots of hysteria, a theme his student Freud would complicate, but his driving aim was to secularise hysteria by dwelling on its nosology and quintessential signs. Freud encountered Charcot’s peculiar extravaganza on a study bursary at the Salpêtrière. Eventually developing what he would insist was a science – Psychoanalysis – he spent his entire life researching and promoting this in the face of disdain and criticism, confronting the foundations of bourgeois European shibboleths. The Charcotian hysteric was predominantly working class – mobile and expressive. Her Freudian peer was typically middle class – corseted and repressed. The Freudian hysteric ‘converted’

Preface  xv her suffering into symptom – twitches, hallucinations, paralyses. She didn’t explode. She imploded. And here lies another key factor: hysteria is culturally determined. It has its own local and epochal style. Critics have argued that Charcot’s team of doctors and visual artists invented the very hysteric attacks he was claiming to discover (Didi-Huberman, 2003). His patients learned their condition performatively, aspiring to stardom in his hysteric spectacular, with its visual and photographic ‘takes.’ The Freudian hysteric didn’t share her experiences in the collective cultural cauldron of the city asylum. Hers was a privatised domestic tragedy. Her audience was her psychoanalyst. Her performance, acted out in her “private theatre” (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.74),11 didn’t disturb public peace. Ears were to Freud as eyes were to Charcot. Freud was digging the depths of the psyche, heeding speech utterance to grapple with what drives people towards neurotic despair; Charcot was obsessed with external signs and structures. Notwithstanding, in both theatres “of forgotten scenes” (Cixous and Clément, 1986, p.5), the hysteric herself insisted on occupying a witnessed space so as to convey, albeit in obtuse codes, ineffable truths of what was distressing and disabling her. I took poetic licence to bring all three characters simultaneously into this space. Sea/Woman (2011) explores a bourgeois hysteric type. Via a feminist post-Freudian reading we comprehend Ibsen’s proposals on what his women might be suffering from and might want:12 Choking in conventional marriages, they are far too bright and capable than their duller bourgeois husbands. They champ at the bit for freedoms society is not yet ready to permit. So they leave; commit suicide; or, as in the case of Ellida, merge in risqué fashion with Nature, longing for the promise of remembered passion, yearning to fulfil authentic desire and identity. Sea/Woman adapts Ibsen’s late play The Lady from the Sea (1888), a portrait of a woman suffering debilitating neurotic anxiety. To Freud, hysterics were in a state of non-linear and haphazard self-revelation. They had no control over what came out of them. In this sense, rather than manipulative and wilful deceivers (as they were construed by Charcot), they were more like bad liars. Our Sea/Woman is an actress, a professional dissembler, studying the part of Ellida through a Stanislavskian – psychological – reading.13 It is in her confrontation with the text and the application of Stanislavski’s system that she accesses the character’s – and eventually her own – causal distress and confronts the asphyxiating torpor from which she desperately wants to break free. Shocks (2018) reaches into male vulnerability within the ambits of war neurosis. This was performed in the site of the renowned Edinburgh psychiatric hospital, Craiglockhart, where war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were incarcerated. Shocks asserts shellshock as male hysteria. Hysteric

xvi Preface symptoms, according to Freud, evidence unsuccessful repression and the inability to inhibit trauma that, in its unspeakable nature, diverts across the landscape of the body to erupt through the fissures from which it can surface. Shellshocked men were suffering from what the pioneering Craiglockhart doctor William Halse Rivers distinguished as ‘suppressed’ memory of trench horrors. Showalter argues that combat stress is a form of protest against military rules. She has written controversially about the first Gulf War (1990–1991), when veterans would present inexplicable lesions, rashes, and other physical signs. Male hysteria is provocative. It implies effeminacy. First World War survivors of death, deprivation, and disfigurement were men whose social and professional roles and true natures were incompatible, which led them to resort to communicating their trauma somatically. The shellshocked cracked under pressure to uphold the ideology of military heroism that they experienced as morally and ethically impossible in the face of war’s atrocities. The very idea of glory was to the young Officer Wilfred Owen an “old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori.”14 Remarkably, poets like Owen did have a voice and used it, shedding “floods of ink as well as floods of blood” in this war (Reid, 2010, p.5). If hysteric hallmarks shifted from the 19th to the early 20th century, the term had disappeared from medical vocabularies by the late 20th. It is rarely applied today, passing into the vernacular to describe irrational, loud, or hilarious behaviours, normally by women. In today’s parlance, we ‘laugh hysterically’ (uncontrollably), have ‘hysterical fits’ of weeping (uncontrollably), or are simply hysterical because we are behaving in unrestrained ways. EDs actually manifest quite differently. These are the converse of uncontrolled displays. They are sly. They slip under the radar, imperceptibly. With sleight of hand, today’s hysteric does her thing to herself secretly, behind closed doors, in bathrooms, over toilet bowls, in front of fridges in the night, unable to express the darker anxieties and fears that unsettle her psyche. Food becomes a weapon to turn on herself. EDs dislocate nourishment from survival and convert the selecting, ingesting, expelling, or vomiting of sustenance into auto-destructive ritual, enacted on the flesh of its sufferers. Gorgeous (1997) is a non-didactic text for a contemporary teenage audience. It proposes how social issues persist in affecting individual psyches. I explore the shift of consciousness from the 19th to the 21st centuries as operating on the imagination of Alice, connoting Lewis Carroll’s size-shifter. Alice is trapped in a material mountain: her huge party dress a teenage version of Samuel Beckett’s menopausal Winnie’s mound.15 I explore how girlhood is culturally conditioned by the pressures of consumer society and its impact on body image and sense of self. On her fifteenth birthday, Alice Goodbody foresees future teenage life,

Figure 0.3 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture (Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

xviii Preface from Barbies to labels and burgers, becoming image-disordered as a result. Learning the standards of perfection controlling her, she buckles. The positioning of Alice in this volume’s hysterical anthology invites the reader to consider how hysteria, arguably, endures today. Gorgeous’s audience was the age of its protagonist, the same as Augustine upon admission to the Salpêtrière asylum. In recent decades hysteria has engrossed feminist and cultural studies theorists, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, medical and art historians, as well as novelists.16 It illustrates compellingly the fraught relationship between individual and authority. The hystericised body is emblematic of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, in which the body becomes a site of inscription that speaks of how it is disciplined by regimes of power.17 Where some take biopolitical condition and turn it outwards towards rational political protest, the hysteric has not yet discovered how to articulate dissent methodically. Her solipsism is symptomatic of her conundrum: that her oppressive lived experience languishes in a condition of internal chaos, festering inside, swirling without issue, without logos. Hysteria is impacted rage. What remains incontrovertible is that its versatile modes of expression have extended far beyond those Viennese bourgeoises who could afford Freud’s attentions or those poor thrashing specimens in Charcot’s overbearing optic machine. Freud declared that “much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.393). Hysterias, then: forms of dilated unhappiness, tortuous distress signals acted out in compositions of bodily signs, divertissements18 to set the spectator off-track. Hysterics express the psyche in awkward, deviant, and hyperbolic semaphore. Here is evidence of how, in the end, our bodies will always, forcefully and without instruction, speak our minds (Figure 0.3).

Notes

Preface  xix

References Barker, P. (1995) The Regeneration Trilogy. London: Viking. Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. Beckett, S. (2010) Happy Days. London: Faber. Brandon, R. (1991) Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah Bernhardt. London: Secker & Warburg. Cixous, H. and Clément, C. (1987) The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née). Wing, B. (trans.) Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2003) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Hartsz, L. (trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Sheridan, A. (trans.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— (1998) The History of Sexuality: 1, The Will To Knowledge. Hurley, R. (trans.) London: Penguin Books. Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1988) Studies on Hysteria. Luckhurst, N. (trans.) London: Penguin Books. Garafola, L. (1986) ‘The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth Ballet,’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 17, 18, No. 1, 2, 35–40. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harpin, A. (2018) Madness Art and Society, Beyond Illness. Oxford; New York: Routledge. Hustvedt, S. (2011) The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves. London: Sceptre.

xx Preface Ibsen, H. (1980) Plays: Three, Rosmershorm, The Lady from the Sea Little Eyolf. Meyer, M. (trans.) London: Eyre Methuen. Marshall, J. (2016) Performing Neurology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCarren, F. (1998) Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics and Medicine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Money, K (1965) The Art of Margot Fonteyn. London: Michael Joseph. Reid, F. (2012) Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Acknowledgements

Theatre is a collaborative art. I could not have fleshed out my hysteric protagonists without, in particular, (in alphabetical order) Diogo André, Antonella Diana, Ken Dempster, James Drefus, Sally Jacobs, Susan Martin, Graeme Miller, Maja Mitić, Shona Morris, Wolfe Morris (RIP), and Matthew Wernham. They are among many artists and technicians, credited within the text, who brought the texts to fruition in performance. I extend heartfelt gratitude to those individuals and all who worked in the four production companies. Support from the following over the duration of my four projects across the years and in the writing of this book has been invaluable: First I am indebted to my original source of inspiration, Elaine Showalter, for her pioneering feminist investigation of hysterias, her encouragement thirty years ago and since, and now for writing the Foreword. Cindy Oswin introduced me to Showalter’s Female Malady when working with Scarlet Harlets on La Folie back in the 1980’s: thank you for a life-changing read. The brilliant maverick director Annie Castledine (RIP) took a leap of faith in commissioning my very first play Augustine (Big Hysteria) for Derby Playhouse in 1990. Posthumous thanks to my friend the psychologist Anne Kilcoyne (RIP) for her love, home, and professional advice as I wrote the first draft in her house in Totnes, where we had a first reading out loud by her fireside. Paines Plough soon appointed me Artistic Director, allowing the project to complete to co-production with Plymouth Theatre Royal in my first year’s programming (exceptionally, since staging your own work is generally not in the job description of leading new writing companies). More recently, Maja Mitić has been a friend and co-creator of Sea/Woman, bravely bringing her own life experience to our project. Pauline Miller Judd took an unusual step and risk in commissioning Shocks at Craiglockhart, University of Napier, a unique opportunity for which I am ever grateful. Ros Hutt, then Artistic Director of Theatre Centre, is warmly thanked for both commissioning and directing Gorgeous, which seemed such a risk at the time, and for taking the production to Malaysia and the Philippines. I am grateful too

xxii Acknowledgements to The New Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, who kept Gorgeous in their repertoire for years. In terms of this volume, gratitude to Hugo Glendinning, Djordje Tomić, Timothy Nunn, and Nina Klaff, who have given me kind permission to use their photos, and Sheila Burnett for her super generous time and care in the digital upgrading of her photos from the pre-digital age two decades ago. Alan Read extended intellectual generosity, Jonathan Marshall provided detailed and astute feedback on the manuscript, and Clare Finburgh Delijani gave invaluable advice. Kitty McKay and Phoebe Cunningham with contributed painstaking assistance to the preparation of the manuscript. Last but not least, a great big thank you to Talia Rodgers, the initiator of the project whilst Editor at Routledge. Her successor, Ben Piggott, inherited the idea and ran with it, trustingly encouraging the unusual format and supporting me throughout. His Editorial Assistants at Routledge, Laura Soppelosa and Ellie Auton, have been excellent advisors, and Jeanine Furino managed the copy editing with precision and care. And then, of course, special gratitude and deep love to my immediate family Nina and Jack Klaff, who patiently listened to chunks read out loud into the night, empathised, encouraged, and generally helped me to keep going as this book was gestated. It takes a village…

1

Making a drama out of a crisis Augustine (Big Hysteria)1

On 21 October 1875, a decade before Freud’s six-month internship that would redirect his life’s opus towards forging psychoanalysis, a fifteen-year-old hysteric was delivered to the Salpêtrière hospital into the hands of the celebrated neurologist Professor Jean Martin Charcot. The second volume of the Salpêtrière’s Iconographie Photographique (IPS)2 edited by Charcot’s colleague and promoter, the neurologist Desiré-Magloire Bourneville, devotes forty-three pages to Augustine’s case, including utterances, photographs, twenty pages of commentary, and twelve pages of observation. Admission notes describe her as bright, capricious, and coquette. Her portrait photograph shows her smiling, placid, eyes straight to camera, evoking a young woman way beyond her years. She certainly doesn’t resemble the very troubled and mentally ill teenager she was at the time. This image by Paul Régnard (1850–1927)3 is the first of Augustine’s many performances to camera throughout her volatile career in the asylum. She was extremely photogenic (Figure 1.1). Augustine was Charcot’s star, the perfect exemplar among many women (and fewer men)4 from whom he derived his hysteric prototype. Charcot was a Republican and a Positivist (Goetz).5 Liberating hysteria from its Catholic association with witchcraft and superstition, his mission was to prove its pathology scientifically. He sought methodologically the recurrence of its topography, signs, and stigmata. “I was befuddled as I looked at such patients,” he declared in one of his renowned public Tuesday Leçons, and this impotence greatly irritated me. Then one day, when reflecting over all these patients as a group, I was struck with a sort of intuition about them. I again said to myself, ‘Something about them makes them all the same.’ (Charcot, 1987, p.103) The efficacy of classical imagery resides in the way it constrains the real to resemble the rational. As Georges Didi-Huberman deplores, in seeking to define the classical sequencing of hysteria,

Figure 1.1 Augustine,  Hystéro-Épilepsie: État Normal (Hystero-Epilepsy: Normal Condition). IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

Making a drama out of a crisis  creating a standard against which to measure all cases, Charcot invented out of the condition a consummate art form. Boasting his patient collection to the public (Didi-Huberman, 2003; Marshall, 2016), his soloists rose to distinction from his psychiatric corps de ballet, quasi-Wilis recycling suffering, not from thwarted love and premature death but from impotent explosive rage. Despite acknowledging hysteria as a post-traumatic condition, Charcot’s medical protocol was more diagnostic than curative, descriptive rather than dynamic. It was not that he sought to heal, but to classify, perfect, and (re)produce hysteria. His project was taxonomic: an (unfulfilled) search for a scientific, biological aetiology that would prove an inherited degenerate defect passing through the female line which could be located in the cerebral cortex. Hysteria was “an illness of the neurosensory function – and not principally a psychological or sexual disease, as others contended” (Marshall, 2016, p.122). From the coercive way his cameras trapped subjects – in the Lacanian sense of how the art work “traps” the Gaze, to give “something for the eye to feed on” (Lacan, 1998, p.101) – Charcot’s illuminating legacy is the extensive photographic archive from which to comprehend the specific hysteric construct at the Salpêtrière under his direction. This, in turn, contributes to contextualising 19th-century mores with regard to outsider women made Other in bourgeois urban culture. Augustine’s clinical notes include a striking passage in which cause and effect are discussed. The text cites her mother’s behaviour and relations her brother established between her and his male friends. Remarkably, no mention is made here of two older men, one of whom attempted and the other of whom succeeded to rape the child Augustine, triggering her first attacks. To a modern reader, her case presents a narrative of blatant sexual abuse in prurient tones typical of the social and clinical gaze of her time. Her harrowing story unfolds from the convent where she was beaten and exorcised at six years old for being ‘possessed.’6 This developed into a fully fledged hysteric condition by her teenage years, aggravated by being raped again at the age of thirteen by ‘Monsieur C’ for whom her mother worked as live-in housekeeper. Monsieur C and Augustine’s mother had struck a deal: the child would learn appropriate domestic skills, enjoying the privilege of learning to read and write alongside Monsieur  C’s children. Monsieur C had intentions. He raped Augustine at razor-point. A doctor mistook her ensuing pain and vaginal bleeding for menstruation. Later, she bumped into Monsieur C in the street. He grabbed her by the hair. She managed to escape. Her attacks became more violent. Threatened to silence by Monsieur C’s gaze, Augustine began vomiting and developed stomach pains. Her daily attacks began. Terrified lest he carry out his threat to kill her, she developed classic hysteric symptoms: recurring visions (of eyes, significantly – Monsieur C 

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Making a drama out of a crisis had used his to control her during and after violations), numbness, abdominal pain, fits during which she exhibited uncontrollable energy, sensations of suffocation, partial paralysis, garish nightmares, hallucinations, and babbling. During ensuing family rows, Augustine came to understand that her mother was Monsieur C’s mistress “to whom in some sense (the mother) delivered her”7 (IPS 2, 1876, p.127). Where Augustine’s mother had colluded in this paedophilia, she subsequently consigned her to Charcot. Hospital notes recount two visits to the Tuesday Leçons by Monsieur C, whom Augustine threatened to denounce (ibid., p.160). In my play, the anonymous “C” is named Carnot so as to imply transference between her abuser and doctor.8 In the same vein, I take poetic licence in calling Augustine “Dubois” (“of the woods”) to connote those deep uncanny forests associated with witches, into which she struggles to escape her urban prison. Charcot instantly diagnosed Augustine a classic grande hystérique. She proved a compliant subject. Under his charismatic tutelage she was elevated to kinky stardom. Regularly paraded before gazing medics and laypeople at the Charcot freakshows, her notes attest to recurring leitmotifs: nightmares of blood, fire, revolution, theatre, and escape. As if these weren’t clues enough, she acted out regular sorties into the hospital gardens at night. She recounted her rapes, cyclically. Her unambiguous imagery recurs like incantation, captured by, presumably, feverishly scribbling witnesses, which probably accounts for the many ellipses. One could hardly find more potent language to describe the penis and anal and vaginal penetration: “What do you know about medicine? […] I don’t want you anywhere near me! […] I won’t uncross my legs […] Oh! You’ve hurt me too much … no you won’t be able to! […] Help! […] Bastard! Nurd! Jerk! […] I’m sorry! I’m sorry Monsieur! Let me go! […] It’s impossible! […] You don’t want any more? Again! […] Take that snake out of your trousers! […] You wanted me to sin before you, but you’d already sinned […]” (she opens her mouth, puts her hand in as though to take something out of it) “I’m confiding secrets to you […] Spoken words fly away, written ones remain […] You’re pulling my leg! You can say Yes all you like, I’m saying No! […] I won’t uncross my legs […] It’s impossible! […] I don’t have time (bis) […] the rats are in my bottom! Get rid of them!” (IPS 2, 1876, p.153)9 At this time, she frequently thrashed with inexhaustible hysteric abandon, suffering total paralysis in one arm. Within three years of incarceration she would undergo a staggering 1,097 attacks in 1876, 1,293 in 1877, and 605 in 1878 (ibid., p.167). At her worst, she might undergo 200 attacks a week, each lasting up to fifteen

Making a drama out of a crisis  minutes. By this calculation, at times of crisis, she would be in the throes of an attack on average seven hours and fifteen minutes a day, or fifty hours a week. Augustine would sometimes be straightjacketed, often at her own request. ‘Treatment’ included amyl nitrate, ether, gold (administered internally and externally), morphine, and regular hypnosis. Applying hypnosis, Charcot could prove his central thesis and most significant contribution to the understanding of the neuroses as contrasted with the psychoses: hysteric stigmata are mimetic, mutable, psychosomatic.10 This was established by removing or relocating the patient’s hysterical paralysis, easily achieved once they were under his spell. He also proved that an enraged womb was not acrobatically jumping round the body – an ancient misconception still fashionable at the time.11 These women were feigning their symptoms! The paralysis and seizures were masquerades! The body was lying! Such dramatic evidence was demonstrated in dazzling magic shows, with compelling narration (Figure 1.2). It would take Freud eventually to read, in the full sense, the underlying text of such fake gestures, those enfleshed decoys that both drew and diverted attention simultaneously: “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips: betrayal forces its way through every pore” (Freud, 1977c, p.114). Augustine’s hysteria took her body to extremis, and eventual colour blindness. With biting irony, she somatised the camera’s incessant “takes”: seeing the world in black and white. The Salpêtrière authorities not only stole her visual acuity. Her name slips around throughout the IPS as if her identity had also been snatched and arbitrarily reinvented. On some pages she is referred to as Augustine, at others as Louise, L, or simply X. Inconsistent labelling suggests that observer-scribes, penning an archive of extraordinary theatrical talent and a way with words, found no fixed-point or vestige of stability in their young patient – or didn’t care to. As she fitted, prattled, and convulsed her life away before her witnesses, this hapless patient explicitly alluded to recurring animal images: spiders, menacing green cat and peacock eyes, vermin (“the rats in my bottom! They’re biting me!” (IPS 2, 1876, p.145)),12 and the trousered “serpent” she insisted must be removed. As her condition helter-skeltered, she provided a perfect series in the Attitudes Passionnelles catalogue – (re)enacting scenes with her “invisibles,” figures from her imagination and/or men with whom she has had sexual relations both tender/willing or frightening/abusive. Photogenic billet-doux conversations with these characters oscillated between the seductive, terrified, and enraged. Augustine was delivering a script that screamed out her disregarded autobiography. She was a supreme dramaturg, agitatedly representing and recreating her own condition. Her

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Making a drama out of a crisis

Figure 1.2 Shona Morris as Augustine, Wolfe Morris as Charcot, and James Dreyfus as Freud in Augustine (Big Hysteria) by Furse. Hypnosis. Photo: Hugo Glendinning, 1990.

art was self-parody, the weapon of the oppressed.13 Already an outsider, she co-opted her designated condition and fashioned herself even more Other (Figure 1.3). If Charcot was searching for dramatic, if not narrative, unity, Augustine’s auto-biographical expositions presented an exemplary model, with consequent celebrity earned at her own expense. Immersed in the gallery of hysterical portraiture, she proved a superb apprentice in learning – and perhaps crafting – physical scores, precisely from her environmental culture. Her scenarios were repetitions-of-repetitions. The process by which she became the mechanism of her own oppression also led to liberation, for parody, imitation, and simulation can also teach the actor the function of power relations. Miraculously, this hysteric diva used the very transformative ability that accorded her

Figure 1.3 Shona Morris as Augustine (Attitudes Passionelles), in Augustine (Big Hysteria) by Furse. Photo: Sheila Burnett, 1990.

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Making a drama out of a crisis special status within the hospital to escape it: she simply walked out, dressed as a man. No one intervened because they didn’t recognise her. She was incognito (unknown), opaque, invisible, and, finally, hors scene (off-stage). Augustine’s subversion and eventual rebellion from Charcot’s grasp had nonetheless been preceded by converse complicity. She excelled in shows evidencing the power of suggestion under hypnosis, Charcot’s party trick. Where hypnosis was employed to demonstrate the non-organic basis of contractures, it was also used to reveal the power of her experimenters under whose instruction she fluxed: According to the attitude that you impose on the patient, the gestures you make her perform, her physiognomy will change and harmonise with this attitude. Place her hands in the situation of someone who is angry, the physiognomy expresses anger. Join her hands together, the physiognomy  expresses supplication. Put the patient on her knees, it is the expression of prayer. Bring her index and medius to her lips, as in the action of kissing, and amorous pleasure paints on her face. (IPS 2, 1876, p.194) This teenager was malleable putty in medical hands, those same omnipresent digits that probed her body inside and out, searching for what oozed from her, examining her vagina for signs of sexual arousal during attacks, an absurd practice for this data was never used for healing. Abundant discharge was diligently recorded, alongside notes of temperature, spasms, menstruation, micturition, and tears. For a figure determined to rescue hysteria from its superstitious association with the womb, it is striking to read of Charcot’s preoccupation with the relationship between Augustine’s attacks, menstrual cycle, vaginal excitement, and ‘hysterogenic region.’ Hysterics provided a repressed 19thcentury medical society with titillation: the opportunity to grope and gawp gratis. Augustine herself alluded to this lurking slippage between professional and sexual relations with the doctors, stating that she never kissed them. Meanwhile she perfected the four-stage symphonic attack that Charcot had categorised as: Epileptoid, Clownism (or grand mouvements), Attitudes Passionelles (each lasting from three to fifteen minutes), and Final Delirium, which could last anything up to an hour, delineated in graphic frame-by-frame charts by the anatomical artist and physiologist Paul Richer.14 She also produced a speciality Charcot called “hysterical rhythmic chorea”15 (IPS 2, 1876, p.184) that, he insisted, proved to his critics that his girls were not tricksters (“farceuses”: comics). He defensively declared that Augustine’s unique symptoms verified that another patient “couldn’t have

Making a drama out of a crisis  […] styled X” (ibid.).16 She was unique, yet a classic, whose attacks, including the typical ‘Epileptoid’ prologue with a sense of suffocation and the famous arc-en-cercle bowing of the body, shaped themselves perfectly into the Charcotian template. Charcot was a maestro. In his designed-to-impress mises-enscene, specialities of the house included swaggering demonstrations of hysterical numbness by pricking the patient’s skin with needles or, applying hypnosis, the removal of a paralysis. A contortion that had been dramatically melted away might be sculpted onto the other side of the body. A range of props augmented this theatre of medico-performative turns, prompted by suggestion. Ammonia would be sniffed with delight as if rose water, charcoal eaten as if chocolate, paper as if potatoes, whilst animal suggestions produced mimicry of dogs and birds. One hysteric given a top hat and told it was her baby, cradled and rocked it. Another would “lift her skirts with a shriek in terror when a glove was thrown at her feet with a suggestion of being a snake” (Showalter, 1987, p.148). Such scenes of apparent gullibility found their way into my play, Freud acting as Charcot’s conjuring assistant, Augustine swooning into his arms (Brouillet, Figure 1.5, p.20).17 Charcot asks her, when collapsed ‘unconscious’, to identify her whereabouts and her audience. She can’t. However, on being asked who Charcot is, she names him, signifying his colossal power over her consciousness, even whilst apparently under the influence of hypnosis. She was, after all, performing for him, enthralled, dying to please. If hypnotism was his forte, so was Charcot’s technique of applying pressure to the ovarian region, a key ‘hysterogenic point,’18 bizarrely, to stimulate or quell an attack or simply to inscribe a contraction on the body. A male authority figure touching a body part so deeply associated with sex, moreover in public, would surely provoke extreme anxiety and over-reaction. Augustine’s body was overloaded with distress, the context supercharged. Charcot’s obsession with ovaries as switches for flicking hysteria on and off saw him introduce an Ovarian Compressor, a steel and leather belt with a drumstick-like tourniquet to press tight on the ovary. On one occasion this was applied to Augustine, stimulating her to an artificial contracture of the tongue and larynx that was irreversible for thirty-six hours. No wonder that, having complied with such brio in his sensationalist spectacles, riding a regular psychophysical rollercoaster whilst muttering a range of disjointed sexual novellas en route, she finally burnt out. Having acted out her traumatic memory cyclically for five years in the Salpêtrière’s perverse arena, she finally saved herself,19 quitting this citta dolorosa. Her case history ends abruptly: “X … escapes from the hospital in male disguise” (IPS 1, 1880, p.198).20 Nothing is known of what became of her. Given her class, temperament, and mental health, for all her independent spirit, she might

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Making a drama out of a crisis well have fallen prey to the sex industry and/or further abusive relationships. Charcotian hysteria was a performative language that Freud would define as ‘conversions’: traumas that leak from the body in oblique but decipherable outward signs. Charcotian hysteric performance ritualised unspeakable suffering. It was a device, a ruse. The hysteric was using her body where she was seen-but-notheard, where words failed or would not be heeded. Her choreomania21 (Birringer and Fenger, 2011; Gotman, 2018) constituted self-medication, a cathartic declaration of what was eating her. Projecting theatricality onto his suffering ensemble, Charcot was frankly disinterested in interpretation beyond according indications common, formal, choreographic sequence. His recherché investigative techniques never searched his patients’ consciousness. Where Freud would suggest that a neurosis is somatised into coded gesture, Charcot’s hystériques’ signals remained insignificant, save for evidence of his theory of type, and his conviction that if this body produced symptoms that were merely facsimiles of somatic ailments (Goetz, 1987), it remained for him to prove the biological trait in the brain as causal. Until the end of his life when he finally recognised hysteria as psychological, his career was spent in defining it as a disease of the nervous system. Charcot had a vested interest in establishing hysteria as a universal disease of the organism, even if his attempts remained inconclusive due to the condition’s capriciousness: “Like syphilis, hysteria so pervades the permeable, fluid, female body that Charcot’s displacement of its locus from uterus to nervous system can be no more than a utopian attempt at anatomical rigour” (Bernheimer, 1997, p.234). It was his failure to define the anatomical site of hysteric disease (he referred to the condition as a sphynx), or to make any association between precise cause and symptom, his self-deception and expedient double standards that fuelled the endless regurgitating of behaviours under his watch (Szasz, 1987). We might well imagine hysterics’ debilitating frustration at not being listened to, their recycling attacks proving futile repetitive efforts to attract attention to the core of their anguish. The Salpêtrière provided Charcot with a stockpile of specimens, hundreds of animate objets d’art. On their admission, his penetrating gaze would fix patients, stripped naked before him (Marshall, 2016). Charcot reminded Freud of Adam experiencing “intellectual delight […] when the Lord led before him the creatures of Paradise to be named and grouped” (Freud, 1886, p.11). Charcot’s major preoccupation was in proudly practising nosography (ibid., p.10), a taxonomic exercise. In the name of nosology, he converted his huge state hospital into a sociomedical environment that became renowned for hysteria-asspectacle. This is a peak moment in the history of the disease. Salpêtrièrian hysterics exhibited maladies of their social class

Making a drama out of a crisis  and times. For, unlike other epidemic illnesses that have proliferated as metaphors of their age (Sontag, 1983), hysteria defies any single historical moment. It recurs as a pathological leit motif that has slipped and slid about, appearing in different forms and with labels according to the prevalent religious, scientific, medical, and cultural hegemony. Hysteria is protean. Symptoms have morphed as the condition has adapted to cultural climate, following as well as cultivating a fashion wherever its sufferers have abounded. The illness itself is a performer, mimicking other illnesses. It is a simulacrum, for “to dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have […] Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces ‘true’ symptoms?” (Baudrillard, 2010, p.3). The grande hystérique was ailing from her experiences, her symptoms belonging to an existing repertoire of expressions. Augustine’s twisted paralysed limbs were a gestural declaration and metaphorical representation of the distorting sexuality of her rape trauma. Her body caricatured her desperate need for orthopaedic care.22 She expressed herself figuratively according to the Salpêtrière aesthetic. She was a virtuoso, performing boundlessly on cue and off, and with studied expertise, melodramatic expressions of medical concepts. Aside from the way in which optics at the Salpêtrière trained inmates, Szasz, who compared the hospital to a military institution, with its ranking, promotions, and hierarchies, suggests that the ‘Charcoterie’ groomed women, citing an intern who acknowledged those “who were excellent comedians, when they were offered a slight pecuniary remuneration imitated perfectly the major hysteric crises of former times” (Szasz, 1987, p.47). Didi-Huberman insists the Salpêtrière institutionalised hysteria’s choreographic accomplishments so that an apprentice might gain reward. Charcot used tropes of dissembling to describe his patients,23 whilst hysteria before and since is defined as mimicry, acting, showing, clowning, manipulation, performing, chicanery, lying, displaying, cheating, feigning, pantomime. His traumatised troupe showed little decorum or restraint in their burlesque displays. These included overt sexual mimicry: the aforementioned wild arc-en-cercle, a burlesque representation of orgasm and/or childbirth. Charcot’s hystérique was the carnal body that Bakhtin portrays as “unfinished and open” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.26). She was making an histrionic spectacle of herself because theatrical performance generally provides a contained outlet for behaviour that might otherwise threaten the status quo. Performance styles reflect class. The unrestrained gambol of the working-class hysteric was vulgar and vaudevillian. Soon, her Freudian counterpart, characteristic of her bourgeois class, would operate within the classical performative language of contemporary domestic tragedies (Chapter 2).

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Making a drama out of a crisis

Figure 1.4 Augustine, Léthargie: Hyperexcitabilité Musculaire (Lethargy: Muscular Hyperexcitability). IPS Vol. 3, 1879–1880. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

During Augustine’s chequered career she was locked in a padded cell, promoted to work as a nurse, only to relapse and be locked away again. Some of her most extraordinary photographs at this time show her in uniform stretched rigid across two chairs, or arched in an impossible backbend (Figure 1.4). Notes about this cataleptic phenomenon in the IPS state: X … went back to sleep. We pressed her head on the back of a chair, then we rubbed her back muscles, her thighs and legs, and we placed her feet on a second chair: the body, rigid, remained in this position for quite a long time (we never prolonged the experiment for more than 4 or 5 minutes); it is possible to put a 40 kilogramme weight on her stomach without making the body bend. (IPS 2, 1876, p.192)24

Making a drama out of a crisis  During such induced somnambular trance, Charcot could induce or remove contractures or alter postures that disappeared when the lethargy was lifted; or, contractures could be made to persist if the patient passed into the cataleptic phase without lifting the trance (Charcot, 1987, p.110). It was the excitement generated by such weird displays that drew crowds, and that left behind images of an extraordinary body that was constantly, impossibly, transmogrifying. Hysteria’s plurality of conditions has erupted historically in different cultural forms. The Tarantata of Apulia in Southern Italy, “whose social role is marginalized, and whose psychological problems find a bodily expression in the symptoms they experience and wish to heal through their ecstatic dance” (Daboo, 2010, p.78), has aspects in common with the grande hystérique. Daboo suggests that in her frenzy, the Tarantata is “possessed” by the real or imagined bite of the spider, producing a scenario25 whereby she is given licence to behave irrepressibly, mutating from upright domestic villager to a swooning, stamping, shrieking creature (ibid.). Repetition is key. The Tarantata’s “rimorso” (“re-bite” as well as “remorse,” a significant play on words when considered in a sexual frame) is a pretext for an act-out, affording herself opportunity for action-replay. If Augustine’s first “morso” was her sexual abuse, her “rimorso” points to the performance culture of Charcot’s Leçons that provided her with a ritually controlled context in which to re-enact her distress, but in which she was re-subjected to intense male ocular scrutiny, perhaps triggering memories of Monsieur C. Hysteria, as we have seen, is implicitly and explicitly an expression of protest and rebellion. Szasz calls it a “protolanguage” (Szasz, 1987, p.28), which Showalter refines to a “feminine protolanguage” (in Gilman et al., 1993, p.286). It is communication through bodily signs that resist any quid pro quo causally based interpretation. Rather, it functions by hints, parodies, and messages to be deciphered – or not, as it turned out for Augustine – according to context. In sum, the Salpêtrièrian hysteric survived by claiming formal space for acting out internal suffering, making-a-scene in which displays of ‘unfeminine’ behaviour became de rigueur for spectators to marvel at, and where scopophilia masked as scientific curiosity. It is in Charcot’s spectacular that “the bipolar semoiotics of pain and pleasure, sick and healthy, indigent female patient and prosperous male doctor interact in a medical orgy” (Diamond, 1990–1991, p.64). In this confessional, eroticised, and highly charged ambiance, the despairing hysteric was directed, incarcerated, straitjacketed, examined, probed, provoked, rewarded, and punished. Her body transformed in a chaos of inscriptions: “accusing; they are pointing - with their paralyses, their dyspnoeas, their knotted limbs. And they point either to the father, a dreadful figure, or to some other male

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Making a drama out of a crisis kin” (Cixous and Clément, 1987, p.42). Like the Japanese Butoh dancer,26 this hysteric body presents a montage of broken lines and twisted bones, signs that deconstruct any order and flow, and that, despite Charcot’s obsession with promoting its classical symptomatology, disrupts all fashionable notion of beauty and form. The hysteric is a grotesque – a fabricated monster. The Paris in which my play is set was a city undergoing massive transformation in its culture, science, and demographic. The population of one million in 1850 had almost doubled by 1870, bringing social change and urban anxieties. This was a time of energetic invention, industrialisation, and cultural innovation. With its Positivist obsession with classification and cataloguing and calibrating the material and the human, it was an age of a “frenzy of the visible” and “hard-core knowledge-pleasure” (Williams, 1999, p.36), a restless culture of the eye and the Gaze (Lacan, 1998, p.90),27 with prolific figurative reproduction and a passion for the tricks of the eye. Deceptive Art reflected the popular appetite for spectacles of illusion and magic, whilst the camera lens – a new prosthetic technology – extended the power of the hand in picturing the body; its allure, sexuality, and depravity; its mystique and transgressions. This was a culture of myriad curiosities and visual feasts for the insatiably inquisitive. It generated recurring tropes of woman-as-performer displayed for public scrutiny: as dancer, hysteric, or prostitute – prostitution meaning “to set or place (Latin: statuere) forth, in public (pro)” (Bernheimer, 1997, p.252). Her body, onto which male fantasies – art-loving, sex-buying, or truth-seeking – were projected, was performing in all types of venue, from the Folies Bergères and cabarets to the Comédie Francaise and Paris Opéra (Garafola, 1986; McCarron, 1998). Prostitution was growing exponentially. Whilst eluding definition, the Parisian working girl population between the 1870s and 1880s was estimated at anything between 17,000 and 120,000 women (Thompson, 2016, p.14). Syphilis was epidemic, with an estimated 5,000 new cases each year (Bernheimer, 1997, p.234). The hysteric subject of the Salpêtrière’s aesthetic machine was the prostitute’s social sister. Charcot’s Salpêtrière was for voyeurs.28 Possessing the features of a brothel, it provided masterful ceremonies in which alluring live specimens contorted. In his quest for scientific truth through the production of imagery as durable and empirical evidence, he referred to his medical domain as a museum, not only of suffering but of living pathology (Didi-Huberman, 1982, p.275). He glorified in the nickname ‘The Napoleon of Neuroses’29 and ‘The Ceasar of the Salpêtrière’ (Parry-Jones, 1987), such was his domineering determination. Charcot was the impresario of an image-making industry that enveloped and cultivated hysterics as human wonders. Adapting the clinical gaze into something of a mediatised performance art,

Making a drama out of a crisis  he situated distressed women in vivo as “a sight” (Berger, 1972, p.47). His Salpêtrière momentously coincided with the birth of photography culturally and scientifically, ushering in what would become the means by which advancing optic technologies support medical intervention in treating illness in diagnosis, prognosis, and surgery. Cultural imaging has consistently assisted Western medicine in its monopolisation and fragmenting of the body into ever more detailed parts. The Salpêtrière’s laboratories, typical of 19thcentury scientific research industries and firmly rooted in biologist and typological systems, serviced by an array of the latest and visual prosthetics, worked perfectly to serve Charcot’s project. His assistant Richer led the hospital’s visual research laboratory (1882–1896), adding photography to sculpture and line drawings. Popularised Darwinism sought comparative data by which to measure norms and Otherness. Positivist belief that observation in itself was a valid source of truth was excellently supported by photography. Where formerly ‘true-to-nature’ images were produced by the artist’s fallible eye-hand, objective machine-captured study of anatomy and pathology lent permanence, reliability, visibility, and scientific aplomb to the measurable (Daston and Galison, 2010). Within the scientific and anthropological frame that preoccupied the 19th-century colonising culture, with its attitude towards race, supremacy, and aberration, pioneering Salpêtrière researchers contributed to locating the principle of type: the physiologist Richer, the physiologist-photographers Étienne-Jules Marey30 and Paul Régnard, and Albert Londe, chronophotographer,31 who built a machine to record serial images of the phases of attacks, evidencing ‘classic’ symptomatology in movement terms, the sequencing being of particular interest. Photography captures what the eye cannot see without fracturing time, immortalising a frozen moment. The camera at the Salpêtrière “reified clinical events” (Goetz, 1987, p.184). Still images of the mentally ill broke the flow of movement down, dis-membered action, disrupted organic flow, revealing bodily condition as the sum-of-its-parts. This photography anticipated the filmic technique of fragmenting the body in the close-up, which would subsequently assume forceful fetishistic and scopophiliac power in the cinematic culture (Mulvey, 1989).32 The classificatory systems that Charcot obsessively promoted and produced echoed efforts by experts in other fields to pathologise deviancy through anthropometrics and photography. The idea of ‘born criminals,’ and, for Charcot, hereditary hysterics, was supported by pictorial classifications.33 In this context, the IPS volumes were very much assignments of their time, driven by empiricism and technologies for supposedly scientifically accurate recording. Freud was soon to contest this (I emphasise this in my play as Oedipal rebellion) in rejecting the reliance on visual

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Making a drama out of a crisis reading of symptoms alone, developing ‘the talking cure’ instead which would become the new ‘science’ of Psychoanalysis. How the body has been perceived and represented, objectively and subjectively, in both medical and cultural environments is historically time-sensitive. If optic technologies render the patient object, in turn, on closer scrutiny, resulting ‘objective’ images prove themselves manufactured, transformed, and aestheticised. Compelling images tutor the expert eye and beguile the innocent. The opportunity to search a disorderly body begs questions about visual pleasure being satisfied alongside scientific spectatorship and cinematic surveillance (Cartwright, 1995). The Charcotian photographic laboratory was a powerful apparatus for both describing and promoting his hysteric archetype, operating on the cusp of the birth of the cinema at an historical moment when “the whole world becomes visible” (Comolli, 1980, pp.122–123). It is no coincidence that the camera at the Salpêtrière ‘captured’ hysterics, according to the well-trodden paradigm that the power of the lens resides in its colonisation of its subject. The out-of-control female body evidently held unique fascination for the medico-scientific and cultural gaze. For subjects at the time “posing is like waiting for a moment, the shot, […] a simple yet obscure emergency, the emergency of having to resemble oneself ” (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p.89).34 The IPS remains a disturbing and resonant archive from which to grasp the very particular way Charcot’s clinical system functioned as an agency of male power, authority, and certainty. Perhaps it was infatuation with the new technology of the camera that drove this culture of photographic production, a laboratory that required not only the expertise of the cameraman but the compliance of the subject to hold a pose in a lengthy process, a ‘boys’ toys’ playground in which the tools of the game were so compelling they simply had to be played with – again and again. The compulsion towards the prosthetic gaze has a long human history for sight is associated not only with pleasure but with the more serious quest for wisdom as well as domination over the world – hence the respect paid to the ‘visionary’ across the ages.35 Early scientific photography and cinema, which were to influence entertainment cinema, emerged during the latter period of Charcot’s hystérie project. The year 1895 marks a series of interconnected events: the publication of Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria; the birth of cinema, with the first public screening by the Lumière brothers; and the accidental discovery of X-ray by Wilhelm Röentgen, a new tool for flaying the flesh – the body could now be opened sans knife. X-rays offered entertainment value for the lay public who would send pictures of their skeletal hands as gift tokens, as yet oblivious to radiation dangers.36 The first X-ray was of Röentgen wife, Bertha. There is poetic symmetry in the fact that two Berthas, Breuer’s

Making a drama out of a crisis  patient Pappenheim37 and Röentgen, would simultaneously pioneer unprecedented insight into human interiority, psychological and anatomical respectively. Where photography contributed to 19th-century anatomical and physiological science, X-ray brought innovative visualisation of bones, whilst the advent of the motion picture offered further understanding of physiology (Cartwright, 1995). These technologies would converge explicitly into scientific cinema. Photography was the ideal tool to implement Charcot’s Positivist agenda. If Richer’s sketches presaged cinematic sequencing of movement frame-by-frame, each sketched image appearing like a page of a flipbook or movie still, the camera added innovative verisimilitude to sequencing images as a system for observation. As aforementioned, repetition was fundamental. The performer in this spectacular had to keep reproducing the same gestures, the same attacks, so that the optic machine could be fed and a classic template established. The hysteric and her simulacres served each other in an endless cycle, for social and cultural systems and the individual tend to function in a representational loop (Comolli, 2010). Charcot’s hysterics could not move their way out of their suffering in any linear narrative. They could only circulate wild things swooning and fitting without hope of exit from the endless churning of repeatedly declared symptoms. In a sense, then, the hysteric, creating tout un cinema,38 is also anticipating the medium’s repeatable, durable, looping footage. And whilst the surface of her body was endlessly reproduced, absent from Charcot’s optic machine was “the inversion of spectacularity, namely, the psychic topology hidden beneath the body surface, impenetrable to any investigation of body organs” (Bronfen, 1998, p.176). Charcot’s method effectively engineered grande hystérie, without palliative purpose. With cure being at the bottom of the agenda, compulsive observation, experimentation with substances and materials, measuring bodily fluids, weighing, archiving, presenting scenographies, dramaturgies, and liveshows seemed overwhelmingly compelling to his medical teams. Objectivity, and the striving to prove this, was paramount, with a functioning binary of subject/object, seer/seen, substantiated through the essential practice of forging scientific images in mixed media (Daston and Galison, 2010). Such a parsing gaze was de facto a colonising one, the medical adventure akin to a voyage of discovery, where the patient’s body was a land to be conquered and cultivated. At the Salpêtrière, a fanatical quest for inventive sightings drove a visual momentum that DidiHuberman deplores: “My question is: what anxiety bore within itself the compulsion, […] to always ‘see something new’?” (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p.27). This hospital, with its techniques by which its hysterics were observed, at bedsides, behind cameras, in lectures and performances, was an unambiguous observatory,

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Making a drama out of a crisis a powerful Panopticon39 for containing and controlling its convulsive population. Hospitals are spectacularly dramatic spaces (Furse, 2014, p.239). They are highly regulated and visually orientated environments in which the Situationist definition of spectacle (“a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995, p.12)) takes on special meaning. Optically informed dramas play out therein as expert and patient enact the ‘medical couple’ (Foucault, 1989). This duet is based on power relationships activated within hospital walls. Foucault’s ‘archaeology of medical perception’ (ibid.) traces the history of the hospital-clinic as an institution to emerge in post-Revolutionary France, when the secularisation of medicine combined with democratic ideals. The new public hospital came to breed, articulate, and refine a specifically clinical gaze through a choreography of gestural liaison between the patient’s submissive presence40 and the particular forms by which she came into view under the scrutiny of the physician. Importantly, the Salpêtrière had played a significant role in the social changes that swept post-Revolutionary France. In the context of ground-breaking social reform, medicine in the 1780s had become explicitly politicised for “the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government” (Foucault, 2009, p.38). This period’s most significant medical warrior Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) was put in charge of all Parisian asylums after the Revolution. In 1775 he directed Paris’s largest asylum, the Salpêtrière hospice. In a legendary sweeping gesture, he liberated the mad from their chains, an act both symbolic and real, immortalised in a famous 1795 painting by Robert Fleury. Pinel’s unshackling of the insane made a vital contribution towards medicine’s acquisition of the status of science, setting the scene for another great innovator at this same hospital a few years later, Charcot himself. Charcot’s lurid, grandiose, promotion of hysteria, driven by his Republicanism, for all its psychiatric cabaret, insisted in unshackling this ailment from the superstition and anxiety promoted by the punitive fetters of Catholicism. In attacking gullibility towards demonic possession and religious ecstasy, Charcot was an anti-clerical campaigner promoting the triumph of positivism over superstition (Hunter, 1993), thereby wresting institutional control of hospitals and schools from the church. The IPS must therefore be understood as his cultural weapon in that he used it to compare hysterics with ‘witches,’ women stigmatised and persecuted by the Catholic church over centuries (Walusinski, 2014). Charcot’s extravagant seances were doubtlessly fuelled by public appetites. He was playing to the crowds. Hypnosis was a fashionable phenomenon in Europe, pioneered by the 18th-century Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism and his elucidation of this as a cure through

Making a drama out of a crisis  hypnosis, in spectacular demonstrations, had become all the rage in the early half of the 19th century, giving us the word ‘mesmerise.’ Incongruously, the production of trance states by which Charcot manipulated bodies into performing on command belongs to those very occult practices that he rejected in his quest to prove hysteria’s secular cause. As I depict in my play, his own brand of sorcery, through inducing trance, enabled him to dissolve or conjure physical symptoms magically on the hysterics’ body at his will. So it was, paradoxically, through apparently ‘miraculous’ demonstration that he ‘proved’ hysteria and its stigmata, paralyses, and sensory impairments as virtual. Perhaps it was his love of drama that explains his contradictions. The clinical gaze as a performative event was thematically crucial to the Augustine case history. Augustine’s eminent role in the Charcot circus was as subject of his photographic catalogues as well as her brilliant public displays. My play is set in the Charcotian lecture theatre, suggesting the original proxemics and indexical relationship of his audience, inviting them, in turn, to reflect on how they come to view the performer playing Augustine. Charcot conducted two lecture demonstrations every week, one for the public and one for medical professionals. ‘Lecture’ means both ‘reading’ and ‘selecting.’ Aligned with the word ‘theatre’ (a space for beholding), ‘lecture theatre’ aptly compresses meanings. This is a space in which to spectate, read, and classify – an arena for authoritative spectatorship and show – a venue for rhetorical performance. In his performance lectures Charcot’s project was substantiated (and vice versa) in the playing out of his theories in praxis. The hysteric both matched and was made to match the given archetype depicted in both handcrafted and photographic representations. The former could be accomplished during public sessions, the latter required a laboratory in which only the photographer-technician was the gazing eye. A further twist added to the visual prompts surrounding the hysteric to styling her performance: Augustine and her peers would most likely have been familiar with the work of Charcot’s associate Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who researched neuropathological movement using a technique called ‘galvanotherapy.’ This involved the application of electrical currents, and, in certain cases, photographing the result. Seeking to identify which muscles were involved in the production of emotional expression on the face, Duchenne employed an actor to mime a range of emotional expressions to the patient on whom the electrical stimulus was then applied “until an identical expression was induced there” (Cartwright, 1995, pp.60–61). This was a further convolution in Charcot’s scopic operation. His pictorial industry was explicitly inventing, inducing, and provoking a range of required expressive responses in order to satisfy an empirical hunger for visual evidence on the part of the authorities.

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Figure 1.5 Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, Une Leçon Clinique à La Salpêtrière, 1887.

The key question Bronfen and other critics raise, and which I explore, is the extent to which the patient’s acting out was authentic, and how far were they merely reiterating given cultural texts and active stimuli? In this respect, the iconic Brouillet painting41 merits deconstruction (Figure 1.5). Charcot stands behind the hysteric subject to the right of the frame, a group of twenty-four onlookers keenly gazing at the collapsed woman. He is lecturing to an audience made up entirely of men (one female nurse is present), their eyes variously on him and the patient. At Charcot’s immediate right sits Richer, sketching the patient who is replicating his drawing. Another Richer drawing of an hysteric attack hangs on the rear wall. The patient, surrounded by visual incentives, a house style of medical atlases, is learning how to perform her role from representations of her condition. The subject of the painting is Charcot, the narrator. The dishevelled hysteric is the living corpus and subject of his lecture. Her bodice has suggestively fallen open, sunlight beaming down on her cleavage. The source of light on the spectator’s faces might come from the window, but note that it looks as if it were actually reflected from her bosom. She is radiating her condition, in a pose that can only be described as an illuminating swoon for her spectators. High drama indeed, and permissive for the time in its use of female flesh for impact, this painting joins a long tradition in which medicine would be a pretext for artworks that show more of the body than would have been considered

Making a drama out of a crisis  moral in their day. Such a painting proves itself an ideological promotion: Charcot the authoritative Master in the Theatre of Science. Where medical art is indisputably narrative and ideological, Brouillet displays its heritage in terms of moral connotation: anatomical morbid paintings of the 17th century.42 Spectating the extreme disarray of a live hysteric invited no less complicity than gazing on the ghastly tragedy of the anatomised corpse. It is precisely this invidious role of both public and medical eyewitness that provokes Didi-Huberman’s outrage at “the violence of seeing in its scientific pretensions to experimentation on the body” (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p.8). This violating complacency at the spectacle of the pain of others has a long and indefensible human history, supported by prevalent attitudes to crime and punishment as well as attitudes to morality. Manifest in contemporary ‘infotainment’ reportage as deconstructed by Berger and Sontag (1972, 2003), the mechanism that produces immunity to the suffering of fellow human beings is ideological. The 19th-century Salpêtrière hysteric shares with the criminal, not in final consequence, but in her placement before the public, the role of subject in a dispassionate, judgemental gaze. For she was a degraded person in Charcot’s hoopla. She was seamstress, laundress, or domestic servant – working-class women who also furnished recruits for prostitution and who would likely conjure both sexual desire and anxiety for her male spectators, given the aforementioned epidemic of venereal disease perturbing the bourgeois social mores of the time (Preface). If the debauchery of the prostitute and the excesses of the hysteric can be understood as serving the same male fantasy, ‘scientific’ ogling was not exercised merely in the pursuit of knowledge. The hysteric signified depravity, and her unambiguous erotic value in Charcot’s Theatre of Medicine is expressed in many of the IPS photographs. The most important texts created at the Salpêtrière, recycled by inmates, were of course the photographs themselves. These were objects of autopsy in the very sense of the word, which, whilst connoting the medical examination of  the dead, also means “to look into oneself ” (Porter, 2004, p.44). These photographs were both diagnostic and instructive. They were pedagogic instruments. Augustine’s histrionic ‘Attitudes Passionelles,’ with their prurient and interpretative captions, are particularly telling. As posed and auto-choreographed images designed to please the clinical paparazzi, they speak volumes. Augustine’s utterance itself was disconnected (because it was ignored) from these shots by the Salpêtrière’s visually obsessed clinicians.43 The photogenic hysteric is, I contend, the flipside/ sister/mirror, of the ballerina who was being openly prostituted by the Paris Opéra administration, a milieu where syphilis, causing insanity, was a rampant occupational hazard. Augustine’s

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Making a drama out of a crisis hysteric dance thus aligned her to her ethereal peers in the Romantic ballet’s eternal feminine, her performances on the Charcot boards that of an institutionalised ‘vedette.’44 The idea of Augustine as both artefact and muse, a sexually titillating and charming figure in the altogether erotic texts of Charcotian hysteria, didn’t escape the notice of the sexually liberal and consistently scopophiliac Surrealists in the early 20th century. Celebrating the Quinquagenary of Hysteria, an entire edition of La Revue Surrealiste was devoted to extolling Augustine’s virtues fetishistically, breathlessly declaring her “the perfect archetype, the delicious X. L. Augustine” (Aragon and Breton, 1929, p.22).45 These enthusiasts of Freudian psychoanalysis wrote unabashedly that hysteria was an erotic art form in which the medical couple were unambiguously colluding: Does Freud, who owes so much to Charcot, remember the time - confirmed by the survivors - when interns at the Salpêtrière confused their professional duties and their taste for love? […] Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression. (Ibid.) They continue: This mental state is founded on the need for a reciprocal seduction, which explains the hurriedly accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or counter suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can, in all respects, be considered a supreme mode of expression. (Ibid.) Here, hysteric and doctor are working as a team, his eye on her body, her eye on his eye on her body, a vexed pas de deux in which her performance is guided, suggested, and prodded by his directorial hand, and into which she seductively plays her part, scrutinised by the onlooker. This falls beyond the Szaszian model of collusion on the patient’s part in the asylum environment. It is closer to pornography (Figure 1.6). Showalter notes “What we might call the ‘herstory’ of hysteria is the contribution of feminist social historians to this project, in works that concentrate on the misogyny of male physicians and the persecution of female deviants in witch hunts” (Gilman et  al., 1993, p.287). The link between demonic possession and the hysteric body has a long trajectory. Before hysteria was medicalised in Europe at the turn of the 17th century, symptoms had long been noted, coming into particular prominence during the middle ages with violent witch hunts and writings to ‘prove’ the

Figure 1.6 Augustine,  Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture (Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). Photo: Paul Régnard. IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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Making a drama out of a crisis pathology of the devil’s work. Szasz argues that whilst the association between hysterics and witches frequently insisted that the latter were “ill” with the same symptoms as hysterical “illness,” this psychiatric view of the latter misses the point: witches were a danger to a society that was operating on hypocritical double standards of sexual promiscuity and bible-thumping morality. Thus, charging the witch with highly sexual activities, including consorting with the devil, as in Arthur Miller’s allegorical play The Crucible (Miller, 1987), witches became society’s scapegoats.46 Szasz maintains, “The notion that so-called witches were mentally-ill people discredits the entire theological world view underlying the belief in witchcraft, and enthrones the concept of mental illness as an explanatory theory of wide scope and unchallenged power” (Szasz, 1987, p.191). Further, this expression of power must be understood in the modes of punishment meted out – tortures, burning, drowning, etc. – that “must be viewed in the light of medieval man’s theological world view according to which the body is weak and sinful, and the only goal worthy of man is the eternal salvation of the soul” (ibid., p.192). For Szasz, witchcraft was “an inverted theological game” in which each side was playing its part, whilst modern psychiatry is “a kind of inverted medical game” (ibid., p.202). Inquisitors and psychiatrists have each viewed both witch and madwoman as requiring punishment, stigmatisation, confinement, and social exclusion. Historical records of witches’ ‘symptoms’ – including numbness, paralysis, seizures, stigmata, and other examples of hysterical bodily signs – are recorded in the Inquisition manual Malleus Maleficarum (Kramer and Spenger, 1996). Cixous and Clément compare hysterics with witches, both persecuted martyrs of patriarchy, whilst an audience, ready to satisfy its fantastic desire, is necessary for the spectacular side of sorcery and hysteria. It is, above all, an audience of men: inquisitors, magistrates, doctors the circle of doctors with their fascinated eyes, who surround the hysteric, their bodies tensed to see the tensed body of the possessed woman. (Cixous and Clément, 1986, p.10) Possession, inscribed in the body and culturally understood as connected to religion and superstition, can therefore be comprehended as a physical expression of revolt against social control over women’s bodies and lives. Within any given heightened atmosphere of behavioural protocols, be these clinical institutions or community rituals (the Tarantata), a stage is provided upon which the possessed/hysteric may act-up-and-out extravagantly under the eye of fellow citizens/professional medics. Augustine’s early childhood was at the hands of the highly punitive Catholic

Making a drama out of a crisis  Church. It is here that she was first identified with Devilry. It is conceivable that her rebellious spirit might have internalised prevalent religious views of the time in converting her body into a sign system, inscribing on it such witchy symptoms as numbness (stigmata) and paralysis the hysteric does not write, does not produce, does nothing nothing other than making things circulate without inscribing them. The result: the clandestine sorceress was burned by the thousands; the deceitful and triumphant hysteric has disappeared. But the master is there. He is the one who stays on permanently. He publishes writings. (Ibid., 1986, p.37) The Salpêtrière was a huis clos,47 its dance-dramas and passionplays re-enacted daily as futile cries for help to its clamouring crowds. No wonder it became a mecca for visual theatrical invention, a distorting mirror image of the society beyond its walls. Although discredited soon after his death, Charcot’s asylum was just one institution that, at a particular time and place in history, created rule-bound games between inmates, doctors, and the general public, producing its house style of the hysteric condition and its spectatorship.48 From the fragmented, stuttering, paroxysmal expressions from which Charcot tried to formulate nosological order, the suturing work of psychoanalysis would subsequently become Freud’s domain. He would come to challenge the interlacing of scientific empiricism and visual techniques at the end of the century and, heralding the 20th, insist on discovering narrative meaning and linearity to previously enigmatic symptoms. In his revolutionary endeavour, whatever his detractors argue, he would bring the concept of history to hysteria, indeed all neuroses. He would argue persistently for both genealogy and aetiology in all cases, as well as for a dynamic concept of disease and its manifestation. He left controversy in his wake, that persists today, as to the value and ‘truth’ of the psychoanalytic process: Augustine (Big Hysteria) emerged coincidentally in the midst of the Freud Wars49 as well as much media attention on False Memory Syndrome.50 Finally, the Salpêtrière as site brings uncanny poetic resonance. The hospital building was once a saltpetre store for the French military, saltpetre being a chemical explosive used in weaponry. It was also administered orally, as it was thought to quell male sexual urges. Today, the hospital remains Paris’ major neurological centre and home to the Charcot archive. Close to the tunnel where her fatal accident took place, it was the venue for Princess Diana’s premature death in 1997, an event with further significance: the ‘People’s Princess’ suffered from Bulimia, arguably an hysteria, that I discuss in the final chapter.

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Notes

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Making a drama out of a crisis  ——— (2011) ‘Making a Spectacle of Herself,’ in Birringer, J. and Fenger, J. (eds.) Tanz & WahnSinn/Dance & ChoreoMania (pp. 197–210). Germany: Henschel. ——— (September 2014) ‘Hospital Drama: Visual Theatres of the Medical Rendezvous from Asylum to Hospital with Reference to Specific Works by Anna Furse,’ Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 39, No. 3, 238–257. Garfola, L. (1985, 1986) ‘The Travesty Dancer in NineteenthCentury Ballet,’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 17, 18, No. 2, 1, 35–40. Gilman, S. L., King, H., Porter, R., Rousseau, G. S. and Showalter, E. (1993) Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Goetz, C. G. (trans.) (1987) Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons, Excerpts from Nine Case Presentations on General Neurology Delivered at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1887–1888. New York: Raven Press. Goetz, G., Bonduelle, M. and Gelfand, T. (1995) Charcot, Constructing Neurology. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goffman, E. (1968) Asylums, Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin Books. ——— (1990) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Greffe, F. (1982) ‘Charcot.’ La Salpêtrière: Hier et Aujourd’Hui. L’ Hôpital a Paris. Gunthert, A. (1999) Albert Londe: Photo Poche. Paris: Nathan. Hunter, D. (1993) ‘Representing Mad Contradictoriness in Doctor Charcot’s Hysteria Shows,’ in Madness and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. New York: Cornell University Press.Krämer, H. and Sprenger, J. (1996) Malleus Maleficarum. Summers, M. (trans.) Brackren Books. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror. Chichester; New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits. London: Tavistock Routledge. ——— (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Book XI. Sheridan, A. (trans.) New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company. Le Figaro, J. (2010) Crime & Châtiment: Les Artistes Fascinés par les Grands Criminels. Beaux Arts Magazine. Paris: TTM Group. Leigh Foster, S. (ed.) (1996) Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power. London; New York: Routledge. Lubimoff, A. (1894) Le Professeur Charcot: Étude Scientifique et Biologique. Paris: Bibliotéque Beaubourg. Mannoni, L., Werner, N. and Warner, M. (2004) Eyes, Lies and Illusions. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing.

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Making a drama out of a crisis Marshall, J. (2016) Performing Neurology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mccarren, F. (1998) Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics and Medicine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Melechi, A. (2004) Fugitive Minds: On Madness, Sleep and Other Twilight Afflictions. London: Arrow Books. Miller, A. (1987) The Crucible. London: Penguin. Millett, K. (1972) Sexual Politics. London: Abacus. Mitchell, J. (2002) Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndmills; London: Macmillan Press. Owen, A. R. G. (1971) Hysteria, Hypnosis and Healing: The Work of J.-M. Charcot. London: Dennis Dobson. Ozden, S. (2007) The Staged Encounter. Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Drama. Germany: Ibidem Verlag. Pagels, E. (1982) The Gnostic Gospels. London: Pelican. Parry-Jones, W. (May 1987) ‘“Caesar of the Salpêtrière.” J. M. Charcot’s impact on Psychological Medicine in the 1880s,’ Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Vol. 11, 150–152. Pludermacher, I., Dupin De Beyssat, C., and Corbin, d’A. (preface) (2015) Splendeurs et Misères: Abécédaire de la Prostitution au XIXe siècle. Paris: Flammarion. Porter, R. (2004a) Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine. London: Penguin Books. ——— (2004b) Madness: A Brief History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Saccani, J. (2010) ‘The Invention of the Guillotine, All Equal before Death,’ Crime et Chatiment: Les Artistes Fascinés Par Les Grands Criminels Hors-Serie. Le Figaro, Beaux Arts Magazine. www.beauxartsmagazine.com. (my translation). Sartre, J. P. (1971) Saint Genet. Frechtman, B. (trans.) New York; Toronto; London: New American Library. Shakespeare, W. (2008) Hamlet. Bate, J. and Rasmussen, E. (eds.) Houndmills: Macmillan. Showalter, E. (1987) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago Press. ——— (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Sontag, S. (1983) Illness as Metaphor. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— (1987) On Photography. Middlesex; New York: Penguin. ——— (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London; New York: Penguin Books. Szasz, T. S. (1987) The Myth of Mental Illness. London: Paladin.

Making a drama out of a crisis  Taine, H. (2019) Notes Sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M Frederic-Thomas Graindorge, 4th Edition, Paris, 1868. Facsimile Publisher. Thompson, et al. (2015) Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France 1850–1910. Paris: Flammarion. Tosi, V. (2005) Cinema before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography. London: British Universities Film and Video Council. Treichler, P., Cartwright, L. and Penley, C. (1998) The Visible Woman, Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science. New York; London: New York University Press. Wald, T. (2003) ‘The Haunted Heroines of British Women’s Plays of the 1990s,’ Gender Forum: H(a)unted Heroines, Vol. 4. www. genderforum.org/fileadmin/archiv/genderforum/haunted/ wald.html Wald, C. (2007) Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waller, J. (2009) The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Napierville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc. Walunsinski, O. (2014) ‘The Girls of the Salpêtrière,’ Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, Vol. 35, No. 33, Karger Publishers, 65–77. Wilder, K. (2009) Photography and Science. London: Reaktion Books. Williams, L. (1999) Hard Core, Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wollen, P. (1969) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg.

Exhibitions Fouquier, H. (2009) ‘La Vie Parisienne: 1887,’ Exquisite Bodies. 30th July–18th October 2009. London: Wellcome Trust. Muybridge, E. (2010) Eadweard Muybridge. September 2010–16 January 2011. London: Tate Britain.

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Augustine (Big Hysteria) This play was commissioned by Annie Castledine for Derby Playhouse. It premiered at Plymouth Theatre Royal, 19th April 1991, in a co-production with Paines Plough, where I was then Artistic Director, and Derby Playhouse. This toured the UK and the Ukraine with the Anglo Soviet Cultural Association (1992). It has been produced by the Maly Divadlo Theatre, Czech Republic (1994), Zenith Theatre, Copenhagen City of Culture (1996), Pink Ink, Vancouver (1999), and SHEE Theater, San Francisco (2002). A commissioned Television extract was screened on Channel 4 ‘Are Women Mad?’ (1994). The play was first published by Harwood Academic (1997) and translated and published in Czech (1994).51 I took poetic licence in imagining an overlap between AUGUSTINE and FREUD, each under the influence of CHARCOT. All the clinical data is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. It derives from medical records at the Bibliothèque Charcot in Paris. The photographs can be obtained via the IPS online.52 AUGUSTINE’s VIOLINIST doppelganger plays live. At one moment, both AUGUSTINE’s nightgowns slip off their shoulders and reveal the F-stops of Man Ray’s photograph ‘Le Violon D’Ingres’ (1924) on their backs, referencing the Surrealists’ fetishisation of hysteria. I chose to imagine the young FREUD, a 29-year-old (by all accounts still virgin) on a long engagement with Martha Bernays, too much of a gent and too repressed to admit any attraction to AUGUSTINE, but nonetheless spellbound by her charms. She, using the only tool at her disposal – feminine wiles – becomes his capricious first client. She speaks and seduces. He listens and learns. They bond against the common father figure CHARCOT in a kind of love affair, but one in which they finally betray each other. He abandons her in his pursuit of becoming a Freudian; she responds by escaping, in his clothes. According to Peggy Phelan “dance, like psychoanalysis, helps join the body to time” (Foster, 1996, p.92). I sought choreographic logic in AUGUSTINE’s bodily inscriptions, some historical continuity to her story, cause-and-effect. Splicing together her photographs and recorded speech in the IPS with Richer’s storyboard of a full hysterical attack, we worked in rehearsal on re-constructing a narrative that might suture gesture, memory and meaning. I propose the four-phase attack in my production, narrated by CHARCOT (verbatim) to be a near-accurate

Making a drama out of a crisis  reconstruction of what might have been the total theatre of hysteria in which AUGUSTINE performed her autobiography.53 Aware of the paradox of inviting a contemporary audience to spectate the performer acting out AUGUSTINE’s distress, and perplexed that her medical notes end so abruptly with her escape, I decided to create an epilogue that turns the tables. Sally Jacobs’s scenography translated my invented human triangle into a thick translucent plastic-curtained triangular empty space,54 with splits. This anachronism allowed for projections. It also connotated meat delivery vans. THE COMPANY WRITING AND DIRECTION

Anna Furse

DESIGN MUSIC LIGHTING SLIDE DESIGN PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

Sally Jacobs Graeme Miller Ace McCarron Steve Littman Nick Ferguson

Characters AUGUSTINE A child-woman 15–20 years old. Long dark hair. CHARCOT Late 50s/early 60s. Distinguished. Silvery hair down to his collar. FREUD Bearded. Scholarly. Nervous. Ambitious. Heavy cough and runny nose from cigars and cocaine. VIOLINIST Augustine’s double

Shona Morris

Wolfe Morris

James Dreyfus Anne Wood

The action takes place in the late 19th century at the Salpêtrière hospital, Paris. The audience enter to a barely audible soundscape: violin, laughter and chatter, smatterings of applause, a woman crying, rainfall. Gloomy light. An institutional iron four-poster bed with white curtaining creates a booth, a small mobile stage, and, as now, a screen for projections: Augustine’s portrait photograph by Régnard from the IPS, in her ‘normal state’. As the houselights fade, we hear a girl’s voice singing, falteringly, the tune of a German children’s song. There is a constant atmospheric soundtrack underscoring scenes, mixed with loudly played live violin.

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Making a drama out of a crisis Ach, du liebe Augustine, Augustine, Augustine, Ach, du liebe Augustine, alles ist hin.Oh, ma belle Augustine, Augustine, Augustine, Oh, ma belle Augustine, tout est cassé. Oh, my pretty Augustine, Augustine, Augustine, Oh, my pretty Augustine, everything’s cracked. Eyes are cracked, head is cracked, hand is cracked, heart is cracked, Oh, my pretty Augustine, everything’s cracked.

AUGUSTINE is experiencing the typical first experience of an hysterical attack where the throat constricts. It was this that led ancients to imagine hysteria as the womb leaping into the throat and gave rise to the term ‘hysteria’. The audience is here immediately cast in the role of spectator at one of Charcot’s Leçons de Mardi, a device I use to implicate them in a voyeuristic gaze.

Hysterics are explosive, disruptive.

I have imagined FREUD as the young man he was when he studied at the Salpêtrière and became deeply impressed, not to say awed, by Charcot.

The bed and projection begin to shake violently. Screams from within, throttled gasps to yells and finally to speech. A yet invisible VIOLINIST, is playing. AUGUSTINE Oh, there’s something pulling my fingers, pulling my tongue, there’s something in my throat … MAMAN!!!!!!!! (She weeps.) My neck, oh, my neck, my neck hurts, I can’t, can’t breathe … MAMAN!!!! Image and voice cut. A burst of applause and laughter on soundtrack. Cut to Lecture theatre: CHARCOT, animated, bouncing on his heels, in the middle of a lecture. Acknowledging the mirth he has provoked, he addresses us as his Hospital audience. Paternal familiarity and oratorial charm: CHARCOT Let me answer your question, Monsieur, by way of a poetic metaphor for this … asylum … this citta dolorosa of 5000. Our living museum of suffering was as you may know, at the time of Louis XIII, a saltpetre store. Hence “La Salpêtrière”. Now, saltpetre, Messieurs, makes gunpowder, and gunpowder makes explosions. (mimes this with his arms.) So in this … arsenal of women … with their earth-shattering energies, I, and my colleagues, are simply seeking to defuse our human powder kegs. Your question also raises the issue of whether or not hysteria is an incurable mystery. Now all diseases come from Nature and Nature is most certainly Divine. Severe cold, heat, wet, the restlessness of winds, all play their part in weakening the human body. There’s no need to ascribe a special divinity to one disease over another. Each has a nature, power and intrigue of its own; none is hopeless or incapable of treatment, hysteria included! But firstly, what is hysteria? We must begin by exploring the territory of the hysterical body, then, like cartographers, we must chart it, map out its contours, possess its enigmas… FREUD has brought AUGUSTINE onstage. He stands solicitously close, a nervous, shy young intern. She is in ‘normal’ state, dressed in maid’s outfit. She looks at

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CHARCOT and at the audience with keen interest, a sense of willingness to be there, ‘on stage’. CHARCOT HYSTERIA … HYSTERO … WOMB! CHARCOT moves his hand generally over AUGUSTINE’s womb area. She watches, fascinated. Until most recently we doctors thought the womb to be a dancer, or an animal, crouching, leaping round the body and trying to strangle the hysteric by getting stuck in her throat. So sneezing was prescribed as a cure for hysterical attacks, and even labour pains! Bof! (a French shrugging hand gesture) This of course is nonsense! The uterus is not an acrobat! No, we must seek answers elsewhere. So, if I use methods which may seem to belong more to the fields of art and literature, to the poet rather than the scientist, let me simply say this: I am a visionary! Mine is a science of looking (and I know those artists amongst you, will vouch for the deep revelations the mind’s eye can bring forth); art has as its basis, observation, experience, and reasoning. My method is a form of vivisection if you like - and these slices of life conjure answers before my very eyes! And I repeat, nothing, but nothing is incurable. Not even this apparently elusive disease, subject of my Tuesday Lessons. In a moment, I will make pain palpable to you. I’ll make you recognise all its characteristics. I set before you a case of Grande Hystérie! Time will tell if she will be a Classic example! Doctor?! Turns to AUGUSTINE. Looks intently at her. FREUD Mademoiselle Augustine Dubois, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT Thank you. So, Messieurs, by way of demonstrating my own empirical methods, you will now witness a typical diagnostic encounter between myself and a new patient about whom I know nothing - yet! CHARCOT holds his gaze on AUGUSTINE. He walks around her as though she were a sculpture. He pats his fingers on his lips, breathes loudly and occasionally blows out through his fingers. She watches him, curious. She watches him watching her. She is aware of the audience. She is initially amused, but as the silence continues she bites her lip, impatient for this

CHARCOT is a performer, loving to dramatize and illustrate his narratives.

CHARCOT was in fact less interested in cure than in taxonomy. CHARCOT was keen to identify the classic hysteric archetype. My own invention: Dubois = of-thewoods: a creature of Nature, mystery and associated with witchcraft. See P 4.

Drawn from historical accounts, this action establishes AUGUSTINE as object of CHARCOT’s gaze, and his total disregard for her feelings.

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Making a drama out of a crisis scrutiny to end. She signals this to the audience. Abruptly, from behind her, making her jump. CHARCOT How old are you? AUGUSTINE Fifteen and a half years, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT nods to audience, as though he expected this. Skim reads cursorily from notes handed to him by FREUD.

She also was punished with dousing in cold water as referred to later.

CHARCOT Mother, 41 years, domestic servant, in good health, Father, 45 years, sober … seven children, the eldest being Louise – Augustine – born at full term, breastfed till nine months, sent to relatives in Bordeaux until the age of 6 and a half. From 6 and a half to 13 was with nuns in Ferte-sous-Jouarre. There she was put ‘in the slammer’, because she got bored of reading ‘The Lives of Saints’ in the refectory. Sometimes, the sisters would administer corporal punishment, slaps… AUGUSTINE (Interrupting) Oh I often deserved it…

This name is invented. I wanted to confuse CHARCOT with the name ‘Monsieur C’ (her rapist) in the IPS Case history. This period at the Salpêtrière was lifechanging for FREUD. We must understand the emergence of his psychoanalytic theories in his often silent observational role in the play. Mention of bodily functions and fluids in public is always challenging, but at the time would have been deeply shameful and humiliating.

CHARCOT (Surprised) She has a bright, capricious, wilful disposition and is too outspoken for her age. She is intelligent. Has learnt to read, write and sew. Works as a laundry maid in the same household where her mother is housekeeper to a certain Monsieur Carnot and family… AUGUSTINE has visibly tensed, which escapes the attention of CHARCOT, but not FREUD. CHARCOT The mother, who brought her to us, has no idea what has caused her daughter’s illness, which started 2 years ago. Says that A always felt her attacks coming (pains in the left side of the stomach) gentle at first, culminating in leaps on the bed, screaming. No foaming at the mouth and no involuntary urination. AUGUSTINE is embarrassed but sets a sweet smile on her face, fixing her gaze directly ahead. CHARCOT Finally, last April, a series of attacks leaving her with a paralysis of the right side, couldn’t use her right arm nor

Making a drama out of a crisis  walk because her right leg folded and gave way. The attacks coincided with the development of breasts and pubic hair … A is a big, well-built girl, with nothing of the ways of the child remaining. She almost has the allure of a fully-fledged woman, but has not yet started menstruating.

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As above. The menstrual taboo mentioned in public.

AUGUSTINE is now wearing a rictus smile. CHARCOT continues to scrutinise her. CHARCOT Admitted for paralysis and severe hysterical attacks … 21st October 1885. CHARCOT gazes at AUGUSTINE one last time, then gestures for FREUD to take her away. During the following, the actress, unseen, changes into a hospital gown in the bed-booth. CHARCOT Well, Messieurs, that’s all we have time for today. We will, I’m sure, be meeting our young patient again. I am certain she will prove our hypothesis. She will most certainly be susceptible to provocation. Provocation! That is to say, it will be possible, through hypnosis or ovarian compression, to induce the full, classic cycle of Grande Hystérie I am so keen to show you. It is the most picturesque of illnesses … a fascinating phenomenon! That is why I have built here at the hospital such a vast … observatory for recording, and above all defining its form-perfect as a symphony. Here at the Salpêtrière, science and art are bound together. With my illustrators, my sculptors, my photographers, we are a team of witnesses. And, like ancient astronomers, we gaze, and chart all the secrets of the universe. Stars exist. Fact. It is only for us to prove it, discover and name them. Lights cut to Ward. AUGUSTINE is having her photograph taken. Flashes of bright white light. We must understand from this how long it takes for a photograph to be taken given the technology of the age. AUGUSTINE is hardly moving a muscle. She is clutching a bundle of coloured ribbons with which she keeps fidgeting. The VIOLINIST playing something lyrical. AUGUSTINE Twenty rickety buckets … twenty-one rickety buckets, twenty-two rickety buckets … twenty-three rickety buckets … twenty-four rickety buckets … twenty-five … BANG! (etc)

Poetic licence. This date is that of FREUD’s attendance at the hospital. AUGUSTINE was there a decade earlier.

CHARCOT did establish what we would call today a ‘sciart’ laboratory at the asylum, innovative for its day. CHARCOT alludes to the hysteric body here as a scientific fact. This is the core of his positivist quest to wrest it from superstition, devilry, witchcraft and other associations held by the Catholic church.

The violin as an instrument was chosen specifically because we speak of the nervous as ‘highly strung’. As an instrument it evokes both heart and nerve.

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CHARCOT’s hysterics colluded with the authorities so as to rise in the ranks. Collusion is a technique of the oppressed. AUGUSTINE needs to begin thus to lead to her eventual rebellion. This is in reference to the Surrealists’ infatuation with hysteria and Augustine in particular. See P 22.

Like many teaching hospitals, the powerful expert leads his posse of apprentices round the wards, an event that can make the patient feel like a medical object. An association was made between sexual proclivity and hysteria, the idea that the hysteric is in a state of sexual excitement when undergoing an attack. This is a patriarchal and prejudiced perspective, judgemental and moralistic. The majority of the hysterics at the Salpêtrière were proletarian girls, working in menial jobs or as prostitutes. Poetic licence. I am casting FREUD as a normal medic on the wards here. He himself wouldn’t have performed such tasks, although taking and measuring vaginal secretions during attacks was commonplace. See P 8.

Everything cuts. Blackout. When lights fade up, AUGUSTINE is standing on her bed, the VIOLINIST at a distance with her back to audience. Huge projections of the ‘Attitudes Passionnelles’ photographs, whilst AUGUSTINE dances these poses in slow motion. She smiles, the saucy charm of a striptease artist crossed with the studied control of a ballet dancer: histrionic, erotic, ecstatic. VIOLINIST plays a passionate and rasping counterpoint. It ends with both women turning their backs to the audience and taking off their night robes. Their backs are tattooed with F stops (Man Ray’s ‘Violon D’Ingres’). Blackout. A slow ‘dawn’ fades up to find AUGUSTINE in bed in the Ward. CHARCOT sweeps in, FREUD in tow, looking on with both reverence and a degree of shock at his Maitre’s brusque bedside manners. CHARCOT So, no attacks in four days? FREUD Um, Nothing, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT Menstruation? FREUD Um, No, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT Vaginal secretions? FREUD Abundant during attacks, but normalising in between. CHARCOT And you have been taking samples daily? FREUD Yes, Monsieur le Professeur CHARCOT And no change in contraction or paralysis of the right side? FREUD No, Monsieur le Professeur.

Making a drama out of a crisis  CHARCOT Let’s see if she is, as I suspect, ovariform (firmly presses his hand on her ovarian region. She screams out). AUGUSTINE Oh Jesus Maman!!! Please don’t touch me there! CHARCOT nods. Floats a bottle under her nose. She calms. He pats her head. Walks round her bed, concentrating. She is in pain. Her hands are twisted in her ribbons. CHARCOT If I were to press harder, I would induce a complete cycle of grande hystérie. Now isn’t the time. We have too many patients to see (leading FREUD out. En route): You know Doctor Freud, if there’s anything I’d like you to take with you back to Vienna, anything you have learned here, it’s this: there is no greater satisfaction than to see something new! That is to say, to recognise novelty or to suddenly see things afresh. There is both great value and great difficulty attached to such vision. Why do you think it is that, in medicine, people only see what they have learnt to see? Hmm? No imagination!! To my mind, it is quite marvellous to state how one is suddenly capable of seeing things - new states of an illness, which are probably as old as the human race. AUGUSTINE, fazed from the inhalation, has been trying to catch their attention during this. As they reach the door: AUGUSTINE Messieurs! Messieurs! Which is your favourite coloured ribbon? CHARCOT ignores. FREUD turns to her, momentarily torn. They stare at each other, a flicker. He follows CHARCOT who hasn’t noticed, still in full flow. We hear him continue outside so that the following overlaps: AUGUSTINE (Still hoping for their attention) I like red ones best … red like blood! CHARCOT At a given moment, the light is such that it hits the least prepared minds … what was hitherto residing in the void starts to LIVE … it is just like discovering a new star in the sky… AUGUSTINE (Deflated.)… and the blue ones second best…

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Because contractures and paralyses, since without organic base, could shift in the hysteric body. The ovaries are very near the pubic bone and vagina. Doubtlessly being touched there was an action loaded with significance and trauma for the hysteric. Amyl Nitrate was used with CHARCOT’s hysteric patients.

It is this obsession with novelty and with seeing that Didi-Huberman deplores. She is still young, sometimes childlike and innocent, in contrast with her wild and sexually explicit utterances.

We must understand the relationship between FREUD and AUGUSTINE being a kind of love-affair. This leads to betrayal and revolt.

The tricolore ribbons associate to AUGUSTINE’s dreams of the French Revolution, recorded in her case history. It is also a dramatic device to express her eventual colour blindness. See P 5.

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Collusion again. She knows she is, like a model or actress, needing to please and seduce.

Even today the trees at The Salpêtrière are pollarded, in typical French style of landscape gardening.

She recognises her class status, and how her objectification within the hospital protocols is akin to prostitution in fact.

From this we know that some personal information has been exchanged. Her contorted, twisted, paralysed limb makes her think of the trees again. She looks at the contraction in her right arm, her wrist and hand twisted round, strokes it.

Blackout. Dawn chorus. Light fades up. AUGUSTINE peeps through her curtains. Satisfied no one is about she proceeds to fix her face e.g. pinches her cheeks to bring colour. Makes her bed meticulously, biting the corners, barracks-style, stretching the sheet pristine smooth. Then takes her ribbons from under her pillow. Finally, deliberately slips her gown slightly off her shoulders. She mutters throughout the above to an invisible intimate. AUGUSTINE G’morning! I’m learning to be left-handed! (giggles as she supports her paralysed hand, using her teeth) No I haven’t told anyone at the Salpêtrière. Maman said they’d fix me. That’s why I came here. To get Normal! (darkens) Outside in the courtyard there’s avenues of trees, cool green tunnels of leaves. They’ve even changed the shape of the trees you know. They’ve cut their branches and trained them to grow together so they’re all … flat … intertwined … the branches … and the leaves … twisting and curling into each other, so you can’t tell whose branch is whose except when you look at the trunks and they’re still separate, standing side by side in neat rows … like us girls … all the beds in long rows … neat and tidy … I could easily escape you know. It’s only a wall. And beyond that it’s only a street. Just imagine, nothing but a wall keeping me off the streets! (strikes a cameo ‘whore pose’) Listen, all it’ll take is two months without attacks and I’m getting out of here. But it’s important that I keep out of trouble. What do you mean? Now don’t be jealous. Oh, honestly … but he’s … he’s just a young doctor. He said he really came to cut up children’s brains, on some bursary, but when he found out all the exciting stuff that was happening with us girls, and the Professor’s genius, the lectures and stuff he asked if he could learn all about it, so the Professor said yes. I think the Professor likes him because he’s so serious and intense. And anyways he’s only here for a bit, like me, then he’s going back … to Vienna … where he’s got a girl waiting … Martha … they have to wait years ‘cos he’s got no money yet … I know because he told me, Doctor Freud. Yes! He talks to me! So … No! … you’ve got a filthy mind! Filthy! Anyhow, Professor Charcot says I’m special. He did! He says I am a chef d’oeuvre, a perfect sample, an archetype. He says I am a star! I think some of the other girls are jealous. Which is your favourite colour ribbon? I like the red ones best … the red best and the blue second best … I’m ready now, I’m ready … (afterthought). I wonder if it’s the same underground, if all their roots are tangled together too?

Making a drama out of a crisis  Lights change. Lecture Theatre. The sound of a heavy clock ticking, loud oppressive stillness. Birdsong. FREUD is sitting on a chair, pen and notebook ready, tapping his fingers, looking at his watch. AUGUSTINE is humming to herself, playing with her ribbons. She and FREUD are playing an eye-contact avoidance game - their eyes keep meeting and averting. Shewatching-him-watching-her. Both of them visibly tense at the sound of CHARCOT’S voice offstage: CHARCOT That’s a really fine tapestry. Should hang it where more people get to see it! CHARCOT bursts through the door, briskly chucks his hat, coat and cane at FREUD, gesturing to the audience to say ‘please don’t get up or applaud’, rubs his hands together, and addresses his public, fast and breezily:

The two men are in a power struggle, CHARCOT the older and authoritative figure over FREUD’s respectful, dutiful apprentice.

CHARCOT Messieurs. You see before you a classic example of La Belle Indifférence. Our patient exhibits no outwards signs of awareness of her own illness. Instead, she exhibits, placidity, calm, cheerfulness even. AUGUSTINE nods eagerly, ‘lovely assistant’ to a great magician. We must understand from her behavior in this scene that time has passed and she has become accustomed to these performances. She awaits her cues. CHARCOT Our patient is suffering from partial paralysis in the right side. As you will see her lower right arm is in permanent contraction. Would you lift your lower right arm, please? AUGUSTINE can’t. Smiles at audience with an exaggerated show of ‘it’s hopeless, it won’t lift’. He holds her arm up. CHARCOT Now would you shut your eyes and hold your right arm with your left one, please? AUGUSTINE shuts her eyes. Her left arm waves around in the general direction of her right arm. AUGUSTINE I don’t know where it is. This is really driving me crazy!! Can I stop now?

CHARCOT’s public performances were akin to magic shows.

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Making a drama out of a crisis CHARCOT She feels nothing! You may stop now and open your eyes. What do you feel? AUGUSTINE Nothing, Monsieur le Professeur.

Part of CHARCOT’s positivist mission was to demonstrate the relationship between the Catholic Church and hysterias historically. He wanted to prove that stigmata diabolic were in fact hysterical symptoms such as you would find on an hysteric body. The heart-shaped pincushion is my own punning on the Sacred Heart. CHARCOT’s anticlerical book is an impressive catalogue of depictions of ‘devil possession’ throughout art history. He notes how the bodily gestures resemble hysteric attacks. He was determined to secularise hysteria in the public as well as professional consciousness. Medea was a ‘witch’ in ancient Greek mythology, a woman with magical healing powers, also associated with Otherness as a foreigner. Her rebellion begins.

CHARCOT takes a large pin from a heart-shaped pincushion proffered by FREUD. He pricks AUGUSTINE theatrically. CHARCOT And now? AUGUSTINE Nothing, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT You see, I have pierced the skin … er … slightly, drawn a little blood, and yet there is absolutely no sensation! We are reminded of the skins of sorceresses. Prick a stigmata diaboli, there will be no sensation. Sometimes, even, there will be no blood. Indeed the comparison between hysterics and witches is not to be passed over lightly. Scratch an hysteric, find a witch! (Chuckles. Pricks her again. AUGUSTINE doesn’t respond. She is angry, frustrated, yet fascinated by the spectacle of her own body in his hands) I refer you to my book The Demonic in Art for a detailed study. The shamans turn themselves into birds or tigers. Our hysterics turn themselves into numb grotesques. Twisted, paralysed versions of their former selves. And speaking of witches, en passant, consider, gentlemen, the root of the word medicine: from Medea, a witch if ever there was one! So we medeasin men might not be so far off the track after all, eh? (To AUGUSTINE.) Come now, don’t give us your bad temper young lady! Where’s your lovely smile, eh? AUGUSTINE (To audience) Honestly, he pricks me like a pincushion and I still got to smile! CHARCOT Indeed. Now, does this paralysis and lack of sensation have an organic base? Answer: hysteria is ignorant of anatomy. Hysteria produces its own symptoms in exaggerated form. If this young lady’s paralysis had an organic basis, her upper arm would also be affected. For it is these muscles which control flexion in the lower arm. But this is not the case.

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He pricks AUGUSTINE’s upper arm. She cries out. AUGUSTINE Jesus, Mary, Mother of God and all the saints in heaven! CHARCOT turns away. She produces her red ribbons which she winds around her palms with her left arm and her teeth as one would a bandage. CHARCOT So, what is the root of this symptom? I put before you today that hysteric patients produce their own symptoms by autosuggestion! In other words, here before us is a body which is lying to us. It is manifesting the physiologically impossible! Now, I want to forge a concept of hysteria which doesn’t lie. And for those sceptics among you, who accuse us of charlatanism, would you kindly acknowledge the courage we experimenters have shown in breaking with all traditions, in defying all fear, and in facing the subject squarely! There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in all thy philoso… CHARCOT, carried away, has been tapping his own palm with the pin. There is blood on his hands. FREUD offers him a white handkerchief with which he mops up. This bloodstained object intrigues AUGUSTINE. Suddenly the lights go dark blue. Actors suspend. An eerie atmosphere. Flashback: AUGUSTINE, hands knotted up in red ribbons, in an urgent whisper, very fast AUGUSTINE Sister Jeanne said (mimicking): “Take your hand away, you dirty, dirty girl!” Her face was lit up by the candle. She was dripping hot wax on my pillow, right near my face. Her face was all red and her skin was wobbling on her cheeks. Her eyes were all whites. She said: “God will punish you for this, my child. The flames of hell burn all sinners! The Devil has got into you! You know yourself! You know what we do to little girls who’ve got the devil in them? You are unclean!” They threw icy water in my face. The next day I was put in the slammer again, my hands tied together. I hate Sister Jeanne. She has hands like a dead person. Green and fat. Lights back to Lecture Theatre CHARCOT And today, Messieurs, some proof. I shall employ the power of hypnosis to induce certain hysterical symptoms. Now, let us not forget, gentlemen, that things of the organism

The first of several allusions to Hamlet, signifying the madness theme (c.f. Sarah Bernhardt attending his lectures when preparing for the role, and the oedipal struggle between FREUD and CHARCOT that I explore) The oppressive, not to say misogynistic, effect of Christian belief in Devil possession, as experienced by the child AUGUSTINE for masturbating.

As a child in a convent, AUGUSTINE was brutally punished for being ‘possessed’ by the Devil, due to her boisterous and assertive nature. Her treatment in the convent doubtlessly contributed to her trauma.

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Making a drama out of a crisis aren’t as precise as things mechanical. They say that experiments on animals never work as well in public as they do in the lab. Never mind though, if we don’t succeed as we wish it, it will be a significant learning exercise nonetheless! You see, this young lady is admitted to this hospital with partial paralysis on the right side. In a week, a month, tomorrow, this could easily have moved to the left. The paralysis itself has no organic base. And if it has no organic base, then the mind must have played its part!

CHARCOT the enthusiastic showman.

During this, CHARCOT mimics the movement of paralysis in his own body. AUGUSTINE looks on spellbound. CHARCOT Ah the powers of the mind over matter! Ever since antiquity, you can find a series of phenomena which can only be explained by this singular provoked neurosis: the hypnotic state!

The atmosphere is becoming mysterious. This is CHARCOT’s séance.

See Didi-Huberman for a range of illustrations that show hysterics responding, individually and in groups, in frozen gestures, to gongs, lights and other stimuli.

CHARCOT turns AUGUSTINE’s face towards him so they are both profile to the audience. He places his fingers on her eyelids. She closes her eyes and appears to sleep. He floats a bottle under her nose. She wakes, smiling. CHARCOT to audience CHARCOT Simple lavender water! Our props are inexpensive! Now lift your right arm! (she obeys). And now, my dear, go and shake hands with the audience! AUGUSTINE is delighted by her success. Beaming like an actress at curtain call, in a trance, she shakes hands with members of the audience, thanking them as she does so. CHARCOT Come back now. Sit down. CHARCOT stands behind her. Shuts her eyes. Gets a gong and strikes a fulsome tone. AUGUSTINE wakes into a frozen expression of alarm - melodramatic. CHARCOT takes a stick and touches her lower left arm. She instantly goes into the identical seizure she has just lost on the right hand. CHARCOT displays his success to the audience. He takes his stick and starts to ‘sculpt’ her face into different expressions. He talks as he does so: CHARCOT And at all times in Man’s history, what is called ascetic contemplation was in fact produced by the prolonged fixation of

Making a drama out of a crisis  the gaze on some shiny, brilliant object, upon which some special quality, some saintly power, was attributed. CHARCOT is molding AUGUSTINE’S body. She is free-associating with his cues, now with gestures. CHARCOT folds her arms in prayer. AUGUSTINE’s becomes suffused with saintliness, eyes heavenward. CHARCOT And what do you see?

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Again, he is seeking to demystify, challenge the Church’s viewpoint. This is one of the classic Attitudes Passionelles of Augustine in the IPS: ‘Amorous Supplication.’ See Figure 1.3, p.7.

AUGUSTINE (Ecstatic) I see Saint Theresa! CHARCOT And what does Saint Theresa do? We must imagine this is a repetition of a previously performed scenario, a ritual event. AUGUSTINE She makes me better! CHARCOT And how does she make you better? AUGUSTINE She’s the patron saint! CHARCOT The patron saint? AUGUSTINE Of headaches! CHARCOT Quite so. Now, these contemplations would be swiftly followed by hallucinations, apparitions, and even attacks of ecstasy. In a certain sect in Algeria, these phenomena are most intense. The adepts sit around a fire at night. Gradually, they fall into an ecstatic trance and let out long cries. Some have convulsive fits. The anaesthetic then becomes complete, and they lick red-hot coals, some even swallowing live spiders, and scorpions. Serious accidents can ensue. CHARCOT intercepts AUGUSTINE’S enthralled gaze with his hand. She follows it. He draws a bird shape in the air with his finger. He flies the ‘bird’. AUGUSTINE’s is transfixed to it. It becomes a pas de deux, CHARCOT leading.

CHARCOT is becoming ‘a pain’ to AUGUSTINE. That is her message to him that he doesn’t hear.

Both Shamans and witches were/ are thought to communicate with the spirit world.

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Making a drama out of a crisis AUGUSTINE laughing delightedly. Suddenly CHARCOT draws a snake on the ground. AUGUSTINE’s whole body contracts into a gesture of terror. CHARCOT adds the bird back in with his other hand. Now she is dancing out a ritual fight between the snake and bird, shrieking and hissing. Suddenly, CHARCOT gives her a sheet of white paper.

This scene conflates several accounts of ways CHARCOT’s hysterics would perform when prompted.

CHARCOT Here are some nice potatoes. AUGUSTINE You’re trying to bribe me now! AUGUSTINE takes the paper, gingerly, and starts to eat it. CHARCOT But can’t you taste? Those potatoes fell in the dustbin! AUGUSTINE spits the paper out, retching with disgust, wiping her tongue. CHARCOT gives her his top hat. CHARCOT This is your baby, your dear little baby… AUGUSTINE rocks the “baby” singing the tune of “Ach du liebe Augustine” as a lullaby. CHARCOT now advances towards her. She drops the hat, her face contorted in horror. She falls backwards into a faint, caught by FREUD.

FREUD’s hold of her collapsed body here should evoke the Brouillet painting. See Figure 1.5, p.20.

CHARCOT Where are you? AUGUSTINE I don’t know. CHARCOT Who has caught you falling? AUGUSTINE I don’t know. CHARCOT Who are all those people watching you? AUGUSTINE I don’t know CHARCOT Who am I?

Making a drama out of a crisis  AUGUSTINE Professor Jean-Martin Charcot. CHARCOT gestures to FREUD to lay her on the bed. CHARCOT And so, Messieurs, proof that the hysteric’s mind selects that which she wishes to retain of reality. Our young lady here chose to retain my name, whilst apparently being in a trance-like state. She can do the same with her body. She can choose, quite literally, how to sculpt it. (Tapping his forehead) The idea of movement is movement; the idea of absence of movement is motor-paralysis. The production of paralysis, or indeed movement, through hypnotism, is in fact the result of a dream we have provoked. The content of the delirium is of no importance. The proof is that the cause of hysteric’s thoughts can be altered at will!

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CHARCOT’s power over her is demonstrated here by the fact that, although in trance, some part of her consciousness has retained her awareness of him. An allusion to the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty to re-enforce the idea of the supine ‘patient,’ meaning: she who endures; also connoting the trance state in hypnosis as one of waking dreaming.

AUGUSTINE is now supine. AUGUSTINE She pricked her finger on the spindle and slept for a hundred years. Till it was time to wake. Till it was time to speak. He kissed her mouth. And she knew it was time to speak. Lights murky over AUGUSTINE’s bed. FREUD is there. A confessional atmosphere. AUGUSTINE is struggling to utter, FREUD gently encouraging her, fascinated. AUGUSTINE Eyes … cat’s eyes, green and bright and shiny as topaz. The eyes were following me, watching me, out of the darkness. I screamed out loud. Maman came in: My nose was bleeding. She wipedit with a white rag. She called the doctor. The doctor came and looked at my tongue and my nose and inside my eyes. The doctor said I had become a woman. He said: “You are a woman now, Augustine” and gave me some strips of white cotton to put between my legs. He said “This will happen every month now” and then he said “Avoid water” and left. I hurt. I hurt all over. I hurt under my arms and I hurt between my legs where the rat had been. It felt bruised there. Dry. Sore. I vomited. Maman showed me how to use the rags. But the wound stopped bleeding after a few days, and I haven’t needed to use the rags since, so the doctor was wrong … wasn’t he? FREUD (Caught off guard) Mademoiselle?

I am punning here. She has decided to move from the hypnotic state to the conscious one. She wants to ‘speak’ to her ‘Prince’ FREUD i.e. become his analysand. The shifting proxemics between FREUD and AUGUSTINE are important: he is, through the rest of the play, becoming futureFreud, so that his eventual abandonment of AUGUSTINE is when he has become a psychoanalyst, sitting behind her out of her sight.

She was bleeding from her rapes, not from menstruation. Her menses started whilst at the Salpêtrière. Her mother knew, but did not say, herself probably frightened by ‘Monsieur C’’s threats.

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Making a drama out of a crisis AUGUSTINE Well, I’m not a proper woman … am I? (Suddenly changing the subject) Does he like me? FREUD Who, Mademoiselle? AUGUSTINE The Professor. Does he like me?

She knows that being liked by CHARCOT provides privileges, but she is also instinctively aware of FREUD’s need for CHARCOT’s attention and approval.

FREUD Yes … I … Do you want him to like you? AUGUSTINE Of course! Well, don’t you? FREUD I suppose… AUGUSTINE And do they like me? FREUD They? AUGUSTINE The audience…

She is bringing the live theatre audience into their world.

FREUD Oh I’m sure they must do … Some of them come to the hospital especially to see you. AUGUSTINE Am I famous then? FREUD I suppose you could say… AUGUSTINE Is he famous?

She is articulating the power relationships at play in their triangle.

FREUD Yes, he is… AUGUSTINE More famous than me? FREUD Well, yes, he is…

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AUGUSTINE That’s not fair! FREUD Mademoiselle? AUGUSTINE I have to suffer for my art! … Are you famous? FREUD Er, no, mademoiselle… AUGUSTINE Do you want to be famous, Doctor Freud? Imagine doctors wanting to be famous! (She giggles. She is ‘playing’ FREUD, flirtatious) Do you like me? FREUD, embarrassed, fumbles for his hanky and sneezes. Lights switch to Lecture Theatre. AUGUSTINE’s bed rushed violently to center stage. CHARCOT is using her body as a specimen, touching various parts as he speaks:

She has intuitively identified FREUD’s fierce ambition.

FREUD’s sneeze is both a nervous reaction and symptom of his cocaine addiction, to which I allude more directly later.

CHARCOT Hysterogenic points Messieurs! Secret geysers in the landscape of hysteria! A touch and the attack is cured! The same touch, and the attack is provoked! You will find the location of these … hot spots … invariably under the breasts and on the ovaries of course! Observe! CHARCOT presses AUGUSTINE’s ovaries, this time harder. She screams out, her body convulsing. AUGUSTINE Pig! Pig! You’re hurting me! Pig! catch the rats, catch the rats! The rats are getting bigger! My throat! Oh my throat hurts … Something pulling my tongue! My throat! What do you know about making me better? … I don’t want you anywhere near me! … I won’t uncross my legs! … Oh you’ve hurt me too much … No you won’t … Help! … Bastard! Nurd! Lousy jerk! Excuse me! Excuse me, Monsieur, leave me alone! CHARCOT (Gesturing for FREUD to take her away) Doctor! AUGUSTINE I’m telling you, get rid of that snake, the one in your trousers! It’s bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad…

Verbatim, redacted from the IPS.

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Making a drama out of a crisis AUGUSTINE yells the word over and over, FREUD wheeling her out very fast.

Another Shakespeare reference, to the theatre-going FREUD. The VIOLINIST as AUGUSTINE’s doppelganger must look like her: long loose hair, white gown, bare feet. These actions are derived from IPS photographs of AUGUSTINE’s paralyses. A deliberately FREUDian play on his ideas on oral gratification. Should be slightly heightened, and ironic.

CHARCOT See how hysterics scream and shout? Much ado about nothing! Blackout. Projection of AUGUSTINE IPS photo of her contorted leg. VIOLINIST appears, a visiting spirit. She plays a slow piece of music. The curtains draw apart. AUGUSTINE performs the dance of her contortion and seizure - slow, perverse pin-ups. Simultaneously, on the other side of the stage, CHARCOT and FREUD take fat cigars from cases. A phallic double act, they perform in unison rituals of rolling, licking, snipping and lighting their smoke. They suck furiously and deliciously on them. AUGUSTINE vanishes. CHARCOT Theory is all very well, Herr Doctor, but some things exist which have nothing to do with preconceived theory… FREUD If only we knew what existed… CHARCOT This cigar exists. We exist. Hysteria exists.

FREUD has momentarily forgotten the etiquette of calling CHARCOT ‘Monsieur le Professeur’. Poetic licence: I have cast FREUD as interpreter of the case history.

FREUD Herr Professeur, you know you were talking of the adventure, the courage to see the new? Well … I, er … have been thinking. Couldn’t it all be an antic disposition … a … an outward performance if you like … of some deeper story trying to be told? Of a sexual nature … I have noticed, with Mademoiselle Dubois, whose words during an attack I have been documenting as you asked… CHARCOT Herr Freud, I merely asked you to record what occurred, physically and vocally… FREUD Quite so, yes. But it is as though she trusts me, with certain information. As though she wants me to hear, erm, embarrassing things, intimate things which she could never say, nor

Making a drama out of a crisis  should ever say in, erm, normal everyday life. As though I remind her of someone she feels familiar with. A relative, father, or uncle maybe.

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FREUDian theory of transference appearing.

CHARCOT Doctor Freud, unorthodox as we are proud to be here, we none the less adhere stringently to the ethics of our profession, namely: it is inappropriate, not to say inadmissible, to develop particular affection for the patients. They will always compete for our attention. Our job is to step back, take a good look, keep our minds clear for our scientific purpose! FREUD But of course, Monsieur le Professeur. It’s just that Mademoiselle Dubois’ body would seem to have become … a theatre for forgotten scenes! CHARCOT Too much Sarah Bernhardt, Herr Doctor, and not enough Salpêtrière, eh? He laughs paternally. FREUD is annoyed at failing to arouse CHARCOT’s interest. You are a fine doctor! An astute neurologist! Who knows, one day you too might achieve some eminence in our tough profession. It needs ambition! And obsession, Herr Doctor! We must think as scientists and not let ourselves be manipulated by the febrile imaginings of young girls!

Cixous’ term for hysterics’ narratives.

FREUD was a fan of the French actress Bernhardt, of whom he wrote home enthusiastically. She, in turn, visited the Salpêtrière. Bernhardt also played St Joan, about whom CHARCOT refers later. See p.xii–xiii.

FREUD Professeur Charcot, I… CHARCOT Doctor Freud, I look forward to receiving the results of your comparative study of hysteric and motor paralyses. Very much! And now, I must leave you. Back to Neuilly before the rain comes down, eh? You must come and have dinner with us. Soon! Fridays at the Charcots are something of an institution! FREUD So I’ve heard from some of the interns. CHARCOT My wife and I like to entertain! Talk about something other than shop! Get to meet some interesting people so you can report back home that ‘le tout Paris’ is alive and kicking, eh!?

“Kicking” CHARCOT’s pun on hysteric attacks. A turning point in their relationship. In fact, it was FREUD’s offering to translate CHARCOT into German that earnt him attention and invitation into the Charcoterie.

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Making a drama out of a crisis FREUD I’d like that very much, Monsieur le Professeur.

Hamlet again. CHARCOT is patronising FREUD. He is alluding to his being enthralled to CHARCOT on the one hand and to AUGUSTINE on the other. Charcot’s powerful colonising rule at the Salpêtrière was suggested by his being called variously a Ceasar and a Napoleon. Her case history recounts several attempts to escape before finally achieving this.

CHARCOT Good, good! (tapping his finger authoritatively on FREUD’s forehead) ‘Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ CHARCOT exits, chortling. FREUD stubs his cigar out with his foot. Looks after him. Suddenly remembering: FREUD I dreamt you kissed me three times there (indicates forehead where he has just been tapped) Herr Ceasar! Blackout. VIOLINIST plays. Lush green light. Rain pouring. AUGUSTINE turns slowly in a shower of water, as though slaking a huge thirst. The sound of water magnifies. She is singing. Lights fade up to Ward. AUGUSTINE tumbles onto her bed, as though pushed from behind. We hear on soundtrack a heavy door slam. She weeps, shaking with wet and cold. Lights pass through ‘dawn’ to ‘morning’. Birdsong. VIOLINIST stops playing. FREUD enters, rushing on his way to somewhere, anxious to avoid contact with her. She catches his eye. He hesitates, pauses… AUGUSTINE Doctor! Doctor, I’m thirsty. I got that sugary taste again… FREUD I’ll get you some water. (He pours water from a pitcher into a tin mug. Hands it to her. She gulps it greedily. Hands it back.) AUGUSTINE My throat’s sore. It’s always so sore after amyl nitrate… FREUD You prefer cold water treatment?

Reference to her punishments at the convent as a small child. She has been heard by FREUD. The causal traumatic events of her case history are forming as a theory in FREUD’s mind.

AUGUSTINE pretends not to pick up his reference. FREUD Tell me about your night, mademoiselle. The nurses were worried. It was a terribly wet night and you had next to nothing on… AUGUSTINE Will there any photos today? I must look terrible…

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FREUD Tell me about your night. AUGUSTINE (Suddenly trusting) The night was hot. I thought I was going to suffocate. The air was growling like a cat about to pounce! And then the skies broke and there was lots of loud explosions and this big hot rain came down to wash it all clean … I had to be outside, under the avenue of trees. I wasn’t going to run away, you know. I don’t want to run away … now … I’m not ready yet…

I want to suggest that she has a strategy, that she is developing control over her own destiny.

FREUD Ready? AUGUSTINE contorts in disgust. VIOLINIST underscores. FREUD Fräulein Dubois? AUGUSTINE I just remembered my dream … I’m in an abattoir. Inside are lots of pigs, cows, sheep, chickens. I see them kill them. Kill pigs … one by one with big knives … slit them open from their throats to their bottoms … huge wounds … their insides spilling out … them … screaming, trying to run away … then: cut! cut! cut! and they lie there, all big and skin-pink, with such a frightened look in their eyes … and they lie there in pools of blood. Then everything’s soaked in blood … the floor, the walls, the men’s hands, my dress … all red…

My embellishment of a dream recorded in the IPS.

FREUD Fräulein Dubois? AUGUSTINE is lost in her own reverie and doesn’t respond. FREUD moves towards her as if to start examining her lower body. Blackout. Lights up on CHARCOT, sitting in an armchair connoting his Office, reading. CHARCOT Come in! FREUD enters, excited. FREUD Monsieur le Professeur. Fräulein Dubois has started her menses!

FREUD-the-PreFreudian has made a connection between her dream imagery and the onset of her first period.

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Making a drama out of a crisis CHARCOT Fräulein who? FREUD Fräulein … Mademoiselle Dubois, Augustine. The one you’ve been using in public lectures Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT Ah yes, of course. Our young pearl! Has she had any attacks in the last few days? FREUD Yes, Monsieur le Professeur. You remember a couple of weeks ago she was having some bad ones, and you had prescribed the? Well she had visions then. Lights fade up on AUGUSTINE who choruses with FREUD. He, excited. She, horrorstruck. FREUD She was in a theatre. There was a play about a revolution.

Again, my elaboration on case notes. Perhaps AUGUSTINE’s dreams of Revolution signified her sense of being working class, oppressed in CHARCOT’s empire, needing to rise up against him - which she eventually does.

AUGUSTINE/FREUD: Big men with red eyes and blue teeth were shooting each other. A man next to her/me was shot, in the head. He lay next to her/me, bleeding … then, she/I saw cartloads of corpses, pulled by six big black beasts. The corpses were emaciated, lights shone from their eyes, their mouths hung open. They were surrounded by ten men calling to her/me “Fräulein Dubois!”, surrounded by flames, big black crows, and a Tricolore flag! Lights out on AUGUSTINE. FREUD Well, these attacks have been continuing on and off this past fortnight and then in the last few days have accelerated. During some of them she also saw huge rats with long tails. Anyway, the concierge found her in the middle of the night under the trees; with nothing on … but her nightgown, sir, and the rain was pouring down! She was soaked through for hours out there. When she was brought back to the ward she was in a state of semi-hallucination. I gave her a small dose of amyl nitrate. Another series of nightmares, this time a slaughterhouse. Blood, lots of red in it. I saw her this morning, examined her, and she’s most definitely bleeding!

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CHARCOT So our young Doctor has a keen ear and our young woman- a vivid imagination! FREUD Well, yes, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT What did I tell you, eh?! FREUD Quite, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT Thank you for your report, Doctor Freud. FREUD visibly doesn’t want to leave it there. CHARCOT Will that be all, Dr Freud? FREUD Well … You see I just wondered, about those dream images, recurring. Just like in her attacks … rats, snakes, eyes, blood … she’s always … bringing them up! CHARCOT My dear Herr Doctor. The first thing you must learn about our hysterics is that they may have particularly lively minds, excited no doubt by reading cheap novels and romances! Then they come here and spend a lot of time lying on their backs-fiction affliction! Now the disease is precipitated by some trauma no doubt and of course we cannot ignore a predisposition to hysteria, nor its hereditary basis, true. Madness breeds madness! And the past may shape the present! But we won’t find the answer in her chattering, Herr Doctor. And certainly not in dreams! No, the answer lies in the body. We have to think anatomically and physiologically! Hysterics flock to us like so many sphinxes. FREUD Well precisely, Monsieur le Professeur! That is just what I’m thinking. Mademoiselle Dubois is like a sphinx! That is a brilliant way of putting it! A sphinx with a riddle. CHARCOT Solving that riddle is my life’s work, Dr Freud. Hm! Chacun à son clue! Now, I thank you for your report. You

FREUD is thinking forensically. He is on the path to forge the theory of Psychoanalysis here.

All of these treatments were regularly applied. The Ovarian Compressor was a Salpêtrière invention. It was a kind of tourniquet designed to put specific pressure on the ovaries to provoke, or, bizarrely, equally to quell an attack.

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Making a drama out of a crisis have an exceptionally forceful mind. So, Mademoiselle Dubois needs constant recording. Photographs both in the lab and in the ward. We shall continue with gold, morphine and amyl nitrate. Liberal use of ovarian compressor. And regular vaginal swabs. Yes? FREUD Yes, of course, but…

CHARCOT recognises in FREUD a fellow iconoclast.

CHARCOT One step at a time, Doctor Freud! Fly in the face of the establishment we must if we are to advance at all! But, the answer lies in the body, Doctor Freud, the body! FREUD Monsieur le Professeur, I’m merely interested… CHARCOT Now, if you will excuse me… CHARCOT gets up. FREUD passes him his hat, coat, stick. Resigned silence. CHARCOT Been to the theatre lately? FREUD Yes, Monsieur le Professeur. The Comédie Française. CHARCOT Sarah Bernhardt?

‘Saint’ Joan was burnt as a witch.

FREUD ‘Joan of Arc’. CHARCO Ah! The Divine Sarah!

A reference to the hypnotizer Franz Anton Mesmer 1734-1815, from whom the word derives.

FREUD She was mesmerising! CHARCOT The Divine Joan! Burnt as a witch! Voices, voices, they all hear voices! CHARCOT exits, chuckling. FREUD concentrates into the middle distance a beat, then leaves, angry and frustrated. VIOLINIST plays passionately. Ward. AUGUSTINE lying under her bed. She starts as though hearing a voice. Singing to herself, she seeks her ribbons from under her pillow, furtive.

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AUGUSTINE Ach, du liebe Augustine, Augustine, Augustine, ach, du liebe Augustine, alles ist hin…. Oh, my pretty Augustine, Augustine, Augustine…. I like the red ones best and the blue ones second best…. Oh, ma belle Augustine, Augustine Au… AUGUSTINE’S ribbons are now white. She screams and wails long and loud. VIOLINIST picks up the pitch of her scream and continues to play that note on vibrato throughout the following: AUGUSTINE It’s all gone! It’s all gone! All the colour’s gone! Maman! No, no, no! I can’t see my colours! It’s all gone grey! Help, someone help!! help me!!! I can’t see my colours! they’ve taken my colours away! AUGUSTINE is frantically running round her bed, crying, screaming and rattling the iron frame as if it were prison bars. Blackout. Lights up on VIOLINIST in a tight overhead light. She shifts the vibrato note into painful, high-pitched playing. Lights snap to AUGUSTINE, struggling against CHARCOT and FREUD, their backs to the audience, their arms locked in hers, pulling her backwards. Her eyes are fixed in rage and fright on someone in the audience. She spits and splutters. AUGUSTINE How dare you! How dare you come to the! Who let you in? I’ll tell on you! Whoever let you in is a shit! A man like you! A respectable middle-aged man! A family man!! With a housekeeper for a whore! What do you want with her daughter, eh?! I bet Maman doesn’t know you’re here! I hate you! I see your eyes, shining like topazes! Well they can’t get me anymore, not here! I’m going to tell on you. If only they’d listen!!! I decided Sunday before last … in church … I prayed to Saint Theresa that you would die! Bastard! Bastard! Pig! Get rid of that snake in your trousers! I don’t want a rat in my bottom … maman!! … I don’t want doctors’ fingers! I don’t want measurements! I don’t want pictures! I don’t want performances! I don’t want amyl nitrate!!! She weeps, struggles. Blackout. VIOLINIST continues playing. Lights up on AUGUSTINE in a sour beam of light. A cold, uncomfortable atmosphere. She has been locked up. She is holding her arms out in a supplicatory pose. A camera flash.

She picks up AUGUSTINE’s scream note and sustains a vibrato. ‘Monsieur C’ was recorded as having attended CHARCOT’s public lectures on more than one occasion.

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AUGUSTINE requested to be straitjacketed at times, and was put in a padded cell. Here I imagine FREUD has access to her on a frequent basis and that his carrying of IPS photos becomes a device to trigger her outrage and realisation that she has effectively become a Salpêtrière pin-up and poster girl for CHARCOT’s archetypal hysteric.

She relaxes. Adjusts her clothing. Lights discover FREUD, as though the director of the photo session. He scribbles something on a pad. Picks up a folder he’s been carrying. AUGUSTINE Show me! FREUD Fräulein? AUGUSTINE Pictures FREUD Ah! Well they take a long time to change into pictures you can see. You need a darkened room … chemicals. AUGUSTINE But this is a darkened room! FREUD No, Mademoiselle Dubois, you don’t quite understand you see, it…

A reference to Richer, the artist who was part of CHARCOT’s visual team. See Figure 1.5, p.20.

AUGUSTINE Are they better than the sketches they’ve done of me? FREUD Well, er, they’re more, how shall I say, lifelike. AUGUSTINE I want to see them! FREUD Mademoiselle Dubois, it takes time, many hours, as I said. AUGUSTINE Show me some from another time, some that are already done! What you’ve got there under your arm. FREUD Mademoiselle, Monsieur le Professeur doesn’t like patients to see their own pictures without him… AUGUSTINE And if I promise to tell you my dream?… AUGUSTINE has caught his eye. FREUD is seduced.

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FREUD You musn’t tell anyone I showed you, promise? AUGUSTINE Cross my heart and hope to die! FREUD selects a few photos from the folder. AUGUSTINE rifles through them quickly laughing as though they were holiday snaps. AUGUSTINE Is that really me? I don’t look like that!! FREUD They say the camera doesn’t lie, Mademoiselle. AUGUSTINE People do. Their eyes do. Is this how you see me? Is this one really like me? FREUD Mademoiselle, this is how you are, were, for some minutes, holding still until it flashed and recorded your actions. It’s a … a portrait of you, er having an attack, it’s… AUGUSTINE But I look so … messy! (glancing closer at a picture, suddenly furious) What’s this? ‘Amorous Supplication’! ‘Eroticism’! ‘Ecstasy’! Who gave them titles? How does he know? He doesn’t understand a thing! He never listens! He doesn’t know anything! What does he know? Professor Prod, Professor Prick! You know what Herr Doctor? You know what I think? I think he’s got a real nerve! But … if he thinks I’m being good I’ll get more shows, and if I get more shows, well … it’s better.

Titles of the ‘Attitudes Passionelles’ series in the IPS.

A pun on getting well again.

FREUD Better? AUGUSTINE Of course. FREUD Because you like the public lectures? AUGUSTINE Because so long as he needs me he’ll let me out of here, let me back in the ward. I can’t stand it in here, Doctor. I don’t

She is identifying the co-dependency here between doctor and patient in the specific medical couple promoted by CHARCOT.

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Making a drama out of a crisis like bars on the windows. I don’t like these soft walls. It’s no way to treat … a Star! Blackout. VIOLINIST plays. Lights cross-fade to CHARCOT addressing an audience at a Tuesday Leçon. FREUD is supporting AUGUSTINE, who is weeping, from behind, as in Brouillet’s painting “Un Leçon Clinique de Charcot” (Figure 1.5, p.20). A beam of light shines directly onto AUGUSTINE’s bosom. Her gown falls off her shoulders. Applause. The tableau comes alive.

CHARCOT’s total lack of concern for AUGUSTINE’s feelings. She is increasingly enraged and outraged by her dehumanisation.

CHARCOT Gentlemen. Our patient has lately maintained a pattern of an average of 200 attacks a week. Ether has proved unsuccessful in abating them, whereas she responds exceptionally well to amyl nitrate. The ovarian compressor (he holds the metal contraption up for the audience to see) has also been used to suppress attacks with some success. She has had fits of rage, provoked by the smallest annoyance. Following one of these she was found yet again, barefoot, in her nightgown, outdoors in the gardens in torrential rain. We had to put her in a strait jacket which she tore. Her extreme unmanageability has obliged us to confine her to a padded cell. So you see the extraordinary energy we are dealing with! An energy you will, shortly I hope, see at work in a full cycle of Grande Hystérie. How, an interesting new development: our patient, upon examination, showed colour blindness, matched by an increase of visual acuity. So, whilst she can only see things in black and white, she is actually seeing more clearly. AUGUSTINE suddenly fixes her gaze on someone in the audience. Screams. AUGUSTINE Oh no! Monsieur Carnot! Not you again! (She is furious. Her bed is rolled on and she is laid down on it, protesting.) CHARCOT Now I want you to appreciate especially the unfolding of the attack. Most important: the spectacle is a single event that unrolls sequentially. Beginning, middle and end. With a climax, and catharsis. Just like a classic play. Or symphony rather. I’m talking about the archetypal model of course. It is most important to learn to identify the archetype. Then you have a yardstick to measure by. So, we will just use a little hysterogenic point to provoke an attack as a form of therapy!

Making a drama out of a crisis  CHARCOT presses lightly under her breast. AUGUSTINE arches. Her body goes rigid. She utters strangled cries. She remains in this arched rigid state whilst CHARCOT speaks. He is calmly pedagogic throughout.

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The ‘arc en cercle.’

CHARCOT There! Our young lady is entering the prologue of her attack - what we call the ‘aura’ - which will presently lead into the first movement - the ‘epileptoid phase’… AUGUSTINE I … can hardly … breathe … I won’t be ill … so as not to have … to have … any amyl nitrate! CHARCOT You know, when I first came to the Salpêtrière 20 years ago and witnessed these hysterical attacks, I said to myself, “how can it be that such events are not described in the textbooks? How should I go about describing these displays from my first-hand experience?” Hysterics simply befuddled me and I felt irritatingly powerless before them. Then one day, I was struck by a sort of intuition. I said to myself, “Something about them makes them all the same … there is a lowest common denominator which is…” He breaks off. AUGUSTINE is thrashing. CHARCOT Ah! Now you can see the arched back has become rather pronounced… AUGUSTINE Dirty … beast … Pig! Pig! I’ll tell Papal You’re so heavy! You’re hurting me! Kill the rats! Kill the Rats! I don’t want a rat in my botto … Mama! … My neck … My neck … I’ll go as soon as I can! You’re making me a prossie! Put that snake back in your trousers! (opens her mouth and puts her hand in as if to take something out, holds the invisible thing on the palm of her hand and spits on it). He dares again! He’s got a nerve! Watch out! Watch out! You dare come to the Salpêtrière? You dare come to the Salpêtrière? … the next time you come … you lousy bastard … you are a bad man … you are a very, very bad man! … and you are a disgusting mother! And my father forgave you? If hitting one’s mother were allowed, then I’d hit you! I would! How could you go with him! He’s a dirty pig, a pig do you hear! You don’t want me to tell the truth! You say I am ruining the

In the original production the full cycle of this attack was reconstructed by splicing together Augustine’s spoken words from the IPS, with my own words also, and the Richer: Synoptic Tableau of the “complete full and regular attack of hysteria, with both typical and variant positions.” Richer, P, 1881, Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Epilepsie.

She has figured out her mother’s collusion with Monsieur C, and that she was also his mistress

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Making a drama out of a crisis family, the household! And I’m telling you, you’re not my mother anymore! Don’t send me rats! Don’t send me your stinking rats!! CHARCOT and the phase of emotional outbursts … Remember the sequence. First phase, what we call epileptoid - arched back then vocalizations – then contractures… AUGUSTINE is convulsing, arching, twisting. CHARCOT You know, the extraordinary thing about these attacks is that the patient curiously recovers without being in the least bit tired or spent.

Attacks were, effectively, performances.

AUGUSTINE suddenly pauses. Sits up. Ties a ribbon on her corsage, adjusts her hair. Resumes fit. CHARCOT unsurprised. CHARCOT So, now let’s use a hysterogenic point again, this time the ovary. Here we go again! (presses on her ovary. AUGUSTINE freezes). AUGUSTINE Maman! I’m scared! Oh, no! Oh, please no! Oh, please don’t! CHARCOT Note the emotional outburst again. AUGUSTINE moves into wildly, convulsing and arching as before. Each position she arrives at she holds for a beat or two, holding her breath and then releasing out of it into the next phase of contortions. CHARCOT And now we are in the second phase, that we call ‘exotic movements’ or ‘clowning’… as you can see, this … dance has as its recurring leitmotif, the arched back position, which we call ‘arc en cercle’ (marveling at her agonizing performance). And I bet some of you are wondering “how is it humanly possible she can do that?” Well, the truth of the matter is, none of us knows where this demonic energy comes from. Makes the Folies Bergères look like a funeral march, eh?! AUGUSTINE strikes a very stiffened version of one of her ‘Attitudes Passionnelles’ poses.

Making a drama out of a crisis  A projection fades in of the IPS AUGUSTINE in identical pose. It drenches the set. VIOLINIST plays a short vibrato on a high note. Projection fades with the music as the pose releases in tension. AUGUSTINE’S face lights up with pleasure, then anger. During the following phase of the attack, she sometimes addresses the audience directly, sometimes an imaginary man very near to her, sometimes on her bed. She acts it all out. A very cinematic interlude.

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A momentary suspension of action.

CHARCOT Ah! Attitudes Passionnelles! AUGUSTINE You’re being silly! You’re making me blush! Me, crazy? Oh, now listen! Is it for real or are you teasing me? You’re tickling me! (giggles, suddenly stops.) What? You refuse to believe I’d be faithful? Ah, now come on, now! That’s not fair! We’re in the meadow … you try to kiss me. I like it. But I don’t like you treating me like I was easy. Then I turn your face around in my hands and I look in your face and suddenly you kiss me. You put your tongue in my mouth. I like it. I like you, I like your smell. Then … suddenly … I remember him! Stop! Vomit!

Her case history suggests she had a relationship with one of her brother’s friends. As a rape-traumatised young woman, it is hard to enjoy normal sexual relations as there are going to be triggers.

AUGUSTINE contorts in disgust and then fright. She scuttles to the upstage corner of the bed and starts to play out the aggressor and herself with her own hands. One hand moves towards her body, the other pulling it away, a tussle. The following in a deep register, very fast. AUGUSTINE You’re so heavy! You’re hurting me! Put that snake back in your trousers! Oh, the peacocks, the peacocks with their big tails cluttered with eyes! Get your rat out of my botto … Maman! Oh, the pig! The pig! … No, I didn’t know that’s how babies were made … it made me cry then … I don’t think it’s all that nice, you know … It’s true I still can’t get that big fat pig out of my mind … Oh, please, please!! I beg you to get rid of him! He’s got a 22-year-old daughter! A proper gent! When the thing happened, he deserved prison, he did! But I didn’t tell! I didn’t tell because of my reputation! And because of the knife! I told you about the knife! You what? … Oh, really? And what if I became pregnant here at the Salpêtrière, eh? And had a baby here? What would the doctors say? Oh, we never kiss doctors! Never! Never! Never! Never! … Not even the kind ones. She freezes in an ecstatic pose, arms outstretched as though reaching for someone above her. Projection and VIOLINIST on as before, very brief, then out.

She has unequivocally declared Monsieur C’s rapes and violent threats.

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Making a drama out of a crisis CHARCOT Perfect! Which brings us swiftly to the fourth and final phase, a period of delirium. AUGUSTINE starts to move more energetically again. She performs extraordinary rocking movements, her legs tossed above her head, then twists and turns.

The above blends my own words with case notes. That AUGUSTINE didn’t ‘have time’ is poignant. Her childhood and adolescence were ripped away from her by her rapes. She didn’t have proper time to grow up normally and then, incarcerated at the asylum, her time is hardly her own, given the hours and hours spent fitting with her attacks.

AUGUSTINE I won’t uncross my legs! NO! You’ve got a snake too! What do you mean, you won’t take no for an … I can’t, you hear, can’t! … Because I don’t like it … no, whatever they say. No rats in my tummy … Oh, so I’m a woman of the world am I? Who says? What do I know? I haven’t got time! I haven’t got time! I haven’t got time! Madame is here … I’m telling you that Monsieur is out on business … (gazes in space, eyes wide open, smiles, then suddenly sobs). I’m telling you, Monsieur Carnot has gone out … Yes, the one who wants my bottom … He’d be furious … I’m telling you I can’t … It’s impossible … I was going to tell … but Monsieur Carnot said he’d kill me … he had a knife … the way he looked at me to stop me telling … I didn’t know what he meant when he showed me … He forced my legs … I didn’t know it was a beast that was going to bite me! I want to go out every night, because he wants to get in my bed, when Madame is asleep. He told me outright he’d kill me … I’m telling you, it’s him who wanted it … He hurts me. He makes me dry, sore, bloody … he tells me that later it’ll do me good … But it’s a sin … it’s bad, bad, bad … I’ll have to leave, you know … I hate him, I really hate him, but I love you, but I can’t do that, please, no! Please listen to me! CHARCOT At this point the cycle may commence all over again and may continue for some days. Our patient, during an active period, may have several such attacks in one hour. We may now use the hysterogenic point to alleviate the attack if we so wish. He indicates to FREUD to press hard on her ovary. Her attack abates.

An allusion to Demonic Possession. And then to Sleeping Beauty.

CHARCOT The demon has entered, the demon has left … for the time being. Our patient will rest. She will awake smiling, like Sleeping Beauty from a long absence. She will probably have forgotten all theobscenity she has uttered here in this ‘lascivious choreography’. She will, in short, be charm itself.

Making a drama out of a crisis  Lights snap to VIOLINIST stamping out a wild tarantella. AUGUSTINE is frantically knotting and tying her bed linen into huge, futile attempts at escape. She collapses, exhausted on her bed, drained of emotion. VIOLINIST exits. FREUD enters to find AUGUSTINE, desolate, hugging her knees, rocking, on her bed.

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An ironic response to CHARCOT’s predictions. See p.p. 13 and 24 for discussion of the Tarantata.

FREUD Fräulein Dubois? AUGUSTINE Where do colours go when they go? FREUD Mademoiselle Dubois? AUGUSTINE suddenly relaxes, opens out, smiles and looks at FREUD. AUGUSTINE Doctor! Do sit down! How was I?

A pun on health, trance states and performing.

FREUD tentatively sits on the corner of her bed. AUGUSTINE Make me born again! FREUD nervously places his hands on her head, to hypnotise her, gauche. A healing gesture, but deliberately ambiguous. Blackout. Lights up on AUGUSTINE sitting on the edge of her bed. FREUD is sitting on a chair, taking notes.

Healing can be a form of rebirth. An allusion to FREUD’s early attempts at hypnosis that were not altogether successful.

AUGUSTINE I dreamt I wasn’t at the Salpêtrière any longer. I was walking in the Bois de Boulogne. The bluebells were out. I was knee-deep in a lavender sea of them. My skirt was stained by their ink and my boots were wet. Suddenly I heard a flock of starlings and looked up. The tree was peppered with them. They sounded like a million screeching bells. Then, as if by magic, they all stopped singing at once and took flight, wheeling out of sight … out of sight. CHARCOT’s Study. Evening. He is smoking a pipe with relish. He is in fact ‘high’ from his smoke, sketching. A knock at the door. CHARCOT Come in! If you must!

c.f. FREUD’s cocaine habit and CHARCOT’s experimentation with Hashish.

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Making a drama out of a crisis FREUD enters, sniffs the air, perplexed.

The cannabis-using Club des Assassins (Hashischins) in Paris 1844–1849.

FREUD Ah, Monsieur le Professeur. I’ve just been sent an article from… CHARCOT Welcome to The Club des Assassins, Herr Doctor! FREUD Monsieur le Professeur?

CHARCOT assassinates hysteric’s spirits by not according them their life story and treating them merely as medical material and physical performers.

19th century French poets and writers, socalled ‘Poetes maudits’ who lived as dissenting social outsiders, experimenting with drugs, alcohol and altered states of consciousness. My translation. From the French ‘nostalgie de la boue.’

Charcot did experiment with hashish and sketched a doodle during this. This can be sourced at http:// www.wikigallery.org/ wiki/painting_168766/ Jean-Martin-Charcot/ Drawing-producedunder-the-influence-ofhashish

CHARCOT Assassins! Hashischins! Hash … ish … chins! CHARCOT giggles, holds up his sketch for FREUD. CHARCOT I wanted to see what all the fuss was about! FREUD The fuss, Monsieur le Professeur? CHARCOT Baudelaire, Gautier, De Nerval. All that lot. Les Fleurs du Mal … the artist’s nostalgia for filth, the temptation of another state of consciousness … I had to try it for myself … and what I find is I have drawn lots of … bodies and beasts, all co-mingled like some ghastly gothic dream! Definitely … no plan … nothing I wished to convey … just what tumbled out of my mind’s eye … see! The stage fills with a projection of Charcot’s doodle. FREUD It’s, er, very good, Monsieur le Professeur… CHARCOT Good? Rubbish! It’s a doodle, Herr Doctor, a mere doodle. No compliments, please! I want your powers of analysis! FREUD You want me to tell you what I think? CHARCOT Why, yes!

Making a drama out of a crisis  FREUD wanders around the images, dwarfed by mutant beasts, genitals; curious, unsure what to say. FREUD Well it’s er…

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FREUD-thePre-Freudian is not too willing to psychoanalyse his Master due to deference.

CHARCOT Yes? FREUD It’s … erotic … Monsieur le Professeur! CHARCOT I might have guessed! I suppose it is rather, when you look at it like that … ha, ha … it always comes down to genitals in the end.

CHARCOT did state that sexual experience might be the root cause of hysteria, but he never followed this through.

FREUD But I thought you didn’t… CHARCOT “Don’t think,” my mother always used to say, “leave it to the horses. They’ve got a bigger head than you!” Great mirth. FREUD is baffled. FREUD Monsieur Le Professeur, now maybe isn’t the time… CHARCOT Herr Doctor, my mind is as clear as a bell. Just … exceptional lucidity … I’m all ears… (giggles uncontrollably) I’m all ears!!! FREUD Monsieur le Professeur. I have just been sent an article from Vienna about a most interesting case there … a young hysteric … a case presenting a variegated picture of paralysis and contractures, inhibitions and states of mental confusion. CHARCOT So, as I always say, we do not invent hysteria here, eh?! FREUD No, Monsieur le Professeur. The thing is this: a chance observation showed her physician that she could be relieved of

FREUD is alluding to his correspondence with Joseph Breuer on the Anna O case. See p.79. Didi-Huberman’s book is called ‘The Invention of Hysteria.’

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Making a drama out of a crisis these clouded states of consciousness if she was induced by hypnosis to express in words the affective fantasy by which she was at that moment dominated… CHARCOT Ah! But amyl nitrate makes our young ladies most loquacious. And you yourself have made copious notes of Mademoiselle Dubois, as I recall. No, there is nothing stopping the flow of words in this hospital. The corridors are positively cacophanous! FREUD No, but … it’s about listening to the meaning … to what they say. That’s the point he’s findi…

Citing the aforementioned Caesar.

CHARCOT I listen with my eyes, Herr Doctor … That’s the difference between us … veni, vidi, vici!!! CHARCOT rises, roars with laughter, nods for FREUD to pass him his hat, coat and stick. CHARCOT All female hysterics cry rape! Fantasy, Herr Doctor! We are an audience for their obscene imaginings! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I didn’t realise it was so late lost track of time. My wife is most keen to meet the Young Turk from Vienna! Next Friday it is, eh! She loves to talk, so if you’re a good listener… CHARCOT sweeps out, singing ‘La Donna è Mobile’ (literally means “woman is mobile/fickle,” the title of the famous aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto), his sketch under his arm. FREUD half-pleased, half-insulted, stunned. He sniffs the air, takes out a cigar. The moment he lights up, VIOLINIST plays. Lights and scene change so that FREUD is still in the same position, smoking, but is now in the same space as AUGUSTINE on her bed. She is twisting her hands in her colourless ribbons. FREUD moves to the head of her bed, detached, interrogating (he is becoming a Freudian). He speaks more assertively than before, probing her. FREUD You were saying… AUGUSTINE I forget…

Making a drama out of a crisis  FREUD Your feelings for Monsieur Carnot. These were, these were  … uncomfortable, perhaps. Nice feelings, but … uncomfortable perhaps? AUGUSTINE I didn’t say that!! FREUD Tell me about Monsieur Carnot, Mademoiselle Dubois, the first thing which springs to mind. AUGUSTINE He smoked cigars. You can never get rid of the smell … the way his breath smells. Once I passed him on the stairs. I was on my way to the kitchen, my arms were full of bread. I’d just come from the bakery. I turned away so as not to have to look into his eyes. He pulled my hair and made me look in his face. He said I was a filthy whore and he’d kill me if I told anyone. Then he said: “What’s for dinner?” And I said: “Pig’s liver” (suddenly crying). I did it because I was frightened! Have you ever been frightened, Doctor? AUGUSTINE suspends, lost in recall.

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FREUD-the-character’s ultimate betrayal of AUGUSTINE. Poetic licence to take us from FREUD’s earlier mid-1880’s ‘Seduction Theory’ of sexual abuse as the root cause of hysteria to the Oedipal theory when he shifted the cause to the patient’s own repressed sexual desires. See p.82.

The smell of cigar is significant. AUGUSTINE is alluding to both FREUD and CARNOT, her rapist, suggesting Freud’s ‘Transference Theory’ in which the analyst is cast by the analysand as a quasi-parental or other significant, affecting, figure in their lives.

FREUD So you think he was really saying he’d kill you, Monsieur Carnot? AUGUSTINE (Angry) I don’t think, I know! He did! That night at dinner, my mother and I were serving table. I wanted to tell. I wanted to shout out to my mother, I wanted to tell her he’d done it. I wanted to tear his hair out for being so disgusting! FREUD So … you wanted your mother to play a part in your relationship with Monsieur Carnot? AUGUSTINE I wanted to throw soup in her face because I’m sure she knew and she wouldn’t say it! And because she had known him. He had touched her and she had liked it. FREUD What kind of feelings do you get when you think of your mother and Monsieur Carnot?

AUGUSTINE’s mother colluded with Monsieur C. It is she who delivered her daughter to CHARCOT. FREUD’s confidence as a psychoanalyst is growing.

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Making a drama out of a crisis AUGUSTINE He caught my eyes in his gaze. They were terrible. Green. Bright. Like topaz. They said: “If you ever tell I’ll kill you!” FREUD So why do you feel you want to tell me this story?

FREUD had a cocaine addiction, whilst his heavy use of cigars throughout his life may well have caused the throat cancer from which he died.

Drawn from biographical fact, the idea of CHARCOT as being effectively barbarically cruel to his hysterics whilst being a zoophile is ironic.

FREUD is observing her with deep concentration, smoking. She is distressed, anguished at FREUD’s pressure. VIOLINIST plays. AUGUSTINE curls up in her bed and pulls the sheets over her head. FREUD stubs out his cigar. Moves downstage into a chartreuse light spot. He is facing out to the audience. Meticulously prepares some cocaine, evidently nervous. He sniffs it with all the greed of an addict. Soundtrack fades up as he performs this ritual: clinking of glasses and cutlery, laughter, male and female. CHARCOT (On soundtrack, as if behind the front door) Of course I’m zoophile! That’s why there’s a sign above my door at the hospital: No Dog Laboratories Here! I hate blood sports with a passion. What can be more barbaric than hunting? It is man’s festival of murder! The only huntress I can accept is Diana! Naked, her bow in her hand, arrows in her quiver, running through the forest barefoot, caring not a jot, neither for her outfit nor the danger. No, one thing I can’t stand in the country today is the sight of these velvet-clad ladyhuntresses of ours, pistol in hand, ready to shoot the nearest pigeon. It is utterly revolting! (laughter). MALE VOICE Perhaps, Professor, Diana’s nudity may have something to do with the exception you make for her! CHARCOT Why certainly, I find her pleasing! She’s Nature herself, the personification of its forces, a symbol… A doorbell rings. FREUD’s face, out to audience, lights up to greet his hosts, he raises his hat, offers his hand.

Women protest that we are not ‘a piece of meat.’

CHARCOT (On soundtrack) Ah! Why, welcome, Doctor Freud! We were just discussing the ethics concerning the meat on our plates! Sounds of dinner party merriment. This merges with sounds of heavy rain as smatterings of the dinner party

Making a drama out of a crisis 

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blow in and out. VIOLINIST live and visible. AUGUSTINE is in her green-lit ‘slice of nature’, turning, catching raindrops  on her tongue. Arms upstretched. She is talking to the trees. AUGUSTINE I love you trees! I love you! You are all right side up! I’m all upside down! Yes, I’m an upside down festival! I’m the impossible dance! I’m the sabbath! I’m the spider dance! I’m a Tarantella! Look at me dance! I’ve been asleep for a hundred years! A hundred years! I’m a Walpurgis night! I’m bad smells, wicked, terrible bad smells! I’m sour milk. I’m a feast of roses. I’m pot-pourri. I’m bad blood. I curdle mayonnaise!! I’m tears and snot and the wet from inside!! I’m the flood! Press it out! Press it out of me! I’m sour grapes! Trample me and you’ll get wine! Sour wine, mind, wine to rot your guts! Press it out of me! Press my soul out of me! I want to be born all over again! I’m so angry! I’m so angry! I! Where am I to stand? I look for myself and don’t see myself in any of it! I’m a volcano! You’d better watch out! I will pour hot lava all over your cities and your hospitals! I will burn them up! I am a gun! I will shoot, bang, bang, bang! I’m a bird. I’m a snake. I’m a bird and a snake. I slither and I peck and I eat eggs whole and I fly! I’m spit! I’m juices! I’m lots of crying! Listen trees, listen, will you! I’m a bad, bad, bad, bad… Ward. She dives onto her bed again (as though pushed from behind) as slide cuts and soundtrack quietens. AUGUSTINE I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. It’s time to wake. Time to speak… AUGUSTINE pulls the sheets over her head. A light brings FREUD into the scene. We are in the middle of something. FREUD Try to remember. You were alone with Monsieur Carnot. AUGUSTINE No! I can’t. I want to remember everything. As it was. When Professeur Charcot puts me to sleep, I can’t remember anything. I can’t even remember my dreams… AUGUSTINE sleeps. CHARCOT joins FREUD to peer at her.

She is meaning: another (psychoanalytic) session with FREUD.

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Making a drama out of a crisis FREUD She has been like this for 22 hours, Monsieur le Professeur. CHARCOT How can this be?

Sloppy medical practice and abuse to patients, about which CHARCOT shows no remorse. c.f. Sleeping Beauty, who suspends animation for one hundred years.

FREUD Well, Monsieur le Professeur, erm, when you hypnotised her yesterday you … you inadvertently forgot to bring her round at the end. CHARCOT Is that so? My! My! So we have here a case of an attack of artificial sleep. Fascinating! CHARCOT peels back the sheet. Touches AUGUSTINE’S breast. She screams, convulses.

AUGUSTINE did dream of pigs, according to her case notes. She has previously referred to CARNOT as a pig. Now she is accusing CHARCOT of being one also.

AUGUSTINE Pig! Pig! I’ll tell! I will. I’ll tell! Maman! I can’t breathe! There’s a lump in my throat and it’s getting bigger! Oh, please help me! I’m suffocating! I can’t breathe … I… CHARCOT nods to FREUD. They hold her still. CHARCOT Amyl Nitrate. CHARCOT takes a bottle from FREUD and makes her inhale through a handkerchief. She calms.

In other words, a trance-state is one in which she is also semi-conscious.

This puns on the idea of the shapeshifting witch as well as AUGUSTINE being ‘carnivalesque’ (Bakhtin, 1984)

FREUD Tell me, Augustine, what happens to you when we make you sleep? AUGUSTINE You imagine you’ve been dreaming, but in fact you’ve just been hearing people talk. CHARCOT What else? AUGUSTINE I go upside down. CHARCOT Upside down?!

Making a drama out of a crisis  AUGUSTINE I think I love you when really I hate you. Blackout. VIOLINIST plays an eerie cyclical waltz. Music continues throughout the following tableaux, which should have the effect of a silent movie. AUGUSTINE’s tongue stuck out very far and rigid. CHARCOT is pointing to it with a baton. Blackout. A flashgun is exploded. AUGUSTINE in a frozen pose of shock. Blackout. CHARCOT puts her fingers to AUGUSTINE’s lips. She blow audience kisses. Blackout. AUGUSTINE lying, rigid, across two chair backs. CHARCOT is stacking gold coins on her. Blackout. AUGUSTINE waltzes with an imaginary partner, encouraged by CHARCOT. FREUD watches. AUGUSTINE is made to kneel. She takes up a praying position as before. Music stops CHARCOT What do you see? AUGUSTINE God. CHARCOT What else do you see? AUGUSTINE Jesus. CHARCOT Alone? AUGUSTINE No, why, there’s hundreds of them! I thought there was only one little Jesus! CHARCOT Anything else? AUGUSTINE The Virgin Mary.

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Her ultimate revolt: to no longer ‘love’ these men is to no longer want to be owned by them. The following dance of tableaux is a recapitulation of the many ways her body was used in the Salpêtrière experiments as per IPS illustrations.

CHARCOT’s team would administer gold. When AUGUSTINE became rigidly cataleptic as in the IPS photo (Figure 1.4, p.12), they proved the rigidity by putting weights on her torso. Here I am alluding this as well as the fact that, effectively, CHARCOT’s hysterics kept him in business.

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Making a drama out of a crisis CHARCOT What does she look like?

Magdalene was the prostitute and outcast, and, according to Gnostic Gospels,54 Jesus’ lover. AUGUSTINE is defying the traditional Virgin/ Whore dichotomy that is the legacy of Christian teaching, the implication that she has been identified as a whore from her convent experiences, to her rapes to her career at the Salpêtrière. By having the two biblical women communicate, she is resolving for herself how Christian patriarchal oppression has othered her.

c.f. Vesta Tilley. I had been intrigued that the case history tells that AUGUSTINE escaped from the hospital dressed as a man. How come? Whose clothes did she steal? Clothes - especially men’s formal wear - are a uniform, signifying status. By wearing her doctors’ clothes she is also appropriating their power and authority over her body and psyche.

CHARCOT, earlier, has said that stars exist but that humans have to discover them. AUGUSTINE is refusing to be ‘discovered’ any more, or be a star turn.

AUGUSTINE She has her hands in prayer. There’s a rainbow above her head, and a beautiful light behind her, pinkish, white… CHARCOT And? CHARCOT Anything else you’d like to tell the audience? AUGUSTINE She’s talking to Magdalena! … and she’s laughing!!! Speed and frenzy, a projected montage of IPS photographs flash with a chronophotographic/stroboscopic effect. VIOLINIST plays, her white gown picking up the projections as she darts about the stage. Blackout. Drumrolls. AUGUSTINE bursts on, bringing richly saturated coloured lighting, as though the stage had suddenly switched from black and white to technicolor. Dressed in a mixture of CHARCOT and FREUD’s clothes, including top hat and cane, she is like some battered, vaudeville drag artiste. FREUD and CHARCOT are sitting on chairs downstage right and left respectively. They are in undershirts and long johns. Defrocked, they look vulnerable, infantilised. They stare out like statues. AUGUSTINE speaks in full command, confident, assertive and clear. AUGUSTINE My Doctors, Sirs, Messieurs! No more emotion pictures! No more secretions for you! No more exhibition! No more stories! I’m leaving your stage! The masterpiece has been stolen! Writing remains. Words fly off. You will see my body fly away into a thousand sparks. I will fly away. My crisis will shatter into millions of crystal splinters, like stars pricking the sky. I will disappear. Dis-membered. I will return. Re-membered. I will come together again in a form you won’t recognise. Me and my magical body! I will be immortal. I will be salt. I will parch your mouths dry. Then I will tell everything, as I remembered myself. And you, you will put your tools down, you will listen, really listen, and you will believe every word I say.

Making a drama out of a crisis  AUGUSTINE exits by a window of light, as though performing a conjuring trick. VIOLINIST plays “Ach, du liebe Augustine” as the sound of a heavy, purgative rainfall breaks. The two men, gaze impassively at the audience. Very slow fade to blackout.

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She is referring to both CHARCOT’s neglect of hysteric utterance, and FREUD’s eventual rejection of hysteric survivor’s truth when he shifts from the Seduction Theory to the Oedipal theory.

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What she wants



Sea/Woman

Charcot’s impact on the young Freud proved life-changing and lasting. The irresistible opportunity to leave the pathology lab and observe his performance lectures with grande hystériques was to stir his mission to find its origin, an interest begun with another mentor, the Viennese doctor Joseph Breuer, with whom he corresponded throughout his Parisian venture. Freud idolised Charcot. He wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays of Charcot’s “genius […] simply wrecking all my aims and opinions” and how “no other human being has ever affected me in the same way” (Sulloway, 1979, p.31). They named their first-born Jean Martin; and Charcot was to hang over Freudian analysis quite literally: a print of the Brouillet painting discussed on p.20 (Figure 1.5), dedicated by Charcot as a leaving gift, had pride of place over Freud’s iconic couch in Vienna. It was transferred to London after his exile in 1939, where it remains at the Freud Museum to this day. By the 1880s, Charcot had become a controversial figure, promoting the unfashionable idea that hysteria was a condition from which men as well as women could suffer.1 Freud was deeply impressed. Feeling the need to stand out from the adoring crowd, he cannily attracted the Professor’s attention by offering to translate him into German. This gained Freud access to the ‘Charcoterie,’ enjoying soirées at Charcot’s house. The callow twenty-nine-yearold, fortified by cocaine, would find himself among distinguished contemporaries such as Giles de La Tourette and Alfonse Daudet. On returning to Vienna, he and Breuer began to craft their own theory of hysteria and its treatment for publication, developing from Breuer’s earlier work with a patient, ‘Anna O’, which fascinated Freud and in which he had tried, unsuccessfully, to arouse Charcot’s interest.2 Freud opened his own private practice in 1886. His ambition was to steer hysteria into new realms, himself at its helm. This involved both acknowledging and overturning his master’s voice. The potions, performances, and peculiar experiments in Charcot’s clinical razzmatazz were ineffectual laboratory experiments. Freud was interested both in the roots of hysteria and in finding therapeutic cure. If he disputed Charcot’s organic theories, both men, in treating feminine deviancy,

What she wants  persuaded patients to yield psychophysical secrets by touch and/ or verbal suggestion. Their different styles of direction in carefully designed theatres of discovery (Diamond,1997) each executed Foucault’s medical couple as a dance of masterful call and overwhelmed surrender that the Surrealists designated “reciprocal seduction” (Aragon and Breton, 1929, p.22). This was not a level playing field. “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” concluded Freud and Breuer in their Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.58). In 1893, they had co-published ‘On the Psychical mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,’ subsequently included in the volume. Their conclusion underlines the fact that this paper was “a step forward on the path traced so successfully by Charcot with his explanation and artificial imitation of hystero-traumatic paralyses” but that they have as yet to reach understanding “of the internal causes” (ibid., p.69). They set out some key terminology that Freud would come to develop in his Psychoanalytic enquiry: hysteria is idiopathic, a condition arising spontaneously for which the cause is unknown. A traumatic memory is repressed (ibid., p.61) and inhibited. This trauma, “or more precisely the memory of the trauma,” acts like a “foreign body” (ibid., pp.  56–70), a simile suggesting perturbing memory implanting in the unconscious causing inflammation and/or absorption. Abreaction is the expression, and consequent discharge, of repressed psychical trauma (ibid., p.59). Hysterical symptoms and the somatising of the original crisis constitute ‘conversion,’ the expression of trauma, whilst release lies in the emerging psychoanalytic method – at this early stage still presupposing that hypnotic treatment would bring about utterance on the otherwise unthinkable, leading the hypnotised patient to confront the original shock under the guidance of their analyst (ibid., pp.279–292). Studies parses case histories of five women treated by Breuer and Freud respectively, each with a pseudonym to protect their confidentiality in a tight knit bourgeois Jewish social circle (Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992; Masson, 1992). The authors’ Preface acknowledges this. Their experience “is derived from private practice in an educated and literate social class” as an explanation for the lack of “purely scientific grounds” upon which this emerging praxis is beginning to take shape (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.47). In this demographically limited pool, the first, most controversial, and legendary of the cases is ‘Anna O’, whose true name was Bertha Pappenheim. “Everything - the whole enterprise of modern psychotherapy” declares Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, in his demythologising of the Pappenheim case’s veracity (or the reporting thereof), “starts from this marvellous tale of Breuer’s, almost too good to be true. And it isn’t” (Borch-Jacobson, 1996, p.21). There isn’t the space here to detail this, nor weigh its reliability, deeper meanings, and affects, but

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What she wants suffice to say that Pappenheim, as one half of the psychoanalytic couple, invented the cathartic3 “talking cure,” describing this as “chimney sweeping” (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.83), the fantasy life of her daydreaming as her “private theatre” (ibid., p.74), and her hypnosis sessions as “clouds” (ibid., p.80). With her labile repertoire of symptoms – hallucinations, mutism (broken in one episode by inexplicable fluency in English whilst having lost the power to speak in her native tongue, German), deafness, squints, paralyses, headaches, coughs, neuralgia, hydrophobia, and episodes of anorexia – this bright, complex twenty-one-year-old, who had walked into Breuer’s care, decided to walk out two years later, in 1882. Remarkably, she totally recovered from her turbulent talking cure. Pappenheim’s case contributed to the Freudian nomenclature that appears in Studies: the term ‘transference’4 in which the analysand projects onto the analyst an erotic/intimate role in their life.5 This would become axiomatic in the evolution of the psychoanalytic method. Much has been written about the erotic overtones of this psychoanalytic couple’s relationship, her conviction that she was having Breuer’s baby (an ‘hysterical pregnancy’), and even suggestion that this case precipitated a suicide attempt by Breuer’s wife. Breuer appears to have been reluctant at the time to disclose the full facts of the case, an issue that John Gay attributes to his anxieties at the revelation of the sexual nature of such neurosis, “erotic theatre that Breuer found exceedingly disconcerting” (Gay, 1989, p.67). Freud’s original biographer, Ernest Jones,6 corroborated the idea that Breuer had been engaged in some kind of countertransference, noting Pappenheim’s “attractive” physique and personality that had “inflamed the heart of the psychiatrist in charge” in the sanatorium to which she was removed after her first phase of treatment (Jones, 1964, p.204). Freud had confided this countertransference and the episode of pseudocyesis7 to Marie Bonaparte, the wealthy author who supported him right through to his escape from Nazi Germany and who became an analyst herself. “Breuer, the Story goes,” argues BorchJacobsen, “frightened at having the sexual nature of Berthe’s illness so abruptly exposed, and hoping to calm her down, hypnotised her and then fled ‘in a cold sweat’” (Borch-Jacobson, 1996, pp.30–31). Jones writes that Breuer’s “love and guilt” made him bring the treatment to an abrupt end (Jones, 1964, p.203). It didn’t quite end there. Eventually Pappenheim herself asserted the cessation. Borch-Jacobsen’s contention is that Breuer was in fact far more professional than this narrative suggests, and that, despite this gossipy story peddled by Jones, the culprit of its mis-reconstruction was actually Freud, who had himself admitted knowing different versions of the case and its conclusion (Borch-Jacobsen, 1996, p.39). Breuer, meanwhile, wrote a disclaimer in Studies regarding the factual detail of the case

What she wants  histories.8 Borch-Jacobsen’s forensic work dismantles the very idea that Anna O, prototype of the psychoanalytic method, proved the success of treatment. He suggests that, like any story retold, the narrative may have been subject to embellishment. He also insists that Freud’s case history accounts can only ever be understood as interpretations of what actually transpired on his couch (ibid., p.38). This negative perspective on his life’s work as essentially subjective, unstable, even far-fetched, would represent the challenges to Freud’s life-long struggle: to prove Psychoanalysis not so much a social process but a scientific one.9 Freud corresponded about the Breuer/Bertha case with his fiancée Martha – indiscreetly, given the two women were friends – pruriently describing Bertha’s allure as having the power “to turn the head of the most sensible of men” (Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, p.82). Despite failing to engage his interest in this case, it was nonetheless from Charcot, given his quest to find hereditary cause, that he received the perhaps unexpected clue that all hysterias were rooted in the genitals (Owen, 1971, p.82). For Freud, the analyst’s function was to persuade the patient to overcome their resistance to facing the morally repellent fact of their earlier troubling sexual experience and/or repressed desires, and talk it out. This was dangerous material. For a woman of that era to confide in an older man possessing authority over her in his role as nerve doctor was high risk. Given his society’s patriarchal attitudes to women and their place, that Freud was challenging women to break open the seal on repressed memories, or even deny their veracity and designate them fantasy as he was eventually to do, was tantamount to replicating the same kind of oppressive behaviour these patients had experienced with their male abusers. A secular priest, Freud was not only taking confession but undertaking deep excavation of taboos disclosed. His patients were required to collaborate with his psychic archaeology by providing clues, images, symbols, and physical signs as well as words. The analyst/analysand rapport was/is intense, to say the least (Masson, 1992). When Pappenheim abandoned her eventful and energetic theatre-of-her-mind, she didn’t die from her suffering (as Jones wrote that Breuer had wished for her since she was “quite unhinged” (Jones, 1964, p.203)). Fully restored, she went on to develop a successful career as a writer and political activist, leaving unanswered questions about whether her hysteria might also have been fabricated, co-crafted by a powerful male figure and a powerless, susceptible, and fiercely imaginative young woman. Her case was published without her consent just over a decade after her treatment. She had hoped for her true identity not to be revealed. Whilst she became the famous pioneer subject of the psychoanalytic quest, she repudiated it. That her story was stolen from her has contributed to feminist protest against the

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What she wants patriarchal mechanism of the Freudian project; his insistence on women’s penis envy, which confused sexual organ with phallic privilege; and his appropriation of women’s experience of oppression. If lack of a penis is not taken literally as lack of biological organ, as Freud suggested, then this want, or envy, is women’s entirely appropriate and rightful desire for man’s status, agency, and privilege to inscribe themselves in what Jones coined the ‘phallocentric’ society. That Freud’s theories might have located a woman’s sexuality and her unconscious as being as important as a man’s was argued by Juliet Mitchell in her ground-breaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1976). Mitchell proposed that feminism must validate Freud’s theories precisely that he pinpoints the issue of sexual difference, from his perspective as a man both of his patriarchal time and ahead of it. Freud’s remaining cases in the Studies include Emmy Von M, Lucy R, Katerina, and Fraulein Elizabeth Von R. From the comfort of his Jewish conservatism as regards gender and marital norms, and without a trace of irony nor insight as to the revelatory meaning of these words, he notes that the latter “was in fact greatly discontented with being a girl. She was full of ambitious plans” (Freud and Breuer, 1988, p.207). Freud, a stubborn pioneer, building his intractable theory of sexual neuroses as the key to human unhappiness, sought ultimate understanding of the psyche, not only through his patients’ disclosures and his interpretation of these, but in the culture. He could only decipher his hysterics from what would later be proven as subjective and fallible constructions on gender and sexuality. Having located sexual abuse as the cause of hysterical suffering, subsequently confronting its epidemic proportions in his close Viennese circle that might also have implicated his own father, Freud volte-faced. He developed an alternative theory to argue that hysterical trauma derived from sexual fantasy. His pivot from the Seduction Theory to the Oedipal and Electra Complexes proved his unpardonable betrayal of the sexually oppressed and abused. Shifting the blame to the sexual imagination of sufferers rather than on the fathers, uncles, and family friends who transgressed with young vulnerable people was to turn the tables on understanding hysteria as mental illness. It was no longer about what lay outside the patient and caused such anguish that mattered, but what lurked within: the patient brought it all on herself through masturbation and repressed sexual proclivity. Freud was regressing to ancient concepts of woman’s condition itself as latent hysterical possibility. This has left Freud the subject of mistrust and contempt for both feminist and anti-psychiatry schools of thought. Masson declares all available psychotherapeutic models “wrong” (ibid., p.24) and “flawed” (ibid., p.29). Despite

What she wants  its adversaries, the potent inheritance of the Freudian paradigm, for all its errors, lies in forensic examination of the relationship between past and present, memory and experience, feelings and their frequently somatised expression. It enables understanding of human emotional disturbance as conditioned from lived experience rather than as consequence of pathological and/or inherited predisposition. Freud’s theories retain the essential idea that we are made into what we are through what happens to us, inside and out (in fact), and that mental illnesses are not necessarily caused by hereditary or congenital malfunction. In short, suffering is not a destiny. Change is possible. Freud studied classical mythology, figurative art across the ages,10 and possessed catholic tastes in literature. He read widely, into classical drama and contemporary novelists, poets, and playwrights. He greatly admired the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, “a courageous iconoclast” (Gay, 1989, p.166). He published a controversial analysis of Ibsen’s Rebecca West from Romersholm (Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, p.115). Meanwhile, he doubtlessly discussed Ibsen with his friend Lou Andreas Salomé, who had come to Vienna to study psychoanalysis with him in 1912 at the age of fifty-one. Already a distinguished intellectual, closely associated with luminaries such as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and theatre director Max Reinhart, Salomé had published her searching Ibsen’s Heroines in 1892. Her intricate analysis of Ibsen’s female protagonists suggests that she was already conversant with Freud’s published writings. Discussing the central character in his twenty-first play The Lady from the Sea, produced in 1888, when he was sixty years old, her prose bears the hallmark of psychoanalytic theory: “Ellida’s path to the external is blocked, and she sickens in the depths of her inwardness, where she is limited to a life of fantasy” (Salomé, 1985, p.113), and Although Wangel’s act of love gives Ellida a feeling of freedom in his presence, it insufficiently explains her restoration to health; it only induces a crisis that will run its course successfully. True, the manic feeling that she is imprisoned has disappeared, but the root cause of her mania has not. Salomé contributes important feminist insight in “Ellida suffered […] from an unchecked aimlessness of being,11 which necessarily produce an inner imagination synonymous with madness and mental derangement” (ibid., p.117). She comments that not all Ibsen’s heroines experience the same marriages nor relationship to their struggle for liberty in the same way: Nora (Doll’s House) is seeking an ideal form of emancipation from marriage, whilst Ellida’s suffering is from inner turmoil, surrounded by men who disempower her, from her father to Wangel to The Stranger

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What she wants (ibid., p.121). The eponymous Hedda Gabler, meanwhile, may only prove her inner freedom “by cancelling herself out” (ibid., p.145). Hedda’s suicide from her father’s (phallic) pistol, with which she has repeatedly toyed in the play, is considered by Salomé the natural consequence of her “lack of inwardness and capacity to develop” (ibid., p.130). If Hedda suffers from deficient maternal instincts and desires, hemmed in by a life against which she is in revolt but incapable of escaping, Ellida’s emancipation from similarly claustrophobic bourgeois domesticity eventually comes from neither auto-destructive nor material, but psychic release. One of the sections of La Jeune Née12 is titled ‘Sorties,’ meaning outings, departures, releases: “We don’t stay in your houses; we are not going to remain in your beds. We wander” (Cixous and Clément, 1987, p.67). Strikingly common to Augustine, Anna O, and Dora (even Frau Emmy Von M, who eventually replaces Freud with another doctor), Ibsen’s Nora and Hedda, is that they all make an exit. They are quitters. They quit because it’s the only choice available to them. If Psychoanalysis constitutes an intimate relationship between two parties, and marriage is assumed to be one, these women, constrained by their social and economic condition and offered little agency, use their own material presence/absence to (re)move themselves in protest from a contract that is disappointing or failing them, be this marital or medical. Their departures signal renouncement, and for the most part they give no notice. Within this scheme of making a move lies the very core principle of Psychoanalysis itself for “At the heart of psychoanalysis is an ideology of movement, of the curative potential of moving” (Phelan in Leigh Foster, 1996, p.95). If neurosis signifies being stuck in a past that inhibits healthy progress, treatment is designed to dislodge impacted trauma that lurks in the id, that has been censored by the ego and makes possible the next steps in life, that today we call ‘moving on’ – to be, as Freud offered, on a path towards at least some kind of common human unhappiness.13 My next protagonist struggles to move on by swimming her way out of what is eating her. Movement and progress, for Ibsen’s Ellida, is conveyed more as an abiding pining to depart and an eventual desperate plan to do so that she subsequently reverses. This compulsion is signalled in a recurring set of unheeded warnings. The text is awash with allusion to Nordic sea myths. Ellida expresses throughout the play her neurotic despair and yearning for what she seeks in sea life that land life fails to deliver. She leaves daily clues about her desolation. She doesn’t conceal her angst. She doesn’t feign. Yet she remains, until the end, unable to shift anything. She re-enacts her gestures of rebellion, her repetition neurosis (Freud, 2015) expressed in daily (apparently naked) dives into the sea, identification with its creatures, and dreams of departure. Her very first

What she wants  entrance would be startling to a 19th-century bourgeois audience if the production followed Ibsen’s stage directions: “ELLIDA WANGEL comes through the trees by the arbour, wearing a large, lightweight bathing wrap, her hair wet and spread over her shoulders” (Ibsen, 1980, p.136). Given Ibsen’s habitual attention to detail, the wet hair and wrap leave little to the imagination. With Ellida, Ibsen takes the woman’s urge to resign and elasticates this, imbuing it with poetic and mythical resonance. Ellida eventually plans an elopement with a man from her past called ‘The Stranger’ until her husband fully realises the cause of her desperation to flee and offers her the key – his prerogative as a 19th-century male – to her freedom. It is at the option of choice that Ibsen twists the plot and makes Ellida paradoxically decide to stay since she is no longer trapped but existentially free of the normal obligations of being a wife-without-occupation. Ibsen, an astute psychologist, is asserting that if a woman cannot yet be afforded economic independence, she can at least begin to establish, within the confines of marriage, that she has elected to be there, an equal, albeit domesticated. There is little talk of women’s labour in Ibsen’s plays. He is writing in a period when the suffrage movement was gaining traction, and he contributed to the debates of First Wave Norwegian feminism that had begun in the 1840s. Norwegian women were eventually among the earliest in Europe to get the vote, in 1913.14 But like many of Ibsen’s female protagonists, Ellida, though possessing intellect and spirit, is without financial independence, a recipe for the typical 19th-century hysterical disaster. In this play there is constructive talk of emotional and psychological liberty, of what, as Freud would ask Bonaparte, ‘does a woman want?’,15 ‘want’ being such a potently loaded word that denotes both desire and lack. For Freud, women’s lack is of a penis, giving rise to his highly contested penis envy postulation in which woman can only be relative to phallic power.16 Freud actually contradicted this patriarchal professional perspective in his private life, given his sprightly intellectual relationships with emancipated women such as Salomé, Bonaparte, and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays. Within the rise of French post-Marxist and Feminist critical theory projects of the 1970s and 1980s, Freudian theory was critiqued by women thinkers such as Kristeva, Irigary, and Cixous, who developed philosophical and political discourses, debating also Lacan’s theory of reformulating Freud’s anatomical theories on clitoris, vagina, and penis towards the idea of the symbolic phallus as distinct from biological. For Ibsen, Ellida’s drive is not only for symbolic, phallic, agency. What she wants, and precisely lacks, is equal power with her husband in the domestic arrangement. Ibsen knew that access to existential choice rather than designated fate might begin with mental disposition. Freedom is ultimately social and economic, but it is also psychological and

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What she wants emotional. Like the Studies women, Ellida is suffering a version of hysteric illness. Acutely, along with Hedda and Nora, she is suffering from her bourgeois lot itself. Ibsen’s realism connects the new science of psychoanalysis with his protagonist’s aetiology. His contemporary audience were asked to identify with these characters, assuming therefore that an hysteric response to patriarchal society lurked both on stage and in the auditorium (Diamond, 1990–1991). Ibsen’s protagonists suffering domestic tragedy revealed their past as the root of their misery, beating the air in their on-stage drawing rooms whose décor mirrored those of their audience.17 Diamond asserts that “hysteria provides stage realism with one of its richest, and ideologically, one of its most satisfying plots” (ibid., p.60)18 and proposes The Lady from Sea as Ibsen’s “optimistic ‘case history’ of the hysteric” (ibid., p.20). The play’s narrative follows a therapeutic journey. As this unfolds, we learn that Ellida is the childless young wife of an older doctor, Wangel. Like Emmy Von N, Freud’s first case study, she is the second wife of an older man whose stepchildren treat her as an outsider (the confusion between mother/ stepmother recurs in short dialogues re-enforcing her outsider status in the household). They live in a remote spot by a fjord, not those beautiful Nordic scenes of mountain peaks and crystal depths, but a hemmed-in, stale lagoon. Desperately trapped by her condition, Ellida obsessively dives daily into these ‘sick’ waters. She craves to swim out from this trapped stagnation to an open sea, but is incapable. She can only stare at the horizon, the reach of which is beyond her control. She swims (naked as a baby, perhaps, regressing) in neurotic despair, struggling to escape her condition. The depths into which she is diving, in psychoanalytic terms, represent the toxic profundities of her stifled unconscious. The play brims with images of marine creatures – birds, mammals, and fish – with which Ellida deeply identifies: mostly we talked about whales and dolphins, and seals that lie out on the islands when it’s hot. And we spoke of gulls and eagles and other sea birds, you know. And, isn’t it strange? when we talked about these things, I had a feeling that these sea beasts and sea birds were somehow the same blood as he […] I felt almost as if I were one of them too. (Ibsen, 1980, p.155) Ellida is so associated with the sea that the character Ballested has been inspired to make a painting he thinks of calling ‘The Death of The Mermaid’ (ibid., p.128). The suggestion that Ellida is from the sea, as Ibsen’s title reinforces, links her not only to a symbolic place of the unconscious (the ocean) but to

What she wants  mythological heritage. If she is a dead mermaid, this is because she is a mythic woman now trapped in the dry land of patriarchal domesticity. Ellida is alienated in that bourgeois house on the edge of a Fjord in which she finds herself washed up. Her mental illness is referred to more than once: HILDE: God knows why Father ever dragged her into the house! I shouldn’t be surprised if she went off her head one of these fine days. BOLETTE: Off her head? How can you say such a thing? HILDE: It wouldn’t surprise me. Her mother went mad. She died in an asylum. I know. (Ibsen, 1980, p.150)

That her mother died in an asylum suggests that something might have been amiss in her marriage (Ibsen never clarifies this), whilst the lighthouse in which Ellida was raised by her father might be understood as a site of both social isolation and a (pre-Freudian) phallic symbol. Ellida herself makes frequent references to the ‘insanity’ of her past, such as the time when Arnholm had proposed to her when she was in love with The Stranger. She repeats the phrase “the whole thing was insane” twice in this dialogue (ibid., pp.139–140) and tells him that she couldn’t speak of what was going on at the time because “You would only think I was ill or mad” (ibid., p.140).19 Analysing the play as a pre-psychoanalytic model of therapeutic processes, two contemporary Adlerian20 authors introduce the meaning of the mermaid who recurs in the play as key to understanding Ibsen’s psychological insights. Ibsen was going to call this play “The Mermaid” in fact (Stone and Wagner, 2014, p.63). The Norwegian word eventyr signifies the magical world of mermaids, mermen and trolls […] Trolls serve as a mythic symbol for what inhibits human progress and keep us from fulfilling a course of action […] are the dregs of our unconscious. (Ibid., p.66) I propose that in this scheme, Ellida, seawoman, connotes wetness, her landman husband: dryness. From this analogy follows the suggestion of sexual longing versus sexlessness, or even impotence. Like the fairy tale The Little Mermaid (Andersen, 2014), it is impossible for this oceanic woman to possess both the freedom of the sea and life on (man’s) land. Where the Little Mermaid sacrifices her voice to obtain legs (genitalia), Ellida has sacrificed her freedom of choice for marital security to a man she doesn’t love, in a household in which she is barely tolerated by her judgemental step-daughters. Ellida knows that however much she is

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What she wants controlled by the patriarchal condition that blocks her, her inner life is her own. She is unambiguous about this: Wangel! Let me say this […] Of course you can keep me here. You have the power and the means to do so. And that is what you want me to do. But my mind, my thoughts, my dreams and longings, those you cannot imprison. They strain to roam and hunt, out into the unknown, which I was born for, and which you have locked me away from. (Ibsen, 1980, pp. 205–206) Ellida’s quest is precisely towards unlocking what she wants, and she does this by confronting her unconscious self, represented by the mysterious Stranger, her soulmate, to whom she declares she is more truly married than to Wangel, with whom an arrangement was established for pragmatic reasons. This holds clues to her anxiety. Ellida, along with other of Ibsen’s neurotic heroines who seem “to have been aware of their own fear of sexuality and everything that it involves” (Hartman, 2004, p.4), has not been able to fulfil her sexuality due to her fear of intimacy and motherhood, whilst her relationship to the older Wangel is more like a child’s love for its parents and represents a flight from the strong sexual feelings that The Stranger had awakened in her and that she felt unable to control. Later, after the death of her son, Ellida refused to have sex with her husband and has not had intercourse with him for three years. (Ibid., p.5)21 Freud’s earliest theory on anxiety neurosis (Strachey, 1962) asserted that this was unequivocally caused by women’s sexual lives: either they were not fulfilled sexually, or they were abstinent.22 In the sense of linking anxiety and distress with lack of sexual fulfilment, for all his more problematic theoretical advancements, one can propose Freud as a kind of proto (hetero)sexual counsellor, advising that a healthy sex life was key to happiness (Appignannesi and Forrester, 1992). Ellida’s thwarted passion signals that the longing she suggests is her destiny, out of reach in the early part of the play, gradually becomes an attainable gratification the closer the beckoning call of The Stranger approaches. Where there has been inner resistance23 to free herself from what binds her, any eventual defiance is outward-facing: she resists the normal assumptions of marital relations. Her transformation demonstrates the-personal-as-political: that the human psyche is conditioned by experience, and that structures of power exist not only in the external world but are internalised in the interior landscape of the mind.

What she wants  Among several neologisms Ibsen invented, not always precisely translatable, is Livslögnen, meaning ‘Life-lie,’ generally mis-translated as ‘illusion’ (Stone and Wagner, 2014). The Lifelie was taken up by the post-Freudian psychoanalyst Adler as referring to the way an individual might construct a fantasy inner life. This is equivalent to self-deception, providing a private imaginative coping mechanism, because facing the truth can be impossibly painful and the ego puts up resistance to safeguard distressing memories. Life-lie is akin to the Freudian mechanism of repression – only here abreaction finds expression in the imagination rather than being somatised. Life-lie is a potent and revealing term for what Ellida is enduring. If, to Freud, dreams are wish-fulfilments, it is Ellida’s waking dreams, her scenes, images, and creatures, representing potential libidinous happiness, that consume her fretting mind. They are also the one space she can claim as her own, even if they turn out to inhibit her ability to lead a fulfilled life. These are the “dreams and longings” (Ibsen, 1980, p.205) that she asserts as her own private theatre. It is the Life-lie that, like repressed and unspoken trauma, impedes progress; it is what ties people down, traps them in their past, or even, in the case of Ellida, lures them into potentially dangerous waters, for she both keens for and is terrified of the/her (hysterical) depths. The mythical Troll clings to the bottom of ships, sinking them. The Troll in psychoanalytic terms represents the Life-lying internal self, that, if not confronted, can only perpetuate debilitating misery and delusion. Ellida’s Life-lie is complex. It is expressed both in The Stranger and his sea-beast blood, to which she feels she belongs, and in those briny creatures she spends her days swimming with or intently gazing upon. Her neurotic/hysterical condition that necessitates this Life-lie comprises: being the (motherless) child of an insane mother; the daughter of an isolated/isolating man; a woman who has lost a baby; a wife stuck in a loveless marriage; a free spirit geographically isolated from both urban civilisation and Nature; and a woman with deep and unfulfilled sexual desire. Ibsen implies that Ellida’s condition began when she lost the baby (ibid., p.158). Evidently, as above, sex has not occurred since that moment. This scene ends with an intriguing exchange between the husband and wife regarding the eyes of their dead child (ibid., pp.160–161). The insinuation is that Ellida was somehow impregnated by The Stranger, even though she claims she had not seen him since seven years prior to her pregnancy. This adds to the play’s mythical dimension, also suggesting an element of guilt and repression on Ellida’s part. The plot remains unclear as to the relationship between fact and fiction. What is remarkable here, unlike Freud’s hysteric patients, is that the mechanism of Ellida’s repression doesn’t appear to be based on sexual shame. In fact she remonstrates with Wangel for suggesting this. She is guilty of her (perhaps) phantom infidelity/pregnancy, but is

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What she wants forthcoming in discussing this with her husband, something that Freud’s analysands were incapable of doing outside of their confidential and special relationship with the persuasive doctor and his earlier techniques of haptically induced hypnosis. Ellida is desirous of another life/man/sexual experience. She doesn’t conceal this. Rather, the narrative lets this libidinous truth unfold. She not only summons The Stranger (the erotic) in her constant reference to her longing for the open sea, but, by dint of this, conjures his presence, whether literal or figurative, into the marital dialogic space. It is not morality-based repression from which that she is suffering. Ellida doesn’t subscribe to bourgeois morals even though she demonstrates respect for Wangel. It is her embodied experience of immobility and lack of control in that remote house on the fjord, on the edge of everything she craves, that pains her. Ellida is a thwarted nonconformist, a woman less interested in the formalities of the expectations of marriage and who is, rather, experiencing the trauma of her womanhood itself: lack of agency as an independent, creative individual. Her motherlessness might be a clue to her strength and her independence, but might also explain her failure to relate to her step-children, whilst they themselves seem reluctant, if not hostile, to her replacing their dead mother whose birthday they are memorialising in the opening of the play. Without maternal model of their class and time such women might transcend prescribed rules and emancipate themselves. They might be able to invent their own path in the struggle for equality, independence, and authenticity, be different and do things that ‘people don’t do.’24 These enigmatic and unique characters strive to forge their own terms of engagement with varying degrees of success. Ellida is a typical only-lonely child who has learned to live in her fantasy world. Her pathway out of the banality of her immediate surroundings is through thinking “in pictures and visual images” (ibid., p.207), but hers is a frustrated optic. Her hysteric condition is a protest against the obstruction to her true identity and fulfilment, expressed in a constant stream of marine metaphor and allusion. If she thinks imagistically, she is hardly mute. On the contrary, she finds words to declare what’s going on in her head, even if she never quite reveals what the original trigger to her angst might have been – in Freudian terms, ‘the primal scene’ of childhood traumatic event. Her unhappy past is only hinted at. The noxious effect of her anguish gets instantly cleansed by the shift to choice. Thus, choice itself becomes a decisive motor to transformative healing. Ibsen doesn’t provide a revelatory scene in terms of forensic discovery. The discovery, or revelation, lies within Ellida’s psyche itself, for she possesses enough self-knowledge to recognise that the external force pulling her towards what she also recognises as auto-destructive is not real, but that “The root of that fascination lies in my own

What she wants  mind” (ibid., p.190). When external pressure is removed, and internal drive is accommodated, and the two are reconciled, she experiences an immediate and almost magical erasure of misery, a sense of cure and recovery, and an acceptance of her lot. The Stranger, whose arrival motivates a change of heart for both Ellida and Wangel, remains an obscure apparition, so much so that on first reading one might wonder if he only exists in Ellida’s mind, even though he does appear to Wangel also in the turning point of the plot in Act 5. The Stranger defines Ellida’s Life-lie, her true but imperilled other half, the epitome of her authentic self: “he said that we two were going to marry ourselves to the sea” (ibid., p.157). Transmuted symbolically in her Life-lie into birds and sea creatures, he calls to her like a siren.25 It is in facing her libido, personified in The Stranger and the choice he is offering to plunge into her true self and renounce her landlocked oppression, that releases Ellida into finding the freedom from which she is exiled, and from which she is suffering. Her hysteria doesn’t manifest in physical twitches, paralyses, or sensory shut-down, but in feelings of suffocation and a compulsion to dive repeatedly into the filthy Fjord (her obscure past and psychological pollution), to surface none the wiser. Wangel, with children close to Ellida’s own age, and who is, significantly, a doctor, detects her hysterical condition. Declaring “how difficult it is for a doctor to diagnose for a patient that means a lot to him!” and that her condition and mental state “isn’t any ordinary illness” (ibid., p.181), he assumes a healing/psychotherapeutic role. In a dialogue that leads to discussing the economic terms of their marriage, he guides her to understand the influence of The Stranger on her psyche and suggests, sympathetically, that his coming to meet her “may be what you need to bring you back to health,” even though this might prove a challenge to his own hold over her (ibid., p.186). Ellida meanwhile, once she has faced the option of leaving with The Stranger, followed by her unpredictable reversal to remain by Wangel’s side, says “you have been a good doctor to me. You discovered, and dared to prescribe, the right remedy - the only one that could have cured me” to which Wangel replies “When things are desperate, we doctors have to take desperate measures” (ibid., p.207). Wangel eventually comes to realise that his power over the will of this creature he has procured into marriage, however benignly, must give way – that healing will only come about if he lets her depart from his failing marital-therapeutic treatment, and it is precisely in his abdication of male spousal authority that Ellida is socially liberated from marital entrapment and psychoanalytically unlocked from her oppressive Life-lie. In an extraordinarily modern scene, a dénoument (literally meaning: un-knotting) or turning point, an existential conundrum in couple relationships unfurls. Put simply, a woman wants to leave

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What she wants her husband for another man. He grants her the freedom to do so, without prejudice. As soon as he declares this, she decides to stay because at last she feels free. As a late 19th-century character in a bourgeois realist drama, penned by a liberal feminist thinker, The Lady quite simply, but desperately, needs to know that she possesses control over her own destiny – an open sea and all its resonances – rather than the murky one into whose wreck below she has been repeatedly diving,26 perpetuating neurotic despair cyclically and without issue. It is in this scene that psychoanalytic catharsis takes place. With the possibility of freedom of choice, progress (movement) is made, and with this comes Ibsen’s paradoxical reversal: Ellida decides not to move on but to remain, possessing the means now to advance psychologically and emotionally, at least. The dialogue, meanwhile, lays bare the economic contract of 19th-century European bourgeois marriage, analogous, as feminists would argue, to legalised prostitution: ELLIDA: The real truth of the matter is that you came out there and bought me.WANGEL: Bought? Did you say bought? ELLIDA: Oh, I wasn’t any better than you. I agreed to the bargain. Left home and sold myself to you. (Ibid., p.187)

The question of husband owning his wife as a chattel is explicit, as is the very idea of legal divorce: ELLIDA:

Let me leave you. Let me go Wangel.

[…] WANGEL: You’ve never really belonged to me… divorce then? Is this what you want? A full, legal divorce? (Ibid., p.188)

Ellida, however, is operating on other terms than legal ones – the level of human psychology: ELLIDA: How little you understand me! I’m not interested in the formalities. All I want is that we two should freely agree to release each other. WANGEL: Cancel the bargain, you mean? ELLIDA: Exactly, cancel the bargain. […] WANGEL: We’re talking of choices? Choice Ellida? ELLIDA: Yes, I must be free to choose. (Ibid., pp.184–192)

What this woman wants, deep down and unequivocally, is to live in freedom.

What she wants 

Notes

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19 20

21

22

23 24 25 22

because it needs a reality as referent, and re-enforces this, even if it argues with it (p.61). Ibsen’s Ghosts deals with the topic of fatality and mental illness, scandalising his audiences and critics. Alfred Adler, along with Carl Gustav Jung, had played a significant part in the early Psychoanalytic Movement, subsequently becoming ‘secessionists.’ Adler, wrote Freud, “entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality” and “traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men’s desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiority” (Freud, 2010, p.97). Freud insisted that such ‘heretics’ not call their work Psychoanalysis, an intolerance for which he was much criticised and against which he hotly defended himself – and ultimately failed. In Act 2, Wangel attributes their loss of sexual relationship to Ellida’s guilt at having taken the place of his first wife: “You feel as though there is something - indecent in our relationship. That’s why you can’t why you don’t want to live with me as my wife any longer” (p.153). This false diagnosis leads Ellida to confess to him that she had been in love earlier, not with Arnholm, as Wangel assumed, but with The Stranger. Freud had, after all, learned this theory directly from the mouth of Charcot who, in his forcefully ‘proven’ arguments for the physiological basis of the condition, always maintained that the hysteric had a sexual predisposition, famously letting slip, as overhead by a puzzled Freud, that “in such cases it’s always the genital thing, always... always” (Freud, 1948 p. 295). In Freudian terms, the work of repression that must be broken down in the analytic process. As Judge Brack says of Hedda Gabler’s suicide (Ibsen, 1989). Mermaids/men were also said to be sea lions on rocks at night, heard crying but only dimly seen in the dark from ships by sailors. “I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail” (Rich, 2013, p.22).

References Aragon, L. and Breton, A. (1929) La Revolution Surrealiste. No. 11, 15, Mars Quatriéme Edition. Paris: Gallimard. Borch-Jacobson, M. (1996) Remembering Anna O: A Century of Mystification. Olson, K. (trans.) New York; London: Routledge. Christian Andersen, H. (2014) The Little Mermaid. USA: Hytholday Press. Cixous, H. and Clément, C. (1987) The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née). Wing, B. (trans.) Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Conroy, C. (2010) Theatre and the Body. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Diamond, E. (Fall-Winter, 1990–1991) ‘Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis,’ Discourse, Vol. 13, No. 1, A Special Issue on the Emotions, 59–92. Wayne State University Press. ——— (1997) Unmaking Mimesis, Essays on Feminism and Theater. London; New York: Routledge.

What she wants  Felman, S. (1993) What Does A Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Freud, S. (1948) ‘Charcot,’ Collected Papers, Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press. ——— (1962) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: (1893–1899) Early PsychoAnalytic Publications. Strachey, J. (trans.) London: The Hogarth Press. ——— (1977a) Sigmund Freud 1: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Strachey, A. and Strachey, J. (trans.) London; New York: Penguin Books. ——— (1977b) Sigmund Freud 2: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Strachey, A. and Strachey, J. (trans.) London; New York: Penguin Books. ——— (1977c) Sigmund Freud 8: Case Histories 1: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans.’ Strachey, A. and Strachey, J. (trans.) London; New York: Penguin Books. ——— (1989) On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company. ——— (1997) Sexuality and Psychology of Love. New York: Touchstone. ——— (2005) Civilization and Its Discontents. Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.) New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ——— (2010) An Autobiographical Study. New York: Martino Publishing. ——— (2015) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mineola; New York: Dover Publications. Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1988) Studies on Hysteria. Luckhurst, N. (trans.) London: Penguin Books. Furse, A. (2001) ‘A Spectacle of Suffering,’ in Coulter-Smith, J. (ed.) The Visual-Narrative Matrix: Interdisciplinary Collisions and Collusions. Southampton: Southampton Institute of Art, pp. 73–77. ——— (2011). ‘In Every Litre of Seawater There Are Two Tablespoons of Salt…, On Making Sea/Woman,’ Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, 411–427. Gay, P. (1989) Freud: A Life for Our Time. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Goetz, C. G. (trans.) (1987) Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons, Excerpts from Nine Case Presentations on General Neurology Delivered at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1887–88. New York: Raven Press. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hartmann, E. (2006) ‘Ibsen’s Motherless Women,’ Ibsen Studies. Taylor and Francis, pp. 80–91. Hegel, G. W. F. (2003) The Phenomenology of Mind. Baillie, J. B. (trans.) Mineola: Dover Publications.

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What she wants Ibsen, H. (1980) The Dolls’ House. Meyer, M. (trans.) London: Methuen. ——— (1980) Plays: Three, Rosmershorm, The Lady from the Sea Little Eyolf. Meyer, M. (trans.) London: Eyre Methuen. ——— (1989) Hedda Gabler. Hampton, C. (trans.) London: Samuel French. Jones, E. (1964) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. London: Penguin. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Masson, J. (1992) Against Therapy. London: Harper Collins. Mitchell, J. (1976) Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin Books. Newton, M. (1995) Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis. New York; London: Guilford Press. Rich, A. (2013) Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1970–1971. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Salomé, L. (1985) Ibsen’s Heroines. Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books. Stanislavski, C. (2013) An Actor Prepares. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ——— (2014) Building a Character. London: Routledge. Stone. M. H. and Wagner, C. (2014) Henrik Ibsen: Poet, Playwright and Psychologist. Bloomington: iUniverse LLC. Sulloway, F. J. (1979) Freud. Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. London: Burnett Books. Szasz, T. S. (1987) The Myth of Mental Illness. London: Paladin. Williams, H. (1988) Whale Nation. London: Jonathan Cape. Zanuso, B (1986) The Young Freud. Oxford; New York: Basil Blackwell.

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Sea/Woman Taking the actor’s autobiographical identification with Ellida as a starting point, applying a post-Freudian feminist interpretation of the character’s hysteria, and comparing the play’s leitmotif of a polluted sea to contemporary marine eco catastrophe, this text was fashioned from Ibsen (in the Meyer translation), adding material from Heathcote William’s epic poetic lament for the whaling industry ‘Whale Nation’, and text from improvisation as well as my own. Maja Mitić is herself/an actress, encountering the Ibsen text in two languages (Serbian and English). From a Stanislavskian methodology of Emotion Memory, she locates not only her own anxiety, but her screaming anguish at ecological catastrophe. The image of an albatross chick dead from starvation, its belly bursting with floating plastic detritus that its mother has instinctively fed it, became the underscoring motif, today augmented by whale corpses with bellyfulls of plastic bags. Williams’s text lists scores of uses for whale products, including whalebone corsets (constraining Ibsen’s heroines) and nitroglycerine that is used in making bombs (Maja was in Belgrade during the NATO bombings of 1999). Sea/Woman uses the device of many postdramas: repetition, in its very sense of the word, as in the French term ‘répétition’ for rehearsal and the Serbian word for the same, ‘proba,’ which means to dig deep. Our Woman/Maja dives deep into the Ibsen text, repeating this to herself, to unlock a contemporary interpretation of what was a play already ahead of its time. The production involves physical action, not only on, but in between, the text. The word ‘remember’ means to rejoin parts. Sea/Woman is made from memory, about memory and memorising. During our collaboration, Maja visited Kornati, a collection of Croatian islands. Contemplating the empty, dry land and seascape from a boat, twenty five dolphins suddenly circled her. In working through this memory, its significance dawned on us: she was born in Croatia when her homeland was Yugoslavia. This was her first trip back since the civil war divided the nation. Maja had lost ‘her’ coast, the seaside she had grown up with as a child. The dolphins were a welcome ‘home.’ She eats paprika like apples in the performance, the smell of them significant in her cultural memory.

Emotion Memory is a technique where the actor locates an emotion they once felt and applies it to the character they are playing, whilst seeking a way to not to be overwhelmed by the original memory. This is one of the cornerstones of Stanislavksi’s ‘System’ and is proposed, along with other key concepts, in his book ‘An Actor Prepares.’ This was towards the end of the civil war in Yugoslavia, also known as the Balkan War 1991–2001.

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What she wants A red paprika dangles inside the transparent white dress that hangs centre stage, a human heart, for Maja/Ellida is eating her heart out. In the last scene, an edited version of the change-of-mind Wangel/Ellida scene from Act 5 is performed. Breaking the fourth wall, Maja invites a member of the audience to volunteer to read Wangel from a text provided in his own language, whilst she dresses as a version of her contemporary self. The last image is of molasses seeping out of her mouth, like crude oil, which she smears across her face (Figure 2.2, p.110). Another marine catastrophe had haunted our rehearsal process: the Mexican Gulf oil spill crisis. The smear of oil, or ‘black blood,’ across Maja’s smiling, knowing complicity with the spectator, finally brings the representation theme full circle: we are, after all, in the theatre. The production was created by Athletes of the Heart in association with DAH Teatar, Belgrade. It was revived and re-premiered in February 2020 with the NKC Centre, Niš, Serbia, THE COMPANY TEXT, DRAMATURGY and DIRECTION PERFORMER, CO-CREATOR SCENOGRAPHER LIGHTING DESIGNER SOUND DESIGN

Anna Furse Maja Mitić Antonella Diana Mischa Twitchin Miloslav Cvetkovic

The stage is minimally set. Floor lights. Litre plastic water bottles strewn around. A large blue bag contains objects used in the performance - boots, books, paprika, water bottle, fabric, cigarettes and lighter. A pile of books serves as a seat for the performer. A translucent Wedding Dress hangs CS, glowing from within, a large ghostly lampshade. Deep blue general lighting giving an atmosphere of late night solitude. I have discovered that in theatre you can illuminate a very small object and that, depending on the audience proxemics of course, this can ‘read.’ The wedding ring must glow in the dark, emblematic of the whole piece.

Ibsen’s words are in bold parenthesis. Williams’s and Stanislavski’s in italics. The ACTRESS moves between playing herself and the Ibsen character ELLIDA. This must be understood in the way she speaks text. Darkness. The sounds of whales singing and seabirds loud and close. ACTRESS facing US in black robe. As HL fade. Total darkness. Turns DS. Walks very slowly and controlled USL in downstage line to DSL. Light from a small torch she is holding illuminates her wedding ring.

What she wants  MAJA:

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(hesitant, searchingly)

I think and feel in pictures and visual images Performs fragments of a physical score that she forgets. Distributes bottles of water downstage. Turns on light bulb. Perhaps you thought that was my text. It wasn’t. It was from Ibsen. Not the Lady from the Sea’s words (she's called Ellida) but what her older husband Wangel says to her, about her. The play is about the second wife of a doctor living by a fjord. She feels trapped, she suffers from deep and terrible ennui. She is obsessed with the sea, and with a man from her past simply called ‘The Stranger’ who suddenly appears from a ship, offering escape. Her husband comes to understand how powerful this pull towards another life is, and offers her a separation. The moment he does this, she changes her mind and decides to stay, because at last she feels free. The play was written in 1888 when Ibsen was 60. I’ve been to Ibsen’s house. The light there is wonderful, clear and clean. His house is very simple, full of pale wood, blue and white china, white cotton, glass…

My own starting points when creating/writing a new work. I tend to start with a theatrical image/visual premise/ metaphoric space.

Night and day, winter and summer it fills me - this longing for the sea. Fresh? Dear God, the water here is never fresh. It’s lifeless and stale. Ugh! The water is sick here in the fjord…Yes, sick. I mean I think it makes one sick. Poisonous too. She ‘coughs up’ a plastic bottle top under the light bulb. A whale moans.

The first allusion to contemporary marine pollution.

Pours salt over the bottles as she speaks: In every litre of seawater there are about two tablespoons of salt, or 35 grams. In all the oceans put together there is about 26 thousand million, million, tons of salt. There are also about 92 tons of radium, 2.6 million tons of silver and 5.3 million tons of gold. Drinking seawater doesn’t make you mad as they say, but it can certainly kill you. Because drinking that amount of salt causes acute dehydration. Drinks from plastic bottle. Water pours from her mouth as she looks at wedding ring finger – hysterical contraction of hand (Figure 2.1, p.103). Start to pull at ring. I don’t know how I could begin to tell you. You would only think I was ill or mad.

c.f. allusion to salt in Augustine (Big Hysteria): the ancient idea of salt as an anathema to evil that can protect from witchcraft.

The hysterical contraction here is borrowed from Augustine. See Chapter 1.

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Maja worked for years with Dah Teatar, a women’s company with close affinity to Barba’s Odin Teatret. Physical scores, developed from Jerzy Grotowski’s work by Eugenio Barba, also differently by Michael Chekov and others, are a psychophysical way into locating emotion or inner action and meaning. By expressing the idea/moment/ action/character/ emotion in large, expressive movement scores, derived from improvisational research, the performer can then use these scores, by internalising them, to nourish their performance. Physical scores in our production drew on material from Grande Hystérie - Augustine’s photos. This enabled Maja, a highly physical performer, to embody the entirety of the meaning of the piece, an actress-playing-anactress. Boots because ELLIDA and WANGEL are living in wild terrain. Also this footwear lifts our Ellida from her specific era and makes her legible as our contemporary also. Maja, the actress. To walk in other people’s shoes is an act of identification. Stanislavski also speaks of shoes as a way to find the character one is playing.

Puts heavy boots on her hands and slams them across face. Bursts into very fast physical score, running round in circles in between. Your will has no power over me anymore. Takes off boots. I step into other people’s shoes for a living. Looking for a way…. How to perform… For authenticity… And sometimes I forget my scores, text, memories. Opens plastic box, sits on it and eats red paprika. Starts to read from script. She is working out a translation. VASA VOLJA NEMA NADA MNOM VISE NI MALO UTICAJA! But this is ridiculous! She is using formal address! How do they have sex, I mean?! “Your will has no power over me any more…Your will has no power over me any more” ….OK “Your mind is like the sea, it flows and ebbs…what changed you” Hmm maybe the moon!.. Distracted They’re selling the moon. You can buy an acre of the Sea of Tranquility for $37.50 cents… The Sea of Tranquility is nearby to the Sea of Serenity where an acre costs $31.25 cents. Returns to script “Your mind…it flows and ebbs”. In Serbian it’s like “ODAKLE DOLAZI TA PROMENA” - where does it come from this flow? I would say very directly STA- what not ODAKLE - where? If I say “what changed you?” It can be…I can really think about flows or ebbs but in Serbian…ok I change, “What changed you?” “Your mind is like the sea, it flows and ebbs”

What she wants  Takes the plastic food box and pours from the water bottle into it. Mashes plastic bottle into it. She moves this at eye level creating a miniature sea with debris floating. Fresh? Dear God, the water here is never fresh. It’s lifeless and stale. Ugh! The water is sick here in the fjord… Yes, sick. I mean I think it makes one sick. Poisonous too… Repeats this text exactly as before. “Your mind is like the sea, it flows and ebbs…what changed you” Hah maybe the moon! (exactly as before) They’re selling the moon. You can buy an acre of the Sea of Tranquility for $37.50 cents… The Sea of Tranquility is nearby to the Sea of Serenity where an acre costs $31.25 cents (switching attention back to scripts). “Your mind…it flows and ebbs”. Ok I change “What changed you?” “Don’t you understand?” This is OK. “The change came, had to come”. She says, this is ridiculous, she says “when you let me choose freely” and in Serbian it is…ah!!! Its “KAD SAM MOGLA SLOBODNO DA BIRAM”, when I could freely choose. That means that I am free. But in English it means that He is giving her/me the freedom to choose. It’s very different. She is now practising, physically testing the material. You think and feel in pictures and visual images. Your restless yearning for the sea – your yearning for this stranger – all that was nothing but an expression for your longing for freedom. Nothing more… But my mind - my thoughts - my dreams and longings – those you cannot imprison. They strain to roam and hunt - out into the unknown - which I was born for - and which you have locked me away from!

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Such abstract notions of lunar property can be found on the internet. There are gendered ideas about how women supposedly think, differently from men: irrationally and unpredictably – a root interpretation of (unhappy) women as hysterics in the 19th century. The sea is also associated with the depths of the unconscious. Women are associated with the moon, that has influence on the tides (sea). So, a quite traditional othering of this woman’s mind is going on here in the Ibsen original.

This emphasises the instability of meaning. How theatrical text, whether literally being translated from one language to another, or interpreted by artists, can prove malleable. The impossibility of absolute ‘meaning’ is essential for directors and writers when adapting classic texts for contemporary audiences. A cut and paste of different phrases from the Ibsen text.

Slides down a wall US. Inhales deeply the smell of her own hands. I know this. Stanislavski. Gets the Stanislavski book and thumbs it frantically as if searching for some clue. Reading from this.

Where have her hands been? What do they know? What can her own body teach her?

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What she wants

This is a childhood memory of my own. My first experience of the necessity for language and not possessing enough vocabulary to express my needs. Paprika is a national food in Serbia, used in all manner of dishes. Maja has many memories of paprika harvests and preparations. Stanislavski, C., An Actor Prepares. p.145.

Refers to the above memory. Maja is in a state of imaginative research and so her thoughts are jumping around as she free associates.

“Just as your visual memory can reconstruct an inner image of some forgotten thing, place” In the city…walking “or person” Two adults… holding my hands…each side… walking across me, in front of me…and I want to say: ‘move out so I have space to walk between you’ but I’m so little and I don’t have the words for the feeling. I am maybe only 3 years old. Paprika. I smell paprika. I remember people sitting making pickle, paprika… your emotion memory can bring back feelings you have already experienced. They may seem to be beyond recall, when suddenly a suggestion, or a thought, a familiar object will bring them back in full force. Sometimes the emotions are as strong as ever, sometimes weaker, sometimes the same strong feelings will come back but in a somewhat different guise. I’m walking down the street. Looking through windows and asking myself ‘what kind of life do these people have?’ I always imagine their life is better than mine, yellowish, nicer than mine. And I am saying ‘cup’, ‘bowl’, ‘hole’, because I’m so little I still don’t have no words yet for ‘space’. (Falling) “You don’t understand me!” Repeats falling. Foetal position, rolling under white wedding dress, looking out from behind the fabric.

c.f. The bottle top earlier. She is puking up her inner sickness, her memories causing this, like a sea creature who has swallowed plastics and is suffering painful death from this.

He took out of his pocket a key chain, and pulled a ring off his finger, a ring he always used to wear. And he took a little ring from my finger too, and put these two rings onto his key chain. Then he said we two were going to marry ourselves to the sea…then he threw the chain and rings with all his strength, as far as he could, out into the sea. Emerges from wedding dress. Throwing gesture. ‘Swims’ in wild crawl to vomit gesture and coughs up wedding ring. Speaking to the Wedding Dress. We’re going to find a new cure for you now…The fresh air, the cleansing, salt-heavy air of the sea Kornati Islands, Croatia 2009. 64.7 meters deep. I dive into this fresh clear water and I feel completely alone.... I feel alone. All alone. Something jumps out of the water

Figure 2.1 Maja Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse, 2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija.

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What she wants at the right! Then in front....then the other side and then suddenly there are 20 of them....everything is blue.... they are welcoming ME... it feels like a welcome home....but its no longer my country. Croatia is no longer part of my country.... I felt like I was one of them. At this moment I feel really connected -not just to the dolphins and the Sea, but to this country... I feel connected to this country. She works with a large peacock blue silk cloth. Here she has found the erotic in the memory of The Stranger. …What did we talk about?

By reciting Ibsen’s words she is researching the emotional connection she seeks as an actress.

All these words are in the Ibsen text, some of which recur.

Connecting to the character, then the character to the environment. Indicates her nervous state; smoking is (selfharmingly) polluting and unhealthy.

Mostly about the sea… Storms and calms. Dark nights at sea. And the sea on sunny days - we talked about that too. But mostly we talked about whales and dolphins, and seals that lie out on the islands when it’s hot. And we spoke of gulls and eagles and other sea birds - you know. And - isn’t it strange? - when we talked about these things, I had a feeling that these sea beasts and sea birds were somehow the same blood as he…and I felt as if I were one of them too. Sea storms calms dark nights sunny days whales dolphins seals islands gulls eagles sea birds sea beasts blood Drops cloth. Palms open. Traces her veins from arms to heart. Begins to panic and pace about. to connect, to connect I’m afraid…the sort of fear that only the sea can give you. Grabs a cigarette and lighter from bag. Smokes intensely.

What she wants 

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When I’m in the sea I often imagine some beast will come and drag me down to the depths, and I’m very drawn to this idea but also very frightened. Down there on the seabed, I imagine a completely other world deep down below, pulling me, but I’m so afraid… Drops cigarette and lighter into sandwich box that instantly panics her. Birds screech. The Albatross mother flies out over the ocean looking for plankton to feed her young. But the sea’s totally clogged up with bottle tops, syringes, lighters, bits of plastic bag floating on the surface. But she has instincts. She dives, biting at this stuff to feed her babies. In desperate rage she pulls small floaty black plastic bags from her blue bag. A shower of plastic falls. Millions of chicks die of starvation, choking, their bellies exploding with human trash… Distressed. As if to calm herself with a mantra. The whale is good to imagine, the whale is good to imagine. The Inuit say: The Whale is good to imagine… Hugging Whale Nation to heart. Reads from it The whale is good to imagine, the whale is good to imagine. The Inuit say: The Whale is good to imagine… Millions and millions and millions of whales have died for us…for electricity, petroleum, plastic…liver oil, vitamins, antibiotics soap, margarine, lipstick, detergent, skin cream, nitro-glycerine, to make bombs. The sea is full of blood… But who is She? Drinks from plastic bottle. Her first entrance she has come from the fjord. She’s wet. Pours water over her head. Shudders. Tosses her head side to side violently. She’s been swimming, her hair’s wet, she’s dripping wet. Ibsen says this, that her hair is wet and falling about her shoulders. She’s raw. Untidy. Undressed. Maybe naked under her wrap?

During rehearsals we were deeply affected by a haunting photo of a dead albatross, its belly bursting full of lighters, plastic cutlery and bottle tops. We made this work before the whale who had died full of eighty plastic bags had been discovered of the coast of Thailand in 2018 and other examples since. Sea creatures dying of eating plastics is now incontrovertible evidence of catastrophic levels of extreme marine pollution. Like ELLIDA, Maja the ACTRESS identifies with sea creatures. Sound cuts.

This takes us from the blood of the whaling industry to other associations: in Beirut our Lebanese audience associated this line with the fact that during their civil war the dead were thrown into their coast. Today we might consider some of the ideas of hydrofeminism, for example, that eating fish from the Mediterranean Sea is effectively eating from a sea polluted the dead bodies of drowned migrants, on whose flesh fish have fed.

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What she wants Against back wall. Sudden revelation.

A big psychological discovery. An allusion to Ibsen’s stage directions for ELLIDA’s first entrance. See P 85.

Does she swim naked?!!! And her old husband, the first thing he says when he sees his wild young wife is here she is Our Lady from the Sea. She glides, floats above the earth. Technically speaking: Tai’chi walk or Butoh, 2 centimetres above the earth. Floating as if on water.

Maja the ACTRESS is searching for a physical centre from which to identify the core of the character. Chakras are focal points in the body used in ancient Hindu meditation practices. Stanislavski, in Building a Character, discusses the importance of feet and walking in the chapter ‘Plasticity of Motion.’ Physical Theatre innovators such as Grotowski and Barba have drawn on esoteric Asian meditation and Yoga practices in developing their actor methodologies. A discovery. ELLIDA is unable to express her emotional state (until the end of the play) and it is her repressed feelings that are making her ill. A discovery. Maja is seeking an Emotion Memory, but chooses a physical, sensory, approach here.

Maja is searching for ELLIDA’s walk. Both Tai ‘Chi and Butoh walks are very slow and grounded, with low centre of gravity, knees bent and feet in parallel facing forward. She’s not in the present, not in her own environment. She is not in the present. Where is she? Probably, in my chest chakra. I’m walking straight but very concentrated inside my body. My focus, my mind, my eyes. Probably work with the eyes. Never completely open. You could open focus. Internal focus. My focus slides to the side of your head. She looks at you but… Sliding down wall. She’s completely locked up!! Needs something fierce to wake her. She feels life is sick, the water is sick, everything. She desperately needs change. She’s trying to change in the sea. She swims to feel something, to find the shock of freezing cold, pain, to jolt her memory. That’s why she says the water is dirty and lifeless. Because she can’t find… I need to find the despair!! She twist the blue silk into a whip and leaps about, slapping the silk cloth across her back. She is desperate. Turns this into a baby who she sings to trying to calm. I think if people could only have learned from the beginning to live on the sea – perhaps even in the sea – we should be quite different now from what we are. Better and happier…We’ve taken a wrong turning and become land animals instead of sea animals…I think people sense it. They endure it, as one endures a secret sorrow.

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I’m sure that’s the real reason why people are melancholy. I’m sure of it. Happiness - it’s like our happiness through the long, bright summer days. Behind it lies the knowledge of advancing darkness. And the knowledge casts its shadow over people’s happiness, as the drifting cloud casts its shadow over the fjord. There it lies, so bright and blue, And then suddenly… She opens a folder of newspapers. They feature her on the front pages. She reads from them. “All alone on Italian titanic Maja Mitic, an actress from Serbia, and her husband survived the sinking of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. 13th January, 2012.” What did I get from this experience? My only thought was ‘it is alright to die’. The wreck has to be removed otherwise the 2500 tonnes of oil will cause a marine catastrophe. The total cost of this tragedy will be 1.5 billion euros. We were happy for a while. Then we divorced. The real truth of the matter is that you came out there and bought me. Whispers to the wedding dress. Why didn’t I stay? I felt I was going to die Without breath It’s very organic I can’t speak about it You feel you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and you just have to go

Maja is here identifying with ELLIDA from her own life experience.

But you don’t understand/how little you understand me/ don’t you understand? Why didn’t I stay? I felt I was going to die Without breath It’s very organic I can’t speak about it You feel you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and you just have to go As if a mantra to calm herself again

c.f. The hysteric feeling of suffocation, of the throat closing and not being able to breathe at the onset of an attack.

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Audience members were very willing to participate in this exercise. She is sharing the real process of making this piece, which already has the overlay of Maja/ACTRESS/ character.

The whale is good to imagine… A mantra in Sanskrit is a vocal sound that is considered sacred. It might be a word or group of words, or phonemes, a numinous sound, or a syllable. It is thought that by repetition of a mantra, an altered state of consciousness can be achieved. I must be free to choose. Ok I’m ready to try now. Let’s try. Let’s see how it goes…. Hands a script to a man in audience. Improvises agreement to participate. As she gathers up her belongings She goes US. Ok let’s go. Please, give me your first line The male audience member speaks WANGELS’s lines in his first language. MAJA responds as below. WANGEL We can’t go on like this…..we should trust each other… live together as man and wife. ACTRESS Impossible. The real truth of the matter is that came out there and bought me. Interrupts. Moves to audience member as if to help him understand better how to speak the lines

This pivotal scene being the one that drew me, and then Maja, to want to make this work. This intervention designed to make him feel more at ease rather than put him on the spot.

Based on Maja’s own look and style in fact.

I’m really sorry. I should maybe explain: The play is about the second wife of a doctor living in a remote spot by a fjord. She feels trapped, she suffers from deep and terrible ennui. She is obsessed with the sea, and with a man from her past simply called The Stranger who suddenly appears from his ship, offering escape. Her husband comes to understand how powerful this pull towards another person is and offers her a separation. The moment he does this, she changes her mind and decides to stay. Because at last she feels free OK? So let’s go, again, from the top. During following, changes into a contemporary chic dress, white but smeared with black abstract print, hair in chignon, lipstick, heels, ending up very elegant, Catherine Deneuve in the 1960s. WANGEL Bought? Did you say bought?

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ACTRESS Oh I wasn’t any better than you. I agreed to the bargain. Let me leave you. Let me go Wangel. WANGEL You’ve never really belonged to me… divorce then? Is this what you want? ACTRESS How little you understand me! I’m not interested in the formalities. All I want is that we two should freely agree to release each other. WANGEL Cancel the bargain, you mean? ACTRESS

I discuss this scene and what it tells about the economic basis of marriage on p.92.

Exactly, cancel the bargain. WANGEL We’re talking of choices? ACTRESS Yes, I must be free to choose…Protect me? What is there to protect me against? There is no power or force outside of me that threatens me. The root of that fascination lies in my own mind. But my mind - my thoughts - my dreams and longings - those you cannot imprison. They strain to roam and hunt - out into the unknown - which I was born for – and which you have locked me away from. WANGEL I see it! Little by little you are slipping away from me. Therefore - I agree to - to cancel the bargain. You can make your choice Ellida - in freedom. ACTRESS Do you mean that? Do you really mean that? With all your heart?… Freedom and responsibility. Responsibility as well? Everything is changing. Your will has no power over me anymore. Don’t you understand? The change came - had to come - when you let me choose freely…I no longer yearn for it, nor fear it.

ELLIDA recognises that both her unhappiness/ illness and liberation are ‘in the mind.’ This realisation eventually frees her.

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What she wants

We must really believe this is her final exit. An important moment of complicity with the audience: no illusion, just the demonstration of how theatrical image operates. And a reference back to the start of the piece “You think in pictures and visual images.”

To man in audience who has read. Thank you that was really great and very helpful, thank you. She moves offstage as if the show is over. Suddenly returns holding out a jar of molasses and spoon. Actually it’s all in the subtext. It’s theatre, so it’s very easy to say “you let me choose” but with the subtext ‘I am free.’ And we are working in metaphor…

‘Black oil’ pouring out of her mouth (again). She is now like a tarred seabird. The character and ACTRESS are now enfolded completely into the condition of the sea creature: she has become a contemporary SeaWoman: beautiful, tarnished and polluted by Man’s actions.

As if demonstrating a recipe, she spoons molasses in her mouth. It dribbles down. She smears it across her cheeks. ­(Figure 2.2) Exits slowly to Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’ on the piano. The only thing left on stage lit is Wedding dress, that fades very slowly. Blackout

Figure 2.2 Maja  Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse, 2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija.

3

The duty to run mad



Shocks

During the First World War, despite active resistance, the rigid ideological apparatus of Victorian masculinity was losing control. The British stiff upper lip was now quivering, irrepressibly (Reid, 2010). Thousands suffered breakdown. As the poet Robert Graves, a shellshock survivor, wrote: War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities, Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world has still kept head in air, Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck The inward scream, the duty to run mad. (Graves, in Stallworthy, 2008, p.196) The ‘duty to run mad’ suggests the only rational response to the appalling circumstances of this conflict was not military duty but expression of its insanity. Human response to unendurable and inexpressible trauma is found symptomising, again. The psychophysical effects of war trauma, inaccurately termed ‘shellshock’ at the time,1 is another somatised speech act of hysteria. It is a language of protest: a furiously sane response to a convulsively insane experience. The shellshocked soldier presented as first cousin of the sexually traumatised patients at the Salpêtrière and 19, Bergstrasse, Vienna.2 Graves’s ‘inward scream’ generated, or converted into, a range of psychophysical indicators, presenting on a massive statistical scale. In response, the medical establishment was eventually obliged, willy-nilly, to rethink effective treatment methods for the huge numbers who returned from the trenches, not mad as such (a distinction military medical authorities had to recognise, reluctantly), but acting out classic features of the hysterical condition in reaction to extreme stress. During this ‘great war,’ the establishment sought to maintain the idea that a shuddering, crumpling soldier, unfit to fight, was genetically or clinically predisposed to mental illness, or else a

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Figure 3.1 Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018.

wilful malingerer. This fitted post-Victorian patriarchal ideology. Doctors such as the zealous Canadian Lewis Yealland applied traditional methods used in mental asylums at the time to the war-traumatised. His aversion therapy was designed quite plainly to shock the shocked out of their condition through faradisation, a clinical torture delivering obedient ‘recovery.’ Antithetically forward-thinking medical professionals, tasked with treating these miserably damaged men, introduced kinder rehabilitation methods, facilitating the healing process through physical task exercise and pleasant nature environments. New talking therapies, inspired by the then innovative Freud, began to be practised experimentally. Whatever the preferred treatment methods adopted by doctors responsible, the sheer numbers of soldiers returning from the battlefield suffering shellshock  – soon defined as a form of hysteria – caused the British authorities serious consternation. This epidemic proved a political and strategic challenge. How to distinguish the shellshocked from the malingerer? How to define shellshock itself ? If so many men were diagnosed, how to provide pensions for the mentally wounded? If they were not mad, then the asylum was not a fit place in which to heal them. Besides, how should they be healed? This was of prime importance, since the chief medical mission was to fix the wounded so that they could be speedily returned to a depleted battlefield given catastrophic casualties.

The duty to run mad  New  paradigms emerged that would affect not only legal and economic approaches to the accumulation of mentally wounded – their pensions and rehabilitation – but also military approaches in its medical organisations, such as establishing specialist centres to house and heal them. The crisis of this war, spawning its wrecked male population, marked an important shift in the culture. However militantly the British struggled to preserve the pride and tradition of centuries of colonising power, “the centre” could “not hold,” whilst the “the worst/Are full of passionate intensity,” as Yeats would write in his blistering 1919 poem The Second Coming (Yeats, 1997, p.39). As the culture progressed inexorably towards Modernism, so did the concept of Self, and with this, ideas of the mind, mental illness and how to view and treat it. Thinking was moving towards an existentialist perspective. Belief structures and faith God were crumbling, only to disintegrate in the aftermath of this ‘war to end all wars.’ Culturally, logic and reason were exploded in brutal, ugly, and aggressive acts. The brouhaha of French Avant-garde exuberance was being drowned out by the “first war whoop” of the Dada movement (Shattuck, 1969, p.358). Dadaists responded to the catastrophe with a creative assault on bourgeois sensibility. Concurrently, during this critical period of violent upheaval across Europe, Freud’s ideas had begun to take root in Britain, and along with this the revival of hypnosis and the development of the talking cure. The war itself, presented to the public – like all wars – as inevitable, actually transformed, profoundly, understanding of environmental conditioning, the relationship between trauma and psychophysical response, and between what human beings cause and what they affect. The question had to be asked: if a man was mentally mutilated, what precisely had ravaged him? And how does an amputated limb compare to a smashed-up psyche? These vital problems began to be answered with evolving definitions and protocols that would shape understanding of war neuroses – and gender itself – since. From the long view, we can see how such issues were to wrench the nation from its stolid Victoriana and, for all the war machine’s defiance during and after, force the eventual transformation of British society. The British conceived the war as a moral mission to preserve the values of the past and extend “the sense of civic virtue […] teaching both the foreigner and the uneducated Briton the rules of civilised social conduct” (Eksteins, 1989, p.117). The Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling listed stoic virtues that would confirm how to be “a man, my son” in his iconic poem If (Kipling, 2001, p.605). Henry Newbolt, in his own landmark poem Vitae Lampada, equated brave manhood with aspiring to “play up and play the game” (in Stallworthy, 2008, p.146). This ‘game’ of team spirit, obeying your cricket Captain and being an unquestioning humble servant of the Empire, was inculcated in the sports

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The duty to run mad curriculum and classical syllabus of English public schools. What was being absorbed into the social DNA of the upper and middle classes was the performance of patriarchal authority, masculine sang froid, and the requisite gestures to express nationalist and colonialist superiority. If “War is, in fact, one of the most rigidly ‘gendered’ activities known to humankind” (Ehrenreich, 2011, p.125), this war articulated deeply felt conservatism. Germany, the fin de siècle activist modernist nation, was intensely disruptive and threatening Britain’s amour propre, habitually “the establishment of a measure of law and order in the world” (Eksteins, 1989, p.117). A futurist, expansionist, and idealistic country, Germany represented revolt against the 19th-century world order. In the many social changes of its Lebensreformbewegung,3 the nation aimed at reforming fundamental values and ways of life. The British would never allow such influence into their society, certainly not by invasion. This disturbing enemy had to be tackled and resisted. A strong spirit of nationalism was imperative. A British past had to be invoked, with evidence of its enduring contemporary power and influence. Colonialism and its appropriate masculine behaviours were consequently bound together as proof of righteousness, superiority, and might, characteristics clung to with vicious determination. It was this that guaranteed the successful recruitment of the war’s thousands of victims and survivors. The establishment was cultivating a collective droit de seigneur psyche in a now threatened nation that had grown rich plundering the world’s wealth. Patriotism and duty went hand in hand, the whole country mobilised in a pro-war ethic. Bernard Shaw describes “civilized young women handing white feathers to all young men who were not in uniform” (Gilbert in Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, p.209). Suffragettes planted feathers on men daring to walk the streets in mufti rather than rushing to enlist, branding them in public with this badge of cowardice (Downing, 2017; Ehrenreich, 2011). This was a bloodthirsty Britain. The Church joined the collective baying. The belligerent Bishop of London, Right Reverend A.F. Winnington-Ingram, thundered jingoistically from his pulpit: Kill Germans! Kill them! … not for the sake of killing, but to save the world…kill the good as well as the bad…kill the young as well as the old… […] I look upon it as a war of purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr. (Ekstein, 1989, p.236) Not surprising, then, that if the whole nation was stirred towards the ultimate expression of male prowess and dominance over the threatening Bosch, the chance to enlist to the battlefields of France was seized upon by men from all classes. This

The duty to run mad  was mass arousal towards a grand cause. War was rendered obvious, logical, and decent. “We may enjoy the company of our fellows” remarks Ehrenreich, parsing the roots of pugnaciousness from man’s earliest existence “but we thrill to the prospect of joining them in collective defense against the common enemy” (Ehrenreich, 2011, p.224). Along with humans and weapons, images are mobilised in war strategies (Finburgh Delijani, 2019). When Lord Kitchener, Minister for War, launched a recruitment drive with his iconic 1914 finger-pointing poster instructing, “Your country needs YOU,” his patriotic propaganda, targeted at the working classes, promoted the false assumption that the conflict would be short lived – and fun. Men were often recruited as PALS battalions to work as units of colleagues, friends, and families from their home communities. Enlisting was a chance to go abroad for a uniformed vacation from the hardships of life back home in the slums. The army offered a warm overcoat, decent boots, respectable clothing and three hot meals a day. Used as they were to hard physical graft in the mines or dull, monotonous jobs for long hours in a factory or workshop, the army seemed to such men a marked improvement. (Downing, 2017, p.47) PALS recruitment messages were unambiguous: “Are you a Man or Are you a Mouse? Are you a man who will forever be handed down to posterity as a Gallant Patriot [or] as a rotter and a coward? If You Are a Man Enlist Now” (ibid., p.39). The trenches were fantasised as jaunty spaces for male bonding and fraternisation, away from wives, girlfriends, mothers, and children; the army was an environment in which, whilst your mettle was tested, love for your own gender might find legitimised emotional release. Given staunchly heteronormative values, military bonding offered permissive situational homoeroticism. Among the most distinguished elite and fiercely anti-war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were both clandestinely (for illegally) homosexual. Vitally, action at The Front was imagined as a site where the innocent could aspire to contributing to the country’s needs, achieve significance, prove heroism, and assert proud masculinity. The reality was quite different. Discovering first-hand the degradation of this barbaric battlefield proved a crashing disappointment: “Mobilised and marched off to the front, idealistic soldiers soon found themselves immobilised even buried alive, in trenches of death that seemed to have been dug along the remotest margins of civilisation” (Gilbert in Higgonet and Jenson, 1987, p.201). As their dreadful experiences unfolded, real events

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The duty to run mad and wretched conditions brought these men face to face with the most horrific sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, beyond their wildest nightmares. Arriving as enthusiastic boys, the war rebirthed them broken warriors. Battered, bruised, and bewildered, many would recoil in horror and disgust, but “To flinch was so closely linked to femininity that for a man to do so would humiliatingly call his gender into question” (Watt Smith, 2014, p.15). A tough and resilient masculine ambiance was imperative for victory (Reid, 2012); conversely, this super-male environment was producing unmanly behaviours. Unable to admit to being poleaxed by fear, hysteric conversion and a sequence of embodied psychophysical revulsions would etch into the soldier’s psyche and bodily presence: “If it was the essence of manliness not to complain, then shellshock was the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest, not only against the war, but against the concept of manliness itself ” (Showalter in Higgonet and Jensen, 1987, p.64). So, what precisely were these men flinching from and complaining about on such a rampant scale? What exactly were they somatising in their myriad symptoms, from nervous twitches to paralyses and hallucinations to mutism? Was there no one who might listen sympathetically and understand? Could they not find words for this brutal Armageddon?

Figure 3.2 Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018.

The duty to run mad  The Times reported the first day’s results of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916: upon the whole, very satisfactory for both the British and the French. It was not a lightning-like stroke intended to pierce the German lines right through, but rather a continuous and methodical push to make sure of the ground which had been devastated by artillery fire. This involved less loss of life and more certain results. Rapid advances are like rapid rises of the barometer, liable to quick reversals. (The Times, 2018, p.501) This omitted to mention the fact that, by the end of that single day of battle, two years into the war, the British counted 57,470 casualties, with 19,240 killed or who would die of their wounds. This greatest loss ever sustained in a single day of the history of the British army was only the beginning (Downing, 2017). The gulf between propaganda and truth is hardly surprising. The authorities didn’t want to demoralise a nation and its warriors, nor threaten the crucial recruitment machine. However, it is precisely this kind of casualisation of atrocity in the language of war narrative, compared to the crisis experienced by those actually suffering it, that produced a cognitive dissonance leading to the response of shellshock and occasional desertion, the two sometimes conflated punitively by the authorities. The conditions that shaped men’s anguish had become simply inhuman. The trenches were floored with duckboards which would prove ineffective against torrential rains that regularly converted the narrow networks into rivers of mud, perhaps several feet deep. Soldiers were inadequately kitted-out. It was common to wear the same unwashed uniform for weeks, even months, at a time. In filth and detritus, infested with lice, they shared stinking premises with plagues of rats. Food supplies for the non-officer classes were below the daily calorific intake, consisting of a monotonous diet of bullybeef, hard-as-nails biscuits, and tea. Sleep was hard to sustain in such circumstances, the close or distant sound of gunfire and shells exploding frequently in the night. There were long periods of inaction. Waiting and boredom produced active or floating anxiety. A fair amount of activity was required in necessary labouring – digging trenches and dug outs, laying boards, sandbagging, re-vetting trench walls, laying barbed wire, and organising supplies and equipment – but troops would experience extensive stretches of time waiting in taut anticipation of action to come, an imposed tenacity that stretched both patience and nerve.4 Parcels from home brought news, photos of loved ones, cake, and cigarettes, but these were situations of appalling deprivation and severe hardship. Battle, when eventually mobilised, was

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The duty to run mad terrifying. This was a highly industrialised war, employing new forms of munitions: tanks, shells, machine guns requiring six men to operate that fired 600 rounds per minute, and vile nerve gases  – mustard, chlorine, and phosgene – causing immense suffering and long, slow, agonising deaths. Soldiers negotiating this weaponry, both against the enemy and on its receiving end, would be doing so whilst carrying a minimum of thirty kilos of supplies on their back in the event of capturing an enemy dugout or trench (Downing, 2017). Inside their packs were food supplies, bandages, and weapons for close body-contact fighting, which might include hand guns, knives, and koshes with nails.5 Men suffered trench foot from long immersion in water and mud, and gangrene from wounds that went untreated due to lack of sterile equipment. This whole grim scenario seems today like some macabre experiment on a massive scale to see how far human degradation and endurance could stretch. The experience was indescribable, quite literally: letters home were heavily censored. Loved ones received chirpy redacted accounts of action and conditions, an organised conspiracy to produce a national state of denial. No Man’s Land that separated the British and French from the German frontline was in parts half a mile wide and at others a mere few, terrifying, yards. Going ‘up and over’ into battles was horrific, a poorly choreographed chaos of men staggering towards enemy firing lines, in danger at every step of being pounded to death by machine gunfire or exploded high into the air by shells. Those shot would fall into tangles of barbed wire. The shelled would explode into pieces. A soldier advancing under his officer’s command into ongoing gunfire might witness his mate being blown to smithereens right next to him, without being permitted to pause for even a second. In the event of a gas attack, men would witness their peers writhing in slow corroding deaths. Owen writes about this viscerally in Dulce et Decorum Est as a recurring nightmare memory: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight/he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (Owen, 1992, p.117). Soldiers surviving a battle might not only have seen terrible and bloodied sufferings from dismemberment, but would have walked or leopard crawled across corpses, bones and body parts on the way there and back. Owen wrote “They are dying again at Beaumont Hamel, which already in 1916 was cobbled with skulls” (Hibberd, 1992, p.103). The soil was mashed with blood. John Masefield described the Somme in October 1916 as “a kind of stagnant river, too thick to flow yet too thick to stand, and it had a kind of glisten and shine on it like reddish cheese” (Eksteins, 1989, p.218). It was this same blood-mud that Owen describes jamming wheels in Strange Meeting “Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels/ I would go up and wash them from sweet wells” (Owen, 1992, p.125). It was impossible to clear the battlefields

The duty to run mad  totally of bodies for there were always too few stretcher bearers. Corpses often lay close to the trenches, into which casualties also fell from snipers and shells. Down there where men lived, or rather survived, the stench of putrefaction from the unburied and the sight of vermin chewing human flesh were a constant reminder that death was all around. It was common practice to be ordered to clear up body parts in and around the trenches after battle, disposing of chunks of comrades into sacks. This was a regular olfactory, haptic relationship to human mutilation. Graves describes snatching his “fingers in horror from where I have planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse” (Graves, p.110). Coping mechanisms varied. Seeing a pal’s viscera might lead to profound alienation and numb denial or, for the imaginative Graves, a gruesome new aesthetic: the spattering of brains on a dying man’s cap became “a poetical figment” (ibid. p.98). Unsurprisingly, many simply couldn’t manage. For some, petrified and panicked by what they’d witnessed and survived, mental breakdown would be expressed, in tears, involuntary urination, and debilitating physical symptoms. There were essentially three medical views on shellshock that affected treatment protocols. First, Charles Samuel Myers, who had originally coined the term and was sympathetic to soldiers’ plight, believed that symptoms were caused by the impact of shell explosions on the physiology of the brain, causing lesions. Second was the Freudian explanation. Among those subscribing to this was William Halse Rivers. Rivers firmly believed, and practised accordingly, that the condition was a somatised response to trauma and suffering caused by the overall mental and physical conditions of warfare itself. Third, shellshock was viewed as a congenital predisposition due to heritage and upbringing. This prejudice appeared as a recurring motif in the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell Shock’ chaired by Lord Southborough, which presented its findings to Parliament to inform treatment and compensation. The Report, an instrument of government published in 1922, was aimed at undermining claims for compensation to reduce the war pensions budget (Van der Kolk, 2015). The theme of cowardice, as opposed to shellshock being a valid illness caused by war itself, permeated the entire debate (Bogasz, 1989). Victorian morality linked shellshock to lack of will and degeneracy and was viewed with contempt (Micale, 2008). In the end, consulting military, medical, and parliamentary experts and debating evidence given for over two years, the Report managed to evade causation in favour of its recommendations. One of these was to eliminate the term itself from official nomenclature since, as the Committee concluded, shellshock had elicited such public sympathy it had become “a desirable complaint from which to suffer” (Report, 1922, p.6). Its usage was to be avoided in any future conflict since the term itself, conceived as a rebellious and uncontrollable virus, might run amok among

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The duty to run mad the ranks. The Report “left a core dilemma unresolved; How to compensate the truly deserving courageous men traumatised by combat without rewarding those for whom the psychological injury merely offered an escape from military duty” (Wessely, 2009, p.54), whilst its publication represented a high watermark in the history of shellshock and henceforth the term vanished from official medical and military vocabularies. This represents a remarkable paradox. Just at the time when the cultural significance of shellshock was beginning to gain ground, most particularly in its literary expression, it fell from use in psychiatric and medical texts until revived in the 1970s as an historical introduction to post traumatic stress disorder. (Ibid.) The Committee’s anxiety about the use of the inaccurate but influential term ‘shellshock’ belied that it expressed more than individual battle trauma. The neologism emerged in response to an undeniable medical epidemic, but described and stood for something much more significant in the culture: primarily, the wider impact of collective alarm and horror at witnessing what the war machine had done to those men returning home in their droves, not only facially mutilated and/or amputees, but emotionally distraught and incapacitated. The pragmatic as well as imaginative question arose of how to come to terms with what this actually meant for a society predicated upon firm gender binaries. Linguistically, the term skirts around the taboo of men breaking down rather than manning up to the role of warrior. As Jay Winter argues, it denoted a violent physical injury, albeit of a special kind. That injury was validated by the term, enabling many people and their families to bypass the stigma associated with terms like ‘hysteria’ or ‘neurasthenia’ connoting a condition arising out of psychological vulnerability. ‘Shellshock’ was a vehicle at one and the same time of consolation and legitimation. (Winter, 2000, pp.7–11) The very term takes on “a notation which moved from the medical to the metaphysical” and “thereby in some places became a metaphor for the nature of industrialized warfare, a term which suggests the corrosive force of the 1914–18 conflict tout court, and in peculiarly compelling ways” (ibid., p.8). The idiom is expressed in two short sharp syllables. Even the post-war Committee had noted “the alliteration and dramatic significance of the term had caught the public imagination” (ibid., p.5). Shellshock, therefore, presented a new branding of male behaviour that, akin to female neuroses and hysterias, had to be distinguished from its

Figure 3.3 Mathew Wernham and Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018.

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The duty to run mad association with femininity, only to be airbrushed subsequently from medical military diagnostic language. If the term usefully preserved some kind of special masculine status to a specific kind of vulnerability acted out in nervous breakdown, the condition threatened the very fabric and raison d’être of warmongering military ideology and its prevailing modes of operating on the human body and psyche. Warriors are, quite simply, created, as are wars themselves, by human choice, intervention, training, and technological and strategic ingenuity. That Kitchener aimed his authoritative digit at postEdwardian youth reflected the patriarchal class mores of the day. It worked. His call for volunteers exceeded all targets. Such was civic enthusiasm – at one time when he needed a hundred thousand men, a million signed up. Newly appointed Minister for War, Kitchener declared in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Guildhall Banquet on 9 November 1914: I have no complaint whatever to make about the response to my appeals for men -and I may mention that the progress in military training of those who have already enlisted is most remarkable; the country may well be proud of them - but I shall want more men, and still more, until the enemy is crushed. (Davray, 1917) If the war was a maw with gargantuan appetite, there was no lack of cannon fodder for its insatiable production line. Exact numbers fluctuate in statistics, but there is general consensus that, from all sides together, the war produced eight million dead and twenty-one million wounded. From the total of almost nine million men mobilised from Britain (including from the Empire), deaths totalled between 700,000 and 800,000. The numbers of mutilated British survivors were as high as two million. Reid, who is judiciously unsentimental in her assessment of the complexities facing the authorities in handling the devastation, calculates that by the end there were a total of 55,469 cases of shellshock or neurasthenia, based on official records for pensions awarded from 1918 to the beginning of 1922. She stresses that obtaining accurate statistics was impossible, and these figures exclude many who were not awarded pensions and who, whilst suffering nervous disorders, weren’t diagnosed (Reid, 2012). British youth was being culled. Surviving human evidence was coming home in droves, shattered and maimed. It is no wonder that so many men were so very frightened. Giving evidence to the Southborough Committee, a squadron leader, W. Tyrell (who regarded shellshocked men as ‘unfit’ for military service and an unacceptable drain on resources), astutely sums up that their fear

The duty to run mad  was compounded by “the fear of being found afraid” (Report, 1922, p.33). This war was producing conflicting demands on the male psyche: on the one hand to prove yourself a man whilst petrified both of the appalling conditions and realities you were witnessing, and on the other hand being too scared to admit this. Where sheer terror and terror of utterance combine forces, the perfect circumstances for hysterical abreaction take root, a theory developed in the practice of Craiglockhart’s doctor Rivers, which I shall come to below. Today, the military establishment is modernising because it must. Women are enlisting into the armed forces, connoting an intrusion of potential weakness and aberration – everything a male soldier must not be and to which the enemy would wish to reduce him (Mann, 2014). Meanwhile, in British recruitment publicity, the idea of soldiering is presented as lively and varied, involving travel and learning new skills. Killing isn’t mentioned, nor is manliness too explicitly, although it is implied in ideas of valour and bravery. In January 2019, a misjudged zeitgeist, oneand-a-half million-pound army recruitment campaign posted a photo of a young soldier (without his permission), bearing the post-Kitchener text “Snowflakes, your army needs YOU and your compassion.” This was one of a series designed to appeal to the selfie-generation. It quickly backfired. The soldier, twenty-eight year-old Stephen McWhirter, instantly bullied and teased by his mates in the barracks, responded by planning to quit the army, making media headlines. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the unethical theft of his image but associating him with unmanly virtues that proved unbearable to a soldier needing to establish his prowess and bravery to his peers within the military institution. Hysteria’s history is long, and battle neurosis was not invented in the First World War. It is evidenced in military narratives going back to ancient Greece, as discussed in more recent studies of shellshock (Babington, 1997; King, 2001; Wessely, 2009). Historically, there has never been a direct and absolute correlation between male gender and stoic bravery. Gender, as Butler, and De Beauvoir before her, have enlightened us, is not born but made, through the repetitive performance of its signs. Ergo, a fundamentalist idea that masculinity easily converts into Male Warrior, proves a constructed fallacy that might well collapse face à face in the real circumstances of war. Thinking of shellshock through the lens of gender studies raises important questions concerning how soldiers are conditioned within military ideology and training regimes. In this sense, we might understand shellshock as a form of psychophysical revolt against the gendered practice of being militarised. We can then also begin to understand what happens when a disjuncture emerges between what are deemed appropriate behavioural responses to intolerably violent

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The duty to run mad conditions, and the reality of being a vulnerable, weaponised, human-in-uniform. As Showalter proposes, By applying feminist methods and insights to the symptoms, therapies, and texts of male hysteria, we may begin to understand that issues of gender and sexual difference are as crucial to understand the history of male experience as they have been in shaping the history of women. (Showalter in Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, pp.61–69) Wessely credits Showalter’s writing on hysterias since her groundbreaking The Female Malady (1987), in numerous articles, and her controversial book Hystories (1997), in noting the fact that (the first Iraq) war forced the male medical establishment to accept that men as well as hysterical women “also had psychic dimension” (Wessely, 2009, p.49). Showalter’s argument that Gulf War Syndrome was a form of combat stress did not go down well with veterans trying to sue the US government for the use of chemical weapons that they alleged caused their rashes, lesions, and bleedings. But her case presents a clear, if uncomfortable, argument: that mental illness should be given equal status to physical illness, including any war compensation or pension, and that it needs to be lifted out of its association with effeminacy. The Times had argued this as early as May 1915 in an article on ‘battle shock’ proposing, with remarkable prescience, that “wounds of consciousness” should receive “the same serious attention as wounds of flesh or bone” (Downing, 2017, p.94; Reid, 2012, p.32). There was undoubted stigma around male mental illness at the time, which persists today. Through gender analysis we can comprehend hysteria’s expression and its treatment as symptomatic of the social system. Mental illnesses not only surface as a response to the capitalist apparatus but are managed according to its imperatives. Ongoing denial of the social and environmental causes of mental distress is accelerated by the financial interests of pharmaceuticals (Fisher, 2009). If not profiting from shellshock through a pharma industry at the time, military and political authorities dispensing medical care and/or war pensions nonetheless had, for both economic and military reasons, their own vested interest in an accurate triage of men presenting with symptoms. The pension system and sufficient supply of troops were both at the forefront of their agenda, which was itself driven by a capitalist-imperialist imperative. Authorities deeply suspected malingering, and were keen to draw a distinct line between the worthy and the unworthy, both during and after the war. This is why, throughout the Report,

The duty to run mad  the military and many, though not all, medical experts dispute that shellshock is caused by war, prejudicially typecasting sufferers as “not the fighting type” (Report, 1922, p.48), meaning: not strong enough to cope, genetically prone, and, by implication, effeminate. Whilst there is debate as to whether each war produces its own repertoire of symptoms relating to the use of chemical or other technologies, or whether all war trauma survivors share the same symptoms (Wessely, 2009), its labels have certainly evolved, along with new wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Gilbert notes, regarding nomenclature: the most common [feminine] hysterical disorders of peacetime, […] often acquired new and dramatic names in war: ‘the burial alive neurosis’, ‘gas neurosis’, ‘soldier’s heart’, ‘hysterical sympathy with the enemy.’ … [W]hat has been predominately a disease of women before the war became a disease of men in combat. (Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, p.223) In 1980, the term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was coined to join ‘combat stress,’ ‘war neurosis,’ and ‘battle fatigue’6 when a delegation of Vietnam War Vets and psychiatrists lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis that could include the range of symptoms from which Vets were suffering. Whatever its name, the malady is deeply rooted in the unspeakable cause of trauma, muted for fear of breaking taboos and exposing the thin carapace of received ideas about what constitutes correct ways to behave and respond in a gender-coded militarised society. Hysteria, shellshock included, is, I repeat, an expression of powerlessness, and a way of claiming space and attention where empathy and compassion might fail to be forthcoming. Like the hysterias that preceded it, shellshock is, importantly, an act of revulsion, a recoil from distressing experience, a full-on psychophysical flinch reflex against what threatens, hurts, or shocks in conditions of war (Watt Smith, 2014). Conventional wisdom would have it that the military body and mental state should remain intact, stiffened even, against any unbearable brutality. That is what men are/were trained for. The unmanly flinch can be understood as a gesture of withdrawal and avoidance at what frightens or appals. Like Julia Kristeva’s retch (Kristeva, 1982), it constitutes a disgust reflex at contact with the abject, here being, presumably, the exploded blood, flesh, and guts of your peers, and your identification with this. I want to suggest that hysteria’s flinch on a grand scale speaks of a form self-protective stuckness, an inability to progress, a

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The duty to run mad need to remain in the present state of recoiling trauma, unless therapeutically healed out of it. The shellshocked soldier who signed up for military action, through his trauma, became incapable of action, in every sense. His normal flight/fright response had been immobilised, rendering him physically useless (demobbed). Hysteria is a disavowal of duty, whether this be domestic or, as here, military. It is strike action, a withdrawal of labour, printed in the psyche and emblazoned on the body, even though its assertive retreat is interpreted by those in authority as the opposite: defeat. For “the gloomily bruised modernist anti-heroes churned out by the war suffer specifically from sexual wounds, as if, having travelled literally and figuratively through No Man’s Land, all have become not just No Men, nobodies, but not men, unmen” (Gilbert in Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, p.198). Gilbert cites Adrienne Rich’s poem The Images (Rich, 1993), in which, punning on No Man’s Land, she despairs, as a lesbian, her “chosen danger,” declaring that “there is no no man’s land”, by which Gilbert concludes “she clearly meant there is still no Herland” (Gilbert in Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, p.225). No Man’s Land is the reverse of a woman’s territory (which she mightn’t own in any event): woman’s space, which might – in uncontested ideas of the traditional feminine – suggest nurture, kindness, and (pro) creativity. No Man’s Land represents, figuratively, the scarred and pitted site on which Man fights Man for territory and supremacy, a gruesomely damaged terrain in whose unforgiving bloody mud manhood will drown, or flail tearfully in an effort to survive. The unmanly blench of shellshock encompasses a wide range of physical and emotional symptoms strikingly differentiated by class and rank. In soldiers, symptoms tended overwhelmingly to be physical, paralyses, limps, blindness, deafness, mutism (the most common symptom), contractures of a limb or vomiting. In officers, symptoms tended towards the emotional, nightmares, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, disorientation, and anxiety attacks. Sexual impotence was widespread in all ranks, so that the sexual wounds that Sandra Gilbert has noted as a major trope of post-war writing had their source in symbolic disorders of powerlessness. (Showalter in Higonnet and Jensen, 1987, p.62) Hysteria reflects what a patient has learned, according to their education and class. Where Charcot’s proletarian hystériques mimicked popular culture in their lurid burlesques, the shellshocked private soldier, a working-class youth, blubbered and buckled in a similarly flailing dance. Conversely, where Freud’s Viennese

The duty to run mad  bourgeoises displayed sedate idiosyncratic symptoms of inner distress, the Officer, formed by his repressive public school education, presented with hypersensitive neurasthenia. Hysterics, as we have seen, are performing both condition and conditioning. The War Committee, in its forty-one sittings and consulting fifty-nine witnesses to prepare its final Report, painstakingly analysed the condition. Opening with a ‘delimitation of the term,’ it categorised shellshock into two main types: (1) (a) commotional disturbance and (b) emotional disturbance, and (2) mental disorder. By page four the Report is introducing shellshock as a “war neurosis” that has proved “practically indistinguishable from the forms of neurosis known to every doctor under ordinary conditions of civil life.” Many of those giving evidence insisted the shellshocked soldier was a “martial misfit” and “highly strung” (ibid. p.23), prone to cracking up due to some prior mental weakness, “an enormous proportion amongst the men who broke down had been neurotics previously” (ibid., p.22). The Report concluded that “authorities are agreed that, in the majority of cases of war neurosis, there already existed a congenital or acquired predisposition to pathological reaction in the individual concerned, and that this constitutional characteristic was of vast importance” (ibid., p.97). It is obviously devoid of any reflection on the war’s ruinous lunacy, how the trenches’ cruel conditions were such profound deviation from normal, decent, humanity, or the futile tactics and failed strategies of military methodology that took such a devastating toll. Lack of proper military training emerged as one of shellshock’s chief causes. Lieutenant Colonel H. Clay proposed sloppy “haphazard” protocols in medical examinations of non-professional volunteers following Kitchener’s call (ibid., p.41). Military training is generally designed to produce ésprit de corps, loyalty, and pride. That it might have failed thousands of men was in part due to its brevity. Volunteers who had signed up eagerly to a citizen’s army were hectically thrust into military life, in barracks designed for far fewer numbers of men, and met with lack of food supplies, beds, and equipment. The training itself was inadequate. Even if drilled by disciplining sergeants in whatever makeshift barrack yards and fields, by the time troops arrived in France, the majority had no experience of fighting for real, nor any schooling in such a hierarchical institution as the military, with its rigid attachment to traditional codes of conduct. As Rivers commented to the Committee: The man who got to France had stress. There was no question of that; perhaps for him, a very big stress indeed. The case of the man totally unfitted for warfare finding himself in the trenches meant a very big stress for him. (Ibid., p.55)

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The duty to run mad In his own book Rivers was careful to emphasise the relationship between War Neurosis and Military Training: There is little question that one of the chief causes of the great prevalence of nervous disorders in war is that vast numbers of men have been called upon to endure hardships and dangers of unprecedented severity with a quite insufficient training. (Rivers, 1920, p.206) The Officer class was better instructed in what was deemed the forming of ‘character.’ The public schools of England inculcated conservative values of loyalty and obedience to the hierarchical status quo (Downing, 2017; Rivers, 1920). It was precisely Newbolt’s association of the school cricket match with bloody battle that signalled the way in which the severe and punitive, as well as the outdoor and sporty, ethos of the British public school predisposed a man towards unquestioning stoicism. Institutional mores imparted and expected a particular kind of effort at self-control and bravery in the face of pain or threat, qualities that supposedly made even a young officer without any war experience a ‘natural’ leader of men. Downing adds the comment that public school education also taught the value of individual pragmatism that he suggests, “made a virtue out of the belief in ‘muddling through’” (Downing, 2017, p.52). Rivers emerges in the Report as one of the more modern and compassionate medical professionals. If Freud proposed memory to be the root cause of suffering, the shellshocked “would not remember anything about the horrifying events that lay at the origin of his pitiable state. Disassociation or amnesia was therefore the hallmark of the war neuroses” (Leys, 1994, p.625). Rivers introduced his concept of how amnesia operated in the shellshocked mind. He discussed Freudian theories of repression as “a normal process […] a normal mechanism for a cause for which it was not suitable” and continued to explain “The things which the men were trying to put out of their minds were far too powerful. They were using an instrument of repression for a purpose for which it was unsuited and inadequate” (Report, 1922, p.58). He was careful to distinguish between the Freudian concept of ‘repression’ and what, he argued, occurred in the shellshocked mind: ‘suppression.’ Suppression for Rivers was not unwitting, i.e. material that has been forced into the unconscious, but constituted an active process of pushing extremely painful (and recent) memories from the conscious mind because they are too disturbing. Rivers argues that Suppression is only one form of forgetting […] because the interest and meaning are of a kind that arouse pain or

The duty to run mad  discomfort and, if present in consciousness would set up activities that would be painful or uncomfortable. Active forgetting is thus a protective process or mechanism. (Rivers, 1920, p.18) The repression/suppression distinction has another important dimension in Rivers’s scheme, as contrasted with Freud’s emphasis on childhood sexuality as the trigger for neuroses. Rivers was keenly exposing the war itself, not the precondition of traumatic childhood experience, as causal: in the vast majority of cases there is no reason to suppose that factors derived from the sexual life played any essential part in causation but that these disorders became explicable as the result of disturbance of another instinct, one even more fundamental of that of sex - the instinct of selfpreservation, especially those forms of it which are adapted to protect the animal from danger. (Ibid., pp.4–5) In short, Freudian guilt was substituted with fear (Wessely, 2009), a taboo on the battlefield as powerful as any bourgeois sexual anxiety in peacetime. It is his concept of the shellshock sufferer’s instant response to intolerable thoughts and memories that must be suppressed that marks Rivers as a pioneer. His innovative thinking would eventually emerge as an understanding of trauma as a stress disorder rather than as a congenital neurosis rooted in infancy or childhood sexual abuse. Whilst many of his peers recommended that patients banish their memories of the trenches and battlefield from their minds, Rivers favoured the opposite: the unearthing of lost suppressed memories and the retelling of the original traumas. In one example, he sums up his approach: The problem […] was to find some aspect of the painful experience which would allow the patient to dwell upon it in such a way as to relieve its terrifying character. The aspect to which I drew his attention was that the mangled state of the body of his friend was conclusive evidence that he had been killed outright, and he had been spared the prolonged suffering which is often the case of those who sustain mortal wounds. He brightened at once […] he saw at once that this was an aspect of his experience upon which he could allow his thoughts to dwell. He said he would no longer attempt to banish thoughts and memories of his friend from his mind but would think of the pain and the suffering he had been spared. (Ibid., p.191)

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The duty to run mad In short, Rivers was appealing to the rational mind to make sense of what had sparked a memory that was too appalling and unutterable to confront. This approach has been recently supported by neuroscientific research into memory loss: that shows that memories that are retrieved tend to return to the memory bank with modifications […] As long as memory is inaccessible, the mind is unable to change it. But as soon as the story start being told […] it changes – the act of telling itself changes the tale (Van der Kolk, 2015, p.191) or, as Bachelard suggests, “All memory has to be reimagined” (Bachelard, 1994, p.175). Van der Kolk makes an important distinction between traumatic memories and stories we might normally tell of the past: “They are disassociated. The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography” (ibid., p.194). If the cause of suffering was being suppressed by the shellshocked, Rivers also laid emphasis on the manner in which the war had produced a deep conflict within the soldier’s psyche, between his natural instinct for self-preservation (the flinch recoil, refusal, or flight from battle) and “certain social standards of thought and conduct, according to which fear and its expression are regarded as reprehensible” (Rivers, 1920, p.208). The already stressed man was struggling with what he knew he needed to do to save his own life (and that of others) versus the military rules by which he was forced to operate against all his better instincts.7 He was caught therefore, impossibly, between duty and fear. Rivers cites education as fundamental for if, on the one hand, fear was “especially abhorrent to the moral standards of the public schools at which the majority of officers have been educated,” on the other hand “the private soldier has far fewer scruples about giving expression to his fear” (ibid., p.209) due to lack of education. If the routines of bootcamp are designed to transform the individual identity “a creature of the military - an automaton and also, ideally a willing killer of other men” (Ehenreich, 2011, p.12), according to Rivers, military training bears many of the same hallmarks as the hypnotic state in which the power and efficacy of suggestion reach their acme, the individual responds immediately without question or hesitation, not merely to the command of his hypnotiser, but even to a desire or impulse of the hypnotiser’s mind which is not expressed by speech or obvious gesture. (Rivers, 1920, p.212)

The duty to run mad  Blind obedience forces the individual to execute actions as a conditioned reflex that they would never normally perform, because they are highly irrational. Drilling produces brainwashing: “It is the private soldier especially who is submitted to prolonged mechanical drill and is continually subject to the command of others” (ibid., p.217). His theory on the different styles of shellshock also binds to class and education: the private soldier is especially apt to succumb to that form of neurosis which closely resembles the effects produced by hypnotism or other forms of suggestion, because his military training has been of a kind to enhance his suggestibility. The officer, on the other hand, is less prone to this form of neurosis […] is especially liable to anxiety-neurosis, because the nature of his duties especially puts him into positions of responsibility which produce or accentuate mental conflicts set up by repression, thus producing states of anxiety, the form taken by his nervous disorder. (Ibid., p.221) Social power and powerlessness are thus implicated in the lineaments of this genre of hysterical symptomising. Somatising mental anguish can be read as a form of dissent, situating the sufferer in a position of reclamation: hystericising is a strategy for expression, and, ultimately, a means to an end. The shellshocked soldier was removed from battle, the site of trauma. This was some small victory perhaps, for it made the thing stop. For this reason, the authorities were terrified of a shellshock contagion that would drain armies, exhaust moral fibre, and disrupt loyalty. The protest scheme of hysteria, put forward by Showalter and argued by other pioneering feminists such as Bordo and Orbach, politicises the subject. The hysteric, when understood from a feminist interpretation, is a disempowered individual who cannot conform to the gendered status quo and who, lacking any other tool available with which to articulate this, creates a performative act that cannot be ignored, since apart from anything else it provokes disturbance. The shellshocked soldier was, like Augustine, making a spectacle of himself. He Othered himself amongst his peers through his psychophysical behaviour, distinguishing himself from the assumed institutionalised and trained (brainwashed) behavioural reaction to an impossible reality. If we look at his response as rebellious acting out, it could be argued that the shellshocked soldier was rejecting any fundamentalist idea of Man’s origins on earth as a way of explaining his contemporary actions. Ehrenreich’s thesis is that war is rooted in ancient rituals of blood-letting sacrifice to the Gods since it “allowed

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The duty to run mad human sacrifice to achieve a truly spectacular scale” (Ehrenreich, 2011, p.66). She proposes: The original trauma […] was the trauma of being hunted by animals and eaten. Here, most likely, lies the source of our human habit of sacralizing violence: in the terror inspired by the devouring beast and in the powerful emotions, associated with courage and altruism, that were required for group defence. (Ibid., p.47) According to this theory, at a certain time in human evolution, roles between animal and Man were reversed and Man became predator. The predatory act of sacrifice is rooted in the ancient past, when Man needed to sacrifice one of his own to appease the hungry pack of predators. For whatever reasons it was performed, with animal or human victims, the sacrificial ritual in many ways mimics the crisis of a predator’s attack. An animal or perhaps a human member of the group is singled out for slaughter, often in a spectacularly bloody manner. (Ibid., p.67) For Ehrenreich, war is not in Man’s Nature but a conditioned, archaically derived response to stress and threat, So there is no compelling biological or ‘natural’ reason why men have so exclusively starred in the drama of war. Men make wars for many reasons, but one of the most recurring ones, is to establish that they are, in fact, ‘real men’. Warfare and aggressive masculinity have been, in other words, mutually reinforcing cultural enterprises. (Ibid., p.129) From this perspective, the shellshocked soldier was refuting any absolute atavistic sacrificial blood rite of war, recognising that his opponent, in Owen’s words, was just like him in fact: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend” (Owen, 1992, p.125). Soldiering is not only murderous but self-destructive. Opting out might be a strategy, not only for survival but for seeking to repair this ancient wound of Man’s defensive habituation to shed blood. Such an individual obstructs military purpose. He is dangerous to the preservation of an ideology that relies explicitly on morale in the face of adversity. Across the Report one reads this sense of danger to the military establishment that shellshock provoked and a profound resistance to its veracity. You can almost feel witnesses figuratively clutching their genitals. It was precisely the idea of pollutant danger that the shellshocked stirred that caused

The duty to run mad  some of the more draconian punishments such as those punitive court-martials that led to execution. Many shellshocked soldiers were court-martialled, and some were pardoned. Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, signed off all sentences. “Butcher Haig” was not known for leniency or compassion, neither were medics on the field. One such, Esler, a former civilian doctor, had, at the start of his military career, shown great clemency. As the war progressed, he adapted to the military ideology and insisted that execution for the ‘crime’ of desertion was just. On one occasion, he had to preside over such an event, always conducted at dawn and often close to the trenches. The firing squad comprised soldier peers of the condemned man, one with the job of pinning the piece of fabric on the man’s heart to facilitate correct aiming. Reid reports “Esler insisted the sentence was just: ‘it was absolutely essential. It was setting a bad example to the men’” (Reid, 2012, p.55). Reid herself is unsentimental about what we now consider the barbaric practice of shooting your own in wartime, justified by the idea that cowardice was a crime. She argues that modern commentators might consider such disturbing questions posed to authorities as Should soldiers on active service be punished for cowardice and desertion? And were all deserters really suffering from war neuroses? […] senior officers in the First World War did not have the luxury of almost one hundred years of hindsight: a man who refused to fight for whatever reason - was a serious problem. It was not possible consistently to take a sympathetic view of cowardice and desertion. After all, many men were pushed beyond reasonable limits. (Ibid., p.100) On 16 August 2006 the British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, announced that, after years of campaigning, the 306 servicemen shot for desertion were finally to be pardoned. One of these, Private Harry Farr, a scaffolder from West London, was shot by firing squad due to the army’s refusal to recognise his shellshock as a serious psychological condition.8 Farr was court-martialled on 17 October 1916, the day before his execution. In his defence, Pte Farr told the hearing that when he reported sick because he “could not stand it”, his sergeant major replied: “You are a fucking coward, and you will go to the trenches … I give fuck-all for my life, and I give fuck-all for yours; and I’ll get you fucking well shot.” […] At his 6am execution, Pte Farr refused a blindfold, preferring to look the firing squad in the eye. (Norton-Taylor, 2006)

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The duty to run mad One can imagine the emotions of those men obliged to shoot one of their own, and of the victim who knew his executioners were comrades and mates. Fear versus duty, cowardice versus grim manly resignation to obey orders, produced impossible conflict in the sufferer. The deserter – sissy, pussy, faggot, or ‘skrimshanker,’ as he was variously known – was the frightened man, the non-man, deleted, quite literally on occasion, from the battlefield as well as life itself. Desertion has, until the 2006 pardon, remained a deep stigma for surviving families. The Armistice centenary addressed some such affects in documentaries and articles. That the pardon has enabled a healing process speaks volumes of the enduring power of military ideology in branding a father, grandfather, uncle, or great uncle an unforgivable unmanly shame to his country. Rivers came to work at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, in 1916, and headed up its innovative therapeutic approach. His most famous patient was the already known and published poet Sassoon, incarcerated on false pretences. A decorated war hero, Sassoon had written an inflammatory letter, published in The Times in 1917, in which he accused the government of deliberately and unnecessarily prolonging the War. This provoked public outrage. His friend, the poet Graves, managed to convince the authorities that Sassoon suffered shellshock. It was only this that prevented his being court-martialled. Craiglockhart was one of the new specialist centres established after the April 1915 Bill for the Mentally Sick was passed, making special provision for those thousands of soldiers presenting with mental breakdown. Reid notes the significance of this Bill in establishing “a respectable, masculine category for nervous breakdown” (Reid, 2012, p.30). At Craiglockhart, Rivers developed what he called ‘autognosis’ (self-knowledge, or insight), helping his patients to recognise not only the cause of their suffering but its stranger and – vital to note – temporary, therefore curable, nature. Recognising that shellshock memories were fresher than deeply buried childhood ones, with less time to sink down where they are hard to retrieve and might take years of supine analysis, he sought ways for patients to reconstruct their memories as a coherent story rather than the fractured narrative of Freudian psychoanalytic method. If the PTSD of shellshock had resulted in disassociation,9 then Rivers’s treatment was to produce association: the ability to re-integrate the suppressed, cauterised memory into the present and distinguish this from the past so that a then and a now – a timeline – was mentally organised. Arguably, memory itself possesses the quality of action in time. Like a strip of film footage, it can be viewed and reviewed, processed, or shut down. The working of memory is in itself a form of storytelling. Repressing, or, according to Rivers, suppressing, memory is akin to an action of stopping something from

The duty to run mad  proceeding. It is like shutting a book, computer, or turning off a projector. Accessing obscured, impacted memory reveals the processes of the mind in storing and sorting experiential recall so that living becomes tolerable. Psychoanalysis is, as we have seen, a process of cognitive movement. Rivers, a Freudian even before the war, was among those pioneers who recognised the benefits of the psychoanalytic method that would soon begin to insert itself into British culture following Jones’s founding of the Psychoanalytic Society in 1919. A gentle empathetic man, Rivers was keenly opposed to the treatment methods of some of his more conservative and punitive peers such as Yealland, who operated in the theatrical tradition of the Charcotian medical entertainer. Unlike Charcot, who was disinterested in cure but intent on exposing the forms of the hysteric condition, Yealland’s explicitly dispassionate techniques were designed to produce the fastest result: cure and fitness to return to battle. That he terrorised patients through painful and torturous methods, driven by the (re)production of fear itself, resulted in only temporary effectiveness. Yealland believed that the shellshocked suffered from inherent weakness of will. His grisly aversion therapy applied the then common faradisation machines, such as you might find in a fairground. In his own words: Strapped to a chair for twenty minutes at a time while strong electricity was applied to his neck and throat; lighted cigarettes had been applied to the tip of his tongue and hotplates had been placed at the back of his mouth he then warned the wretched patient that there would be no escape from that room until the cure had been effected (Yealland cited in Wessely, 2009, p.39). He cautioned “faradisation applied without suggestion and persistence in otherwise intractable cases will fail to produce recovery” (ibid.). Another wartime doctor who prided himself on the efficacy of treatment was Arthur Hurst, working at the Netley Military Hospital in Devon where “he experimented with a range of punishing ‘therapies’ aimed at forcing his patients to relinquish their symptoms” (Watt Smith, 2014, p.172). Similar to Charcot’s Salpêtrière, Netley was an environment in which mental illness, spectacular treatment, and the prosthetic gaze of the camera converged. This huge military hospital was dubbed England’s ‘largest palace of pain,’ according to a 1900 report.10 Special walled premises were built behind the main building to treat shellshocked patients. Alongside Kings College Hospital, Netley was the clearing hospital from which mentally ill servicemen would be dispersed through the expanding number of treatment centres across Britain (Wessely, 2009). Watt Smith notes Hurst’s thespian predilections in a range of

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The duty to run mad theatrical practices and in particular his deliberate choreographing of both patients and medical staff as emotional and self-conscious audiences. […] The enduring films of Netley War Neuroses (1917) […] have become iconic representations of some of the most extreme and disturbing forms of shellshock. The film also played a vital therapeutic role, because it facilitated a set of peculiarly theatrical relationships between recovering performers and suffering spectators that sustained an ‘atmosphere of cure’ […] created through the self-consciously upbeat performances of medical staff and patients. (Watt Smith, 2014, pp.166–169) The footage shows patients smiling compliantly to the camera, echoing Augustine’s flirtatious posing for her immortalising stills. These men are exposing, in a quasi-Brechtian demonstrative manner, their out-of-control body: feebleness, paralyses, collapsing limbs, twitches, and instability (Figure 3.1). In one clip, a man keeps slipping from his wheelchair, apparently colluding with his amused nurse, in self-deprecating smiling insouciance. Subjects then appear miraculously as ‘normal and cured,’ walking straight lines right towards the camera, within minutes. Propaganda for sure (the films were made at a time when public support for the war that had already lasted three years was declining), this eerie footage, as shaky and jerky as the men performing in it, was meant to stand as testament to Hurst’s methods of cure, although these were eventually discredited by the Report. We shall never know if the performers were reproducing their own symptoms or feigning them on behalf of others. What is certain, according to Watt Smith, is that By 1917, Hurst was so confident in his ‘atmosphere of cure’ that he went so far as to say that ‘the nature of the actual treatment is really immaterial’ but that ‘persuasion through the atmosphere of cure is the most powerful means of reversing the neurotic symptoms.’ By turning staff as well as patients into actors, Hurst did create a powerful theatre through which, as War Neuroses testifies, profound neurotic symptoms disappeared with astonishing rapidity. However, like all theatrical transformations, once the play was the over the effects quickly vanished into dust. (Ibid., p.182) Compared to such manipulative medical bravura, Rivers’s quieter, private, one-to-one methods of creating a safe space in which utterance and storytelling were possible seem both humane and remarkably contemporary. One of the most common symptoms of shellshock was mutism. Trauma is prelingual, speechless. According to Van Der Kolk it takes us to “the edge of comprehension,

The duty to run mad  cutting us off from language based on common experience or an unimaginable past” (Van der Kolk, 2015, p.43), whilst Freud himself, when discussing combat neuroses in the First World War, had reaffirmed that “lack of verbal memory is central in trauma” (ibid., p.181) The therapeutic process of encouraging utterance and narrative construction was one that goes to the heart of the “language destroying” effect of intense pain (Scarry, 1987, p.35). Physical pain in torture obliterates psychological pain, a tortured prisoner becoming “a colossal body with no voice” whilst the torturer “a colossal voice […] with no body” (ibid., p.57). To the young man in the trenches, we might substitute the idea of this “colossal voice” with that of the commanding officer, the enemy, or indeed the bloodthirsty superego of the State ideology itself. In this analysis, his own voice, and the very act of speaking that projects the individual self beyond the confines of their own body, is inhibited by shock and distress, the Self retreating from being fully present in the(ir) world through the performance of silence. I suggest that shellshock is, precisely, psychological pain experienced as a form of torture. Shellshock as a reaction to others’ pain (Sontag, 2003) was the consequence of an agony that operated not on the body of the soldier, but on his mind and his senses. It was the horror of identification: what if this happens to me? It was the anguish of both what might hurt him directly and what hurt him from his role as witness to the unendurable suffering of others. In this sense, shellshock expresses empathy, the pain of being, in a word, human. Owen uses the term ‘pity’ in sketching out the preface to his collection of poems before his death “My subject is War and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity” (Owen, 1992, p.192). Pity is a resonant choice of word for it connotes not just fellow feeling, and the sense of anguish at the suffering and waste in the human condition, but regret. Above all, pity suggests compassion. And this, Owen would find at Craiglockhart, where he would pen his own torment in some of his most famous poems. Rivers spent most of his days talking with the officers at Craiglockhart, using his own voice to draw that of his patients out and guiding them through a process of re-membering so that they could become the authors of their own otherwise locked-up memories. His method heralded the ‘talking cure’ approach to therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), that has become more widespread today than the classic and very long-term commitment of Freudian psychoanalysis. Even if compassionate to what he heard in his sessions, he was not particularly known to be an anti-war pacifist. Along with his medical peers, Rivers’s objective was to heal men and render them fit for a return to service. At least, that is what evidence suggests from his writings. In this regard, the military psychiatrists faced their own conflicting demands: they were obliged to treat those men who were breaking

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The duty to run mad down whilst keeping the numbers of cases to a minimum. They were, in effect, willy-nilly, gatekeepers against the malingerer and shirker, servants of the war effort whilst at the same time healers of the mentally war-wounded (Wessely, 2009, p.47). In certain cases, this was true of the sufferers themselves, those men who might be seeking treatment not as a total withdrawal from the army but precisely, if inexplicably, so as to become fit for battle once more. Such was Owen himself, a young shellshocked officer on arrival at Craiglockhart. Here he encountered Sassoon, and, inspired, wrote some of the most devastating war poems and edited the hospital’s literary magazine The Hydra, publishing some Sassoon poems. Owen was not treated by Rivers in fact, but by his colleague Arthur John Brock. Supposedly healed, he willingly returned to serve in France where he was killed in action one week before Armistice, on the Oise on 4 November 1918. One can only wonder at how his artistic revolt against the traumatic conditions of this devastating war was overcome by his determination to return, fatally, to duty. Was this revisiting the site of his trauma perhaps some kind of death wish? A Freudian repetition compulsion? Craiglockhart as a venue played a special, if temporary, part in First World War history as a designated shellshock hospital, which Sassoon called ‘Dottyville.’ And it is for and in its Chapel that Shocks was created in November 2018.

Figure 3.4 Mathew Wernham, Diogo André, and Chorus in Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018.

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Notes

References Antze, P. and Lambeck, M. (eds.) (1996) Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York; London: Routledge. Ashbury, J. (2018) Imperial War Museum London: Guidebook. London: IWM Publishing. Babington, A. (1997) Shell-Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis. London: Leo Cooper. Bachelard, G. (Summer, 1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Barrett, M. (2012) ‘Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” Trilogy and the Freudianization of Shell,’ Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2, 237–260. Barker, P. (1991) Regeneration. London: Penguin Books. Bogacz, T. (April 1989) ‘War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914–22: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock,’ Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Studies on War, 227–256. Chambers, E. (2018) Aftermath: Art after World War One. London: Tate. Crocq, M. and Crocq, L. (2000) ‘From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A History of Psychotraumatology,’ Dialogues Clin Neurosci, 2(1), 47–55. Davray, H. (1917) Lord Kitchener, His Work and Prestige. London: T Fisher Unwin Ltd. Downing, T. (2017) Breakdown. The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme, 1916. London: Abacus. Ehrenreich, B. (2011) Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of War. London: Granta Books. Eksteins, M. (1989) Rites of Spring: The Great War and The Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Doubleday. Faulks, S. (1994) Birdsong. London: Vintage.

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The duty to run mad Finburgh Delijani, C. (2019) Watching War on The Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict. London; New York: Methuen Drama. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Hants: O Books. Graves, R. (2000) Goodbye to All That. London: Penguin Classics. Hart, P. J. (2010) ‘The White Feather Campaign: A Struggle with Masculinity during World War I,’ Inquiries Journal, Vol. 2. No. 2. Hibberd, D. (November 1990) ‘The Patchwork Flag’ (1918) an Unrecorded Book by Robert Graves,’ The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 41, No. 164, pp. 521–532. ——— (1992) Wilfred Owen: The Last Year 1917–1918. London: Constable. Higgonet, M. R. and Jensen, J. (1987) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. Janet, P. (2018) L’Automatisme Psychologique Essai de Psychologie Experimentale Sur Les Formes Inférieures de l’Activité Humaine. Sydney: Wentworth Press. King, H. (2001) ‘Recovering Hysteria from History: Herodotus and “the First Case of Shell Shock,”’ in Halligan, P., Bass, C. and Marshall, J. (eds.) Contemporary Approaches to the Science of Hysteria: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 36–48. Kipling, R. (2001) Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Köhne, J. B. (2014) ‘Visualizing ‘War Hysterics’: Strategies of Feminization and Re-Masculinization in Scientific Cinematography, 1916-1918,’ in Hammerle, C., Ubergegger, O., Bader Zaar, B. (eds.) Gender and the First World War. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 72–88. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror. Chichester; New York: Columbia University Press. Leys, R. (1994) ‘Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 4, 623–662. Loughran, T. (Autumn 2012) ‘Reviewed Work(s): Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914 -1930,’ History Workshop Journal, No. 74, 277–283, Oxford University Press. Mann, B. (2014) Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Micale, M. S. (2008) Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nerves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The duty to run mad  Mosse, G. L. (January 2000) ‘Shell-Shock as a Social Disease,’ Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock, 101–108. Norton-Taylor, R. (2006) ‘Executed WW1 Soldiers to be Given Pardons,’ The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/ aug/16/military.immigrationpolicy Owen, W. (1992) The Poems of Wilfred Owen (ed. Stallworthy, J.). London: Chatto and Windus. Reid, F. (2012) Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Rich, A. (1993) A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. New York; London: Norton. Rivers, W. H. R. (1920) Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shattuck, R. (1969) The Banquet Years, The origins of the avantgarde in France: 1885 to World War 1. London: Jonathan Cape. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London; New York: Penguin Books. Southborough (Chair) (1922) Report of the War Office Committee, or Enquiry into “Shell-Shock.” London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Stallworthy, J. (ed.) (2008) The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Times Books. (2018) Battle of the Somme. London: Times Books. Van Der Kolk, B. (2015) The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. London: Penguin Books. Watt Smith, T. (2014) On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wessely, S. and Jones, E. (2007) Shell Shock to PTSD: Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Hove and New York: Psychology Press. Winter, J. (January 2000) ‘Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War,’ Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock, 7–11. Yeats, W. B. (2004) W.B.Yeats. Everyman’s Poetry. London: Everyman.

Films War Neuroses: Netley Hospital (1917) https://archive.org/details/ WarNeurosesNetleyHospital1917-wellcome

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Shocks A theatrical requiem

Production Notes Shocks premiered at Craiglockhart Chapel, Edinburgh, on 18 November 2018. It was commissioned by the Dean of the School of Arts and Creative Industries, Napier, Edinburgh University, Pauline Miller Judd, in co-production with Athletes of the Heart. It was created in collaboration with staff and students from Napier, The School of Light and Sound and QMU, Edinburgh alongside the professional company. Remembrance tends to be associated with a narrative of heroism and the inevitability of war, its annual rituals transmitted in tones of melancholic triumphalism. I wanted to challenge the propaganda of such ‘inevitability,’ giving voice to those who were mentally mutilated. The character SHOCKED performs a replica of the Netley War Neurosis footage. Given that this was already a staged propaganda exercise, my deliberate use of this must be seen as an attempt on my part to cultivate in my dramaturgy a critical spectator gaze on what would otherwise be mere spectacle-of-a-spectacle (c.f. AUGUSTINE (Big Hysteria)). SHOCKED revolts and rages, bonds with the DOCTOR, heals, and is shot dead at the end (c.f. Owen). I see him as an Everyman. Text in bold is citation from the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Henry Newbolt and Rudyard Kipling. Most, though not all, of DOCTOR’s words are Rivers.’ Words drawn from his book are in citation marks. The rest is my own. THE COMPANY WRITER, DIRECTOR, COMPOSER, MUSICAL DIRECTOR, CONDUCTOR OWEN/OFFICER, SOLDIER, DOCTOR, THE BISHOP OF LONDON SHOCKED, a shell-shocked soldier LIGHTING DESIGN SOPRANO

Anna Furse Ken Dempster Mathew Wernham Diogo André George Tarbuck Lorna Murray

The duty to run mad  Alexandra Prentice Sophie Cushnie Dan Safford Joanna stark SUFFRAGETTES, NURSES, DOCTORS, Charlie west, James Hay, NON-ENLISTED MEN, SOLDIER’S Craig Giblin, Fergus WIFE Munro, Bryony Carson, Holly Clark, Keziah Sharp Sarah Innes, Ellie Kerr, Harris Williamson PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Susan Martin VIDEOGRAPHER Tina Gonzalez COSTUME DESIGN Karolina Anuszkiewicz WARDROBE SUPERVISOR Orlagh Phelan COSTUME TUTOR Polly Lister STAGE MANAGEMENT Veera Laitinen, Olivia Lunn, Naomi Ireland- Jones

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To one side US a STRING QUARTET, dressed in formal black of the period. SOPRANO at a mic. VOICE is sat at a desk CSL, turn of century style, heavy wood, green banker’s light. He is dressed in soldier’s uniform. Haze. A strong beam of light catches a kit bag. SHOCKED, in uniform, is sat on it, his back to audience. NURSES, WOMEN, SOLDIERS, SUFFRAGETTES and 2 white-coated military DOCTORS stand with their backs to the audience. Silence. Stillness. The atmosphere stark and bleak. As HL fades, the beam of light very slowly brightens SHOCKED is standing centre stage facing audience. NURSES and DOCTORS come to him. Suddenly, a massive explosion. NURSES and DOCTORS in one split-second action rip off SHOCKED’s uniform in pieces leaving him in only his underpants. QUARTET plays. SHOCKED very slowly contorts into the shellshocked soldier from the film footage “War Neuroses”. He enacts a cycle of the shellshock soldier. He moves to OFFICER’s desk and collapses to the floor. Music continues with SOPRANO. OFFICER Let me tell you an unspeakable truth. Battle is a kind of birth. It takes a boy and births a warrior. A battlefield is one big meat sacrifice to feed the Gods. Without its meals of blood, the ancients thought, the Sun would die.

The instruments for our performance were lent by Steve Burnett, local Luthier and Environmentalist. His five instruments were made from the large branch of a sycamore tree that still grows in the grounds of Craiglockhart: An Envoy For Peace & Reconciliation Through The Power Of Music. These represent as Violins: the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon & Robert Graves, the Viola representing the Matron of Craiglockhart WW1 Hospital, Maggie McBean, and The Rivers/Brock Cello, honouring the two Doctors who treated Sassoon & Owen. Burnett considers these instruments a complete voice of a living tree for our fragile environment and for Peace, adding an important musical dimension to anti-War poetry. Ken Dempster composed twenty-five minutes of music as a score to be ‘cut-andpasted’ into my text. This proved remarkably effective and we quickly agreed what should be played, when to underscore and/or punctuate, or at times when the composition should inhabit its own musical space.

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The actor has distinct voices and accents for each character he speaks. The OFFICER is based loosely on Wilfred Owen, the DOCTOR on Rivers. The SOLDIER is a working class everyman, i.e. the voice of the silent SHOCKED.

An allusion to Newbolt’s iconic poem ‘Vitae Lampada’ that will be quoted later. According to Rivers, the public schoolboy is at an advantage over the under-educated working class soldier who has never been trained in the rigid masculine conditioning of these kinds of institutions. In fact, it was precisely his lack of preparation and training that made it especially hard for the soldier in the trenches. See p.115.

A marching song. Sung slowly it loses its gusto and becomes melancholic.

SOLDIER I, I, I’m not posh like. I didn’t go to those schools where they learn Latin play cricket. But I know what I know. And I know that when it all started I just had to go. It’s not even a choice see. It’s duty. For our country. For freedom. For my family. “For King and Country”. “Your King and country needs YOU”. VIDEO projection of the Kitchener poster looms very large. That finger seems to point right at you. Calling YOU. After the first year or so with thousands killed Kitchener asked for 100,000 men and A million signed up! A million! We all have to go. Like it was just what we have to do. No question like. But Ohhhh, the thrill of it! Signing up with all those other blokes. Getting the gear, CHORUS SOLDIER sings “Pack up you Troubles”, in a pew, slowly. CHORUS enter and march, in sequence. They whistle, sprightly. They each wave a Union Jack (overlapping with song) Marching off. to some foreign place, far from loved ones, from firesides and teacakes, hot baths and beds with sheets, and her cheek to kiss goodnight. They tell us it would be 6 months. So, for us it’s a kind of holiday. From civvy street. There’s lads under age signing up. Eyes lit up. “I wanna go fight”. I think the recruiting officers know but they want as many men as possible. So they come. Kids! Some as young as 16. CHORUS line up DS, rictus smiles. Suddenly CHORUS shout:

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Hey! CHORUS freeze. SHOCKED is also facing out, rictus smile, waving his flag, in his underpants. All Disperse. 2 DOCTORS hold up the kitbag as if it were a training body dummy. During the following SHOCKED hurls himself at it again and again. SOLDIER ‘smile, smile, smile’ Music They trained us to be a kind of machine. That’s the only way to do it, follow orders from the blokes who went to proper school, clever like, know how to plan it out, understand the bigger picture out there. Bayonetting bags with a cry. The Serj yelling at us to be fiercer! Calls us names till we go at it with everything we got Arghhhhhhhhhh! and stick it in. Teach us that when they blow their whistle we’ll go up and over bang bang bang! Kill Fritz!! Yeah. It’s great, it really is going to be great.

Training recruits and volunteers was often done in a mere matter of weeks due to the imperative of supplying troops to the front that was losing so many men.

SOPRANO (sings) CHORUS GIRLFRIEND screaming out over him Stop his gallop so he won’t go!!!!!! SHOCKED is huddled on the floor. A large flag is wrapped around him. He is trembling. Music OFFICER There is always a before, there is always a during, and there is always an after. There is a man, there is a soldier and there is a broken warrior. There is a field, there is a battlefield and there is a scarred and pitted landscape. The middle bit. That’s what I want to speak of. The bit where there is a war, a soldier and a battlefield. I want to speak of how we become bloodthirsty.

Patriotism and nationalism were an ideological fervour at the time. Wrapping the vulnerable SHOCKED in the flag is an ironic visual pun: the flag cannot be a comfort, indeed the opposite.

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Warriors are not born but made. Trained and conditioned. Affected by environmental necessity. A flash of civvy life.

See P 114. It is quite shocking to discover how warmongering the Suffragettes were, a symptom of how the whole nation’s psyche had been mobilised towards the ideology of this being a ‘just war.’

A very painstaking walk, from the War Neurosis footage. Rivers did compare military training with hypnosis. (See p.130.)

My original concept was that the actor and dancer would never ‘meet’ as such, and that the voice work would be as a live radio play down a mic. In rehearsals the actors found such rapport, and the actor working with voice is so physically adventurous, that they devised movement interludes in rehearsal that we began to insert into the piece. This also created a kind of love-affair between the SHOCKED and his Other, who, in fact, gradually presents his own symptoms, as if absorbing the pain of the patient.

The thirst for blood, the enemy’s blood. Because in war one should kill, should steal, should burn cities and farms, should rape, should do everything and anything we’re forbidden to do in peacetime. It’s a kind of frenzy. CHORUS sudden outburst of bike bells. Video fades. Music out OFFICER Everyone catches it, like a virus. Even civilians. They’re the worst in fact. SUFFRAGETTE cycles on in bloomers frantically ringing her bell. She is joined by another. A scene of taunting 2 men in Mufti, pinning white feathers to their lapel. CHORUS point and tut, bullying them offstage DSR as NURSES and DOCTORS bring on a bed. NURSES very neatly make up the bed with sheet and pillows. DOCTORS fetch SHOCKED and take off his Union Jack. They lift him onto the bed, cover him with flag. His legs are twitching repetitively. DOCTORS start moving his legs in cycles to cut his twitching. NURSES remove their white coats. DOCTORS now in military uniform move to bed. They lift SHOCKED who is cycling his feet in the air. They put him down, watch him ‘walk into the wind’ in a circle. OFFICER Men sleepwalk. Our job is to lead. Show them what a stiff upper lip means. Stiffen the men. Make an example of any man who doesn’t face up to it. Some Officers shoot the tremblers, the cry-babies, the sissies who cower and freeze and won’t do the job. Because if you give in to them the whole unit catch it and then where would we be hmm? We need brave men who follow orders. Blindly. Like Haig says, ‘how can we allow the weak deserters if we are to win?’ It’s all about morale. If they show any sign of terror, I force them out of it by yelling and shoving them up and over. By looking them in the eye. He stands and goes to look SHOCKED in the eye. Face off. He suddenly lifts SHOCKED and plonks him down like a sack of potatoes (Figure 3.3 p.121). Violent bullying dance sequence. At end forcing SHOCKED to salute with a violent slap. Returns to desk (Figure 3.4 p.138). There’s nothing like looking a private in the eye to say it all. And he gets it. Challenge them. Let them know I’m with them. I won’t let them down. I think they respect that.

The duty to run mad  He swigs from a bottle of whisky. His hands shake. SHOCKED begins to turn slowly on the spot, his hand still raised in salute. CHORUS DOCTOR stops him in his tracks, swings a watch in front of his eyes, hypnotising him. DOCTOR (RIVERS) (stammering) The process by which a capacity for immediate response to orders comes into being resembles very closely, if it be not actually identical with, the process we call suggestion. In the hypnotic state, in which the power and efficacy of suggestion reach their acme, (SHOCKED, hypnotised, drifts bad to bed) the individual responds immediately without question or hesitation, not merely to the command of his hypnotiser, but even to a desire or impulse of the hypnotiser’s mind which is not expressed by speech or obvious gesture.

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He will drink whisky throughout to steady his nerves. As above. We start to understand here that shellshock is incipient in the OFFICER, who is reacting violently to SHOCKED, because he is defensive.

OFFICER Now, as the battle approaches they’re on fire with anticipation. The idea of winning excites. Nostrils flaring. Every rope of nerve taut, like horses champing at the bit, foaming at the mouth almost, panting. The smell of the other man’s blood is a thrill. Dying to kill. (Dark laugh at this irony. He is swigging.) War makes us tell another story about ourselves. About the beast inside us all. Or the angel. The story of … total … Senseless… lunacy! Nobody wins a war. And this one’s run by idiots. Those killing fields are saturated with what we write with our bodies. Our blood an ink we write this story with. Puts on a dog collar CHORUS to pews, praying. All rise except for MUFTI men during following VOICE OF BISHOP OF LONDON (as from a pulpit, tub thumping) to kill Germans; to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill

Verbatim, The Bishop of London, Right Reverend A.F Winnington-Ingram. See p.114.

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The duty to run mad the young as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded……kill them lest the civilisation of the world itself be killed. Amen (dog collar is removed).

Wilfred Owen ‘Strange Meeting’.

OFFICER I…I am the enemy you k…killed My friend… Music. CHORUS GIRLFRIEND throws a letter and parcel onto SHOCKED’s bed. He opens the letter with a photograph in it. She stands over him at his bedhead. CHORUS GIRLFRIEND “Darling I love you. When are you coming home?” SHOCKED is crying. He opens the parcel cautiously as if he thought it might explode and takes out a pot of jam and a pair of socks. Puts on socks.

This is based on an Owen letter home. Letters were censored for security reasons. Interestingly, as Graves writes in Goodbye To All That, some were permitted home leave during which families would at least sense what was going on at the front.

‘Pro Patria Mori’ is one of Owen’s most iconic poems. I wanted this to be the basic score. The composer Ken Dempster set the poem to music, sung by a Soprano, with string quartet. This would recur in fragments during the performance, then sung in total at the very end.

OFFICER (As if reading the letter out loud) My own mother, I am not allowed to send a sketch, but you must know I am transformed now. These are the things I need: 1. Small pair of nail scissors 2. Celluloid hairpin box from Boots (9d) with tightfitting lid, & containing boracic powder 3. Players Navy Cut 4. Ink pellets 5. Sweets It was only tear-gas from a shell, and I got safely back in my helmet, with nothing worse than a severe fright! I can’t wash my hair and have taken to washing my face with snow. SHOCKED and OFFICER simultaneously fold letters back into envelopes. SOPRANO sings ‘Pro Patria Mori.’. SHOCKED sobs. He curls up on bed and eats jam from the pot with his fingers. SOLDIER (Wiping his face on his sleeve)

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It’s not all action mind. When we arrive, they give us shovels and we have to dig. There’s miles and miles of trenches to dig. Lateral and horizontal. The front line and all that network behind. Then, it’s a lot of waiting. Days of waiting. Days and days. Killing machine? Waiting machine more like. On your feet. Dawn to dusk. Daily grind. Trenches are 7 to 8 foot dee: With dug outs at the sides for sleeping, for the wounded, for the officers to make their headquarters. Tiny mind. Fritz got there first, typical, dug their brilliant trenches right deep to hold the land we was trying to get back off them. High up on ridges, so the water from theirs drain down into ours. So, we have the worst soil to dig in. Really stony and chalky. We have to keep checking the boards. Sound track of very heavy thunderstorm mixed with shells explosion. VIDEO of muddy battleground with rain. A blossom of black umbrellas from the CHORUS. Choreography of negotiating the rain as if in a city during the following: SOLDIER Cos’ when it rains, or if it gets too dry the walls move. Keep the sides from collapsing. When it rains: everything’s sodden. Even our woollen vests. Mud without duckboards can be 4 feet dee: But even the duckboards can’t stop the mud from oozing u: Sometimes we have to tunnel. The worst job. Fritz might be only a few hundred yards away. So we have to be very very quiet. We can put explosives in the tunnel and set it off. CHORUS off You got to be strong. I mean the kit alone. Weighs 60lbs. That’s half my bodyweight! You know what we have in them besides ammo and bandages and stuff ? A knife, a shovel and a nailed kosh! Like those caveman things. Nails! Honest to God. ‘Cos the idea is that when we get a Fritz shell hole or trench, it’s like close-up body contact you know? You gotta stab or hit cos it’s too close to shoot a rifle. My boots: 5lbs each. The new helmets we got: 2lbs. And the rations! We don’t get to eat much. Half what we need someone said. Bread, bully beef and biscuits. So hard you have to smash them with stones. Tea helps wash them down so your teeth don’t break. Tastes of muck and paraffin. But with sugar it goes down. Warm at least. The Officers don’t eat our muck. They have the high-class stuff. (Posh voice) Paté (whatever that is). Christmas, they get hampers from Piccadilly. Fortnum and Mason! Bastards.

One of these was in the WW1 Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in 2018. Graves refers to this weapon in his kit (‘Goodbye to All That’), comparing it to the Germans’ effective knives for slitting captured enemy throats.

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Graves says that his Captain received a hamper each week, which he would share with the Officers (ibid.).

They censor our letters if there’s anything in them might make them feel bad back home. Upset them like. Or give away military secrets. So, nothing about the battle plans. Gotta keep going. Positive like. I mean it’s the war innit. Video of training regime

Video material edited from archive sources and created for this piece were not used didactically: they are an added scenographic element, a large scale wash against the back walls and ceiling to add texture and reference. He means from his class background and schooling. He is not really well trained in military terms, hence his struggle. This is similar to AUGUSTINE when she is first being scrutinised and diagnosed by CHARCOT: the patient/ sufferer is astonished at their own symptoms, observing their body almost dispassionately. Their medical body has been made strange to them.

DOCTOR “One of the chief objects of military training is to fit the soldier to meet with the special assaults upon the instinct of self-preservation to which his calling will expose him”. OFFICER (Teeth gritted) I am twenty-five years old. I am an Officer. I am trained for this. I am ready to lead a unit of men. 2 DOCTORS and 2 NURSES go to SHOCKED. They are working his legs repetitively in circles, bending them violently. He watches as if this were not his own body, during the following: DOCTOR Fear and its expression are especially abhorrent to the moral standards of the public schools at which the majority of officers have been educated. The games and contests which make up so large a part of the school curriculum are all directed to enable the boy to meet without manifestation or fear any occasion likely to call forth that emotion. The public schoolboy enters the army with a long course of training behind him, which enables him successfully to repress, not only expressions of fear, but also the emotion itself. Music Video of shellshocked hands. SHOCKED hands illuminated by torch.

In the War Neurosis films there is one of a man with ‘trigger finger’ where the fingers have frozen in contracture as if he were pulling the trigger of a gun. The doctor is straightening the fingers out.

SOLDIER The rats, they got it good. Fat on Tommy flesh. They scamper over you. If you sleep with your mouth open sometimes they put their foot in it (shudders). There’s more of them than us. Bloated bastards. Fucking vermin. It stinks. However much lime we pour, it stinks of shit and piss and blood and rotten meat, cos the dead are in shallow graves. Trench foot. That’s crap that. Feet go black and yer skin falls off.

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SHOCKED leaps up suddenly as if bitten by bugs, scratching furiously. Sits on bed and runs a lit match up and down his arm, is legs, his crotch. Or gas gangrene when yer body goes off so bad it starts to go really putrid like. You start to let off a gas that really pongs. There’s bacteria in the soil like. Lice in our clothes. We’re always scratching. You can burn off the eggs with a live flame but it never lasts. We try to keep clean and shaved but we can’t always wash. The reek of men. The smell of fear. Sweat. It’s like we’re all going rancid like old food that’s been left out. Proper stinkers we are. We love each other. Geezers. We do. The only beauty down here is our mates. A mate’s smile. You’d give your last breath for your mate. Comrade. God love ‘em. SHOCKED and SOLDIER in unison shout out, their arms flung open wide. I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!! SOLDIER This war is all about new fancy weapons. We got artillery: bayonets, machine guns (they take 6 men to operate. 600 rounds a minute!), shells, and they have tanks. And there’s the horses of course. If a bloke pops his head over the top to have a dekko, curious like: ‘where’s the war?’ like: where’s Fritz?’, he gets his head blown off. Snipers see. Both sides. Even in this quiet. They didn’t train us for this, see. They trained us aye, but not for this. Not for battle. We’re a civvy army. We aren’t trained for how it really goes each day, week. Waiting. The fear. The long, long time down here, waiting, and then suddenly ‘boom’ and it all goes mad. No one told us what it’d be like. Really. And, you know what? I’m telling you it’s really hard to speak about it. I mean if you aren’t here you can’t imagine. It’s like…it’s like: nothing on earth, nothing. So, we tell jokes and that. Some right dirty ones I can tell you. Tell each other about our wimmin. The kids. Make up nicknames for each other and for the Officers. Tease each other a lot. Mustn’t grumble. Keep cheerful I say. We write home jolly like. Make it sound like fun. I don’t tell my mum and my missus about the rats and lice and dead and wounded. The crap food and the smell of shite. The blokes with bits blown off. The blood in the mud. It’d shock’em to death.

An ecstatic moment, their arms flung out like Christs on the cross. Throughout the piece, the homoerotic in the relationship between SHOCKED and the other male characters grows, as symptoms take root, develop and become more pronounced in the DOCTOR and OFFICER.

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The duty to run mad SHOCKED is rocking on is bed, his arms wrapped around himself. He bites his arms. DOCTOR “The training of a soldier is designed to adapt him to act calmly and methodically in the presence of events naturally calculated to arouse disturbing emotions”. On an OHP, CHORUS SOLDIER writes the following by hand in ink, crossing out words and re-writing. OFFICER

Owen uses the term ‘pity’ in sketching out the preface to his collection of poems before his death: “My subject is War and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity” (Owen, 1992, p.192). See P 137.

From Owen’s ‘Pro Patria Mori’.

Graves talks about the taboo of naming gas supplies. They were called ‘accessories.’

SHOCKED is responding/associating with the spoken words throughout, but not literally. Here, however, he is recalling perhaps a gas attack, such as you see in the Netley War Neurosis films, where a man leaps under a bed when startled.

‘War And the pity of war’ this is what I am going to write about Music under the following. He rises, duet with SHOCKED. Ends facing front with SHOCKED on his shoulders like a wounded friend. on OHP, writing appears on ceiling and walls, very large: Men marched asleep Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind’ crossing out on OHP to replace with: ‘Of tired voices’ crossing out on OHP to replace with: Of tired, outstripped five and nines that dropped behind Gas. SOLDIER There’s 3 types of gas see: Chlorine. Phosgene. and Mustard. With chlorine its asphyxiation does it. But with mustard. Argh! The body slowly rots, blisters something awful. It can take a whole month to die as you burn up and choke. No Mans Land’s strewn with decomposing men, still alive some of them. Unable to move. Rats get in their coats and eat their faces off. SHOCKED rolls under bed. OFFICER (in sync with OHP writing)

The duty to run mad  ‘Gas! GAS! An ecstasy of (OHP crossing out/ OFFICER correcting himself to replace with:) Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time’ QUARTET plays SOPRANO sings OFFICER They must never know. Never guess what I am feeling inside. What I am thinking. I get a command. I know the exact second I must climb that ladder, blow my whistle and order them to go up and over. Synchronise with others along the line. I have my watch in my left hand, my gun in my right. My men are poised, focused. Their filthy fingered hands clutching their rifles. Knuckles white. Hardly breathing. Hardly blinking. Their eyes dart from the sky to me. A jackdaw suddenly screeches, and everyone startles. Video of bird flying over. Soundtrack of a jackdaw cawing. Whole cast look up. I sign to them to shut up. Then we hear the flapping of its wings as it finds another tree. I get the 15-minute signal. I order them to load their bayonets. They raise their knives in unison. There’s a silver metal sound slicing the trench air as they fix their weapons. Jaws set. Nostrils wide. Their breath just visible, smoking from their lips. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 !!! CHORUS blow whistles. Smoke and lights flashing. Music. Repetitive falls from 3 CHORUS MILITARY. SHOCKED is falling and rolling up and over his bed in cycles. All to create a sense of battlefield chaos. GO GO YOU FUCKERS GO GO GO COME ON GO YOU BRILLIANT BASTARDS GIVE THE GERRY ALL YOU GOT YOU MUST WALK, WALK, TILL YOU GET THE ORDER TO SHOOT GO DON’T STOP, GO GO GO!!!!! GO GO GO GO GO GO!!! A hunched khaki corps de ballet. Trudging. Teeth gritted. Can’t see the enemy for smoke. Some of them are crying. Then, a shell blasts us from the other side and everything becomes a wild moving painting. I order the men to shoot now. Confusion everywhere. Smoke, fire, whizzbang, bodies exploding, dropping, splitting in two. Heads shooting off like coconuts at a shy. Rabbits and badgers come out their holes to die with us

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The duty to run mad on the field. Shell holes opening up like craters. And I keep yelling and waving my arms to go forward. There’s screams and groans all around and whimpering “mum!!!!” and “help me” as the tatatatatat of machine gun fire mows them down, their arms flinging outwards, like tumbling Christs. The earth bursts open with flames. The smoke’s choking us. Greeny-blue against the flaming red and yellow and orange. I signal retreat for those who can still move. Back because the Gerrys have more ammo this time and we’ve lost too many men. We’re stumbling over bodies. Skulls like smashed boiled eggs cobbling the way. I’m sweltering with sweat and splattered with my men’s blood and mud. The firing stops. Music, action and sound stops. Stage empty now. Except for SHOCKED lying down still on bed. Fetal. His mouth moving, muttering, torchlit. Silence

A break for the actor and audience. Allows for an emotional shift of gear.

SOLDIER It suddenly stops. The raving screaming shooting stops. And beside me, right beside me, is my best mate Jim and he’s lying with half his face blown off, still alive, looking me in the eye and begging me to shoot him but I won’t I can’t. I’m just looking at his brains. His skull, his jaw. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t do anything but look at him. I’m shaking. I can’t stop shaking. Then some lads suddenly come with a stretcher and push past me and shove him in it and he’s screaming out and I can’t hear what he’s screaming and my eyes suddenly go red and there’s blood coming down into my eyes…. (Wipes his eyes). Burning wood. Cordite. Meat. Blood. Jesus wept. Fuck me. Music SOLDIER Now the Officer’s ordering us to clean up the trench. Piles of dead men at the ladders. Before they even got onto the field like. Someone shoves a sack in my hands. Points around. We’re told to pick up the …bits, and label the bag. Bodies blown to smithereens. Stuck on the walls and floor. Each piece no bigger than a chunk of mutton. OFFICER The high command has no new ideas. They keep recycling old failed strategies. It’s suicidal. We’re ordering a mass human sacrifice. Walk! Right into the fire. The medical services

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are unprepared for the scale of our battles. There just isn’t enough manpower, equipment. Drowning in the mud. And there’s nothing I can do. I have to take care of the men who’ve survived back in the trench. Keep their spirits u: I can’t stand touching the wounded but I have to. The sight of their mutilations makes me want to vomit. But I put my hand on them, try and say something reassuring like ‘you’ll be fine lad’. I congratulate them. Give them a swig of my whisky sometimes. Put my arms around them if they look like they aren’t coping well. One man holds my gaze a really long time. SHOCKED goes to OFFICER and lays his head on his shoulder like a comforting angel.

I was inspired for this by Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire.

And it’s a kind of bond. And I have to avert my eyes as his gaze begins to break into my heart.

This tenderness occurs, fleetingly, dangerously.

And I can’t be having that. OFFICER violently shrugs SHOCKED off. He is showing signs of distress he is struggling to master. QUARTET and SOPRANO. OFFICER (Reading from a volume of poems, Newbolt, under his breath). ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight Ten to make and a match to win A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to make and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame But his Captains hand on his shoulder smote ‘Play up Play up and play the game! (Slams book shut) Fuck that. SHOCKED is now going crazy on his bed. He is punching and tearing at his pillow. A snowfall of white feathers fall on him. VIDEO of feathers falling like a snow storm. Music. It continues during the following CHORUS WOMEN sprinkle a snow of feathers over him during the following. OFFICER Some Officers follow the orders from the high command to make an example of the weak. Put the fear of God in the men by a discipline of fear. Shoot the feeble. The shirkers.

Henry Newbolt ‘Vitae Lampada’.

The bed feather storm creates a ‘snowfall.’ This moment is inspired by a description of an execution at dawn of a shellshocked deserter that took place in the snow. The blood stained snow had to be cleaned before the local peasants passed in the early morning. It alludes also to the label of cowardice: white feathers the Suffragettes pinned on the non-enlisting men earlier.

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See P 133.

The shell shocked. A savage irony. A man volunteers his life for his country and his country kills him. Always in the first light of day. Butcher Haig signs them all off. A kind of military eugenics. I could never do this. CHORUS SOLDIER is now sat beside SHOCKED as if in a trench. He is trying to ignore the shaking whimpering SHOCKED. SOLDIER Sometimes they’d take a bloke who they thought wasn’t doing his job right ‘cos he was a slacker, wouldn’t fight, and they’d shoot him to teach us a lesson. Always at dawn. Not far from the unit. Firing squad, sometimes with his own mates in it. My mate had to do this to another mate. Had to pin a square of fabric over our mate’s heart as a target. They was ordered to clean up the bloodstained snow so the French peasants wouldn’t see it in the morning. OFFICER These men are a real threat to the ésprit de corps we need. Sometimes the lads take it into their own hands. SOLDIER suddenly throws his mug of tea over SHOCKED. Fuck off!!!! Music stops. SOLDIER goes off.

Rivers writes about this case, who became a character in Pat Barker’s trilogy (see bibliography) and a character in the 1997 film ‘Regeneration’ based on the Barker novels, directed by Raoul Walsh.

OFFICER What could you do if he freezes and won’t do his job anymore? We have to get him out of the trench. Demob him. Send him to the hospital. The thing is this: the army needs as many men as possible so the medics’ job was to get them fit and well again and send them back. That’s why they take the less wounded first for treatment not the most severe cases. That’s why so many die who could have been saved. It’s kind of upside down logic. The army also has to try and reduce the number of men who’d need pensions. Mentally ill men are a burden on the nation. And there’s not a lot of money about as it’s all going on the war effort. SOLDIER There’s one bloke I heard about. Wouldn’t eat. Not a thing. Throw up if they made him. Got so thin he was skin and bone. The Doctor found out he’d been blown up into the air by a shell and landed right head first into the rotten belly of a

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corpse. His mouth and nose had filled with a dead feller’s putrid flesh. That’s why we wouldn’t walk over face-up corpses. It’s too disgusting. Some blokes are so terrified of going back up and over that they swallow baccy to give themselves a heart attack, or inject their knees with petrol. Makes the knees go all inflamed. They soon find out, the authorities. Court bloody martial. There’s loads of names for us frightened men: He rises and circles SHOCKED, aiming each word like a body blow to SHOCKED who is trying to resist. QUARTET playing a sharp chord for each ‘blow’. Weakling! Coward! Quitter! Deserter! Degenerate! Malingerer! Madman! Mutineer! Shirker! Skrimshanker! Traitor! Pussycat! Girl! Faggot! Sick in the head! Twisted! Potty! Loony! Bastard! Bastard! (weeping now) Shit! Shit! Shit! Both men are now curled into balls of distress Music OFFICER There’s a lot of talk about how to cope because there are so many men coming off the battlefield with the same symptoms. Shaking. Their bodies crumbling. Not eating. Mute.

Each word now causes SHOCKS to fall and quickly recover, defiant, to look his bully in the eye.

The identification is going deep now, their differences breaking down.

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The duty to run mad It can last months. It’s an epidemic. Some of us just get the nightmares, hallucinations, terrors and sweats. Others the full blown physical collapse. It’s a class thing apparently.

This action was taken from Netley War Neurosis footage.

NURSES come to SHOCKED and put him in wheelchair. Move him CS. He is laughing at himself. They laugh at audience as if to a camera, about SHOCKED’s disobedient body DOCTOR In the majority of cases men become mute. The group that I have provisionally labelled hysteria – as in Freud’s definition of abreaction to trauma, that is, the conversion of mental distress into physical symptom - is especially apt to affect the private soldier. In soldiers, symptoms tend overwhelmingly to be physical: paralyses, limps, blindness, deafness, mutism (as I say, the most common symptom), contractures of a limb or vomiting. The private has to think only, or chiefly, of himself; he has not to bear with him continually the thought that the lives of forty or fifty men are immediately, and many more remotely, dependent on his success in controlling an expression of fear or apprehension. So, Officers’ symptoms tend towards the emotional: nightmares, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, disorientation, and anxiety attacks. Impotence is widespread in all ranks, a kind of sexual powerlessness. Anxiety-neurosis is not limited to officers, but affects them more frequently, and usually more profoundly than the private soldier. In the proper performance of his duty, it is essential that the officer appear calm and unconcerned in the midst of danger. The difficulty of keeping up this appearance, after long continued strain, or after some shock of war has lessened the power of control, produces a state of persistent anxiety. The whole CHORUS now laugh, very sinister.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.

OFFICER (Reading from the volume of poetry again) If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…. You’ll be a man my son

White feathers again. The normal memorial poppy wreath converted here into a pacifist one.

Music ‘Pro Patria Mori’ SHOCKED is standing upright now. A kind of statue. CHORUS create a tableau around him with a wreath of white flowers as halo: a grandiose war memorial. This shifts to a pieta.

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SHOCKED is back in wheelchair, his tongue stuck out eyes wide. He is struggling. His face is torchlit. DOCTOR The advice that has usually been given to my patients in other hospitals is that they should endeavour to banish all thoughts of war from their minds. In fact, one particular colleague, Yealland, uses aversion therapy. A kind of torture to shock the shocked out of their condition so that the fear of treatment is worse than the fear that caused the condition. He uses faradisation – electric shocks. He prises open men’s mouths with clamps and burns their tongues with lit cigarettes till they break their silence and speak out of fear of being burnt again. SHOCKED (Tongue out, struggling to utter) I…I…I OFFICER This seems to me not to get to the core of the problem. And it tends not to work in the long term. Besides. It’s cruel. Active forgetting is a protective process or mechanism. The memories that disappear in war-neurosis are always of happenings so distressing that the most painful emotions arise when the happenings are recalled. The problem before me is to find some aspect of the painful experience which would allow the patient to dwell upon it in such a way as to relieve its horrible and terrifying character. SHOCKED wheels into DOCTOR’S ‘office’ as if in a consultation I speak with the men and encourage them to speak with me. Tell me about the experiences they had as a story that I can then respond to. For example, the aspect to which I drew one man’s attention who was traumatised by seeing his friend die, was that the mangled state of the body of his friend was conclusive evidence that he had been killed outright, and he had been spared the prolonged suffering which is often the case of those who sustain mortal wounds. He brightened at once. He saw at once that this was an aspect of his experience upon which he could allow his thoughts to dwell. He said he would no longer attempt to banish thoughts and memories of his friend from his mind, but would think of the pain and the suffering he had been spared. Music. Duet between SHOCKED and SOLDIER that leaves the latter twitching, SHOCKED upright, back to audience. Music out

In my piece, however, SHOCKED will only ever utter these words.

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The duty to run mad SOLDIER (Shaking, twitching.) They took me back to Blighty. Put me in a loony hospital. I had the wind up. I was a gonner. Lost me bottle. Couldn’t do it anymore. I can’t even get my pecker up. I’m done for. What’s the wife going to say? I’m a basket case. What will we live on? OFFICER (Twitching. Trying to be upright and strong)

The case for pensions. See p.113.

Siegfried Sassoon called Craiglockhart ‘Dottyville’.

I came here to Dottyville. That’s what Siegfried calls it. The place full of Officers mostly. Gloomy. Long corridors full of men. We have our own bedrooms. And a communal dining room. We play cards. Smoke. Walk in the gardens. Read. Some men just won’t speak when you greet them. Won’t speak at all. There’s screamers in the night. Terror. Hallucinations. Twitches. Shakes. The sound of crying. Grown men crying out loud. They’re good to us here though. Listen. That’s the main thing. There’s the shame though that haunts. Of not being manly. Of being a coward. I want to get well enough to go back. Resume my duties. DOCTOR “When treating officers or men suffering from warneuroses, we have not only to think of the restoration of the patient’s health, we have also to consider the question of fitness for military service. In the case of officers, the patient is keenly anxious to remain in the Army. The first step in the treatment is to assure the patient that there is no cause for shame; that the fear he experiences is a well-recognised symptom of strain, and is due to the temporary failure of the mechanism by which, in the healthy and normal man, fear is kept under adequate control.” Music OFFICER We’ve been to hell. Worse. We’ve been through No Man’s Land. And back. We’ve used mens’ bones as stepping stones. We’re in grief. We blub inside like babies at what we’ve seen and heard smelt and touched. Because of No Man’s Land We are no men.

The duty to run mad  Un-men. Un-done. Unfit for service. I want to be a Man again. Regain control of myself. Master the situation. I am broken and I need to be mended. Do the right thing. (swigs from whisky bottle) There’s not much point in anything else now anyway. Music out

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Alluding to Owen’s decision, on recovering at Craiglockhart, to return to battle where he was shot. Had he lost the will to live? His poems from the period are so anti-war it is hard to understand how he would have voluntarily returned to the very site of trauma that made him ill in the first place.

DOCTOR By the end of this war, there will be 9 million men dead. Between August 1914 and January 1918 there will be 40,000 British men pensioned for mental disability. CHORUS enter and take up positions in semi-circle head bowed as if at a funeral or remembrance service. The numbers will rise in the aftermath, as the government will respond to the evidence that shellshock was in fact a misnomer for combat stress in varying forms, and that the war itself had caused thousands of men the deepest distress and anxiety. We might think of these symptoms as a form of protest in fact. If a man goes blind it is from what he has seen. If he is mute it is from what he cannot say. If he stumbles it is because he can’t walk into gunfire any more. These men, these many men suffering traumatic stress, were deeply hurt by the savagery and brutality of what was supposed to the war to end all wars. They might well be angry. For years the streets of Europe will be full of the legless, armless and smashed-faced survivors of this huge scale unforgivable catastrophe. This human disaster. This shattering blood rite. It is my view that wounds of the mind deserve the same compassion and care as wounds of the flesh. CHORUS blossom their black umbrellas MUSIC swelling SHOCKED is being dressed in full uniform by DOCTORS and NURSES. At the end he stands facing out, with a rifle over his shoulder OFFICER Without its meals of blood, the ancients thought, the Sun would die.

This was an idea I refer to on p.124, both from The Times newspaper report at the time and from Rivers himself; and, of course, in contemporary culture from authors such as Showalter.

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The duty to run mad Video. CHORUS disperse. Music swells over the following. OFFICER (Reading from volume of poems)

Owen’s ‘Pro Patria Mori’, also being sung simultaneously.

‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knockkneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime… Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori’ SOPRANO sings, her voice filling the space. A huge explosion. SHOCKED falls to the floor. Blackout.

4

Shapeshifting Gorgeous

Anorexia Nervosa, commonly shortened to Anorexia (meaning ‘want of appetite’), is one of seventy-one symptoms listed in the Index to Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1988). However, Anorexia is distinguished from hysteria in contemporary medical protocols, associated with several Eating Disorders (EDs),1 Body Image Disorders (BIDs), and Body Dysmorphia (BD).2 The key trope common to EDs is that women3 are voicing their anguish through controlling appetite (Brumberg, 2000). Such conditions are “not hysteria in modern dress but rather that both illnesses are culturally mandated modes of adapting to conflict around unrealistic social expectations” (Bemporad et al., 2016, p.96). In this chapter, taking poetic licence, I continue exploring the environmental effect on mental disturbance, where mind-isnot-brain (Kaplan and Court, 2016) and suggest how trauma is (hysterically) somatised. Problematising EDs beyond the medical in her feminist re-conceptualisation, which includes subtle and complex considerations, Susan Bordo insists on “the many layers of cultural signification that are crystallized in the disorder” (Bordo, 2003, p.67). The root cause might be repressed and inaccessible to the conscious mind, but EDs are expressively active conditions. Unlike the historical hysteric who was operating unconsciously, the sufferer is in painstaking, wilful control of the means by which symptoms can be articulated in the flesh or its elimination. Bordo refuses a binary stance as to whether anorexia is illness or cultural expression, disease or protest: it is all of these. It needs to be wrested from the exclusive control of experts and properly understood by cultural critics and citizens as political. Orbach calls the disease(s) an “adaptation” (Orbach, 1984, p.26) to conflicting pressures, expressing “the inequality of the sexes” (ibid., p.18). Orbach’s pioneering feminist methodology states categorically that it is precisely women’s oppression that provokes EDs, recalling how women’s bodies are historically ‘hystericised’ (Foucault, 1998, p.114). Psychotherapist and author, Orbach has consistently argued for EDs to be understood within the context of global capitalism, where multi-million-dollar industries

164 Shapeshifting promise to design women’s bodies to conform to norms of beauty through plastic surgery, body modification, bone extensions, diet, slimming products, and exercise (Orbach, 2009). At risk of critique, I  include Gorgeous here because the BID/ED sufferer is engaged in a corporeal speech act4 that is sending “an excruciating message about the gender politics that regulate our lives” (Bordo, 2003, p.65). Originally the province of psychoanalysts and clinicians, over recent decades, along with a rise in numbers presenting with diseases annually,5 the discourse on EDs/BIDs has entered mainstream culture through political pressure groups, women’s magazines, the media, and the internet. A notably interdisciplinary field, that of research and praxis, involves psychologists, GPs, social workers, nutritionists, counsellors, and teachers, each contributing attempt to treat and heal the Anorexic. Feminist scholars have advanced understanding of these conditions as a consequence of capitalist patriarchal societies. Hence clinicians will refer to culture and gender studies theorists who provide a feminist perspective, whilst the latter, in turn, historicise the field of enquiry and draw on clinical data. That EDs/BIDs are more common in richer countries might be symptomatic of Western societies’ multinational food production and the availability of vast quantities and types of produce for which, traditionally, women are domestically responsible and at whom the majority of consumer campaigns are still directed. The Anorexic is presenting a distorted manifestation of a world of plenty. She is keenly expressing something wrong with it all, with the economies of power, gender, and the sexualisation of her body from an early age, and she is refusing to be the object of gaze by offering up an alternative: her unappealingly altered bodily presence. If Anorexia is an act of denial – a refusal to eat and drink – Compulsive Eating is conversely acted out as bearing no correlation between appetite and food quantity. Eating becomes out of control. Bulimia allows both conditions to co-operate through overfeeding the body and then purging by vomiting or laxative overdosing, bringing relief. Newer emergent conditions include Orthorexia, where the sufferer becomes obsessed with the precision of what is ingested, including brand names and provenance, which may also be a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD);6 and the alarming Diabulimia, where people with Type One Diabetes deliberately give themselves less insulin than they need so as to lose weight.7 All such conditions are overarched by BID, where the sufferer cannot experience accurate feedback from a mirror. As a tool for vanity, grooming, and the construction of appearance, the mirror has both class and cultural history. Its importance in body dissatisfaction cannot be underestimated. The ‘looking glass’ was the preserve of the rich until the latter

Shapeshifting  part of the 19th century, when the middle classes could afford this domestic instrument, along with bathrooms and running water. Those who couldn’t afford such luxury resorted to seeing their reflection in windows or other surfaces (Brumberg, 1998). Today, mirrors are not merely a material tool for self-observation. They transmute into appearance-focussed smartphones and webcams, where ‘selfies’ can be doctored and broadcast to an audience of familiar and unknown viewers, who may or may not comment, critique, encourage, compare, and champion such mediatised images. For someone with BID, looking in the mirror constitutes a hallucination in the sense that they are fantasising. Where Alice discovers another parallel fantasy world beyond the looking glass,8 today’s BID sufferer is inventing their own parallel world on the other side of their reflection that reinforces their selfdisgust, providing a monitoring system by which to measure progress, success, or failure in their quest and, above all, express how they are feeling in the sense of experiencing their bodyin-the-world and the emotions this provokes. Meredith Leston calls the dissatisfaction that motivates Anorexia “neurological artifice” (Leston, 2016). She describes how her perception of her weight when gaining as she recovered (seeing herself getting thinner) operated in contrast to when she had been losing weight (seeing herself gaining weight), asking at what point body dissatisfaction slips over into the clinical condition BD.9 Meanwhile, Leston asserts, each case is “as unique as a fingerprint, as unique as a cobweb” (ibid.), a statement that clinical specialists and therapists might nuance, given recurring traits in EDs’ root causes such as bullying, sexual abuse, and traumatic events, let alone societal pressure and the beauty culture. The ruses Anorexics employ to avoid ingesting food fall into a recognisable repertoire, learned from without. From a feminist perspective, ED characteristics are symptoms of gendered orthodoxies, intensified, magnified, and pathologised. The complex set of circumstances that lead one individual to be merely dissatisfied and another to become disordered are multilayered, the threshold between body-image anxiety and the havoc of illness remaining slippery. EDs are not 20th/21st century diseases. Examples can be found across history. In the 14th century Saint Catherine, an ascetic, starved herself to death at the age of thirty-three. This Anorexic suicide was penitential, spiritual. Where Brumberg asserts this as a distinction, Bordo argues that Anorexics might share ascetic ambitions and spiritual quests with Medieval saints. Further, as we have seen in previous chapters, my protagonists have each performed disavowals of norms, be they domestic or military. They are refuseniks. Social withdrawal is a potent metaphor and form of protest.10 The 19th-century female condition bred forms of

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166 Shapeshifting hysteria among bourgeois women that included fasting and taking to their beds.11 Nineteenth-century girls who starved themselves were not striving towards a stereotyped feminine ideal but principally conquering their carnal appetite for food and – by implication – sex. They would have experienced an emphasis on good works rather than good looks, orientating them towards a sense of social worth compared to the proprioception of contemporary young women (Brumberg, 1998).12 Moreover, as Brumberg notes, the clothing industry was not yet commercialised. Garments were hand-made, necessary adjustments made privately and bespoke. With no store-bought clothing sizes to conform to or measure themselves by, a young woman a century or more ago might not have suffered the same angst as today’s teenager. Brumberg is explicit about the mutability of Anorexia across different historical periods: its symptomatology changes. A 19th-century tendency focussed on the somatic, the ‘pain’ that eating might cause, whereas the contemporary Anorexic speaks of being “too fat.”13 Brumberg discusses the socially sensitive aspect of Bulimia, detailing why this was virtually non-existent in the Victorian era: bourgeois emphasis on family mealtimes, plumbing, chamber pots, lack of privacy, and non-access to food for supporting covert bingeing and purging.14 Modern Bulimia, she proposes, depends on personal freedom – bathrooms with mirrors and scales, grazing in kitchens, supermarkets, and irregular mealtimes. Such factors demonstrate social, rather than biological, features of the disease. Brumberg also notes the effect of globalisation: affluent Western societies have exported the disease to countries such as Japan, Brazil, Singapore, China, and Eastern Europe, where, I would add, fast food multinationals persistently spread their empire. Her eyes awash with images of perfection and unattainable lifestyle, today’s ED sufferer is inspired, or made to feel inadequate, by the beauty and dietary industries’ insistent myth of transformation. Young people are living today in a society of mass consumption with daily media bombardment. Studies of contemporary effects across social media, advertising, and popular entertainment include video games, where idealised bodies in the form of avatars have been proven to lower body-image satisfaction among users (Grogan, 2017, p.113). The fashion industry feeds into the BID narrative, promoting the undersized model since Twiggy defined the 1960s ideal woman. The Anorexic, who might embark on the journey to conform to ideals that thin is desirable, might also be motivated by the need to deny her sexuality by arresting her development, perhaps through fear from some past trauma. A severely Anorexic adult resembles a thin adolescent boy. One symptom of the disease is loss of menstruation, the biological means to reproduce.

Shapeshifting  The UK’s mental health and addiction rehabilitation institution The Priory Group’s website cites that 1.6 million people in the UK today suffer from EDs. Their statistics make for sobering reading.15 The UK has taken the issue seriously at the level of political debate. An All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) established in 2012 (Report, Swinson, 2012)16 was followed by Caroline Noakes’s APPG Enquiry in 2015 into the fashion industry’s use of severely underweight models, followed by the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman publishing its report, December 2017. In 2019, evidence followed of a crisis level of under-provision for the over eighteen-year-olds.17 Government attention has brought positive counter-imagery into the culture, with size-plus models and examples of fat-positive beauty messaging in advertising campaigns. Notwithstanding, the pages of women’s magazines stubbornly persist in hanging clothes on bony flat-chested, hipless size six to eight models, simultaneously promoting diet plans. Dieting is a widespread practice: “Estimates of the frequency of dieting in British and American women show that about 95 percent of women have dieted at some stage of their lives” (Grogan, 2017, p.53). This staggering figure reflects the fact that in affluent Westernised societies being slender and smooth is a common aspiration, connoting happiness and success. It suggests the thin individual is in control, whilst fat people are judged lazy and out of control (of their appetites). Medical concern with overweight is founded on prejudice. Fat is a social marker of poverty, and the medical profession operating “fat bigotry” (Grogan, 2017, p.17). Doctors focus more on body weight than other underlying factors. In Bakhtin’s scheme, the fat low-class peasant is the butt of comedy, whilst the lean aristocrat is respected as a superior being who has mastered the corporeal (Bakhtin, 1984) and, I suggest, can afford to eat accordingly.18 Classical culture celebrates a tight, sealed, muscular physique. The wafer-thin ballerina connotes repression of sexuality, Expressed in a geometry of rapture, pliability, and impossible levitation, the ballet dancer is Bakhtin’s classical body ‘cleansed […] of all scoriae if birth and development’ par excellence. She flies, light as a feather, on pointe and off, striving always to give us the vicarious thrill of weightlessness and ethereality […] she certainly transmutes, converting organic complication into something non-reproductive (the ballerina’s ideal body is anorexic) and more linear than the layperson can ever be. (Furse, 2011, p.53). Regulating body size implies autonomy: that individuals are (misleadingly) able to negotiate the complex demands of

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168 Shapeshifting post-industrial technological society, which itself provides the constant illusion of choice whilst exerting increasing control over citizens. Surveillance – CCTV cameras or social media – is only one way in which individuals are constantly being scrutinised by others, and may, or may not, possess authority over or be able to access self-images. Willing self-surveillance is evidenced in the self-invention and celebrity afforded by the internet, broadcasting the self-as-story. Online ‘thinspiration’ social media sites proliferate. A 2018 Pro-Ana diet website – the term compressing ‘promotion’ and ‘Anorexia’ – provides visitors with a range of plans to lose weight very rapidly by consuming 100–800 calories on certain days, together with fast days.19 This site proclaims, “The pro-anorexic lifestyle is related to promoting and mimicking behaviours of those who suffer from Anorexia Nervosa, an eating disorder,” suggesting that their diet plans merely borrow from the Anorexic’s strict regime rather than trigger it. Pro-communities normalise behaviour by making the user feel that it is acceptable, justifiable, sometimes even desirable. In March 2019, the blog ‘pro-ana’20 discussed the “toxic” effect of “Pro-Ana” and “Pro-Mia” (promoting Bulimia) websites whilst arguing for their use if the idea of promotion is removed and replaced by the notion of community as beneficial to sufferers. Keen to test to what extent such sites trigger and inspire ED behaviour, a research team from the University of Durham examining “Pro-ana” versus “Pro-recovery” sites notes “a link between viewing of online ED content and offline ED behavior although the nature of this relationship is currently unknown” (Branley and Covey, 2017). Observing how many pro-ED communities promote the idea of lifestyle choices, they found that “‘Proana’ posts included content that depicted a desire to engage in ED behaviors without any indication that recovery was desired and no apparent recognition of disordered eating as a negative behavior” (ibid.). Posts on Anti-ana sites express an explicit resistance against the Pro-ana mentality, challenging the sharing of Pro-ana material and expressing concerns regarding the potential harm it may elicit in vulnerable users. Anti-ana users were generally not against discussion about ED, providing this was done in a positive manner, e.g. helping to alleviate feelings of isolation. (Ibid.) Finally, they found in Pro-Recovery sites that “The daily conflict between their desire to engage in ED behavior and the desire to recover was highlighted” (ibid.). They conclude that ‘thinspiration’ might actively trigger disorders in the vulnerable. This research questions precisely what such online sites are offering that cannot be accessed through normal offline support mechanisms.

Shapeshifting  Clearly, EDs are contagions growing exponentially in affluent sectors of advanced capitalist societies, triggered, encouraged, and/or motivated by online advice. They are fostered by social pressures that make a public “feel fat” and construe fatness negatively, and, in turn, convert this into multi-billion-dollarprofit diet, fitness, and plastic surgery industries, exploiting people’s obsessive dissatisfaction with their body size and shape. EDs have moved beyond the norms of decades ago. In terms of demographic, the stereotype of the Caucasian high-achieving, perfectionist middle class Anorexic is shifting, as more ethnic groups (and males) are presenting with the condition. This has been attributed to the acculturation of minorities into the dominant beauty culture, where low self-esteem among women may override any ethnic cultural ideal. Generations of minorities as well as recent immigrant groups who live, study, and work in Western societies are evidently assailed with the same messaging from social media and the entertainment industry, submitting to the same coercion through advertising and magazines as their white peers (Bordo, p.103). Oprah Winfrey positioned an African American woman’s experience of body image obsession and dieting firmly in the public domain. An investor in the organisation Weight Watchers, whose weight has consistently yo-yoed, has tried and tested many diets available and archived her weightshifting journey in public throughout her career. Winfrey’s epiphany that wasting away is a waste of time, “I think of all the years I’ve wasted hating myself fat, wanting myself thin” (Oprah. com, 2008), remains sadly unachievable for many. The body in consumer society is itself an object for consumption. For it to be attractive to others as well as acceptable to the self it needs constant nurture, grooming, attention, and care. The difference between nurturing the body as a ‘normal’ female commodity (if one can couple such terms in any rational sentence), and in cases of EDs/BIDs, is that attention on the self-as-body becomes, in effect, addictive. These are compulsions towards recycling body dissatisfaction that come to dominate a person’s entire existence. In a society where the body is freighted with values and impossible ideals, a self-destructive, over-intensified relationship to food becomes a form of dependency, whether using the tools of glut or deprivation. It is the addictive aspect that makes it so hard to break the cycle, and proves resistant to unlocking through food plans for weight gain or self-image adjustment exercises proposed by some clinicians. Like any addict, the sufferer has got to be the agent of change. Whilst experts seek to bring her condition under control, she herself is likely to forbear against the odds. The struggle for control over the body marks ED/BID conditions and their treatment. The wider political meaning of the individual’s defiance of authority, control, and surveillance in a society in which her body is not considered her

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170 Shapeshifting own is significant. For the aspiring ED person, as above, the internet provides a disturbingly rich array of information and advice to support such resistance, whilst a burgeoning literature is available in print. Publishing on the topic fall into four types: aforementioned academic writing by social and political theorists, feminists, and medical professionals; inspiration sites on the web, as discussed above, that include ‘thinspiration,’ ‘purgespiration,’ ‘fitspiration,’ and the macabre ‘bonespiration’; self-help books by patients and professionals; and publishers’ dispassionate classification ‘misery memoirs’ by survivors. Given how embedded EDs are in popular culture, I will continue to explore this vein further: among documentary and fictional films available on popular sites, the plot of the controversial Netflix To the Bone (2017) unfolds from the effect of online publishing by the Anorexic protagonist on an unseen suicide. The central character, Ellen (Lily Collins, Hollywood thin-chic), has a backstory involving extreme reaction that her online art, featuring herself, has triggered. The majority of scenes take place around a recovery clinic’s meal times, enabling the narrative to bring a range of ‘sick’ characters and their quirks to the table, even while the eccentric maverick psychiatrist Keanu Reeves’s first scene begins with “no talk about food. It’s boring and it’s unhelpful.” Written and directed by an Anorexia survivor, Marti Noxon, the film has been panned by the media and clinical experts for its false storyline about treatments; healers; and, crucially, the therapeutic process that normally takes place over time. In this scenario, Ellen goes walkabout from her lesbian mother’s house overnight (we are supposed to imagine her mother might be some cause of her illness). Awaking blinkingly in blistering sunlight, she hallucinates seeing herself from above, foetally curled, the sack of bones she has become. She strides home miraculously ‘cured,’ or determined to be so. Ellen’s neo-Biblical epiphany in the wilderness apparently prompts recovery. In a bizarre sequence that evokes Madonna and Child paintings, her mother bottle-feeds her, cradling her emaciated teenager in some act of redemption, presumably from earlier maternal neglect. Professionals who work with underlying causes of EDs argue that what prevents true understanding of the condition, and even fuels it, is to focus obsessively – as with this film – on what the Anorexic does or doesn’t eat, since food remains the symptom not the cause. Proprioception is key – the way we perceive ourselves – involving not only our sense of our bodies’ materiality, volume, size, and shape but also how much space we take up in the world, or feel we have a right to. As the celebrity Bulimic, Princess Diana (whose therapist was Susie Orbach) expressed it, the sufferer wants “to dissolve, to melt away ‘like a Dispirin’” (Hunt, 1993). This idea of wanting to disappear can be suicidal, both

Shapeshifting  literally and figuratively. When women occupy public or social space, they are traditionally present for consumption under the male gaze. As discussed, to withdraw from the public arena might be construed as an act of empowerment, even if, in the case of EDs, this entails self-harm. Like her grande hystérique sister, the ED patient is declaring, denying, and contesting her assigned place in the social space she inhabits, including her volume and her capaciousness. Ethnographic evidence suggests that women occupy distinct significance in social spaces, as well as reflect or organise themselves within them differently: “A woman who can be observed in public, or by men who are not related to her by ties of kinship or marriage, is considered in many cultures to be provoking attention to her sexuality” (Blair in Ardner, 1993, p.205), whilst There is a conceptual space for a woman which may be called the ‘interior’ as opposed to the ‘exterior’ body. Unlike a man’s, this private interior cannot be expressed in private relationships, because her body has been born into a world in which value and significance is an object for exchange between men, and she has lost control over it. (Ibid., p.207) Woman then, in public/social space, appears for others as well as, more problematically, for herself, trapped in the societal gaze (Berger, 1972). A woman who is actively working to diminish her size is reducing the amount of space she is taking up, materially, whilst at the same time commanding attention for her disappearing act. Admiration from others towards the Anorexic for losing weight easily shifts to anxiety, concern, and even aggression. The Anorectic mien can provoke mixed feelings, not only from family and loved ones but from strangers – opinion, comparison, and judgement. She elicits alarmed disgust. Her body is sensed as a frightening spectacle of skeletal vulnerability. The Anorexic body terrifies because she is withering before our eyes, stimulating atavistic anxiety about starvation, and reminding us of our own mortality and existential helplessness at the reality of dying. The Anorexic is performing not only on and for her-self-in-the-world, but speaking to society as a whole. Her flesh-inscribed speech reminds us disturbingly of being bodies, or of having one, and of our corporeality being a condition of constant and degenerating mutability towards ultimate decomposition entirely: death. This can be horrifying. “Saying that I have a body,” writes Merleau-Ponty, is “a way of saying that I can be seen as an object and that I try to be seen as a subject” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.193). On the subject of gaze “I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person” (ibid.). The gaze becomes a key theoretical

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172 Shapeshifting proposal of Lacan’s post-Freudian analysis of being a woman in society and the culture, elaborated in Laura Mulvey’s seminal writing on the scopophiliac gaze on women in cinema (Mulvey, 1989). Merleau-Ponty provides a framework for approaching the question of how we are present in the world we inhabit, and what the relationship might be between the facticity of our being present and how we might experience this. His phenomenological scheme, insisting on a dynamic relationship between subjective and objective states, self and other, body and world, segues usefully into some of the fundamentals of feminist theory of the corporeal. Elizabeth Grosz credits the important contribution Merleau-Ponty makes to resolving the inheritance of Cartesian dualism:21 Not only does he link experience to the privileged locus of consciousness; he also demonstrates that experience is always necessarily embodied, corporeally constituted, located in and as the subject’s incarnation. Experience can only be understood between mind and body - or across them - in their lived conjunction. (Grosz, 1994, p.95) Merleau-Ponty proposes that embodied experience 22 is the only reliable way to comprehend our bodily presence. The body itself thus becomes a perspective, a point of view. A body-in-the-world looks out on this world from the body. Further, perception itself is embodied since the brain is in/of the body itself (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). In short, subjectivity is not separable from embodiment, and vice versa (Matthews, 2002). If Merleau-Ponty has been enthusiastically taken up by gender studies and cultural theorists, feminist artists, philosophers, and mental health professionals, Gallagher has cautioned against the effect caused by misunderstanding of his writing on ‘Body Image.’ He suggests that when more accurately translated and understood as his concept of ‘Body Schema,’ new comprehension of EDs can be introduced, shedding light on approaches to treatment. This alters the idea of self-image as a static picture and introduces the dynamic aspect of proprioception. ‘Body Schema’ is how we live minute-by-minute, in a constant feedback loop between the embodied self-in-this-world and the impact and effect of this world, in turn, on our feelings and bodily sensations. Similarly, Thomas Fuchs devised the theory of “emotional bodily experience,” based on the phenomenological model provided by Merleau-Ponty of the “lived body” (Fuchs, 2016, p.17): the emotional bodily experience in a healthy happy person would consist of a fluid, affective interrelationship between the world and the body as lived-in, with feeling, given that feelings/emotions themselves alter our sense of our bodies. For example, when we

Shapeshifting  are frightened or excited we will experience our body differently than when we are calm. Fuchs, collaborating with Gaete across the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry, argues against traditional clinicians’ focus on the patient’s body image, which consequently brings to the treatment modes of corrective exercises, mirrors, virtual reality, video, and so on since these sustain the idea of her picturising her body through a distorted lens, assuming a normal lens by which body image is calibrated by any individual, which cannot be accurately established. Their paper sets out a range of theoretical approaches that have informed understanding and treatment of EDs, and that include more recent research findings from neuroscience. One key conclusion they reach is that following the emotional bodily experience model […], the hypothesis is that the most threatening things for ED patients are emotions. The corresponding assumption would be that the emotional bodily experience as part of any intersubjective exchange shows a hyper-arousal for ED patients. It means that being ‘touched’ (affective aspect of emotion) and being ‘moved’ (emotive aspect of emotion) are experienced as an unbearable way of feeling the body and that in replacing the threatening objects in the world, they rigidly focus on their bodies as objects both for controlling and for manipulating. This is what could be called the tyranny of the self over the body, implying a disturbance of emotional bodily experience. (Gaete and Fuchs, 2016, p.31) In this scheme, too-much emotion translates into too-much food/too-much-feeling-of-too-much-fat, the physical sensation of heaviness reflecting that of being burdened or overwhelmed by negative effects. There is excess, surfeit, overabundance. One is simply too much. The body schema is unsettled. The world in which the body-is-lived recedes as the body itself and its materiality are foregrounded. The relief of vomiting is emotional (binge episodes being ways of “‘eating emotions’ that could be driven out by vomiting, but are not expressed in the real world” (ibid., p.32)), whilst food intake restriction leads to release through a sense of power and control. Violence to the body, whose presence and emotional meaning are causing distortion, signifies desire for power and agency. This can go in both directions: highly managed starvation, or guilt and shame at the out-of-control chaos of compulsive eating and Bulimia. This individual is operating on themselves with high levels of management, often ritualised

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174 Shapeshifting and systematically auto-monitored. As a coping strategy, which is called here embodied defence, “patients use their bodies as the object towards which emotional arousal is directed” (ibid., p.32). The condition is active. If the ED sufferer locates the body as a site on which to enact auto-cruelty through abstinence/excess or other extended relationships to food (nourishment being the means for survival), they are doing so in a reciprocal relationship to the environment they inhabit – the spaces in which they can express their disorder. Spatiality is core to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis. In his chapter ‘The Spatiality of one’s own body and motility’ he puts this very clearly: “my whole body for me is not an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space. I am in undivided possession of it and I know where each of my limbs is through a body image23 in which all are included” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.113). Bodily space is “distinguished from external space” (ibid., p.115), and thus “We must avoid saying that our body is in space or in time. It inhabits space and time” (ibid., p.161). The body is not static and, as part of nature and the world, is in a state of constant change because it exists in time. Proprioception and Body Schema are thus the means by which we anchor ourselves in the external world, experience and come to understand its impermanence. When we “make perception out of things perceived” (ibid., p.5), we are not perceiving accurately, in the moment, from our bodily sensation/awareness/ image/schema alone, but, in effect, interpreting any sensation of ‘being there’ according to a set of preconceptions. That a Body Schema-disordered individual is hallucinating their reflection implies that they are producing a non-scientific view of themselvesin-the-world. Merleau-Ponty is arguing against the propensity of Western culture (perhaps French culture particularly), to privilege scientific, objective views of reality. By locating perception through bodily experience, he is introducing the importance of subjectivity – knowing-in-ones-bones – to human knowledge, highlighting any subjectively inclined definition of reality. This is neither assuming nor promoting an individualist outlook. The point for Merleau-Ponty is that there is the solid existence of a material world (even if this is in constant flux), whilst perceptual truth is achieved by the individual negotiating this materiality through their own perceptual apparatus. And so, his argument situates each individual in a social world, assuming that, given intrinsic facticity or truth to the world beyond the body, human cognition will find common perceptual understanding by virtue of being in the world together, albeit from different points of view, perspective, and location (Sanz and Burkitt, 2001). In short, perception is, partly, social. However, for the ED individual, this socially interacting subjectivity is thwarted by a pre-conditioned obsession that, in phenomenological terms,

Shapeshifting  would constitute a making-of-perception, as above. By implication, the process of making perception will be unreliable, since it is based on preconceived, even received, ideas as filters of what is actually being perceived and/or experienced (e.g. aspirational ideals of beautiful body type). What this body subject is doingin-the-world is being involved in a reciprocal relationship between her own sensory receiving of this – that she is making sense of – and expressing – as a way of being of and in this world. For a disordered person, this reciprocal relationship between self and world is corrupted. Rather than an unbroken set of relations between the embodied self (including the perceptual apparatus understood in the brain), the space people inhabit, and external objects in that space – that they come to understand relationally – there is a fractured continuum. The subject is operating on an already perturbed proprioceptive premise: unattainable ideas of perfection, socially promoted. Body Schema – the way we understand our body parts in relation to each other and to space beyond our edges – is misshapen, in a way that Merleau-Ponty would describe as prejudiced, in that this distorted purview of the self is responding to external givens. The person suffering this dysmorphia is operating on the basis of a fictionalised idea of her presence, the space she occupies, her dimensions, as well as the way she is seen by others, all within an already predetermined set of norms. Thus, “the other’s gaze,” as he calls it (ibid., p.420), is adding to the production of a negative reading, already formed in the ED psyche. This gaze affect here is crucial. An Anorexic is gazing at her own body with an extended, twisted, version of the social gaze. She is not inventing this inaccuracy. It has come to her consciousness through the social apparatus, only to be used against her, punitively, in the auto-destructive process of her condition. From the phenomenological perspective we cannot say that Anorexics’ perceptions of their own bodies are false, because we can never see ourselves exactly how others see us (Sanz and Burkitt, 2001). Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception can therefore be applied to contradict the idea of ‘distorted’ perception and to critique clinicians’ failure to consider specific cultural contexts: if the anorectic’s perception of her body is of a fat body, then that is her perception; it is not changed or disqualified by the differing perceptions of those who surround her. It is her lived perception, the way she feels living in her body, and this is not changed by others trying to convince her that their differing perceptions are correct, then becoming frustrated or resorting to medical explanation when she fails to ‘see [the other’s] reason’. (Ibid., p.44)

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176 Shapeshifting Sanz and Burkitt, critiquing the God’s-eye clinical view of physical truth, state that medical professionals fail to understand “that while there is an embodied perception of the world, this is lived from a situated perspective that is both individual (the person’s relation to the world and their experience of important life events) and socio-historical” (ibid.). In short, distorted selfimage is both culturally informed and individually experienced, through bodily feeling. The authors take up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘introception’ – that is, the feeling we have of our own body internally and externally as well as in relation to the world – and relate it usefully to the Anorexic experience: Body Schema and self-image are interrelated, and the identity of a person is formed by these perceptual experiences interacting with social relations, networks, and practices. In this sense, the Anorexic body is not pathological but is acting out a struggle with the way the body in general for women (and, increasingly, men) is symbolically defined in the culture. The Anorexic is holding up a mirror not only to herself, but to the society that has formed her; and she is working on the basis of this exchange. Might she be recognised as the apogee for a beauty-obsessed capitalistic culture that is both promoting narcissism and profiting from self-hatred? Where an hysteric might somatise historical trauma involuntarily, through the process of repression that we have seen in the Freudian construct, or in externalised dramatisation as in the Charcotian model, the ED individual actively converts distress into symptom by controlling – or managing loss of control over – the ingestion of food. The body is then ‘made’ into a sign system by the sufferer, who, in a constant relationship to her unfaithful proprioception via her own reflection, (re)produces herself in an altered state of bodily presence. Merleau-Ponty is explicit on the matter of authorship when discussing the hysterical symptom: “one keeps silence only when one can speak” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.187) and If the hysterical patient is a deceiver, it is first and foremost himself (sic) that he deceives, so that it is impossible to separate what he really feels or thinks and what he overtly expresses […] the girl does not cease to speak, she ‘loses’ her voice, as one loses a memory. It is true again that, as psychoanalysis shows, the lost memory is not accidentally lost, it is lost rather in so far as it belongs to an area of my life which I reject. (Ibid.) The person suffering dysmorphia, to the extent that they alter their body weight and size – perhaps drastically, through controlling ingestion of nutrients – is acting in a process of rejection of something previously experienced, or acting out this repressed feeling. It is thus a choice, of sorts.

Shapeshifting  The problem with treating EDs through the imaged self, as Merleau-Ponty postulated, is that there is the question of reversibility: the hand that touches its pair hand is both touching and feeling at the same time. The ED person is not only treating their body as an object but experiencing this self-inflicted treatment. Psychiatrists and psychologists such as Fuchs insist that this process of effective self-harm through control/loss of control of food is merely, like any hysterical symptom, a semaphore for something deeper and fundamentally causal, averring that “the changing nature of emotions must be the focus of the psychotherapeutic work” (Gaete and Fuchs, 2016, p.35). Favouring talking therapy, encouraging sufferers to move away from foregrounding their bodies as objects, so as to recuperate the sense of listening to their bodily sensations and kinaesthetic tendencies, will enable them to handle their condition and begin recovery. Yet this can be problematic since this shift of patients’ rigid objectification of their bodies to a subject position of their lived bodies, where bodily signals of emotions are the basic tool for understanding themselves and their relationship with the world, can create a high degree of anxiety. (Ibid., p.35) However, they argue, by working consistently to focus treatment not on removing the symptom, but on seeking the underlying weakness that would have been triggered by the original repressed distress, proves the only way to work towards more permanent recovery so that the sufferer can experience once more their bodies, not as objects, but as lived-in subjects. Phenomenological understanding thus knits together with a feminist social view. Anorexia, I repeat, like hysterias, is a language. Besides, language and speech are themselves enfleshed, arising from the body organically. Since perception of the world preceded language in the human story, language arises from the body conceptually (Lakoff and Johnson). Early Human measured distance according to the length of their arm. The body was therefore the first measure of environment. The ED individual is measuring a relationship to the world, a proxemic relationship to beyond the body, through controlling the amount of self-perceived body they bring to the equation. Merleau-Ponty suggests normal language and the intention to speak as “an open experience. It makes its appearance like the boiling point of a liquid, when, in the density of being, volumes of empty space are built up and move outwards” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.196). As we have seen in previous hysterics, that empty space might well recede when a person is suffering from an unspeakable memory, event, or trauma. If physical pain is language destroying (Scarry, 1987), so is emotional

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178 Shapeshifting pain. This leads the sufferer to seek a structure for a new language to be born. The Anorexic speaks morphological volumes: the lady vanishes, before our very eyes. She has created this corporeal language where speech fails. She has focussed entirely and obsessively on her body and her experience of this, even though she is still aware of the world outwith since this continues as a reference point. She is inhabiting the Merleau-Pontian construct of a ‘lived body,’ constantly negotiating between the proprioceptive and the external world, and learning from the latter. Contrary to popular understanding, she is not working only from self-image. She is feeling (living) her bodily experiences in-the-world, emotionally and physically. When she sees herself as fat in the mirror she is feeling fat.24 This understanding of the Anorexic experience of herself as in the world is vital since she is so often described as having lost a sense of reality. The Anorexic experience is very real – for her. Merleau-Ponty provides a formula by which to understand that the body itself, transformed by the Anorexic through sheer willpower, is merely the symptom, the effect of effect. What distinguishes the Anorexic from other hysterics – whose symptoms mysteriously erupt on their body without their having apparent control over this – is that she is actively using nutrition as a tool, painstakingly and mathematically so, in order to produce her desired results. She knows precisely what weight she must sustain if she is to remain above the threshold that would be life-threatening (an average of five stone seven pounds would normally see the patient hospitalised in emergency). She is an expert at her own illness, its creator, if not its cause. “Dying is an art like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well” wrote the suicidal Sylvia Plath (Plath, 1974, p.17). There is talent, and tenacity. She pronounces, in the language of fat, the story of the otherwise powerless body, converted by addiction into a greater or lesser version of its destiny. In this sense, as a shapeshifter, the sufferer is both an individual with a unique life story that has led to her condition, and a social invalid from the complex problems of a capitalist age. She takes the site of experience, her body, and enacts on this violent protests against what she has been born to, or given to be. She is a hunger artist25 (in both directions of excess or deprivation), because she knows that appetite converts to flesh, and that the lineaments of power in late capitalist culture depend precisely on sustaining the appetite of the consumer, a word that in itself connotes the open mouth ingesting, devouring material from outside. She is the canary in the mine, testing the toxic cultural air for us all (Bordo, 2003). She is a sign of her times, responding dissentingly to the mass messaging that engulfs her. She is choosing to be this way, even if her choices are those of the oppressed, which are, finally, abject (Kristeva, 1982). Another performer then, like her predecessors in this volume, acting out dissenting distress on her rejected flesh, the medium of her language the very stuff of survival itself: nourishment.

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Notes

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References Ardener, S. (1993) Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps. Oxford and Providence: Berg. Arthurs, J. and Grimshaw, J. (eds.) (1999) Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression. London; New York: Cassell. Beckett, S. (2010) Happy Days. London: Faber. Behrens, R. (2017) Ignoring the Alarms: How NHS Eating Disorder Services are Failing Patient. Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications Bemporad, J., Ratey, J., O’Driscoll. G. and Daehler, M. (2016) ‘Hysteria, Anorexia and the Culture of Self-Denial,’ Psychiatry, Vol 51, February 1988. Published online 2016, pp. 96–103. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London; New York: Penguin Books. Bordo, S. (2003) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Branley, D. and Convey, J. (2017) ‘Pro-ana versus Pro-recovery: A Content Analytic Comparison of Social Media Users’ Communication about Eating Disorders on Twitter and Tumblr’, Front. Psychol. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01356. Brown, Z. and Tiggenann, M. (2016) ‘Attractive Celebrity and Peer Images on Instagram: Effect on Women’s Mood and Body Image,’ Body Image, Vol. 19, 37–43. Brumberg, J. J. (1998) The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: First Vintage Books. ——— (2000) Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. New York: Vintage Books. Carroll, L. (2018) Alice through the Looking Glass. Haverhill, MA: Haverill Classics. Cixous, H. (1976) Cohen, J. and Cohen, P. (trans) ‘The Laugh of Medusa,’ Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, 875–893. Cohen, R., Newton-John, T. and Slater, A. (2017) ‘The Relationship between Facebook and Instagram Appearance-Focused Activities and Body Image Concerns in Young Women,’ Body Image, Vol. 23, 183–187.

Shapeshifting  ——— (2018) ‘‘Selfie’-Objectification: The Role of Selfies in Self-objectification and Disordered Eating in Young Women,’ Computers in Human Behaviour, Vol. 79, 68–74. Graduate School of Health, University of Technology Sydney, Centre for Appearance Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom. Court, J. and Kaplan, A. (2016) ‘The Disjointed Historical Trajectory of Anorexia Nervosa Before 1970,’ Curr Psychiatry Rep.18:10 DOI 10.1007/s11920-015-0641-6  Dahlborg Lyckhage, E., Gardvik, A., Karlsson, H., Torner Mulari, J. and Berndtsson, I. (January–March 2015) ‘Young Women With Anorexia Nervosa: Writing Oneself Back Into Life,’ SAGE Open 1–8. Drewonowski, A. (November 2010) ‘The Cost of US Foods as Related to Their Nutritive Value,’ The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92(5). Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality: 1, The Will To Knowledge. Hurley, R. (trans.) London: Penguin Books. Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1988) Studies on Hysteria. Luckhurst, N. (trans.) London: Penguin Books. Furse, A (2011) ‘Being Touched,’ in Matthews, J and Torevell, D, (eds.) A Life of Ethics and Performance. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Furst, L. R. and Graham: W. (eds.) (1992) Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gaete, M. I. and Fuchs, T. (2016) ‘From Body Image to Emotional Bodily Experience in Eating Disorders,’ Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 47, 17–40. Gallagher, S. (1986) ‘Body Image and Body Schemas: A Conceptual Clarification,’ The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, Vol. 7, No. 4, 541–554. Ghaznavi, J. and Taylor, J. D. (2015) ‘Bones, Body Parts, and Sex Appeal: An Analysis of #thinspiration Images on Popular Social Media,’ Body Image, Vol. 14, 54–61. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Grogan, S. (2017) Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women and Children. Oxford; New York: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hendrickse, J., Arpan, L. M., Clayton, R. B. and Ridgeway, J. L. (2017) ‘Instagram and College Women’s Body Image: Investigating the Roles of Appearance-Related Comparisons and Intrasexual Competition,’ Computers in Human Behaviour, Vol. 74, pp. 92–100. Holland, G. and Tiggenann, M. (2016) ‘A Systematic Review of the Impact of the Use of Social Networking Sites on Body Image and Disordered Eating Outcomes,’ Body Image, Vol. 17. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 100–110.

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182 Shapeshifting Hunt, L. (1993) ‘Five Hundred Years of Eating Disorders ‘Reflect Women’s Lack of Power,’ The Independent, 2nd May. Jablanoski, J. (2018) ‘From Hysteria to Anorexia Nervosa: An Evolution of Medical Terminology,’ Fugitive Leaves, Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, http://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/fromhysteria-to-anorexia-nervosa/#_ftn10. Jannath, G. and Taylor, L. D. (2015) ‘Bones, Body Parts, and Sex Appeal: An Analysis of #thinspiration Images on Popular Social Media,’ Body Image, Vol. 14. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 54–61. Kafka, F. (2012) A Hunger Artist and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kraidy, M. M. (2018) ‘Biopolitical and Phenomenological Underpinnings of Embodied Contestation: Further Reflections on Creative Insurgency,’ in Peeren, E. Celikates, R. De Kloet, J. & Poell, T. (eds) Global Cultures of Contestation, Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity. London: Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, pp. 113–122. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror. Chichester; New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits. London: Tavistock Routledge. ——— (1998) The Four Fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis: Book XI. Sheridan, A. (trans.) New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Matthews, E. (2002) The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Bucks: Acumen Publishing. McBride, H. L. (2017) Mothers, Daughters and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are. New York: Post Hill Press. McLane, J. (Autumn 1996) ‘The Voice on the Skin: SelfMutilation and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Language,’ Hyptia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence, pp. 107–118. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ——— (2004) The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndmills; London: Macmillan Press. O’Brien, B. (1991) Gorgeous. A New Play by ANNA FURSE: Teacher’s Resource Pack. London: Theatre Centre. Orbach, S. (1984) Fat is a Feminist Issue. London: Hamlyn Paperbacks. ——— (2005) Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty. London: Karnac Books.

Shapeshifting  ——— (2009) Bodies. London: Profile. Perkins Gilman, C. (2019) The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland and Selected Writings. London: Penguin Books Plath, S. (1974) Ariel. London: Faber and Faber. Raven, J. (6th March 2010) ‘Strike a Pose,’ The Guardian Review. Sanz, J. and Burkitt, I. (April 2001) ‘Embodiment, Lived Experience and Anorexia: The Contribution of Phenomenology to a Critical Therapeutic Approach,’ Athenea Digital - num. 0: 38–52. Sartre, J.P. (1971) Saint Genet Actor and Martyr. New York; Toronto; London: New American Library. Scarry, E. (1987) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Tiggemann, M. and Zaccardo, M. (2015) ‘Exercise to Be Fit, Not Skinny: The Effect of Fitspiration Imagery on Women’s Body Image,’ Body Image, Vol. 15, School of Psychology, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 61–67. Young, I. M. (1990) ‘Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays,’ Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana State University Press.

Websites Leston, M. (2016) TedX: Seeing is Believing, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=53_2kLU0ZCc. Oprah.com. (2008) Oprah Winfrey On Body Image - What I Know For Sure by Oprah. https://issuu.com/bodyimage/docs/ reflections_on_body_image/3. Swinson, J. (ed.) (2012) Reflections on Body Image, An allparty Parliamentary Group on Body Image, https://issuu.com/ bodyimage/docs/reflections_on_body_image/3.

Films Noxon, M. (2017) To The Bone, Netflix www.netflix.com/title/ 80171659.

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Gorgeous Gorgeous was commissioned by the UK’s young people’s theatre company Theatre Centre, and premiered in October 1999, at Mount Carmel School, London N19. It toured to Malaysia and the Philippines, and was subsequently produced by the New Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, where it remained in repertory for six years. Education Packs were published with these productions. It was first published in 2003 in Theatre Centre, Plays for Young People, Volume 1, by Aurora Metro. I wanted to write about a girl disorientated by womanhood and all its pressures, a journey into herself and her own shifting body image through time. I was inspired by Virginia Woolf s Orlando – who travels through time and gender; Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days – stuck menopausally in the engulfing earth; and, of course, Lewis Carroll’s Alice. I wrote the first draft on sabbatical in Princeton, citadel of the achieving academic young woman. The how-to-eat-alettuce-in-the-toilet episode was confided to me by a brilliant anorexic student. Gorgeous has a contemporary young woman in mind. Hence the objects, brand names and slang in this text should be adapted for any production and context, in consultation with the author. THE COMPANY WRITER DIRECTOR DESIGN CONCEPT DESIGNER PRODUCTION MANAGER COMPOSER COMPANY STAGE MANAGER VOICE CONSULTANT / EDUCATION RESOURCES Characters ALICE, just turned 15 + VOICES including: FUTURE ALICE MOTHER BARBIE RUBY FERAL CHERYL HANDS, which manipulate objects

Anna Furse Rosamunde Hutt Anna Furse Suzanne Langston-Jones Jane Mackintosh Graeme Miller Marijke Zwart Bernadette O’Brien

Vissey Safavi

Marijke Zwart

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HANDS should appear from under ALICE’s dress so that they connect with her own body. RUBY and FERAL CHERYL are both actual dolls. Ruby was manufactured by the Bodyshop but never marketed. FERAL CHERYL is available via the internet and is used with the permission of the doll’s creator, Lee Duncan. All references should be updated to the time of production. Audience enter to: ALICE in a huge pink and white rosebud crinoline dress which forms the entire stage setting. Her floorlength hair cascades in curls about her shoulders. The image is prettiness incarnate, doll-like, ultra-feminine, mysterious and highly theatrical. This enormous dress, which remains fixed throughout, serves as a surface as if it were a tabletop at waist height for the performer to manipulate objects, lean, sleep on. This now bears a book with a clasp, a quill pen and inkstand. The sound of birds chirping. ALICE is asleep. Eerie piano playing mutates to the sound of a quill pen scratching on paper. ALICE slowly comes to life. She is writing her journal. ALICE Dear diary, today is my birthday! And the first day of Spring. Everything outside is quite bursting with life. Clean green shoots are pushing up through the earth and there’s buds on the willows furry as newborn kittens. The cherry tree is frothing with blossom and the river is nearly bursting its banks. I feel… quite light-headed. And curiously hot. I ran with joy - well, tried to, only my shoes got caked in mud and the hem of my skirt too and then I tripped and fell flat on my face and the whole of me was oozing with the wet brown stuff. So I turned back and tried to avoid Mother but she caught me on the stairs and said MOTHER’S VOICE (Recorded voice. As if calling from another room in the house) Alice Goodbody!! You are a disgrace! When will you learn young lady that you are no longer a child! You are 15!! You cannot cavort about like some unbroken pony. You must learn to be more ladylike. Restraint Alice! Restraint! Or no man will ever wish to marry you! Go upstairs immediately and change your clothes. Put your muddy ones straight into cold water and scrub! And I want to see them hanging on the line within the hour. Leave your shoes till the mud dries and then brush it off. They are probably mined. But if you keep your skirts over your feet as you are supposed then no one need know. Be off with you! And do your hair!

The opening image is important. It was designed to create impact in school settings, where the piece was performed in functional halls. We wanted to bring something highly theatrical and arresting into such environments.

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Any name suitable to the ethnicity of the performer here.

Like AUGUSTINE, ALICE is irrepressible, controlled by those in authority.

ALICE So you see, dear Diary I am a disgrace. I shall never learn to be a proper woman. I shall be on the shelf. Like Auntie Zarie. Unmarried and dependent on my brother to take care of me. Sewing. Trying to make myself useful round the house. But basically useless. No parties, no dancing, no swooning. No babies, because the stork only brings them to married girls. I shall just get tighter and tighter and drier and drier until one by one my teeth fall out and… Oh but how can I talk so of Auntie Zarie whom I love and who has been so good to me. Almost like a mother. Gruff! I try to be good and quiet and still like Mother says. But then I get this urge to move to run to shout and laugh out loud. I still want to climb trees and lift my skirts to jump over streams… Ouch! (She suddenly clutches her belly.) What was that? Twinge… ache… it feels like something is dragging me, pulling me down… it’s gnawing now, tugging and gnawing… and my back hurts… MOTHER Alice! Have you washed your dress? ALICE (shouting back) Yes Mother! MOTHER And what are you doing now? ALICE (Hurriedly snapping her diary shut and hiding it and the inkwell, pen) I… I’m getting ready… I’m doing my hair Mother (she frantically begins to do this) I’m trying to plait it and pin it up like you showed me…

Wearing hair up was a 19th century sign of maturity, here indicating the significance of ALICE’s birthday. Remember that older women’s loose hair connoted madness in the 19th century (see Preface).

MOTHER Good. Remember, it is more becoming and practical coiled tight and then pulled over the ears. You don’t need to fuss with it then. ALICE Yes Mother! MOTHER Oh and Alice!? ALICE Mother?!

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MOTHER Remember, God is watching you! ALICE (Cowering, eyes upwards) Yes Mother… ALICE has finished her hair and has furtively taken out her journal again. She writes ALICE Dear Diary, I resolve: not to be a disgrace to my family. Henceforth I will not rush about. I will not lose a sense of restraint. I shall be dignified. I shan’t talk about myself or my feelings to anyone (except you). I shall interest myself more in others and put my own interests second. I shall think before speaking. I shall work seriously. I shall be restrained… I shall, I shall, both in conversation and in my actions… I shall try to think before speaking and speak before doing. I shall not let my thoughts wander. I shall try not to be clumsy and boyish. I shall strive to be ladylike. I shall. I wish to improve myself for the sake of my Mother, a widow and a brave and resourceful woman, and all she has done for me in teaching me to be a woman and helping me to approach my adulthood with grace and virtue - oops! Oh heavens! (She has knocked the inkwell in her fervour. It has spilt on her dress. She looks helplessly at her inky fingers, resisting the impulse to rub them on her dress, and wails) Oh I will try, I will, hear me God! It was an accident… Ohhhhhh!!!

The journal device, whilst historically apt, allows for ALICE to comment and speak to herself during the piece.

Suddenly HANDS appear from a slit within the dress. They are proffering a white sanitary towel. ALICE, alarmed but curious, dabs at it. HANDS beckon. They are saying, “Use this”. ALICE gingerly wipes her hands on the towel which is now stained blue (Figure 4.1, p.188). Suddenly HANDS swipe it away. ALICE Curiouser and curiouser. I thought… Oh my goodness! Oh… I thought… It looked just like… only Mother’s are… cotton cloth. I know because I’ve seen them on washdays and asked about them and she told me I might soon be wearing them too. When (with great difficulty) my m-e-n-ar-c-h-e comes (whispering) Eve’s curse. The sweet secret. I mean… maybe it wasn’t… Oh! The shape, oh goodness, oh… Dear God! (Flustered, scribbles in her diary) I think I have just started my - I think I have just become - I believe I have just passed the threshold from girlhood to womanhood - I… Oh gracious! This is the menstrual ‘flower’ Mother has

Sanitary Towel ads habitually use blue liquid to signify menstrual blood. The meaning of this ink-tosanitary towel action is clear to an audience familiar with such censored advertising. In the original production HANDS wore long red evening gloves. Their owner was also operating the show technically from under the dress. One of several references to Lewis Carroll.

Figure 4.1 Vissey Safavi in Gorgeous by Furse, directed by Rosamunde Hutt. Photo: Timothy Nunn, 1999.

Shapeshifting  warned me about. She told me about how like flowers we arc. How we need this, this ‘issue’, so as to become mothers ourselves. Oh. My hands are shaking! Ow! As I look out of the window I see the lilacs blooming. Just as I have been told they do. They, bloom and fade. They produce flowers, and then fruit and then seeds which scatter to be… to… to enter the earth once more in order to germinate and make roots downwards and shoots upwards. Oh my goodness! I’m perspiring! What shall I tell Mother? She will now, for sure, restrict my diet. No more pickles, meat or cloves, for fear they excite me. Oh, I am so frightened. And I hurt. My lower region is aching. I think I want to lie down. Drink tea. Do nothing. I have a headache! I feel sick. And so huge. As if I had drunk a barrel of water. Maybe I can skip my tea party. I shall say that I am… indisposed. From now on I shall mark this occasion simply with the letter “X”.

189

She is struggling to articulate her understanding of the connection between menstruation, sex and reproduction, all of which would be taboo.

HANDS appear from another part of the dress to offer ALICE a booklet. NB this should be a sex education manual as currently used in schools. ALICE takes it and reads it out loud. Her eyes grow wide. No! It can’t be possible! I cannot believe that there can be such things! Oh gracious! There’s even a diagram of No. No!!!! This is surely not for my eyes. I can’t look! “Tampon”. What on earth? It looks so - unpleasant. So peculiar. Like a telescope. No! Not right. It can’t be right. No I could never, never, I think I’ll be sick! Ohh… (flicks the pages and scrutinizes the back cover) “… copyright 2003!” She gasps in horror, throws the booklet. HANDS catch it. Make it vanish. HANDS produce a large watch. A timetravelling cacophony of ticking and whirring during which ALICE moves her upper body as if she is tumbling. During this HANDS throw up various objects, pieces of clothing from different apertures. When this is over ALICE’s tabletop is strewn with teenage girl objects of fetish. ALICE surveys them one by one. She picks up a magazine with a picture of Di Caprio. “Leonardo - true love, the true story” (She picks up a pair of Calvin Klein women’s boxer short knickers. Admires them.) I think Mother might approve of these. Well, they’re grey. Cotton. Unadorned. Except perhaps they’re a bit short… Maybe they belong to someone very small. (reads) “C.A.L.V.I.N. K.L.E.I.N.” Hmm. That doesn’t sound like a girl (drops them) Oooooh! Maybe they’re not girls’. Oh! What if they’re boys’ (picks them up gingerly and reads the label again) “One size. Washing instructions: machine wash forty and tumble

The time-travelling device.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice fell down the rabbit hole.

I am using Brechtian A-Effekt here to get the young audience to reflect on objects they take for granted in everyday life.

190 Shapeshifting dry?” “Machine???? Tumble??? Why would Calvin want anyone to know these things about herself, or himself ? (She picks up a pair of platform shoes.) Oooooh. I’ve seen pictures of these in my book about Greek Drama (picks up a Wonderbra). What on earth could this be? (finds label and reads) “Wonderbra” what a strange word. “Thirty-four B cup”… must be some cooking thing. For measuring ingredients? Maybe for cheese-making? You could put the curds in here and hang it over… Certainly couldn’t drink out of it. Feels nice. Reminds me of something but I cannot think what. (finds a make-up purse) Ah! I know what this is. Well, at least I think I do - no, maybe not… (opens lipsticks, blushers, eyeliners, mascaras and reads all the names and descriptions, puzzled and very interested) “Titian Red”, “Charcoal”, “Iridescent Rose Madder”… Maybe it’s some artist’s bag. Wait a minute (opens a powder compact). I think I know what this might be (she sniffs it, dabs it, crumbles it in her fingers). Yes! I knew it! Powder paint!! Maybe Calvin is an artist. Maybe Leonardo is Leonardo Da Vinci and Calvin is his pupil… Maybe Calvin helped mix the colours for the Mona Lisa! Maybe he fell in love with her! But why the knickers? (finds a mobile phone) Gracious! What extraordinary material. Sort of like coal. No. Iron. No. I’ve never felt anything quite like it. Oh! It’s got numbers on it! (she explores the keys, accidentally punches a stored number and gets through). FUTURE ALICE (Recorded voice) Hello. This is Alice’s mobile voicemail. Please leave a message after you hear the beep, saying who you are and when you called and I’ll get back to you when I can. Bye. ALICE (Amazed) It, it can’t be - it sounds so familiar. ALICE slams the phone down. Then cautiously picks it up and tries again. This time, after the voicemail message comes on again. FUTURE ALICE Hello. This is Alice’s mobile voicemail. Please leave a message after you hear the beep, saying who you are and when you called and I’ll get back to you when I can. Bye. ALICE Who are you? Are you in there? Can you hear me?! I’m Alice. I’m Alice Goodbody. And I’m very confused. I’m fifteen

Shapeshifting  years old. Well, just. Today is actually my birthday. I’m just getting ready for my tea-party to celebrate. I have just turned fifteen. Just now. About to. I have just had the most extraordinary sensation of falling. Everything looks just the same, only different somehow. I’m the same. My dress is the same, my hair is the same (well same but different. I mean. Oh never mind…) everything’s the same. Only there are all these strange objects strewn around and, well, I am, well, feeling unwell, a little… unwell, I can’t really talk about it but let’s just say I’m indisposed. A woman who is indisposed. A woman, yes, woman. Young woman, er, as it were, well, maybe that’s why I feel so confused. Maybe that’s why I feel like I have fallen. I don’t know who you are but I feel I know you. If you’re a ghost I’m not frightened of you. Surprisingly. So maybe you’d like to put the matter straight and make yourself known to me. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere, so I think you’ll find me. Here, where I always am – A loud tone, then a click. ALICE has run out of message time. She’s puzzled. Suddenly the phone in her hands rings. She’s alarmed. She explores it as if it were an archeological find trying, to understand what the noise is and its provenance. Then, by accident, discovers the answer button. FUTURE ALICE’S voice now speaks. FUTURE ALICE Alice! Hiya! It’s me. Got your message. It’s wicked to hear you. I’ve been like doing this project at school and I’ve been thinking what it must be like to be living like a hundred years ago and now… you’ve arrived! Oh innit such a relief we got our period at last?! I was nearly the last in the class. I really thought there was something wrong with me. D’you know what I mean? I’m well happy I’ve come on. I want everyone to know, everyone! I can’t wait to tell the girls at school. They’ll stop calling me fried eggs now innit. D’you know what I think? I think they should throw a party for us to celebrate. I do! Shani at school says that in Ghana the Asante tribe put a girl who’s just started under an umbrella and sing and dance in her honour. What do we get? A lesson in hygiene and a packet of Lillets. It’s well out of order! Well from now on I’m going to have big tits and wear a push up Wonderbra on Saturday nights! Mind you right now they feel like someone’s been using them for boxing training so maybe I’ll leave it a week! Oh it’s so cool to hear you! Welcome to the future. We are going on a journey into our womanhood. Oi you know like you found our knickers

191

Menstrual taboo as well as Eve’s Fall from grace. ALICE feels she has physically as well as, perhaps, morally, fallen.

A contemporary teenage voice with which the audience can identify.

192 Shapeshifting and makeup? What you thought was paint? It’s face paint… make-up, you know? Well, you probably don’t but never mind. The “cheesecloth”? That’s a bra. Size thirty-four bust means we’re not exactly Posh Spice but we’re, well, sort of sporty. ALICE Size? What do you mean? I don’t have a size. I’m just me. FUTURE ALICE So where d’you get your clothes from, and how do you know what size to buy? Hm?

See Brumberg, J. (1998).

ALICE I or Mother, make my clothes by hand. FUTURE ALICE Wow. So like you’ll never know if you’re ‘the wrong size’. That’s sooooo cool. I like it. I hate sizes. And manufacturers seem to make them up as they go along anyways so shopping can be a nightmare. D’you know what? Half the time I want to rave all night in my platforms and the other half I want to curl up in Mum’s lap sucking my thumbs and have her feed me bowls of sticky toffee pudding. There’s so much pressure. To look great. To do well at school so as like to get a job or even go to college. To attract boys. Safe sex ALICE shrieks and drops the phone. She starts gagging. FUTURE ALICE (Whispering) Alice! Relax. I know. That word. Scary eh? We’re terrified of it all. Terrified that our skin’s breaking out. Acne. Spots. Blackheads. Ugh! And hair. In the wrong places. Bikini lines, and legs and armpits and face! And blood. Terrified of this bleeding. That it might show. Terrified of changing, of being touched, of having to get it on with boys so that our schoolmates think we’re really cool. Terrified of being different. Of not fitting in. Of being lonely and left out. Of our parents finding out what we get up to. Of them stopping us. Stopping my pocket money. Stopping us going out. Going with our mates. Terrified of our mates. Terrified of being laughed at for our boobs, our bum, our legs, our nose, our hair, our mouth, our teeth, our face. Terrified of being dissed. Of being crap at school. Of people thinking I’m not clever. Of what I’m gonna do with my life. Of not getting a job. Of getting a job. Of getting married. Of not getting married. Of getting pregnant…

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ALICE Yes! Yes! Yes! FUTURE ALICE You know what we need right now? ALICE (Into the mouthpiece) What? FUTURE ALICE A cheeseburger and chips and a large Coke. ALICE A what?! FUTURE ALICE Whenever I get like this I just need to eat.

Stress, anxiety and comfort-eating.

ALICE I don’t know what you’re talking about. The cheese thingummyjig. FUTURE ALICE What? Alice! A cheeseburger is the best invention since sliced bread. Ground meat in a bun, cheese on top and fried potatoes… Anyways and you put loads of tomato ketchup on it and it’s well nice. I can eat more than one at a go and Coca Cola is a fizzy brown drink that tastes… well, I can’t describe it… but there’s really only one brand that’s the real thing. ALICE I want some! HANDS produce a burger meal on a plastic tray. There is a big sign on it: EAT ME. DRINK ME. ALICE is fascinated. Starts to eat and drink. Guzzles. Makes approving sounds and speaks with her mouthful. ALICE Gracious me this is good!!!! Mother wouldn’t approve at all! She wants me to stop eating meat for fear it makes me… excited… and as for this sweet beer stuff… it’s… so… funny. Feels like I’ve swallowed a balloon full of air. Oh how do you make this food? Aren’t you clever! I want the recipe. Let me write it down now (takes her diary and pen). FUTURE ALICE Fast food Alice! Junk food, fast food, quick and cheap and over-the-counter-I-can’t-wait food! I can’t give you the

A direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

194 Shapeshifting recipe! It’s a trade secret! Remember Alice, this is nearly the 21st century! Food’s ready to eat. You just buy it that’s all. You just walk in and buy it. ALICE You mean I don’t have to learn how to cook? FUTURE ALICE Nope. Not really. Except a bit of microwaving I s’pose. ALICE So what do I do all day if I’m not planning and preparing meals? FUTURE ALICE I dunno. Live your own life. Dream your dreams. ALICE Of perfection?!! This thought disturbs ALICE. HANDS produce a mirror. ALICE takes it and scrutinises her face.

See Brumberg. J. on mirrors, pp.164–165 (1998).

ALICE Eurgh! A blemish! Another one! Oh no! Blackheads! My face is so… fleshy!! Pudgy! I’ve never really looked at it closely before! (pinches her cheeks, under her chin) I’m ugly! (scans the rest of her upper body with the mirror) ­Disgusting. This dress is too tight! I hate myself! I hate myself ? I want blue eyes! No green! No brown! No grey! I want to be fairskinned! No dark! I want to be taller! No shorter! I want straight hair, curly hair, black hair, blonde hair! I want bigger boobs, smaller boobs, no boobs. I want a flat stomach! I want… I want… I want another cheeseburger! (HANDS produce another tray of food. This time there’s a Sundae.) On second thoughts, I want you, whatever you are, soft pink creamy sweet pudding that you are! Mmmmmmm. ALICE eats. As she does so, HANDS produce a naked Barbie doll. ALICE stops eating, embarrassed but fixated. The more fixated she is on Barbie the more she eats. She feels Barbie is watching her BARBIE (Recorded voice) A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. ALICE I beg your pardon?

Shapeshifting  BARBIE It’s full-fat ice cream and double whipped cream. It’s a naughty naughty naughty sinful naughty dessert. Are you really sure you want it? ALICE Who are you? Soupy muzak underscores the following: BARBIE Hi! I’m Barbie! Diva of the doll-world. I’m a best-seller!! Two of me are sold each minute! If you laid all of me in the world end to end I’d circle the earth seven times! I’m forty-three years old and I still look as young and pretty and impossible as I did in 1959. Do you know I was the first doll with breasts? At first this meant I didn’t sell well but then folks got kinds used to my cute little pointy things and, well, the rest is history. I’m actually an anatomical impossibility. Like most classical nude paintings of women as a matter of fact. I mean Botticelli’s Venus couldn’t stand up if she tried!! Proportionally my feet are equivalent to a toddler’s shoe-size. And my waist, well, it’s even smaller than those lovely corseted seventeen inchers you gals in the nineteenth century love so much. The thing about me is my total flexibility. I have had no less than five hundred make-overs in forty years! See I keep up! I’m always NOW! I can adapt my style, my fashion sense, even my ethnicity to whatever the current market might be. Folks can never get enough of me! Kids go wild for me! So does Ken actually. Have you met Ken? He’s my bendy-legged toyboy, boytoy, boyfriend, fiancé, husband, colleague… HANDS produce a naked Ken doll. ALICE hides her eyes and peeps through her fingers We’ve both got our own lives and interests but there’s lots we do together. We date all the time. Oh sorry. Ken and I are both real relaxed about nudity, even though we both have such extensive wardrobes. You will note that Ken has no er… real, bump at the front. That’s because everybody out there just didn’t want the real thing you know. Like I don’t have any pubes! I guess that might be one reason why we both keep smiling!!! (giggles) None of that nasty down below stuff to get in the way of a lovely, outfit-filled, hobby-happy life of style and fantasy… ALICE It’s very nice to meet you but please put some clothes on, please!!

195

196 Shapeshifting BARBIE Sure! HANDS produce Barbie and Ken outfits. ALICE realises she is supposed to do the dressing and does so, deeply curious but ashamed at her interest in their bodies. ALICE What on earth are these supposed to be?! BARBIE “Hot surfers.” My thong bikini sure gets some approval let me tell you and Ken, well, he’s just sooooo hot in his Bermuda print surfing shorts… (her voice gets muffled by ALICE pulling things over her head) ALICE If Mother could see me now she’d die! Absolutely die! I’ve never seen a boy naked. Never seen myself naked. It’s, it’s wrong I mean it’s unattractive and should never be allowed. When I get married, my husband will never be allowed to see me naked. Never! I should die of shame! And I never never want to see him in… in… the flesh as it were. I think you are both immoral. I think you have no shame. No sense of decorum and what’s proper. I think your ‘dating’ is quite outrageous. I think you’re obscene, outlandish and… and… quite… gorgeous!!! ALICE throws the dolls down. HANDS whips them away. ALICE easily flips from anxiety and disapproval to consumer.

The Mattel corporation who manufacture Barbie dolls now call the range of ethnic Barbies ‘Dolls of the World.’ They each possess the same features as the original white Barbie, slightly modified.

Please come back! HANDS produces an array of Barbies of all ethnicity and styles. ALICE handles them all. You’re all the same really. Same face shape, eyes, everything, just different skin tones. And you’re always blonde, whatever the colour of your hair!! Even you (she picks up an Asian model) and you (she picks up a black model) have the same features. You are cute, all-American, cheesecake white girls. What did I just say? What do those words mean? I look at you (HANDS proffer mirror again) and then myself. I can only see difference. There’s nothing about you that looks like me. I touch your taut limbs, your tiny waist, your tight breasts and you feel like some miniature un-breakable dream of hard body and daintiness. You’re a plastic princess. Epic womanhood. You’re everything and everyone and everywhere. I

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dress you, I dream of the world in which you live, of fun, of appliances and of jobs being all about wearing the right clothes and smiling a lot. (ALICE’S voice is now mutating into FUTURE ALICE) When I play with you I’m playing with a dream. A serious dream. A dream of career and boyfriend and wide-eyed beauty. Your beauty is my shame. I’ll never be you. I can only admire you. I want more and more of you in my hands. I want to belong to your world. I want to be a part of your world-wide corporation. I’ll buy you. I’ll dress you. I will I will!! And I will visit your website at www dot Barbie dot com and I will never never stop loving you! I’m so hungry! I’m dying to eat! I need some chocolate now!!!! (HANDS produce chocolate. ALICE munches, begins to cry.) This is hell. I hate being here, being me, here. Sweet, sweet creamy melt-on-my-tongue and smell-of-angels food! Can’t get enough! What’s happening to me?!!!!! BARBIE (Nurse or doctor doll, smug, treacly) Chocolate has a chemical in it that replaces the chemical lost in tears when we cry. That’s why when you’re unhappy you think of chocolate. And when you’ve got your period you lose a lot of iron. Chocolate contains a lot of iron. So when you have your period and you want to cry and eat chocolate it means you’re unhappy and low in both iron and that weep chemical. I guess you could say chocolate and tears well, just go together for women… ALICE (An enervated scream) Shutup!!!!! She wallops Barbie on the table to cut her off. She is strung out. When she stops she’s astonished and at first delighted. Then she suddenly glances around, nervous. Oh I’m so sorry! I don’t know what came over me. I just lost control. I’m really truly sorry. Please forgive me (shakes Barbie who doesn’t speak any more) Oh goodness! Are you dead?! Are you alive? You’re just a doll! I think I’m going mad! I feel a kind of hysteria rising in my throat. Alice? Are you there? I need to find myself!! Where am I just when I need myself ? (picks up phone and dials but doesn’t get any joy) Shit! Gracious! Who said that? Gracious oh… I think I’m beginning to see where it’s going. Where I’m going. No more other Alice. Just this Alice, this me. Shit shit shit!!! I’m the past and the present all rolled into one. I’m a time-traveller and a shape-shifter. I have a magical body. I’m shifting shape…

ALICE as a 19th century girl, knows the term and its symptoms.

A reference to Alice in Wonderland shape-shifting.

198 Shapeshifting ALICE is now surrounded with ‘dead’ Barbies and Kens and some of the detritus of foodstuffs and clothing from before. Chaos in other words.

Her larger size is grounding her.

The cop-in-her-head is speaking to her now.

I am thinking of Beckett’s Winnie here, drowning in her mound of earth; here ALICE is drowning in her own corporeality.

The juxtaposition of those two verbs is crucial for the audience to understand.

I’m growing! I’m becoming huge! My neck is streeeeetching. My head can touch the ceiling. I can hardly see my feet any more. I’m blowing up now like a hot air balloon. Getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I’m feeling strong now. And powerful. I’m taking up space in the space around me. I’m a huge me. No one can ignore me. No one dare insult me. I’m the life and soul of the party. Everyone loves me. That Alice they say, she’s soooo strong and Amazonian. She’s a goddess. She’s hilarious. She’s invincible. I’m a larger-than-life woman. Really here. Not floating in some frilly meringue of wispy girlishness. I’m muscle and strength and deep voiced and earthed and really connected. No? No? No! No! That’s not right? That’s not the story? So what is the story? I get it. I get it now. Oh. OK. This is big me: no waist, no hips. Just a huge mass of blubber. I’m disgusting. A wobbling mound of jelly. My flesh hangs in folds from my chin to my knees. It tumbles, like rolled dough, fold upon fold, now melting into itself, now separating. My surface is moist with perspiration. I’m all hot and heavy. My thighs rub against each other, my buttocks dance a silly bouncing dance behind me. My face is disappearing into this pudding of fat that’s adding and adding itself like a halo of lard round my eyes and mouth. I’m all soft and squidgy. A blob. Grotesque. Shapeless. A human mountain. Fingers vanish into my belly, drown in my own flesh. My bones are crushing with the weight of me, my volume, my mass. I am all bulk. I am a rhino an elephant a pig. I’m a pig I’m a pig I’m a pig. Nobody loves me. I hate myself! I’ve got to eat!!!!! I’m disgusting! I’ve got to eat! Something to fill this emptiness inside! I’m a great guzzling cave! I want to fill up with food. Stuff myself. Fill every crevice of me with food. Feed me!! Love me! All kinds of Voices now taunt Alice who is in a reverie. VOICES Fatty! Fat slag! Bouncing Bertha! Lump of lard! Have you got someone stuck to you? Slimfast works you know, you should try it! King Kong! Fatgirl!

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Miss Piggy! Bigboobs! Whales belong in the sea! Flubber! Pigface! Lazy fat cow! ALICE (Suddenly breaking out of her reverie) I hate myself! I need to get a grip. Take control. Show them. You are what you eat. I’m eaten up with hating this. I’ll make them eat their words. Choke on them. (She cries. Then stops) Sooooo, simple: calorie control is fat control. From now on I’ll count. (Takes diary and mutters as she writes) Chicken soup (tinned) — one cup. Calories: one hundred and sixty-seven times two plus - Potato chips - one ounce serving size two hundred and fifty calories times three plus - Burger - regular three ounce serving size, two hundred and eighty-six calories times three plus  -White bread roll - seventy calories times three plus One tablespoon tomato ketchup sixteen calories times three equals two hundred and fifty plus two hundred and eightysix plus seventy plus sixteen times three equals one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six plus - One pint chocolate ice cream equals one thousand calories plus fudge sauce equals three hundred calories equals thirteen hundred calories plus - One extra-large Coke, the real thing, equals a hundred calories - equals a grand total of.. Jesus! I’ve just dreamed of eating a pound of flesh!!! What’s a pound of flesh? Three thousand five hundred calories, that’s what. OK, start again Alice. Reduce Alice. Eliminate. Cut down. Lighten. Diminish. Look for fat-free, sugar-free, low-cal solutions to life. Get it down! Down! Melt it away. Burn it off. Match input to output. No increase, output to input. A calorie is a measurement of heat. Cool down Alice. Take the weight off your legs. Diet. Exercise. Slim. Trim. Look for a new you. Start today! OK OK. One cup chicken broth - eighty-one calories. One burger, no roll, low sugar ketchup - three hundred and fifty calories. One low-fat sugar-free yoghurt - one hundred calories. One Diet Coke zero zero zero. Total - five hundred and thirty-one. There. That’s better. Much better. Much more like it. If I just eat one meal a day like this I’ll burn up two thousand calories which is… (Pause) I’m famished!!! HANDS produce Ruby, a voluptuous doll. ALICE Who are you? You’re, you’re ridiculous! Yuk!

Her knowledge bank tumbles from her as if she were in a state of possession.

200 Shapeshifting ‘Ruby’ was a ‘selfesteem’ doll, produced by Body Shop, but never marketed, now available online as a vintage purchase.

RUBY (Recorded voice, over sincere) I’m Ruby. I was made because Barbie is ridiculous. I’m here to tell you, you look just fine as you are. A woman’s curves, her shape, any shape she chooses, is a natural part of who she is. Most women don’t conform to standard ideals of beauty as promoted by fashion models and Barbie dolls. Most women are… ALICE (Can’t take this piety) Shut up, will you! I’m on a journey of self-improvement and no one’s going to stop me! I’m losing weight!! I’m reducing. I’m starting to find my bones again, under my skin. See? My fingers aren’t drowning in blubber. I can just poke my tummy lightly and it bounces back. I’m a size Twelve, Ten, Eight, going down. I simply eliminate food. So what I do is first I fantasise about everything I want to eat. Then I add it all u: Then I calculate exactly what I can eat each day that’s under one thousand calories. That way I reckon I will lose two thirds of a pound a day which is roughly five pounds a week which is twenty pounds a month which is, well, great, just great. RUBY Alice, you’re beautiful, just as you are… ALICE pushes Ruby away. Hands produces a lettuce and a bottle of low-cal/fat-free dressing.

This anorexic strategy was told to me by a Princeton student I was teaching at the time of writing the play.

ALICE I’ve begun… I’m melting. It’s divine. I love vanishing! They’re starting to praise me out there now. They say, “Wow! You look great! Really great.” I see envy in their eyes. It spurs me on. Here’s what I do when I really get into this thing. I get light headed just talking about it. It makes me feel like I’m walking on air. High as a kite. Floating away like a puff of smoke. When I do this I’m an angel. I’m good. I’m reaching for perfection. I’m in control. I measure time in mouthfuls. My every minute is devoted to achieving my goal of perfection. See. Here’s some of my very own special recipes. First - ‘Turning over new leaves’: Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. A toilet will do, where you can lock the door and be sure of no interruptions. Then, sit comfortably, cradling your (washed) lettuce. Open a bottle of low-cal salad dressing and one by one dip the leaves into the dressing until you’ve eaten all the lettuce and drunk the whole bottle. It’s so great! It can take hours. You can really make it stretch. And it’s only a total of two hundred and fifty calories. If you really really get

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that kind of I want-something-hot-andcomforting-and-filling feeling, there’s always my what I call ‘Do-it-yourself-hotpot.’ You need a small can of vegetable soup - one hundred calories  - carefully remove all the beans to reduce the original calorie content of one hundred and thirty, take some low-sugar breakfast cereal - one cup, a hundred and twenty calories - and mix it with the soup. Bake in a microwave for fifteen minutes so that the bottom gets really caked and crunchy and burnt and the top forms a crust. Remove from microwave and enjoy picking at this for at least one and a half hours, total calories two hundred and twenty! Then there’s the ‘Now-you-chew-it-now-you-don’t.’ For this you need a packet of sweet chewing gum. Chew the sugar out of it and spit. Perfect for those gnawing sugar-craving moods when you could eat your own arm. Calories? (no cheating) Zero. And finally ‘Raw illusion’: slice one apple, with peel - eighty-one calories and one stick of celery - six calories - into tiny shards. Caress these in your mouth for as long as you possibly can before biting. It’s the best and healthiest and lowest calorie meal you can get away with in this disgusting world full of food food food where everybody eats and eats and eats around you. Fat dribbling down their faces! Mouths full of cake! Chewing and spitting crumbs when they talk. And laughing with their mouths full! It’s repulsive! It shouldn’t be allowed! Not in public! Eating should be a private affair!! VOICES Painfully thin! Stick insect! Boy-girl! Skinny! Who ate all the salad then! Needs sellotape to stick herself together! Bone-woman! Wasting away! Belsen! Unwomanly! Frigid! Thin! Bird! Skinny! Walking skeleton! Bone-bag! ALICE No! No! Rubbish! You don’t understand anything! You’re blind! Use your eyes! Look at me!!! ALICE (To audience) I’m still fat! Can’t you see? I’m still fat and I need to keep working on improving myself. Anyway. This

See p.171. The anorexic body can evoke as much disgust and contempt as the obese one.

202 Shapeshifting way I get to stop my periods which is some relief I can tell you. And boys stop looking at me like they want to… to… do things with me. And women admire me. I know they do. They think to themselves, “I wish I was as in control as Alice. I wish I had her determination, her willpower.” Every time I deny myself something to eat and they have some I feel great and they feel guilty. I look at you all and you seem… how shall I put it? Fleshy. Yes. And it makes me feel so virtuous. And funnily enough it makes me want to feed you all up even more. It makes me want to bake for you, little scones and bread and cakes and all those things I might pretend to eat with you but I’m really spitting into my napkin or vomiting up afterwards because I can do that too you know? It’s easy that bit. Great for binges. It’s always best to start with something bright and colourful like tomato juice. That way you’ll know when you’ve got it all up. So you start with the colour-marker as it were and then eat and eat and eat, ten thousand calories if you like. Then, it’s fingers down throat in the loo and magic!! It’s all out and you can forget it ever went in and down in the first place. If you don’t like vomiting, laxatives will work almost as well. Except it can be really painful. MOTHER Alice if you go on like this you’re going to die!! ALICE Exercise is the key, Mum. You can always measure calories you eat against those you use to move about. I never take a lift. I run upstairs. I do push-ups and jog for hours each day. The important thing is to keep moving. MOTHER Alice, you’re killing yourself! ALICE I take tablets too. Chemical warfare on my insides. Stuff to make my system speed. Gobble up the calories. Tick tick tick. There’s a ball of adrenalin stuck in my throat. It’s all go go go!! MOTHER Alice! You’re dying! ALICE (Suddenly paying attention to MOTHER’s voice) I can’t anymore! I collapse in the street, faint at school… I’ve

Shapeshifting  shrivelled to a crisp. I’m dry as a twig. I could snap any moment. I stink! I stink of my disappearing act. My teeth have crumbled. There’s baby-hair all over my body. On my face. But the hair on my head’s falling out. My skin is dry. It’s lost all elasticity, all tone. My bones hurt. They’re bruised from sitting and lying. My eyes stare out of my skull like a lemur. They stare at you all and say, “What are you looking at?!” Is this good enough? No. There’s no such thing as perfection! I tried I tried I tried! It started because I felt so big. Now I feel so very very small. “You’re very small,” said the elephant to the mouse. “I know,” said the mouse. “I’ve been ill.” I’ve been ill. I’m cold all the time. I wear woollen sweaters even in the heat of summer. My teeth chatter. Help, someone, please. I’m terrified of putting on weight, but I know I must. Please talk to me. Talk to me and help me. Help me! I don’t want to be a woman! I want to keep away from you all! Hide away! I repulse you, don’t I? (HANDS produce magazine. She flips it.) “Get rid of unwanted flesh fast. Cosmetic surgery may be the answer to your dreams. The Lissom Clinic offers free confidential advice on most types of surgical procedures including liposuction and collagen injections.” Yes! Yes! That’s the answer! The knife! Suction! Anything! I’ll have it cut off, vacuumed out. I’ll have a nose job, ear job, breast job, tummy job, buttock job, thigh job and I’ll get my face sorted too. Build up the cheekbones. Get my eyelids pinned. A bit of collagen in the lips. I’ll re-model the whole lot of me. Nothing will stop me! Nothing! No one! I want to be gorgeous! I want to be gorgeous! I’ve got to be gorgeous! Gorgeous! Gorgeous! ALICE swoons into a kind of trance. HANDS produce a Feral Cheryl doll. She speaks in an Australian accent. FERAL CHERYL (Recorded voice) Hey doll. Get a life. It’s OK. You’re fine. What’s with all this high-tech medical crap hmh? You’re gorgeous just as you are you know. And bright. You should try spending more time feeding your brain you know. Beauty’s a relative concept. What’s in today is out tomorrow. Enjoy yourself while you’re still young. Life’s too short. There’s a wonderful world out there and the future is female!! Look at you sat there all laced-up, wishing you were someone else, dreaming the impossible. Face yourself! You’re the product of Western Civilisation’s own worst hang-ups: the beauty industry!

203

This doll is still in circulation and even has a Facebook page: www.feralcheryl.com. au.

204 Shapeshifting ALICE Who on earth are you? FERAL CHERYL I’m a friend. I’m Feral Cheryl. I’m thirty-four centimetres tall with brown hair, brown eyes and a realistic body shape. I have pubic hair (why are people so shocked by this?). I am made in Australia in a cottage industry, unlike Barbie who is the product of the Third World sweatshop industry. I represent a simple lifestyle. See? Simple clothing. I don’t need that excessive wardrobe and all those accessories. I take my inspiration from people in Australia who work in the rainforest on ecological issues. Touch me. Reluctantly, ALICE does so. ALICE You’re very confident aren’t you? FERAL CHERYL Dunno. But I guess you could say I’m content with my lot. In control of my life… ALICE Lucky you. You’ll never catch on, you know. You’re silly. And you sound like my Mum’s hippy friend. And I don’t like what you’re wearing. People want glamour. FERAL CHERYL Yeah. I know. But as it happens there’s a bit of a cultfollowing about me from Manhattan to the Shetland Isles actually. I have my own website and I’ve been on TV in London and in California. So watch it miss smug-features. ALICE OK. Really? T.V. Huh… By the way, I really like those things on your arms. What are they? FERAL CHERYL Tattoos. Primitive body art. Incredibly fashionable all over the world. A little bit of pain (quite nice actually) and the ink goes in the flesh to produce the image of your choice, permanently. ALICE I want one. A snake. On my ankle. And a butterfly on my shoulder. And a pig on my belly!! No! I’ve got it! Medusa. I want Medusa tattooed all over me. Medusa with her head

Shapeshifting  of coiling snakes. Medusa who was so hideous that people turned to stone when they looked at her! And I want what you’ve got through your ears. What’s that? FERAL CHERYL Pierced my dear. Hey. Maybe you could get some piercings? Better than all that cosmetic surgery nonsense any day. This way you get to be the artist and your body is your canvas. You can re-invent yourself the way you want. Adorn what’s there, don’t destroy it. Celebrate your own flesh! Most people start with ears. But you can get your belly-button done, or your nose… Oh I could go on… eyes, lips, tongues, and and… ALICE Yes, yes, yes, I want to have pierced everything! I want my tongue full of diamonds. I want my eyes fringed in rings. I want silver studs all over my ears and my nose. And I want scars. Beautiful patterns over my eyebrows. I want to suffer the pain and the ecstasy of needles breaking open my flesh. I want to feel! I want to feel everything. The blood. Savour the moment I mark my own flesh, press ink and metal into it, inscribe it with my own story. I want to own my own body! I want to make myself mine mine mine! I won’t care what people think! They’ll think I’m ugly and stupid anyway. But this way at least they can admire my guts. “Did Alice really go through all that pain to look like that!?” Yes! Yes! Yes she will! And I want to emerge from my ordeal, proud of my endurance. A terrible beauty. The beauty of my power, the power of suffering… I want to be a saint. An angel! (screams) Pierce me!! Cut me!! Paint me in needlepoint! My flesh! My flesh! My flesh is me! I want to be free!!! FERAL CHERYL Hey doll! Come back! Wake up and smell the big beyond. Eat the wind! Drink the sea! Let your hair down. Put on your dancing shoes. Like you could go backpacking, you know. See the world. Sunset in Bali. The Great Coral Reef. The Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty. Wake up Alice! Wake up! Alice! Alice! Alice! ALICE is in deep sleep. Voices sing, “Happy Birthday to Alice” and over this MOTHER’s voice calling MOTHER Alice! Alice! Alice! Where are you? What are you doing Alice? You’ll be late for your own birthday! Everyone’s waiting for you. There’s cake! Put your new earrings on! We’re wai… ting! Come down now! Alice?!

205

Because Medusa, the avenging monster woman, can also laugh (Cixous, 1976).

ALICE is an enthusiastic learner. She gets excited by all the possibilities the future presents her, even as she also discovers the pain and conflict it causes. Here she is accelerating into a form of ecstasy, giddy with the possibilities of her ‘liberation.’

206 Shapeshifting ALICE (Slowly coming to, calls out, disorientated, sleepy) I… I’m coming!! I’m coming down! MOTHER What on earth has taken you this long? What have you been doing? That is, getting ready for adulthood in the future (contemporary) womanhood.

ALICE Nothing! I think I just fell asleep that’s all! (Puzzled. Dazed still.) Nothing. Just… getting ready… that’s all… just getting ready… Lights down.

Conclusion

I never planned to create a gallery of hysteria plays. Assembling these now, and investigating what might link them, my understanding has deepened of when and why my protagonists have erupted, what connects them and why I have returned to versions of the topic across decades of theatre making. I have now attempted a narrative thread through different eras, medical practices, places, and subjects that some of my work has sought to give life to. In this sense, I offer both an epistemological and heuristic perspective as I commute between hysteria’s histories and theories and my practices. Since premiering Augustine (Big Hysteria) in 1991, a burgeoning theoretical literature has been produced on hysterias. Some of my thinking at the time of my first playwriting has been, gratifyingly, corroborated since. I have, meanwhile, referred to many insightful texts that have retrospectively enriched my understanding of the topic, and apologise unreservedly for any oversights. I am aware of inevitable omissions within a far more complex history of medicine and culture. Despite any caesura in my discourse, I am consistently arguing that mental suffering is commonly unutterable in terms of logos, that this compounds its affects, and that capitalism and medicine, overborne by patriarchy, have conspired across centuries to render the vulnerable mute and/or unheard. It is the Master in the world of science who will endure (from “durus” meaning hard), because he inscribes himself through logocentric language into civilisation (Cixous and Clément, 1987). The hysteric tongue is non-logocentric, even if logic lurks within: close reading and decoding will produce disquieting meaning. A display of failure within a capitalist ideology of aspiring to win is repulsed because it terrifies (there-but-for-the-graceof-God-go-I). Being psychologically robust guarantees better survival and success. The insistent presence of the convulsed hysteric, when not titillating, presents a distorting mirror into which society gazes and confronts its exploded, fractured, alter ego. The hysteric I speak for is an outsider whose “revolutionary body” (Diamond, 1997, p.25) must be othered – contained, displayed,

208 

Conclusion fixed, returned to combat or fattened. Demonised, pathologised, punished, or domesticated, s/he presents threatening behaviours that parody the normative society that is provoking their agony. Hysteric patients endure suffering: ‘patient’ derives from the Latin verb ‘pati,’ to suffer, giving us also the word patience. They should therefore tolerate their suffering, passively and according to a tempo, decided on their behalf by medical protocols, which might not accord with the cadences of their condition. Not all hysterics can accept an imposed pace of procedure and might burst out of the chains of such controls. The rebellious hysteric is wildly patient (Rich, 1993). That is not to say I romanticise the disorder as heroic. Hysterics are, rather, powerless antihero/ines, their system wrecked from not being able to reconcile experience with any external code for this. Alterity becomes a tool for survival for a specifically damaged and oppressed individual. Hysteria might be creative, physically brave, an act of uncompromising protest, but remains, in essence, a desperate measure that can involve selfharm. Hysterics are not insane. They unsettle the sane/mad binary. They are gender rebels because the way gender operates on their psychophysicality simply doesn’t function. The disjuncture between lived experience and social norms produces a chasm, and into this chasm crisis tumbles, the spirit breaks, and the body somatises. None of my dramaturgies are naturalistic. If drama revolves dialogically around people’s relationship with each other, I humbly offer my texts as being essentially involved in people’s interchanges with their environment. Dialogue is minimal in Sea/ Woman (only finally with the audience member); Augustine (Big Hysteria) includes scant verbal exchange between Charcot and Augustine, some between Freud and Augustine, Freud and Charcot, with substantial monologue from Charcot addressing the spectators. If speech logos connotes power, Shocks finds Shocked mute, his co-player alternating between voicing him and oppressive figures of authority. Gorgeous is a monologue in which I give the character full voice, for she is speaking to an audience of her own generation who need to hear her, unambiguously. A word about some medical models I have engaged with. The IPS have left visual and verbal archive from which I crafted Augustine (Big Hysteria). Research in rehearsal to re-create an attack of grande hystérie from Richer’s synoptic table, animating this as a physical score and overlaying case history utterance verbatim from the IPS, we produced what might be a near-accurate (though impossible to prove) re-enaction. For Shocks, we cited Netley War Neuroses footage, splicing these together to provide a score learned in detail. Shocked’s corporeality manifests similar features to Augustine – twisted limbs, arched spine, collapsing and repetition, for example. In Sea/

Conclusion  Woman, I borrowed from Augustine to distribute some hysteric symptoms onto Ellida/Maja: she manifests an hysteric contortion in her limbs as she vomits up water. Such is poetic licence. The decision to include EDs is because, even if classifying these as hysterias is outmoded, the sufferer expresses angst somatically, and auto-destructively. If, by setting such choreomanias (Birringer and Fenger, 2011; Gotman, 2018) before an audience, I have risked promoting a contemporary medical gaze, returning the ill person to an objectified and defenseless status, I intend for the way performances operate in relation to these spectacles of suffering to provoke reflexive spectatorship, inviting comprehension of the hysteric condition in its socially constructed roots and its inexcusable maltreatment. I do not compare my texts to contemporaries who have made subsequent filmic or theatrical works on the topic (e.g. Hunter, 1993; Winocours, 2012). I would leave any comparisons between my works and others’ to better critics with more objective purview than that of which I would be capable. In “housing the mix of performative and textual practices alongside each other” (Jones in Nelson, 2013, p.7), straddling scholarship and creative practice, I seek resonance between my theatre and my critical thinking. Rather than discuss my theatrical methodology, I share ideas that have inspired projects. Research stimulates practice, but is never simply given theatrical shape. Something else occurs in the process. The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski advised, when I was being selected for his ‘paratheatre’ in France in 1971, “doubt before, doubt after, but never doubt during” – my mantra since. I have written elsewhere about the artist versus the academic, how the former works in the present tense and the latter in the past, and the tensions germane to embodying both (Delgado and Svich, 2002). The ‘liquid knowledge’ that Marina Abramovic articulates as “subjectivity involved in the production of knowledge” (Nelson, 2013, p.52) constitutes an imperative yielding when seeking to give form to hunches. Creation is a leap into the unknown, even if informed by the known, requiring yielding to ‘what now? and now?’ moment-by-moment artistic enquiry. The present tense of creativity is a distinct zone unlike any other. The imagination makes connections that the intellect might only comprehend retrospectively. I thus hope that, in weaving the theatrical with the theoretical-historical here, with hindsight, I might contribute some useful perspective to cultural enquiry into the absorbing topic of hysterical illness, given its inherently performative nature. Finally, in the current climate of hypersensitivity to what might trigger re-lived trauma, the hysteric-in-extremis might be a dangerous protagonist to face. S/he is, or speaks for, all of us.

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210 

Conclusion In this sense the hysteric is perhaps a group sacrifice, the one who takes it all on herself, the subterranean voice crying out to both those who manage to cope and live their lives without diving into the wreck (Rich, 1993), and to those who have, inescapably, plunged.

References Birringer, J. and Fenger, J. (2011) Tanz & WahnSinn/Dance & ChoreoMania. Germany: Henschel. Bourneville, D. M. and Regnard, L. (1877–80) Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière: service de M. Charcot. Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians. Cixous, H. and Clément, C. (1987) The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née). Wing, B. (trans.) Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2003) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Hartsz, L. (trans.) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Furse, A. (2002) ‘Those Who Can Do Teach,’ in Delgado, M. and Svich, C. (eds.) Theatre in Crisis, Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 64–73. Gotman, K. (2018) Choreomania, Dance and Disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, D. (1993) ‘Representing Mad Contradictoriness in Doctor Charcot’s Hysteria Shows,’ Madness and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–118. Nelson, R. (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts, Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rich, A. (1993) A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. New York; London: Norton. Whitmore, J. (2009) Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Winocours, A. (2012) Augustine, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=oOYgJxoKfFc.

Index

abject 125, 178 abreaction 79, 89, 123, 158 abuse 3, 13, 71, 74, 82, 129, 165 accident 25, 187, 191; accidental 16 acrobat 37 acting viii, xix, 9, 11, 13, 20, 35, 111, 131, 176, 178 acuity 5, 62 Adam 10 Adler, Alfred 89, 94 Adlerian 87 aggression 171 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, Lewis) 193, 197 ammonia 9 amyl nitrate 5, 41, 54, 56, 58–59, 62–63, 70, 74 anger 8, 65 angst 84, 90, 166, 209 anguish 10, 82, 90, 97, 117, 131, 137, 163 Anna O ix, xix, 27, 69, 78–79, 81, 84, 94; see also Pappenheim, Berthe Anorexia Nervosa 163, 168, 180–181; anorexia x, 80, 163–166, 168, 170, 177, 179, 180–183 anxiety x, xv, 9, 17–18, 21, 88, 97, 117, 120, 126, 129, 131, 158, 161, 165, 171, 177, 179, 193 appetite 14, 122, 163–164, 166, 178 arc en cercle 63–64 archive 3, 5, 16, 25, 28–29, 93, 141, 150, 208 arena 9, 19, 171 arsenal 36 art i, xii, xiii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 3, 6, 10, 14, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 37, 39, 44, 51, 83, 95, 111, 139, 170, 178, 204 asylum ix, xii, xv, xviii, 1, 18, 22, 25, 31, 36, 39, 66, 87, 112;

Craiglockhart ix–x, xv–xvi, xix, xxi, 123, 134, 137–138, 142–143, 160–161; Netley ix, 135–136, 141–142, 152, 158, 208; Salpêtrière vi, viii, xii–xiv, xviii–xix, 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 14–18, 20–22, 25–26, 29, 30–33, 35–36, 38–39, 40, 42, 49, 53–54, 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 75–76, 93, 95, 111, 135, 210 attack 5, 8–9, 20, 34, 36, 40, 51–52, 57, 61–63, 65–66, 74, 93, 107, 118, 132, 152, 157, 208; hysterical viii–ix, xi, xiv, xvi, xviii, 5–6, 8–9, 24, 26, 32, 34, 36–37, 39, 44–45, 63, 79, 80, 82, 85, 89, 91, 93, 99, 111, 123–125, 131, 140, 176–177, 209; war ix–x, xv–xvi, 18, 40, 97, 105, 111, 113–120, 122–143, 145–147, 149, 150–152, 156, 158–159, 161, 208 Attitudes Passionelles ix, 7–8, 21, 47, 61 Augustine vi, viii, ix, xiii, xvii– xviii, xxi, 1–9, 11–13, 19, 21–27, 30, 34–38, 40, 47–49, 56, 59, 63, 74, 77, 84, 99, 100, 131, 136, 142, 207–210 Augustine (Big Hysteria) vi, viii, xiii, xxi, 1, 6–7, 25, 30, 34, 142, 207–208 aura 63 baby 9, 48, 65, 80, 86, 89, 106 ballerina xii, 21, 167 ballet xii–xiii, xviii–xix, 22, 27, 31, 40, 167 barbed wire 117–118 battlefield 112, 115, 129, 134, 143, 145, 153, 157 Beckett, Samuel xvi, xix, 180, 184, 198

212 Index Belle Époque xiii Béraud, Jean vi, xiii–xiv bernays 34, 78, 85, 93 Bernhardt, Sarah xii, xviii–xix, 29, 45, 53, 58 Berthe 80 Bishop of London 114, 147 blood xvi, 4, 32, 41, 44–45, 55–57, 72–73, 86, 89, 98, 104–105, 118, 125, 132, 139, 143, 146–147, 150–151, 154–155, 161–162, 187, 192, 205 body i, viii–x, xii, xvi, xviii, 5, 8–17, 19–22, 24–30, 34, 36–37, 39, 41, 44–49, 51, 53, 55, 57–58, 63, 65, 75–76, 79, 94, 101, 106, 116, 118–119, 122, 125–126, 129, 136–137, 141, 145, 149–152, 157–159, 163–165, 167, 169, 171–185, 189, 194, 196–197, 200–205, 208; dysmorphia 163, 175–176, 179 bones 14, 17, 118, 160, 170, 181–182, 198, 200, 203 Bourgeois (ie) xiii–xv, 3, 11, 21, 27, 79, 84–87, 90, 92–93, 113, 129, 166; Paris vi, viii, xiii, xiv, xviii, 14, 18, 21, 25, 28–35, 53, 68, 94; Vienna viii, 41–42, 69, 70, 78, 83, 111 Bourneville, Desiré-Magloire 1, 29, 210 brain xi, 10, 119, 130, 141, 172, 175, 179, 203 breakdown 111, 119, 122, 134, 139 breasts 26, 39, 51, 195–196; hysterogenic point 9, 51, 62, 64, 66 broken: heart xii, xviii; spirit xii, 9, 25, 47, 52, 85, 89, 113–114, 208 brothel xiii, 14 Brouillet, Pierre Aristide André vi, 9, 20–21, 48, 62, 78 bulimia 25, 164, 166, 168, 173 burlesque xii, 11 burns 159 cabaret viii, xiii, xix, 18 camera xix, 1, 5, 14–17, 28, 59, 61, 135–136, 158 cancer 72, 162 career viii, xiv, 1, 10, 12, 76, 81, 133, 169, 197 carnal 11, 166 Carroll, Lewis xvi, 179, 180, 184, 187, 189, 193 case history 9, 38, 41, 52, 54, 65, 76, 81, 86, 208; Augustine 19

catharsis 62, 92, 93; cathartic Cure 10, 80 Catholic church 1, 18, 24, 39, 44, 83 Ceasar 14, 54 Charcot, Professor Jean Martin vi, viii, ix, xii, xiv–xv, xviii–xix, 1, 3, 4–6, 8–11, 13–22, 25–32, 34, 36, 42, 49, 53–54, 62, 68, 73, 78–79, 81, 93–95, 126, 135, 139, 208, 210 Charcoterie 11, 53, 78 Chef d’Oeuvre 42 chimney sweeping 80 choreography 18, 66, 149; Chorée xiv, 26 cigar 52, 54, 70–72 cinema viii,16–17, 33, 172 citta dolorosa 9, 36 class xiv, 9–11, 42, 79, 90, 122, 126, 128, 131, 150, 158, 164, 169, 179, 191; bourgeois xiii, xiv–xv, 3, 11, 21, 27, 79, 84–87, 90, 92–93, 113, 129, 166; upper 114; working xiv, 11, 21, 56, 115, 126, 144 classical xiv, 1, 11, 14, 83, 114, 167, 195; ballet xii–xiii, xviii– xix, 22, 27, 31, 40, 167 clinic 27, 139, 170, 203 close-up 15, 149 clowning 11, 64 cocaine 35, 51, 67, 72, 78 collaboration ix, 97, 142 Comédie Française 58 community xii, xviii, 24, 168 composition 143 conditioning 113, 127, 144 conflict 111, 115, 119–120, 130, 134, 140, 163, 168, 205; psychological xv, 3, 10, 13, 17, 30, 32, 85, 87, 91, 95, 120, 133, 137; war ix–x, xv–xvi, 18, 40, 97, 105, 111, 113–120, 122–143, 145–147, 149, 150–152, 156, 158–159, 161, 208 convent 3, 26, 45, 54, 76 conversion 79, 116, 158 convulsive 18, 47 corporeality 171, 198, 208 Corps de Ballet 3, 153 corpse 21, 119, 157 Craiglockhart Hospital ix, 134; see also asylum crisis viii–ix, 1, 3–6, 8–22, 24, 25–77, 79, 83, 98, 113, 117, 132, 139, 167, 208, 210 Crucible (The), Miller, Arthur 24, 32

Index  213 culture x, xii, 3, 6, 13–16, 27, 29, 31–32, 34, 82, 113, 120, 126, 135, 161, 164–165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 207 cure viii, 17–18, 37, 78, 80, 91, 102, 135–136 Dada 113 dance viii, xii, xiv, xix–xx, 13, 22, 27, 31–32, 34, 52, 64, 73, 75, 79, 126, 146, 191, 198, 210; dancer xii, xix, 14, 31, 37, 40, 146, 167 death xii, xvi, xviii, 3, 25, 28, 32, 86, 88, 102, 115, 118–119, 137–138, 151–152, 165, 171 Degas, Edgar 27 depression 179 despair ix, xv, 84, 86, 92, 106 deviant, xviii devil 24, 26, 44–45, 162 Diabulimia 164 diagnosis 15, 94, 125 dialogue viii, 87, 91–92, 208 diet 117, 164, 167–169, 189, 199 disease xii, 3, 10, 18, 21, 25–27, 36, 37, 57, 125, 141, 163, 166 disgust 48, 65, 116, 125, 171, 201 dissembling i, 11 distress i, viii, xv, xviii, 9, 13, 35, 88, 124, 127, 137, 155, 157–158, 161, 176–178 diva 6, 195 dive 91, 102 doctor viii–ix, xv, 3–4, 13, 22, 37, 41–42, 49, 51–54, 57–58, 61, 67–72, 78, 81, 84, 86, 90–91, 99, 108, 123, 127, 133, 135, 150, 156, 179, 197, 210 domestic xv, 3, 11, 13, 21, 38, 85–86, 93, 126, 165, 179; tragedy xv, 86 drag 26, 76, 105 dramaturgy i. 142 drawing i, 20, 86, 93 dreams 41, 56–57, 73, 84, 88–89, 101, 109, 118, 162, 194, 203; nightmares 4, 56, 116, 126, 158; trenches 118 drowning 24, 118, 155, 162, 198, 200 dryness 87 Duchenne, Guillaume-BenjaminAmand 19 duty ix–x, 111–120, 122–161 ears xv, 5, 69, 130, 186, 205 Eating Disorders (EDs) xi, 163, 180–182

effeminacy xvi, 124 ego xii, 84, 89, 207 Ellida ix, xv, 83–92, 94, 97–100, 109, 209 elusive 37 emotion 29, 67, 76, 97, 100, 102, 106, 150, 173 emotion memory 97, 102, 106 energy 4, 62, 64 escape 3–4, 8, 22, 35, 42, 54, 67, 80, 86, 99, 108, 120, 135 ether 5, 62 eventyr 87 experience xii, xviii, xxi, 13, 36–37, 63, 69, 79, 81–83, 88, 90, 102, 107, 111, 117–118, 124–125, 127–129, 137, 159, 164, 169, 172–174, 176–178, 181, 183, 208 explosion 143, 149, 162 expression xviii, 8, 13, 19, 22, 24, 46, 79, 83, 89, 101, 111, 114, 120, 124–125, 130–131, 150, 158, 163 eyes xv, 1, 3, 5, 20, 24, 31, 36–37, 43–47, 49, 55–57, 59, 61, 65–66, 70–72, 89, 106, 144, 147, 153–155, 159, 162, 166, 171, 178, 187, 189, 194–196, 198, 200–201, 203–205; male gaze 171 fairy tales 49, 87 False Memory Syndrome 25 fame 155 fantasy 21, 26, 70, 80–83, 89, 90, 165, 195 fat 45, 52, 65, 150, 166–167, 169, 175, 178, 182, 198–199, 201 father 13, 34, 38, 53, 63, 82–84, 87, 134 fear xii, 45, 88, 104, 109, 116, 122–123, 125, 129–130, 134–135, 150–151, 155, 158–160, 166, 189, 193 feathers 114, 146, 155, 158 feeling 78, 83, 86, 102, 104, 107, 137, 153, 165, 172–173, 176–178, 191, 198, 201 feminism 29, 32, 82, 85, 93–96, 180–181 film ix, 33, 134, 136, 143, 155–156, 170 fin de siècle 114 fjord 86–87, 90–91, 93, 99, 101, 105, 107–108 flag 56, 140, 145–146; Tricolore 41, 56; Union Jack 144, 146 flesh xii, xvi, 20, 96, 105, 119, 124–125, 150, 157, 161,

214 Index 163, 178, 182, 196, 198–199, 203–205 flinch 116, 125, 130 Folies Bergères 64 food xvi, 101, 117–118, 127, 151, 164–166, 169–170, 173–174, 176–177, 179, 193–194, 197–198, 200–201 forensic 81, 83, 90 freedom 83–85, 87, 91–92, 101, 109, 144, 166 French Revolution 41 frenzy 13–14, 33, 76, 146 Freud, Sigmund vi, viii, ix, xiv–xvi, xviii–xix, 1, 5–6, 9, 10, 15–16, 22, 25, 27–31, 41–42, 51–53, 57–58, 71–72, 78–86, 88–90, 93–96, 112–113, 126, 128–129, 137, 139, 158, 163, 181, 208 frigid 201 gas 118, 125, 151–153, 162 gaze xii, 3, 10, 14, 16–17, 21, 27, 36–39, 47, 62, 72, 77, 142, 155, 164, 171–172, 175, 209; clinical 3, 14, 18–19; prosthetic 16, 135 gender i, viii, x–xi, 29, 33, 82, 113, 115–116, 120, 123–124, 140, 164, 172, 184, 208 genitalia 87 gestures xiv, 5, 8, 17, 39, 44, 46–47, 49, 84, 114 girlhood xvi, 187 Giselle, xii–xiii, xviii gold 5, 58, 75, 99 Grande Hystérie viii, 17, 37, 39, 41, 62–63, 100, 208 Graves, Robert xii,111, 119, 134, 139–140, 143, 148–150, 152 guilt 80, 89, 94, 129, 173 Gulf War Syndrome 124 guns 118, 151 Haig, Field Marshal Douglas 133, 146, 156 hair xii, 3, 35, 39, 52, 64, 71, 85, 105, 108, 148, 185–187, 191–192, 194, 196, 203–205 hallucination 165 Hamlet (Shakespeare) xii, 32, 45, 54 happiness xii, 88–89, 107, 167 haptic 119 headaches 47, 80 healing 8, 32, 44, 67, 90–91, 112, 134

heart i, xviii, 36, 39, 44, 61, 80, 84, 91, 98, 104–105, 109, 125, 133, 137, 139, 142, 155–157; broken, xii, xviii; pincushion 44 Heathcote Williams 97 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen, Henrik) 84, 94, 96 histrionic viii, 11, 21, 40 hollywood 170 hospital viii–ix, xii–xiii, xv, 1, 4, 8–11, 15, 17, 18, 25, 29, 31, 35–36, 39, 42, 46, 50, 70, 72, 76, 95, 135, 138, 143, 156, 160, 179; Craiglockhart ix–x, xv–xvi, xix, xxi, 123, 134, 137–138, 142–143, 160–161; Netley ix, 135–136, 141–142, 152, 158, 208; Salpêtrière vi, viii, xii–xiv, xviii, xix, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10–11, 14–18, 20–22, 25–26, 29–33, 35–36, 38–40, 42, 49, 53–54, 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 75–76, 93, 95, 111, 135, 210 hypnosis vi, 5–6, 8–9, 18–19, 32, 39, 45, 49, 67, 70, 80, 90, 93, 113, 146 hysteria i, iii, viii, ix–xii, xiv–xvi, xviii–xix, 1, 3, 5, 8–11, 13, 16, 18–19, 22, 24–26, 29–36, 40, 44, 51–52, 57, 63, 69, 71, 78–79, 81–82, 86, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 111–112, 120, 123–126, 131, 140, 158, 163, 166, 179, 180–182, 197, 207–208, 210 hysterical pregnancy 80; pseudocyesis 80 hysterogenic point 9, 51, 62, 64, 66 hystories xi, 32, 124 Ibsen, Henrik ix, xv, xx, 83–90, 92, 94–99, 101, 104–105 Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (IPS) vi, ix, xvii, 1, 2, 4–5, 8–9, 12, 15–16, 18, 21, 23, 27, 34–35, 38, 47, 51–52, 55, 60–61, 63, 65, 75–76, 208 id 84, 120 ideology xvi, 84, 112, 122–123, 132–134, 137, 146, 207 illness xix, 3, 11, 15, 24, 32–33, 38, 41, 43, 80, 86, 91, 96, 109, 119, 124, 163, 165, 170, 178–179, 209 image xvi, 1, 17, 25, 29, 36, 97–99, 102, 110, 123, 163, 169, 172–174, 179, 180–185, 204; imagery 1, 4, 14, 55, 183

Index  215 immobility 90 independence 85, 90 individual xvi, xviii, 17, 89–90, 120, 127–128, 130–132, 137, 147, 165, 167, 169, 173–174, 176–179, 208 industry 10, 14, 19, 97, 105, 124, 166–167, 169, 203, 204 Ingres (Le Violon de) 34, 40 instinct 129–130, 141, 150 intern 11, 36 intimacy 88 Janet, Pierre 139–140 Joan of Arc 58 key xi, xv, 9, 13, 20, 79, 82, 85, 87–88, 97, 102, 163, 170–171, 173, 179, 202 kind x, xxii, 24, 34, 41, 57, 65, 71, 80–81, 84, 88, 102, 117–118, 120, 122, 128, 131, 138, 143, 144–146, 155–156, 158–159, 197, 201, 203 knife 65–66, 149, 203 Kramer, Heinrich, Malleus Maleficarum 24, 31 La Revue Surrealiste (1929) 22 labile 80 laboratory 15–16, 19, 39, 78 language viii–x, 4, 10–11, 98, 101–102, 108, 111, 116–117, 122, 137, 177–178, 182, 207 lascivious 66 Le Tout Paris, xiii lecture 19–20, 36, 43, 45, 51; Lecture Theatre 19, 43, 45, 51 leopard crawl 118 letters 118, 148, 150 libido 91 lice 117, 151 lie xvi, 27, 55, 86, 104, 162, 189; camera 61 Life-Lie 89, 91; see also Eventyr limbs 11, 13, 27, 136, 174, 196, 208–209 listening 70, 177 Little Mermaid (The), Andersen, Hans Christian 87, 94 lost 46, 55, 70–71, 80, 89, 97, 129, 152, 154, 160–162, 171, 176, 178, 197, 203 love xii, xxi–xxii, 3, 19, 22, 34, 66, 73, 75, 80, 83, 87–88, 94–95,

111, 115, 148, 151, 182, 186, 189, 190, 195, 198, 200 lover 26, 76 machine xviii, 14–15, 17, 113, 117–118, 120, 145, 149, 151, 154, 189–190 madness xii, xix, 30–32, 45, 57, 83, 186, 210 magical 44, 76, 87, 91, 197 maid 36, 38 malady xxi, 32, 124–125, 179 malingerer 112, 138, 157 Man Ray 34, 40 marching 144 marriage 83– 85, 87, 89–92, 109, 171 martha 34, 42, 78, 81, 93 maternal 84, 90, 93, 170 medea 44 medical i, ix, xi, xvi, xviii, 3, 8, 11, 13–22, 24, 26, 30–31, 34–35, 40, 61, 68, 74, 79, 84, 93, 111–113, 119–120, 122, 124–125, 127–128, 135–137, 139, 150, 154, 163, 167, 170, 175–176, 179, 182, 203, 207–209; prosthetic 14, 16, 135; societal 165, 171 medical couple 18, 22, 61, 79 medicine xx, 4, 15, 18, 20–21, 26, 29, 32, 41, 44, 207 medieval 24, 165; theology 24; witches 4, 18, 24, 44, 47 melancholy 107 memory xvi, xix, 28, 34, 79, 83, 97, 102, 104, 106, 128, 130, 134–135, 137, 139–140, 176–177 menstruation 3, 8, 40, 49, 166, 189 mental illness viii, x, xi, 24, 82–83, 87, 94, 111, 113, 124, 135 mermaid 86–87 Mesmer, Anton: mesmerise 19 metaphor 32, 36, 90, 110, 120, 165 military ix–x, xvi, 11, 25, 111, 113, 115, 119–120, 122–128, 130–135, 137, 141, 143, 146, 150, 156, 160, 165 Miller, Arthur xxi, 24, 32, 35, 142, 184 mind xi, 28, 37, 41–42, 46, 49, 54, 58, 65, 68–69, 71, 73, 88–89, 91, 93, 95–96, 99, 100–101, 106, 108–109, 113, 128– 130, 135, 137, 141, 147, 149, 159,

216 Index 161, 163, 172, 181–182, 184, 191–192 Minna, Bernays 85 mirror 21, 25, 164–165, 176, 178, 194, 196, 207 misery xiii, xviii, 86, 89, 91, 93, 170 model xix, 6, 22, 42, 62, 87, 90, 166, 172–173, 176, 196 Monsieur C 3, 4, 13, 38, 49, 59, 62, 64, 66, 71, 73 morphine 5, 58 mother xii, 3–4, 26, 38, 45, 49, 63–64, 69, 71, 86–87, 89, 90, 97, 105, 148, 170, 185–187, 189, 192–193, 196 motion 17, 40, 106 movement 15, 17, 19, 26, 46, 49, 84–85, 92, 94–95, 100, 113, 135, 139, 146 mud 117–118, 126, 149, 151, 154–155, 185 mutilation 119 mutism x, 80, 116, 126, 136, 158 myth xii, 32, 96, 166 naked 10, 72, 84, 86, 105–106, 194–196 Napoleon 14, 54 narrative xii, 3, 6, 17, 21, 25, 34, 80–81, 86, 90, 117, 134, 137, 142, 166, 170, 207 nature xv–xvi, 36–37, 45, 52, 72–73, 80, 89, 112, 120, 131–132, 134, 136, 168, 174, 177, 209 nerves i, iii, viii, x–xi, xix, 140, 147 Netley Hospital 141 neurasthenia 120, 122, 127 neurology xx, 29, 31–33, 95 neurosis 10, 46, 84, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131; anxiety 88, 131, 158; war x, xv, 125, 127–128, 139, 142, 146, 150, 152, 158–159 Newbolt, Sir Henry 113, 128, 142, 144, 155 No Man’s Land 118, 126, 160 nosology xiv, 10 nude 195 nurse 12, 20, 136, 197 observation 1, 15, 17, 27, 37, 69 ocean 86, 105 officer xvi,118, 127–128, 131, 137–138, 150, 154, 158 open xviii, 11, 20, 44, 55–56, 66, 81, 86, 90, 92, 93, 104, 106,

150–151, 154, 159, 177–178, 181, 200, 205 opera xix, 70 oppression 6, 76, 82, 91, 163 optic xviii, 15–17, 90 order xxi,14, 19, 25, 114, 153, 178, 189, 191 organic 15, 41, 44, 46, 78, 107, 167 organs 17, 174 orthopaedic 11, 26 orthorexia 164 ovarian compressor 58, 62 ovary 9, 64, 66 Owen, Wilfred x, xv, xvi, 32, 81, 115, 118, 132, 137–138, 140–144, 148, 152, 161–162 padded cell 12, 60, 62 paedophilia 4 pain xii, 3–4, 13, 21, 32, 37, 41, 47, 106, 128–129, 135, 137, 141, 146, 159, 166, 177–178, 183, 204, 205 painter: painting 18, 20–21, 27, 48, 62, 68, 78, 86, 153 PALS battalions 115 panic 104 Panopticon 18, 27 Pappenheim, Berthe ix, 17, 79, 80–81, 93 paralysis 4–5, 9, 24–26, 38–40, 43–44, 46, 49, 69 Paris vi, viii, xiii–xiv, xviii, 14, 18, 21, 25, 28–35, 53, 68, 94 parts 15, 27, 51, 97, 118–119, 175, 179, 181–182 paternal 36, 93 patient viii–x, xix, 3, 5, 8–9, 13, 16–20, 22, 27–28, 37, 39, 40, 43, 49, 61–62, 64, 66, 71, 78–79, 81–82, 91, 93, 126, 129, 134–135, 146, 150, 159–160, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180, 208 patriarchy I, 24, 207 patriotism x, 114, 145 peace xv, 143 penetration 4 penis 4, 82, 85; envy 82, 85 performance i, ix, xv, xx–xxi, 10–11, 13–14, 19, 22, 26–27, 32, 52, 64, 78, 97–98, 100, 114, 123, 137, 143, 148, 158, 181, 210 phallic 52, 82, 84–85, 87 phallocentric 82, 93 phenomenology 29, 95, 180, 182–183 photography xix, 15–17, 28, 32–33

Index  217 pictures ix, 16, 59–60, 90, 99, 101, 110, 190; emotion 76 plastic 97–101, 105, 164, 169, 193, 196 poets xv–xvi,68, 83, 115, 143; Adrienne Rich 126; Robert Graves 111, 119, 134, 139, 140, 143, 148–150, 152; Rudyard Kipling 113, 140, 142, 158; Siegfried Sassoon xv, 115, 134, 138, 143, 160; Sir Henry Newbolt 113, 128, 142, 144, 155; Wilfred Owen x, xv–xvi, 32, 81, 115, 118, 132, 137–138, 140–144, 148, 152, 161–162 pornography xiii, xix, 22 pose 16, 20, 42, 59, 65, 75, 183, 194 positivism 18 possession 18, 22, 24, 44–45, 66, 174, 199 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 120, 125, 134, 141 power xviii, 6, 8, 9, 14–16, 18, 24, 27, 31, 33, 36, 43, 45, 47, 49–50, 76, 80–81, 85, 88, 91, 94, 100, 109, 113–114, 130–131, 134, 143, 147, 158, 164, 173, 178, 182, 205, 208 pregnancy 89; hysterical 80 presence 18, 83–84, 90, 116, 152, 164, 172–173, 175–176, 207 pressure xvi, 9, 57, 72, 91, 192; political 164; social viii,169; societal 165, 184; applying to body 9, 59 Princess Diana 25, 170 prison xix, 4, 30, 59, 65 private ix–x, xv 28–29, 78–80, 85, 89, 93, 126, 130–131, 133, 136, 146, 158, 171, 201; soldier x, 126, 130–131, 158 pro-ana 168, 180 prognosis 15 promotion 18, 21, 168 propaganda ix, 115, 117, 136, 142 proprioception 166, 170, 172, 174, 176 prostitute xii, 14, 21, 76; prostitution xix, 14, 21, 28, 32–33, 42, 92 protagonist xi, xviii, 84, 86, 170, 209 protest ix–x, xvi, xviii, 13, 72, 81, 84, 90, 111, 116, 131, 161, 163, 165, 208 pseudocyesis 80

psyche xv–xvi, xviii, 76, 82, 88, 90–91, 113–114, 116, 122–123, 126, 130, 146, 175 psychoanalysis xi, xiv, 1, 16, 22, 25, 30–32, 34, 57, 81–84, 86, 93–96, 135, 137, 176, 182 Psychoanalytic Society 135 psychology 92, 95, 141, 173, 181, 183 psychophysical xi, 9, 79, 100, 111, 113, 116, 123, 125, 131 psychosomatic 5 psychotherapy 28, 79 public xii, xv, xviii, 1, 3, 9, 14, 16, 18–19, 21, 25–26, 38, 39, 43–44, 46, 56, 59, 61, 113–114, 119–120, 127–128, 130, 134, 136, 144, 150, 169, 171, 180, 201 punctum, xiii punishment 21, 24, 26, 38 rank 126 rape 3, 11, 26, 70, 146 rations 149 rats 4, 5, 26, 51, 56–57, 59, 63–64, 66, 117, 150 152 realism 30, 86, 93–94, 140, 179 recovery xx, 91, 112, 135, 140–141, 168, 170, 177 reflection 127, 165, 174, 176 Régnard, Paul vi, xvii, 1, 2, 12, 15, 23, 35 rehabilitation 112–113, 167 rejection 77, 176 remember 22, 56, 64–65, 73, 97, 102, 128, 186–187, 194 repetition 13, 17, 26, 47, 84, 97, 108, 138, 146, 208; attacks 17; neurosis 84; rehearsal 97 report 30, 53, 57, 119–120, 123–125, 127–128, 132, 135–136, 141, 161, 167; The Times 117, 124, 134, 161; War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell Shock’, 119, 139 repression xvi, 89, 90, 93–94, 128, 129, 131, 167, 176 republican 1 revolution 4, 18, 28, 56, 94; French 41; revolutionary body 207 Richer, Paul ix, 8, 15, 17, 20, 26, 29, 34, 60, 63, 164, 208; see also The Synoptic Tableau rigid 12, 63, 75, 111, 127, 144, 177 Rivers, W.H. ix, xvi, 119, 123, 128–130, 134–138, 141–144, 146, 156, 161

218 Index röentgen 16–17; X-ray 16–17 romantic xii, 22 sacred 44, 108 sacrifice 131–132, 143, 154, 210 Saints 38, 45, 165; Joan 53, 58; Theresa 47, 59 Salome, Lou Andreas 83–85, 96 Salpêtrière, Hospital vi, viii, xii–xiv, xviii–xix, 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 14–18, 20–22, 25–26, 29–33, 35–36, 38–40, 42, 49, 53–54, 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 75–76, 93, 95, 111, 135, 210; Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière 29, 210 salt 76, 95, 99 saltpetre 25, 36 Sassoon, Siegfried xv, 115, 134, 138, 143, 160 scenes xii–xiii, xv, 5, 9, 35, 53, 86, 89, 170 schema 172–176, 180; size 167, 169, 170–171, 176, 189, 192, 198–200 score 141, 148, 208; musical 143; physical 6, 99, 100, 208 sculpture 15, 27, 37 sea ix, xv, xx–xxi, 67, 78, 83–84, 86–87, 90–97, 99, 100–102, 104–106, 108, 110, 162, 199, 205, 208; beasts 86, 104; birds 86, 98, 104; The Lady from the ix, xv, xx, 83, 93, 96, 99, 106 secretions 40, 76 Seduction Theory 71, 77, 82 seizure 46, 52 self xvi, 31, 89, 91, 98, 113, 137, 169, 172–173, 175, 177; unconscious 88 sensibility 113 sex xiii, xviii, 9–10, 29, 88–89, 100, 129, 166, 181–182, 189, 192 sexuality xix, 11, 14, 82, 88, 93–95, 129, 166–167, 171, 181 shaking xix, 54, 154, 156–157, 160, 189 shapeshifting x, 74, 163–189, 191–206 shellshock ix, xv, 111–112, 116–117, 119–120, 122–127, 129, 131–134, 136–138, 143, 147, 156, 161 show ix, 12, 19, 20, 39, 43, 46, 60, 110, 146, 167, 179, 187, 192, 199 sickness 102 signs xiv–xvi, xviii, 1, 8, 10, 13–14, 24, 29, 33, 43, 81, 123, 155–156, 180

silence 3, 37, 58, 137, 143, 154, 159, 176 sin 4, 66, 162 size 167, 169, 170–171, 176, 189, 192, 198–200 skin 9, 44–45, 105, 150, 156, 182, 192, 196, 200, 203 skrimshanker 134, 157 Sleeping Beauty 49, 66, 74 smell 65, 71, 97, 101–102, 147, 151, 205 snake 4, 9, 48, 51, 59, 63, 65–66, 73, 204 snow 148, 155–156 soldier 111, 116, 118, 123, 125–127, 130–133, 137, 142–145, 150, 152 soloist 26 somatic 10, 166 space xv, 13, 19, 26, 28, 35, 63, 66, 70, 79, 89, 90, 93, 99, 102, 125, 126, 136, 139, 143, 162, 170–171, 174–175, 177, 180, 198 spectacle 11, 18, 21, 30–31, 44, 62, 95, 131, 171 spectator xviii, 20, 36, 98, 142 speech xv, 34, 36, 111, 122, 130, 147, 164, 171, 177, 178, 208 Sphynx (The Riddle of) 10 Stage (Early) 79 Star ix, 1, 27, 41, 42, 62, 76, 97, 99, 200; stardom xv, 4 starvation 97, 105, 171, 173 stepmother 86 stigmata diaboli 44 story 3, 33–34, 52, 68, 72, 80–81, 130, 134, 147, 159, 177–178, 180, 189, 198, 205 stranger 83, 85, 87–91, 94, 99, 101, 104, 108, 134 stress x, xvi, 27, 93, 111, 124–125, 127, 129, 132, 139, 161, 193 stretcher bearers 119 suffering i, xv–xvi, 3–4, 10, 13–14, 17, 21, 36, 43, 81–83, 86, 90–91, 95, 102, 112, 117–119, 122, 125, 128–130, 133–134, 136–137, 159, 160–161, 175–177, 179, 205, 207–209 suffragettes 114, 146, 155 suicide xv, 80, 84, 94, 165, 170, 179 suppression 128–129 survivor 77, 111, 170 swooning 9, 13, 17, 186 symbol 72, 87 symphony 39, 62 symptom xv, 10, 26, 45, 51, 126, 146, 158, 160, 166, 170, 176–178

Index  219 Synoptic Table 63, 208; see also Richer syphilis xviii, 10, 14, 21 talking cure viii, x, 16, 80, 113, 137 tarantata 13, 24, 67 taxonomy 37 tears xii, 8, 73, 119, 197 theatre i, viii–ix, xv, xix, xxi, 4, 9, 19, 21, 27–30, 34–36, 50, 53, 56, 58, 80, 83, 89, 93–94, 98, 106, 110, 136, 182, 184, 207, 209, 210 therapy 62, 96, 112, 135, 137, 159, 177 Tilley, Vesta 76 time xi, xiii, xxi–xxii, 1, 3–5, 12, 14–16, 20–22, 25, 28, 34, 36–39, 41, 43, 49, 51, 56–58, 60, 63–64, 66, 69–70, 73, 80, 82, 87, 90, 93, 95, 97, 107, 111, 112, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 130, 132, 134–136, 138, 145, 151, 153–155, 161–162, 169–171, 174, 177, 179, 184–185, 190–192, 194–195, 200, 202–203, 207 torture 112, 137, 159 toxic 86, 168, 178 training x, 122–123, 127–128, 144–145, 150, 152, 191; military 122, 127–128, 130–131, 146, 150; Salpêtrière 11 traitor 157 transference 4, 53, 71, 80, 93 trauma xi, xvi, 33, 41, 45, 57, 79, 82, 84, 90, 111, 113, 119–120, 125–126, 129–132, 136–139, 141, 158, 161, 163, 166, 176–177, 209; memory 9, 79; rape 11; unspoken 89; war 111, 125 trembling 145 trench xvi, 117–118, 149–150, 153–156 trench foot 118, 150 tricolore 41, 56 trigger finger 150 troll 89 unconsciousix, 79, 82, 86–88, 101, 128, 141 unhappiness xviii, 82, 84, 93, 109 uniform 12, 76, 114, 117, 143, 146, 161 untidy 105

upset 150 uterus 10, 37 vagina 8, 41, 85 vaudeville 76 veracity 79, 81, 132 verisimilitude 17 Victorian 111, 113, 119, 166 violence 21, 27, 132, 173, 182 violin 35, 39 visible 14, 16, 29, 33, 73, 153 visual xv, 5, 14–17, 19–20, 25, 29, 31–32, 60, 62, 90, 99, 101–102, 110, 145, 182, 208 visuel 27 vomit 65, 102, 155 war ix–x, xv–xvi, 18, 40, 97, 105, 111, 113–120, 122–143, 145–147, 149–152, 156, 158–159, 161, 208; neurosis x, xv, 125, 127–128, 139, 142, 146, 150, 152, 158–159 ward 39–40, 54, 56, 58, 61, 73 warrior 18, 120, 123, 143, 145 weakness 123, 127, 135, 177 weapon xvi, 6, 18, 149 western 15, 96, 164, 166, 169, 174, 180, 182, 203 wild 11, 17, 41, 67, 100, 102, 106, 141, 153, 195, 210 Wili, xii wish fulfilment 89 witch 1, 22, 24, 37, 39, 44, 58, 74, 99 woman viii–x, xv, xix, xxi, 1, 20, 24, 29, 31, 33, 35, 39, 44, 49, 50, 65–66, 70, 78, 81–82, 85, 87, 89, 90–92, 94–95, 97, 101, 126, 166, 169, 171–172, 184, 186–187, 191, 198, 200, 203, 205, 208–210; womanhood 90, 184, 187, 191, 196, 206 womb 5, 8, 26, 36, 37 working girls xii–xiii World War One 139 wound 49, 132 wreck 92, 96, 107, 210 X. L. Augustine 22 X-ray 16–17 Yealland, Lewis 112, 135, 159 zoophile 72