International conference - HYSTERICS. COUNTER-HISTORY OF A DISCOURSE
LE ISTERICHE CONTROSTORIA DI UN DISCORSO
Location: Avignon University - thesis room
Date : 12-13 May 2025
Organisation: Laurent Lombard (Avignon University/ICTT), Stefania Achella (Università di Chieti-Pescara), Davide Luglio (Sorbonne University)
Supporting laboratories : ICTT (Avignon University) and L&gend (University of Chieti-Pescara)
During the 19th century, hysteria took centre stage in literature and art. It became the protagonist of a narrative that portrayed women as constantly unsatisfied: capricious and weak, unstable and endowed with violent desire, or seductive and dangerous, mythomaniacs and pathological liars.
The image of the hysterical woman thus had a strong impact on the artistic world. This representation spread to theatres and cabarets, thanks in particular to the performances of famous actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, and penetrated a literature that described the female reality as constantly blurred, suspended between physical and mental fragility, with an exacerbated sexuality, potentially dangerous for the man who had to know how to recognise, control and, if necessary, punish this excess.
The etymology of the term - hysteron, uterus - links hysteria directly to the female body. Clinically, it manifests as stupor, delirium, amnesia, infantile behaviour, pseudodementia, hallucinations and psychogenic alterations in consciousness. The cause is often identified as an enormous unfulfilled sexual desire. Since the time of Rabelais, who was both a writer and a doctor, the proposed remedy has been to keep women busy with domestic tasks, or, as was thought in the nineteenth century, to force them to have conjugal intercourse, even against their will.
It was not until the 18th century, however, that hysteria was classified as a female genital neurosis, as the great physician of the French Revolution, Philippe Pinel, did in his Nosography. And although Charcot, a century later, put forward the idea that hysteria could be the result of a dynamic lesion in the brain, thus separating it from its exclusively female connotation, it was certain personalities who frequented his salon who gave rise to the so-called "Salpêtrière novels", probably influenced by the "Salpêtrière novels". Tuesday lessons at the Salpêtrière or Clinical lessons on hysteria and hypnotism of Pitres, introduced by Charcot, which gave rise to dialogues with hysterical patients, reported in an almost theatrical manner. On this line, we see The loves of an intern or Léon Daudet's cynical dystopia, Morticolesnovels set in the famous French psychiatric hospital, which, along with more famous works such as Thérèse Raquin or the Rougon-MacquartIn this way, the link between hysteria and femininity was reinforced. And among the clinical cases translated into literature, that of themild hysteria remains central - characterised as it is by the extreme volatility of sensations - and made famous by the physiologist (and sometime novelist) Charles Richet in an article published in 1880 in the A review of two worldsEmma Bovary's posthumous fame as the prototype of the nineteenth-century hysteric. Here, hysteria is linked to the dreamy, naïve character of the bourgeois woman (what Jules de Gaultier calls "bovarism"). This is the same line taken by the Italian writer Italo Svevo, with the character of Amalia in Senilità.
The hysterical subjects described by Freud were also women, belonging to the bourgeois class of the 19th century, to families that were cultured but conditioned by rigid, moralistic and hyper-controlling conceptions, particularly with regard to sexual mores and the relationship with the body. A society in which sexual and aggressive instincts and impulses were held in check by unquestionable moral imperatives. It was not until the third edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 to see hysteria excluded from the pathologies, precisely because to say "hysterical" meant to say "woman" and, above all, an incapable and maladjusted, inferior woman; because it was too discriminating and misogynistic a label, it was replaced by the term "histrionic", which can be applied to both sexes. And yet, although the category of hysteria has been challenged by medical nosology, it has left an indelible mark not only on modern and contemporary literature but also on our culture. The charge of hysteria continues to represent the distinctive imprint of the feminine, pejoratively connoting its character. The conference Hysterics. History of a prejudice (1800-1950) aims to analyse the use of hysteria as an instrument of demonisation, as a social and family stigma - as well as a medical one - against women, and its repercussions in literature, film, theatre and the visual arts between the 19th and 20th centuries.
Mis à jour le 9 May 2025