“Curiouser and Curiouser”: Part III

“[T]he invention of madness as a disease is in fact nothing less than a peculiar disease of our civilization.” (David Cooper’s Introduction to Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault)

Part III:

16th October 2018

I begin reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and my mind is soon buzzing with ideas. It’s unfortunate that not all of these ideas are relevant to my research. This reading is providing me with a good background of knowledge but not much of what I have covered so far directly links to male hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century.

Research is very time consuming and I am finding it difficult to try and skim through irrelevant sections when I find the topics discussed very interesting. Unfortunately I just don’t have the luxury of reading it properly with the volume of texts I need to get through.

At the present, I am intending to analyse male hysteria in Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Foucault’s work covers the idea of madness being linked to ‘unreason’. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein suffers the traumatic loss of his mother and I wonder whether this disruption to his family leads to a state of ‘unreason’ and delirium. It is in a state of seclusion and delirium that the creation of the creature takes place.

In order for my ideas to develop further, I think more reading is required around the subject.

 

25th October 2018

I decide to explore using some other resources. In order to accurately back up my argument on the portrayal of male hysteria, I need to find some primary sources from the Nineteenth-Century. Using the online database ProQuest, I discover some fascinating periodicals discussing the topic.

An article titled ‘Hysteria’, which was published in The London Reader: Of Literature Art and General Information in 1881, is proving particularly interesting. The article is very short but provides an example of a young doctor who displays symptoms of hysteria. The astonished tone of the piece and negative comparison to the behaviour of women suggests that this was considered very unusual. The symptoms also appear to fit some of the descriptions in included in the Nineteenth-Century novels I will be using in my dissertation.