| dc.description | This dissertation traces the elusive meanings, metaphors, and contexts of hysteria from approximately 1670 to 1810. It explores the centrality of hysteria to the eighteenth century and, more particularly, to the eighteenth-century woman writer. Hysteria, I argue, was a cultural, literary, and medical construct inextricably linked to changing views of women in the period. Though it was in many ways a real disease, it also operated as a powerful cultural metaphor, a catchall that explained everything that was wrong with women: it confirmed their inherent pathology, their weakness, their changeability, and their inferior reasoning. But, paradoxically, hysteria also resisted such strategies of containment. For literary women, it had liberating potential and served as a vehicle for emerging feminist ideologies. In order to explore these complex, often contradictory pathways, I take an interdisciplinary approach and examine two distinct strands of textual material. I look to the medical texts of Thomas Sydenham, Bernard Mandeville, Richard Blackmore, Nicholas Robinson, George Cheyne, Robert Whytt, and James Makittrick Adair. My primary focus, however, is on the oft-overlooked journals, letters, memoirs, and confessional poetry of Elizabeth Freke, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others. Exploring the ways these bodies of work intersect and diverge, I follow hysteria's varying diagnoses, symptoms, causes, and treatments. Structurally, the dissertation moves outward, from the relegation of hysteria to the pathological female body; to the recognition that physical and mental symptoms were, from one perspective, a female language of their own; to a study of hysteria's domestic, literary, political, and social causes; to an exploration of the ways women overcame and moved beyond hysteria by escaping their domestic confines, embracing unconventional roles, and fostering their identities as literary women. This movement does not occur along an easily traceable trajectory; it ebbs and flows and mimics the elusiveness of hysteria. It is within this uneven narrative that eighteenth-century women both suffer from hysteria and use it as a springboard for creativity and empowerment. Just as spleen spreads his dominion, I argue, so the woman writer spreads hers. | en_US |
