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Example research essay topic: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Studies On Hysteria - 2,989 words

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Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. -- Fiorello La Guardia, Politics of Experience What a weak barrier truth is when it stands in the way of a hypothesis. -- Mary Wollstoncraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women Whom the Gods destroy they first make mad. To the ancient mind, madness was assigned by the Gods as punishment for human weakness, vice and transgression. Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, was punished by the god Apollo; her foresight and accurate predictions were considered by the inhabitants of Troy to be no more than the ludicrous rantings of a madwoman. This notion of insanity prevailed throughout the Western world well into the nineteenth century where madness was thought to result from various biological and spiritual improprieties.

With the birth of modern psychology, male institutions of government, law and literature found an important ally. Following the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 and the subsequent growth of the universal suffrage movement, women across the country began to push the limits of the cultural constraints in which they had been bound, disregarding the austere Victorian rhetoric of the times. Insanity, madness, neurosis and other mental, emotional and psychological disorders became the overwhelming response to their independence, intelligence and resignation. "Men, in general, " wrote Mary Wollstoncraft in 1792, "seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices rather then to root them out. " The number of cases of hysteria and other nervous disorders reached its peak in turn of the century England and America. By the year President McKinley was shot, hysteria and other disorders of the brain were affecting women at nearly epidemic levels. Given the rapid changes and modernization of the 1800 's, the second industrial revolution in American and Europe, the creation of the telegraph in 1844 and the telephone 32 years later in 1876, early-psychology spread with tremendous speed.

An increasingly literate, educated and mobile society made certain the dissemination of psychology across Europe and throughout the cultural centers of the United States. New waves of psychological literature attempted to explain the rift between the sexes. Couched in terms of the human mind these works touted a justifiable form of discrimination against women who could not, for the most, hope to break through the traditionally male field of science. While psychologists and physicians such as Freud and Krafft-Ebing promoted gender-based models of the human mind, authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath explored the influence of male medicine on the lives of women. Examining these two classes of works gives important insight to the differences between the patriarchal view of madness and the its reality as it affected hundreds and thousands of women in America and abroad while demonstrating the use of psychology to disenfranchise and subjugate women everywhere. Medicine and Madness: Krafft-Ebing and Freud In 1895, German scientist Dr.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing began a study of psychosis in women. Most specifically, Krafft-Ebing was interested in coming to a detailed understanding of congenital homosexuality ["congenial" homosexuality is another topic altogether. JCH], a disorder that in the terms of turn of the century America, "infected" hundreds of women. Independence and self-confidence primarily characterized homosexuality in women. In addition, homosexual women sought the company of other women as social or intellectual partners rather than the comfortable domestic role provided to them. Krafft-Ebing's research of "Sapphic Love" struck at the heart of the female community.

Krafft-Ebing singled out hyper-sexuality and prostitution as the primary sources of mental disorders such as homosexuality in women. These acts were typified by an increased sexual drive or licentious behavior that was considered inappropriate for women at the time. He also attacked institutions of female learning and prestige, such as schools, claiming they were hotbeds of homosexual activity. These he compared to female-only prisons, asylums, harems and brothels. Krafft-Ebing viewed these institutions with suspicion. Labeling woman-only institutions "homosexual" invaded and invalidated the female community.

No doubt, Krafft-Ebing's critiques and exposes into the "hidden realm" of female educational centers discouraged many families from subjecting their young girls to the madness, debauchery and insanity housed beneath the veneer of higher learning. In his seminal work, the Psychopatia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing attempted to correlate female participation in traditionally male realms of society with psychosis, degenerative sexuality and mental disorder. His research was predominately taxonomic: observing his patients (whom he refers to consistently as "creatures") and making records of their various symptoms for further analysis. His work was largely centered on discovery and thus little focus was placed on remedy.

His subjects suffered from various grades of "congenital sexual inversion, " a mental disorder he claimed whereby young women developed an interest in the male cultural role. In his description of gynandry, an extreme mental disorder and progressed state of degenerative homosexuality. Krafft-Ebing described his patients in the following manner: The female urging may chiefly be found in the haunts of boys. She is their rival in their play, preferring the rocking horse, playing soldiers, etc. , to dolls and other girlish occupations. The toilet is neglected and rough boyish manners are affected. Love for art finds a substitute in the pursuit of the sciences.

At times smoking and drinking are cultivated even with passion. The masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom, finds pleasure in the pursuit of manly sports and in manifestations of courage and bravado [emphasis added]. In the Psychopatia Sexualis Krafft-Ebing succeeded in upholding traditional notions of male and female with an introduction of the new science of psychology. Women who trespassed or transcended the cultural norms fit into one of his many category of sexual inversion from frigidity to psychological hermaphratism. In light of Krafft-Ebing's research, women who insisted on education, artistic expression and social outlet were viewed as being disposed to mental illness and sexual inversion. By classifying female independence as equivalent to homosexuality, Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries were belittling the benefits of female society and debunking the growing focus on female suffrage, artistic contributions and the possibility of female independence.

Krafft-Ebing's influence over psychology and the study of sexuality in young women would be short-lived. Published only a few years after Psychopatia Sexualis, Sigmund Freud's The Psychology of Love presented modern theories of homosexuality, outside the arena of psychosis and disorder and was widely accepted by the scientific world and the general public. However, even as Freud's theories of sexuality, liberated women from the constraints Krafft-Ebing had attempted to set, Freud's study of hysteria and other nervous disorders would once again place gender at the center of the study of the human mind while reinforcing the traditional notions of the sexes. During his lifetime, Sigmund Freud produced hundreds of articles, case studies and a number of important texts, which would forever alter the way in which western society approached humanity.

His work influenced, and continues to influence, not only psychology but also the literature of the last hundred years. Under his teacher and mentor, the physician Jean-Martin Charcot, much of Freud's work centered on the investigation and cure of hysteria. Hysteria referred to a conglomeration of mysterious and inexplicable symptoms present predominantly in women. Modern psychologist have attributed the hysteria of the late nineteenth and early twentieth to a combination of insufficient information about the functions of the human mind and the negative effects of sexual and cultural repression. In addition, critics such as Elaine Showalter suggest growing urbanization and modernization contributed greatly to the general dissolve of women's mental health in the late 1800 's. Freud defined hysteria as the physical manifestation of inward desires, fears and anxieties.

The mind of the hysterical patient is full of active yet unconscious ideas; her symptoms proceed from such ideas. It is in fact the most striking character of the hysterical mind to be ruled by them. If a hysterical woman vomits, she may do so from the idea of being pregnant. She has, however, no knowledge of this idea, although it can be detected in her mind and made conscious to her. [A]nalysis will show that she was acting her part in the dramatic reproduction of some incident in her life, the memory of which was unconsciously active during her attack[emphasis added]. In the text Studies on Hysteria, Freud worked closely with his contemporary Josef Breuer. Together, Freud and Breuer cataloged several patients in this comprehensive study of hysteria.

The problem with Freud's work at the time is mainly one of perspective. As psychologist and author Thomas S. Szasz noted in The Myth of Mental Illness both men pursued the study of psychosis as primarily analogous to physical disorders of the body. Specifically, hysteria was thought to be chemical in origin similar to diseases, which plagued the physical body. The sole difference between disorders of the mind and those of the body where that the in the latter cases, the science of the time was crude and exact sources could not be readily discovered. In addition, Szasz criticizes Freud's insistence that each individual he observed was in fact, ill. "They mystified and prejudged the problem before they accepting all such persons as 'patients', by regarding their complaints as 'symptoms' and by viewing these symptoms as the manifestations of some obscure disorder of the psychic-chemical machinery of the complainant's body. " While Studies on Hysteria aided in the creation and acceptance of a new, psycho-chemical disorder it was, however, Freud's famous case study on a young woman named Dora that set the stage a vast association between hysteria and women.

Dora was an eighteen year old girl from a well-to-do Austrian family who suffered a series of unfortunate and painful symptoms ranging from stomach aches and digestive disorders to insomnia and headaches. Freud spent only a few sessions with her and admittedly was unable to write down any of the details of their meetings until after each had ended. Dora symptoms had occurred infrequently since childhood but had grown particularly troublesome sometime in the previous two years. While hysteria was the result of latent desires breaking through the wall of the consciousness and manifesting themselves in physical symptoms, it was caused primarily from some obtrusive "psychic trauma, " something of sufficient power and turmoil to send these unconscious desires bubbling to the surface.

In the case of Dora, her hysteria was the result of tumultuous sexual desires for a family friend. Long hidden, her symptoms first began to demonstrate their presence after this gentleman's thwarted attempt at a sexual advance. Finally, Freud explains, her conscious mind could no longer tame her rapturous desires, which flooded her physical body in the form of aches and pains. Author Claire Kahane has a different take on Freud's relationship with his patient Dora. In her book, Passions of the Voice, Kahane relates Dora's sessions with a form of sexual intercourse, in which Freud persuades a young teenage girl, verging on womanhood, to describe her most vulnerable and erotic thoughts. "What is particularly noticeable in this narrative structure is the emphasis on oral ity. " Kahane continues in this train of thought to equate Freud's psychoanalytic approach to the verbal version of oral sex likening it in many instances to "fellatio. " Kahane insists that Freud's own sexual mores came into play in this case study as well as in the discussion of hysteria as a whole. As a result, Freud's conclusions about hysteria are based in part on his perception of sex at the turn of the century and his own sexuality.

Freud's research into the psyche of women would lead to a renewed effort to enforce the traditional subversion of women throughout the western world. Women, practically barred from the medical profession, would need to find another way to combat the effects of gender-based pseudo-psychology. These female advocates of medical and mental equality (an often times, patients as well) would publish some of the most descriptive and profound accounts of madness and alter our understanding of mental illnesses among women. Over the next century, many authors would take their pens up to further our understanding of the harsh, and often un reproachable, institution of psychology, which had been responsible for the systematic creation, and subsequent justification of unequal treatment among men and women in regards to mental illness. Literature and Madness: Gilman, Woolf and Chopin One champion would leave a vivid and remarkable account of the role of gender in early psychology before Freud's Studies in Hysteria would focus popular attention on the subject. Charlotte Perkins Gilman would publish her chronicle of a woman's digression into madness in the New England Journal in 1892.

Inspired by her own suffering from the ambiguous malady of melancholia, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a dark and dismal tale of one womans struggle to fortify herself against a supposed psychological illness. Gilman's brief text became a rallying point for the feminist movement of the time. 11 years later, in 1903, Gilman published a response to her story saying, It was not meant to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked. After several years of nervous breakdowns, in 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman visited the noted physician and mental health specialist, Silas Wier Mitchell. Mitchell, an expert in nerve disorders popularized the rest cure. " Among his patients were numerous president and intellectual women of the nineteenth century including Jane Addams, Winifred Howells (daughter of William Dean Howells), and Edith Wharton. After several weeks of continuous investigation and research, Mitchell proposed that Gilman return home and live as domestic a life as possible. He warned her to have but two hours of intellectual life a day [and] never to touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as I lived.

Mitchell was well aware that boredom and sensory perception were common side effects for his notorious cure. "When they are bidden to stay in bed a month, " Mitchell was quoted as saying, "and neither read, write, nor sew, and have one nurse who is not a relative then rest becomes for some women rather bitter medicine. " After three months of ardently following her physician's instructions, Gilman tried another method. Despite the reproach of family and friends, most notably her husband Charles Stetson, Gilman made an explicit point to freely participate in activities outside the home. She wrote, engaged in discussion, and lived a full and healthy life. Her cure worked. Gilman's ordeal prompted her to write The Yellow Wallpaper with the hope of preventing countless other women from suffering the same calamity. The story is the tale of a nameless narrator living in the country as part of her prescription for health.

She spends her time in a yellow wallpapered bedroom, keeping a meager diary of her experiences. With time the burden of healing begins to weigh hard on her mind. Guilt and doubt replace resignation. The protagonist somehow feels guilty for her own disorder and unsure if her insistence on writing and recording a few modest thoughts might indeed be thwarting her recovery.

All of these pressures lead her to seek solace and occupation in the contemplation of the gaudy, flamboyant, yellow wallpaper. Throughout the course of the narrative, the young woman discovers an unseen world of trapped women fighting for escape, hidden just behind the brazen print. Her visions embody her own frustrations, pains, as well as her hopes for freedom from the oppressive nature of her condition. By the climax of the story the ailing women locks herself in her room and, in a fit of hysteria and lucidity, tears the wallpaper to shreds, thus freeing the souls of the sick and possessed women imprisoned within.

Unlike Gilman, Kate Chopin was not a victim of the male medicine or psychology of the late nineteenth century. She was, however, no stranger to the social and cultural mores of her time. The daughter of an Irish immigrant, Chopin was much impressed in her youth by authors such as Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant. At the age of nineteen she married Oscar Chopin and moved to New Orleans.

Although she moved back to her native St. Louis in 1884, the cultural of the Cajun and Creole south would influenced much of her writing for the rest of her life. Published in 1899, The Awakening is partly a story of a young society woman's path to sexual liberation and partly a terrible, tragic, journey of a woman in search for freedom and deliverance. The story follows the life of Edna Pontellier on a voyage of self-discovery that begins with a few mournful notes of Chopin and a midnight swim off Louisiana's Grand Isle and ends with an act of self-destruction. Along the way, Edna breaks free of the traditional gender molds and the sexual repression that had constrained her. Neglecting her domestic duties and abandoning her social routine, her husband seeks the help of a renowned physician, Doctor Mandelet. "[S]he doesn't act well.

She's odd, she's not herself. I can't make her out. " Leone Pontellier tells Mandelet. He further complains that the housework has been left undone and Edna has ignored her "Tuesday night home, " preferring to visit friends or wander the streets of New Orleans instead of greet guests, as was the custom of the day. In addition, Edna has expressed displeasure at the thought of attending a friend's upcoming wedding. "She won't go to the marriage. She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. Nice thing for a woman to say to her husband! " Mandelet poses one question: "Has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women?" At Pontellier's negative reply the doctor advises he let her be: "Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar animal and delicate organism a sensitive and highly organized woman as I know Mrs.

Pontellier to be, is e...


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