Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women Elaine Showalter is also the author of "A Literature of Their Own: Women Writers from Bronte to Lessing" and "The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830 - 1980". The sexual abuse of children and the increasing frequency of rape the censoring of art and the banning of pornography anti-abortion campaigns and the AIDs epidemic - these late-20th-century crises are, the author suggests, comparable to their "fin de siecle" counterparts. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in this book the author points out the similarity between that time and this time. It was a time when the words "feminism" and "homosexuality" came into use, redefining accepted ideas of masculine and feminine, and a time when the "emancipated woman" was viewed as a threat to family stability. The novelist George Gissing remarked that the 1880s and 1890s were decades of sexual anarchy, when the notions of gender that governed sexual identity and behaviour were being constantly eroded. (An exploration of the paralells between the ends of the 1.)Īn exploration of the paralells between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries and their representations in art, literature and film, this book asks whether the approaching millenium signals a beginning or points grimly to an end, and whether the ends of centuries are merely imaginery borderlines in time, or cycles, such as the crises of the "fin de siecle" and the sense of ending so ominously present in the works of contemporary writers and artists. Women, Madness, and the Family: R.D.Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle
Feminism and Hysteria: the Daughter’s Diseaseħ. Nervous Women: Sex Roles and Sick RolesĦ. On the Borderland: Henry Maudsley and Psychiatric Darwinismĥ. Domesticating insanity: John Conolly and Moral ManagementĤ. Highly original and beautifully written, The Female Malady is a vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.ġ. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women ‘to their senses’, she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness.
In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about ‘proper’ feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, Culture, 1830-1980
0 kommentar(er)
