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Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920

Online ISBN:
9780191595226
Print ISBN:
9780199579358
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920

Susannah Wilson
Susannah Wilson
Stipendary Lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford.
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Published online:
1 January 2011
Published in print:
26 August 2010
Online ISBN:
9780191595226
Print ISBN:
9780199579358
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book investigates the lives and writings of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self‐proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first‐hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint. By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book is a text‐based analysis, which argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. It suggests that partially delusional narratives such as these may be read as metaphorical representations of real suffering. The construction of these narratives constituted an act of resistance by the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century. Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a fascinating but hitherto unrecognized literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

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