Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920
Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920
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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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Front Matter
- Introduction
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1
1 Women's Writing and Women's Incarceration: Historical and Theoretical Approaches
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2
2 Mémoires d'une aliénée by Hersilie Rouy: ‘Où est la folie là‐dedans?’
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3 Marie Esquiron: ‘Ma triste et injuste séquestration’
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4 Pauline Lair Lamotte: ‘Je sens que la vérité est là’
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5 Camille Claudel: ‘Du rêve que fut ma vie, ceci est le cauchemar’
- Conclusion
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End Matter
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