Elaine Showalter Quotes

Now we are free to come and go as we please, not in sorrow but in laughter.

Devoid of the poetry of madness.

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

Spark asks whether men or women are in the driver's seat and whether the power to choose one's destroyer is women's only form of self-assertion.

This is a work of fiction incorporating episodes from the lives of the historic J. Marion Sims, M.D. (1813–1883), “the Father of Modern Gynecology”; Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. (1829–1914), “the Father of Medical Neurology”; and Henry Cotton, M.D. (1876–1933), the director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum from 1907 to 1930. Several passages, scattered through the text, have been adapted from passages in Sims’s The Story of My Life (1888). Particular thanks are due to Andrew Scull’s Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Yale University Press, 2005), a chronicle of the life and career of Henry Cotton; and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (Pantheon Books, 1985).

Yet when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement. Until women break free for themselves, the chains that make madness a female malady, like Blake's "mind forged manacles," will simply forge themselves anew.

The war on menopausal sexuality is, of course, nothing new—no breast cancer required to enter. According to Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, in Victorian England women who expressed an interest in sex after menopause were ridiculed and derided, and their husbands were advised to “withhold” any sexual stimulation. Some pioneering doctors “treated” oversexed (by which I mean sexed-at-all) middle-aged women’s malady of desire with “a course of injections of ice water into the rectum, introduction of ice into the vagina, and leeching of the labia and the cervix.” It’s no doubt not unrelated that, when women tried to avail themselves of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, one doctor began performing clitoridectomies after which, Showalter notes, the patients each “returned humbly” to their husbands. The squelching of women’s desire has always been one of the main tentacles of patriarchy, and nothing squelches desire more effectively (well, sparing clitoridectomy) than sending a woman a clear message that she will never be desirable again.