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.

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.

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).

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.

Warren published several plays—The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), and The Group (1775)—in the Boston newspapers under the signature “A Lady from Massachusetts.” The Group, published in book form as well, satirized the Tory governing council that represented the British government in Boston. In her list of dramatis personae, Warren caricatured council members, citizens, and writers under such names as Hum Humbug, Sir Sparrow Spendall, Brigadier Hateall, and Scriblerius Fribble, and noted that they were attended by “a swarm of court sycophants, hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers, collected from the neighboring villages, hovering over the stage in the form of locusts … the whole supported by a mighty army and navy from Blunderland, for the laudable purpose of enslaving its best friends.” This blunt comic invective shows how forcefully Warren could express her political views in prose.

Anne Bradstreet happened to be one of the first American women inhabiting a time and place in which heroism was a necessity of life, and men and women were fighting for survival both as individuals and as a community. To find room in that life for any mental activity … was an act of great self-assertion and vitality. To have written poems … while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.

Uncle Tom's Cabin inspired outrage in the proslavery South, and its political message far dominated its literary merits. Some parents forbade their children to read it; “it was not allowed to be even spoken of in our house!” Grace King of New Orleans remembered. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a monster to scare children with, a “hideous, black, dragon-like book that hovered on the horizon of every Southern child.”13 Southern women writers responded with pious self-justification and angry self-defense. Between 1852 and i860, they published nine “anti-Tom” novels, which feature loyal and contented slaves, benevolent plantation owners, pious death scenes of devoted and beloved mammies, dire warnings of the pitfalls of freedom, and an emphasis on the rewards to be found in heavenly mansions where master and slave shall be equal.14 Their emphatic Christianity is actually indoctrination in white supremacy, and behind their glorification of the saintly and powerful planter's wife is a recurring fear of slave insurrections.

Frances Watkins Harper (1825-1911) wrote to Brown in prison, stayed with his wife for two weeks before his execution, and made him the subject of her early forays into fiction. Harper was a free black woman raised in Baltimore by an aunt and an evangelistic Methodist uncle who directed a well-known school, the William Wat-kins Academy for Negro Youth. She had studied there until the age of thirteen, and began early to write poems and essays. After 1850, however, her life in Baltimore was threatened by the hostile environment of the Fugitive Slave Act, and she left to become a teacher, first in Ohio and then in Philadelphia, where she began to publish in the abolitionist press. Three of her poems were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and “To Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe” thanked the author herself: For the sisters of our race Thou'st nobly done thy part Thou hast won thyself a place In every human heart.27