INCONVENIENT WOMEN
The Mad Women’s Ball – Victoria Mas
Prior to reading this work of fiction, I read Desperate Remedies by Andrew Scull on the history of psychiatry. I’d planned to reflect on it for this blog, but, frankly, found it so profoundly depressing that I could not bring myself to write about it.
I, like so many people, have mental health struggles, and I could not reconcile my rage at modern psychiatry’s narcissistically and demonstrably wrong way of handling people in mental and emotional crisis with something approaching… ‘gratitude’? …at having dodged, relatively recently, being electrocuted, lobotomised and mutilated of reproductive organs.
That said, Desperate Remedies is a strongly recommended book for understanding the bigger frame in which hypnosis sits. Tellingly, hypnosis gets barely a mention; it was a novelty in cynically manipulating ‘shellshocked’ World War I soldiers back into battle. Popping a medically qualified pinky up a soldier’s bottom was also a popular motivator for a flagging fighter, to put that into context.
The book ends on a somewhat hopeful note that Freud’s talk therapy has left a legacy that people in crisis should, actually, you know, be heard, listened to, and have agency in their treatment (in which one could include the niche of hypnotherapy). But, overall, it is a sad, sorry indictment of psychiatrists, who should, IMHO, be certified as the dangerous, delusional maniacs they are instead of the people they purport to help.
Anyway. Kev thought I’d enjoy a fiction book related to one such dangerous maniac: Jean-Martin Charcot, neurologist, hypnotist and tormentor of ‘hysterical’ women during the height of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, France, in the mid- to late-1800s.
The Mad Women’s Ball tells the story of a bourgeois young woman, Eugénie, committed to the hospital by her father – mostly because she is inconvenient but also because she lets on that she’s a Spiritualist who can communicate with dead people. To escape, Eugénie must enlist the help of strait-laced senior nurse Geneviève, a Charcot devotee who maintains a cool detachment from patients. Their fates collide at ‘the mad women’s ball’ – an annual event where Parisian society voyeuristically mingled with patients for the lols.
It's a simple but enjoyable story, and I appreciated the research, detail, and empathy the author, Mas, employs. For instance, I’d studied the French Revolution at A-Level, and had learned about the sans-culottes freeing prisoners from the Bastille. But, prior to Charcot, Salpêtrière was just a dumping ground for inconvenient, troubled women and, when they were also freed, they were unable to cope with their ‘freedom’ and were mostly raped and murdered – literally butchered – in the streets. It that respect, Charcot’s appointment was an improvement.
But the book is full of similar sad fictionalised truths. A key character is Louise, a ‘star’ hysteric and hypnotic subject, based on a real Charcot patient, Louise Augustine Gleizes. Mas movingly depicts the abusive power dynamic and what it may perhaps have been like to be a psychological guinea pig for the crowd of male doctors gathered for the regular hypno-demos. (As Alison Winter’s book points out, we don’t know because no one bothered to document what the female subjects said or experienced.) Mas’s Louise, scared, and unprotected as she normally is by Geneviève, suffers some kind of seizure and is left partially paralysed for a long time after. She is also sexually assaulted by a doctor; something that was undoubtably rife in such institutions.
When nurse Geneviève appeals to him to free not-mad Eugénie, Charcot is an aloof, cold, uncaring figure, dismissive of an otherwise loyal and valued woman. Geneviève herself then becomes an inconvenient woman – another specimen for psychiatry to study, rather than a human being to be understood, helped and cared for.
The Mad Women’s Ball is an enjoyable if bittersweet read. It’s also an Amazon movie, but in French with subtitles and this is not conducive to me and Kev eating dinner in front of the telly and so we haven’t watched it (yet).
