Reviving Hysteria: The Nineteenth Century at the End of the Twentieth

Author

Christina Quintana, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Nancy K. Miller

Committee Members

Wayne Koestenbaum

Linda Martín Alcoff

Subject Categories

African American Studies | American Popular Culture | Critical and Cultural Studies | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Medical Humanities | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Visual Studies | Women's Studies

Keywords

Hysteria, madness, feminist, medical humanities, cultural studies, Victorian

Abstract

This dissertation explores popular and medical representations of female madness in two time periods: the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. I argue that 1990s American culture produced an abundance of texts, images, and narratives that revitalized the iconography and medical discourses of late nineteenth-century hysteria. Analyzing popular texts, films, and cultural touchstones of the 1990s, I explore how Victorian ideas about women’s minds—such as the inherent feebleness of the female brain and nervous system; the fatalistic, life-altering effects of female puberty; the association between hysteria and deviant female sexuality; and the implicit racialization of hysteria and female madness more broadly—are repackaged for a late twentieth-century audience. I contend that it was the similar sociopolitical climates of the two time periods—the Industrial Revolution and first-wave feminism in the Victorian period; globalization, the birth of the World Wide Web, and third-wave feminism in the 1990s—that produced these analogous social anxieties over the mental fitness of girls and women. Moving from the 1990s to the early 2000s, I further investigate how the ‘90s hysteric and her associated narrative of white feminine madness continue to circulate in twenty-first-century online spaces and subcultures. Although this digital iteration of the hysteric offers room for feminist play and subversion, it nevertheless runs the risk of colluding with the very narrative it aims to destabilize. In identifying these similarities across time and medium, I seek to draw attention to the ways in which Victorian ideas about the hysterical female continue to inform modern-day cultural narratives.

Recommended Citation

Quintana, Christina, "Reviving Hysteria: The Nineteenth Century at the End of the Twentieth" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6014