Representations of Hysteria in Men
In an article published in European Neurology, Dr. Adam A. Dmytriw discusses the history of depictions of male hysterics. He first addresses the historical evolution of the term hysteria. Since it was first employed by the ancient Greeks to refer to maladies arising from the womb, hysteria was originally considered a disease that only afflicted women. For a large portion of its history, the condition was associated with toxic fluids in the uterus and often the prescribed cure was sexual release.
Shakespeare is credited with one of the earliest mentions of male hysteria in his play, King Lear, in which the titular character says he suffers from “Hysterica passio.” The malady seems to occur when men have passionate fits due to some kind of emotional trauma. Such emotional instability and fragility has traditionally been associated with womanhood. This notion is further borne out by the author’s use of Richard Mainy as an example. Mainy was a sixteenth-century man falsely accusing others of witchcraft. In his diary, he wrote that he suffered from an illness that was the “spice of the Mother” (Dmytriw 45). In other words, the illness was either like those that women suffer, or was passed on to him from his mother. It seems that even when the term hysteria is used to describe a male condition, it alludes to that which is feminine in origin.
By the nineteenth century, hysteria became recognized as the physiological manifestation of a trauma that people were not able to verbalize. Etienne-Jean Georget was first to note that hysteria was not impacted by sex or gender, but was rooted in some kind of anxiety or nervous disorder for all those who suffered from it. Most, however, distinguished between female and male hysteria. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, female hysteria became associated with sexual deviance in women, and further made women objects of male prurient interest as female hysterics were actually put on display by some of those who studied them, notably, neurologist Jean Martin Charcot.
Male hysteria was less characterized by sexual actions than it was by men failing to act like men were expected to act. In essence, they displayed unmasculine or stereotypically feminine characteristics. These characteristics could manifest in sexual behaviors such as homosexuality, or an inability to perform sexually, but those were considered symptoms of a greater trauma of some kind.
Hysterics became literary subjects too. Poets (and neuropsychiatrists) André Breton and Louis Aragon studied and wrote about them, as did Virginia Woolf in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Despite the attempts these authors made to write in an unbiased way about hysterics, the persistent perception was that female hysterics were sexually deviant, and male hysterics were more feminine men — they were more emotional than and not as strong as the typical male.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf used an example of a male hysteric to demonstrate the psychological devastation of war. The character suffered from PTSD after WWI, and was labeled a hysteric. For many, there is no more classic example of emasculation than a man who cannot handle warfare. After all, warrior and male are practically synonymous terms in Western culture. Thus, while it was not Woolf’s intention to reinforce male/female stereotypes or the sexualization of hysteria as a disorder, her depiction of a male hysteric does just that.
Interestingly enough, excessive masturbation, or spermatorrhea, was also a reason for a man to be labeled hysterical. This pathologization derives directly from the Victorian-era need to suppress excessive sexuality and its expression. So, despite the fact that male masturbation is in no way a feminine behavior, it still indicated a loss of control and weakness. As a result, spermatorrhea led to many different kinds of treatments, some of them extremely harsh. Ironically, as with female hysterics, one of those treatments was the “release” of the male fluids in a clinical setting. The condition was equated with venereal disease in terms of the dangers it posed, which is uncomfortably reminiscent of the original perception of hysteria as an ailment that originated in the toxicity of the female reproductive organs. Like a venereal disease, hysteria could be contracted if one was not disciplined or manly enough.
“Hysterical” seems to be an adjective used to stigmatize people for not conforming to gender roles. Women who were purportedly “hysterical” were seen as somehow defective women or sexual deviants, who could be cured through heterosexual marital sex (thus pushing them into the normative lifestyle for women). The notion that males suffering from hysteria were afflicted because they were effeminate pathologized the idea of men expressing femininity, and stigmatized their reactions to trauma or stress as “womanly” weakness.
It also seems that male hysteria could have been a manifestation of male anxieties about not being masculine enough or not performing “male” roles well enough. This relates to a notion discussed by Susan Mattern that Dmytriw also touches on — that the cluster of symptoms known as hysteria may have been people’s responses to trauma and anxieties that they did not know how else to express.
