5/20/2023 0 Comments Fingersmith![]() ![]() ![]() in Bordo 142) - I am going to argue, that hysteria – contrary to Victorian psychiatrist beliefs – can be considered the result, not of women’s physical and mental “fragility”, but rather of the era’s problematic conception of femininity.1 As I will demonstrate, the example of Maud (who was brought up within the rules and restrictions common to Victorian upper-class femininity) illustrates how women, in a culture that sought to control and censure the female body, might have internalized these anxieties about their own bodies that then manifested themselves in the physical symptoms of hysteria. Tammy Kaye Drawing on the findings of Susan Bordo – who, in her book, Unbearable Weight, Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, explores to what extent predominantly female nervous disorders (just like the very construct of the female body) can be seen as “constituted by culture” (Foucault qtd. ![]() While the “madness” for which Sue (as Maud) is confined to the asylum is merely a sham, what I am going to focus on is the Victorian phenomenon of female hysteria and how Maud in Fingersmith actually exhibits disordered symptoms which at the time may have been considered a sign of hysteria. ![]() The aim of this paper is to examine how exactly female mental illness in the Victorian era is represented in Waters’ novel. ![]()
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