Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Nathalie Bouzaglo
Access provided by Northwestern University Library (24 Apr 2014 18:04 GMT)
Doctors’ Visits and Adultery in Late
Nineteenth-Century Narrative
nathalie bouzaglo
northwestern university
I. Introduction
I n 1865, the state court of New Jersey conducted a trial in the divorce proceed-
ings of Emile C. Berckmans v. Sara E. Berckmans. In its ostensibly ‘‘objective’’
narration of the facts, the court indicates that Ms. Berckmans is suspected of
adultery with the family’s physician, Dr. Randolph Titsworth. Her accuser is her
husband’s mother, who alleges that in June of 1859, the ‘‘transaction’’ (Green
Ewing 127) was carried out in the couple’s living room, at a moment when the
mother-in-law was able to look through the window of the adjacent greenhouse.
The mother-in-law’s testimony reveals that the greenhouse window allowed an
observer to glimpse only the smallest portion of the living room sofa, with its
back to the window. She claimed to have seen no more than a pair of feet resting
on the sofa, and a pair of boots. In her words: ‘‘I saw Dr. Titsworth’s feet, his
boots, and the feet lying on the sofa, on the same side of the sofa where I was
looking through the window’’ (129). Implicit in this allegation is the curious
assumption that Dr. Titsworth’s bare feet on the sofa would be sufficient proof
of the misdeed.
In discussing this allegation, the court stops questioning whether the pair com-
mitted adultery to ask instead whether an observer in the greenhouse would
be able to see the sofa. Curiously, the relationship between the lovers cedes its
protagonism to the physical evidentiary question, in much the same way that the
adulterous relationship cedes its protagonism to the relationship between the
lover and the aggrieved husband in the majority of novels of adultery dating
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Another detail of the
case merits highlighting: the accused wife was a middle or lower-middle class
young woman who had married a wealthy man and, in her defense, alleged that
1
Although I will not explore the notion of rivalry in this essay, I want to note briefly that
in the triangular relationships that adultery creates, the bonds between the rivals are typically
stronger and more passionate than those between the lovers themselves. The adulterous
relationship commonly serves as a pretext to facilitate homosocial relations between the
rivals. In this way, the rivalry itself becomes the protagonist of the story and creates the
perfect space for the production of homoerotic bonds ‘‘between men.’’ See Kosofsky
Sedgwick 21–27.
The protagonist of the novel Mimı́ suffers from a hysterical pregnancy: ‘‘her
stomach grows large’’ and she roams the streets, shouting that she is so fat that
she will ‘‘explode like a bomb’’ (121). She imagines that every child is hers, and
eventually comes up with the idea that ‘‘her son’’ has tragically died during an
operation. Mimı́ suffers from recurrent ‘‘attacks,’’ ‘‘deliriums’’ and ‘‘hallucina-
tions,’’ all symptoms of an illness brought on by ‘‘unfulfilled maternal desire’’
(119). In the doctor’s words: ‘‘crazy, yes; she was crazy with maternal love; and it
was necessary to satisfy the instinct suffocated in her, or die’’ (190; my emphasis).
Hysteria has always eluded definition: it has been viewed as everything from
sexual deviation to religious ecstasy.3 However, during the nineteenth century,
2
Rafael Cabrera Malo insists on the truth of his story in a prologue that is as anxious as it
is clumsily written: ‘‘Believe it . . . My book is—I proclaim it—the naked allegations of real
life’’ (n. pag.). All translations of the novel are mine.
3
Two theories of hysteria coexisted in the eighteenth century. According to the first,
hysteria was the result of abstinence or uterine problems; according to the second it was a
neurological problem. In 1775, William Cullen, one of the first scholars of hysteria, classified
it as a neurological problem caused by uterine disorders. It was thus thought that nymphoma-
niacs were especially vulnerable to the disease. As the century closed, additional causes were
added, including, for example, exaggerated pleasure and certain kinds of reading. The nine-
teenth century, until the 1870s or 1880s, was hysteria’s so-called ‘‘golden age,’’ and the
approach to hysteria changed radically. Jean Martin Charcot attempted to reverse the theo-
retical focus from the uterus to the brain (from the gynecological to the neurological).
Although Charcot sought to leave behind the association between hysteria, woman and
uterus, he was unable to eliminate ‘‘cures’’ that treated the ovaries and mammary glands
(Beizer 1–12).
4
According to Sander L. Gilman, the visual representation of hysteria within the world of
nineteenth-century images was always feminine—and hysterical men were always feminizable.
In his study, he compares the hysteric with the Jew, since the latter could also be a hysteric
(as could all ‘‘different’’ or ‘‘sick’’ individuals) (411).
5
‘‘Figure of femininity, label of disorder and difference, hysteria was available for a wide
and often contradictory range of aesthetic and political purposes: instrument of misogyny,
agent of differentiation, magnet diagnosis of society’s multiple ills, emblem of creative frenzy,
identification of the writing self as Other, designation of the century’s marginalized symbolic
center’’ (Beizer 8).
* * *
As shown by the contemporary inquiry into whether a ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘normal’’
body exists outside of its discursive formation, the question of the meaning of
the body continues to produce text. The hysteric’s body, inscribed and (over)ex-
posed, is converted into language. In any event, to understand or penetrate the
body implies the conversion of the woman into a legible and appropriable ‘‘text’’
(Dopico Black 24). As the body becomes the object of language’s desire, the
6
Here I am echoing Tony Tanner (11–17).
In refusing to choose between the two sides, the judge abdicates the judicial duty
to find facts in the face of conflicting evidence and contradictory stories. The
judge’s manipulation of the floor’s elevation as a variable calls attention to the
law’s equivocal approach to an adulterous situation and the effect of point of
view on the search for truth. It also highlights the difficulty of finding the words
and evidence necessary for the narration of adultery. The divorce case therefore
remains unresolved (as does the issue of Mimı́’s guilt in the novel) for lack of
‘‘satisfactory’’ evidence (140), although the court does conclude that ‘‘the visits
of her physician are too frequent and too long, and that, having no father, or
brother, or friend, to whom she could have recourse, she resorted to that physi-
7
Although ‘‘divorce’’ first appears codified under Venezuelan law in the 1873 National
Civil Code, the statute required legal justification before the court could grant a divorce
petition. Mimı́’s experience would have provided neither the moral nor the legal justification
for a divorce.
8
In both cases considered here, the feminine diseases are the result of a particular
context, rather than a consequence of an ‘‘illicit’’ behavior. Had the latter been the case, the
protagonist’s illness would probably have been taken as a didactic example of the risks of
‘‘sin.’’ In ‘‘Monstruo y nación: una lectura de El hombre de hierro,’’ I analyze the need for the
adulterous woman to fall ill or turn monstrous in Latin American narratives of the era.
works cited
Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Performing Arts Journal,
1983. Print.
Beizer, Janet L. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1994. Print.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1998. Print.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of
Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Print.
Cabrera Malo, Rafael. Mimı́. Novela Nacional. Caracas: El Pregonero, 1898. Print.
Didi-Huberman, George. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the
Salpêtrière. Trans. Alisa Hartz. Cambridge: MIT, 2003. Print.
Dopico-Black, Georgina. Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern
Spain. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.
Gilman, Sander L., et al. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne
Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. Print.
Green Ewing, Charles, ed. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Chancery, the
Prerogative Court, and, on Appeal, in the Court of Errors and Appeals, of the State of New Jersey.
Trenton: Hough & Gillespie, 1876. 122–44. Print.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York:
Columbia UP, 1985. Print.
Louis, Anja. Women and the Law: Carmen De Burgos, an Early Feminist. London: Tamesis, 2005.
Print.
Molloy, Sylvia. ‘‘The Politics of Posing.’’ Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Ed. Sylvia Molloy and
Robert Robert McKee Irwin. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 141–60. Print.
Silva Beauregard, Paulette. De médicos, idilios y otras historias: relatos sentimentales y diagnósticos
de fin de siglo (1880–1910). Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello, 2000. Print.
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1979. Print.
9
‘‘Both law and melodrama . . . converge in their potential for social change and their
focus on the conflict of human relationships’’ (Louis 149).