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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies > Feminism
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Voices from the Asylum - Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920 (Hardcover)
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Voices from the Asylum - Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920 (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives
of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and
mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the
feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic
and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of
their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the
foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric
breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint.
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical
diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud,
this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an
integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive
society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read
as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real
suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under
threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance
on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the
feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in
the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and
based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important
contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into
literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto
unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of
psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.
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