Stephanie J. Ryan 
Contemporary Figurative Artist

On Hysteria: Artist’s Statement

By Stephanie J. Ryan (2018)

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“The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes, only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so;”

 

― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper[1]

 

I have been thinking about hysteria:

 

Of the word, hysteria, being derived from the Greek word for uterus, hystera (ὑστέρα’).

 

Of an affliction known as the nervous disease, long associated with the uterus and therefore, with women. Images of women swooning and being revived with smelling salts; of fainting spells and convulsions, of unexplained paralyses, selective amnesia, sleep disorders, numbness, fits, weak nerves, cases of the vapors and of uncontrollable emotional outbursts abound in the popular imagination of cultures past and the present.

 

My mind jumps to mass hysteria of the Salem Witch trials; where fear and ignorance serve as dry tinder for conspiracy theories, superstition, false accusation; where ideas seem virulent, catching like strange wild-fire, changing lives forever.

 

And of Charcot’s famous work with the female inmates at the Salpêtrière in Paris who were labeled as Hysterics and paraded before the public in weekly clinical lectures that ‘proved’ the validity of his theories. A spectacle of ‘power over,’ taken as medical fact until Freud, who proposed the startling theory that Hysteria might be caused by repressed trauma. But he recanted. . .

 

I can’t help but think of Hysteria as being linked to those without voices or agency.

 

To be seen and heard is to have agency; to have a voice so that the most vulnerable may be protected and not victimized further.

 

To be hysterical is to be a woman lost in a maze of trauma, further traumatized through the efforts of others who insist on defining her, diagnosing her, and “treating” her by applying their “cure” to her.

 

This has happened for centuries and this happens still.

 

 

 

[1] Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.