What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences. I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all...
In his footnote on nymphomania, Acton discusses the excision of the clitoris, which has been recommended as a cure, only to say that he doesn’t consider it effective, since there is also ‘special sensibility’ in several portions of the vaginal canal.
Not all the mid-nineteenth-century mind doctors in Britain bought into the uterine or ovarian theory of hysteria and presumed it had a physiological base. Argument was rife, and continued at least until the end of the century. Nor did all of them agree with the guiding Victorian notion that the existence of female desire was itself an indication of a classifiable condition, such as nymphomania, calling for confinement in an asylum. But many shared a sense of the precarious nature of being woman. Women are both endangered and dangerous.
Julius Althaus (1833–1900), a cultivated German-born and -trained neurologist, prolific writer and eventual founder of the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, for instance, is keen to leave the uterus to one side and focus on hysteria’s emotional character alone. Althaus had briefly worked with the young Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, and at times sounds more radical than that French Napoleon of the Neuroses himself – certainly in his conception of hysteria. All symptoms of hysteria, Althaus writes in 1866, ‘have their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment and other painful emotions and affections are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensity’. Women whose ‘sensibility is blunt’, Althaus argues, ‘never become hysterical; while those who are readily accessible to impressions coming from without, who feel acutely and are liable to strong emotions, are certain to become hysterical and made to suffer mental agony or prolonged pain’.
The Protean range of symptoms they may then manifest can include any or several of the following: convulsive attacks, fainting fits, pain, cough, difficulty in swallowing, vomiting, asthma, hiccups, palpitations of the heart, general and partial loss of power, paralysis, anaesthesia and hyperaesthesia. These are extreme symptoms, and yet this is an ordinary enough condition, one that ‘impressionable’ women who are not particularly ‘strong-minded’ are prone to suffer from in an age that requires a ‘long and laborious training’ in ‘self-control’.
George Drysdale, in his Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, by a graduate of Medicine (1857), a book that was soon renamed The Elements of Social Science (1861), was more outspoken in his analysis of hysteria. He had a reformer’s zeal and it was clear to him that hysteria was a mentally and emotionally occasioned condition linked to the sexual abstinence the age demanded, particularly of women. ‘A morbid sexual state both physical and mental lies at the root of hysteria,’ he writes. He emphasizes that the disease is particularly prevalent amongst women of the upper classes, ‘among whom the sexual feelings are much more prominently developed, from the want of a necessary employment to occupy the mind, as well as from the various causes – such as novel reading, poetry, romance, dancing, theatricals, and so many other excitements which elevate to the highest pitch the sexual desires, and paint the delights of love in the most glowing colors’.
Hysteria begins, in his view, with puberty when the young girl is filled with tempestuous desires and surrounded by endless temptations and excitements that are necessarily ungratified. She is forced to hide her feelings and desires. ‘That which should have been the young girl’s pride and delight, becomes her shame and her torture; she must conceal, the unhappy one! And studiously repress her eager and beautiful emotions, and can we wonder that bewilderment, timidity, and impotence result?’ The inability ‘to select her marital mate’ for herself compounds the difficulty of her condition: ‘... nature cannot bear this constant state of slavery; and ever and anon she shows in the hysterical convulsions, in the wild tumultuous hysterical emotions, or in the delirious excitement of nymphomania (love-madness) that she will not be repressed. The passions of youth are a volcanic fire, which in the end will burst through all obstacles.’
Drysdale, though not a woman, had experience of this ‘volcanic fire’. Son of a prominent Edinburgh family, he had had a deeply troubled adolescence which resulted in a breakdown brought about by guilt over his uncontrollable desire to masturbate. Fleeing to the continent, he had disappeared so totally that his family thought him dead. When he finally returned, it was as a free-thinking social and sexual radical. Unrepressed sex had cured him. After studying medicine, Drysdale published his book anonymously: voicing his ideas as himself would have brought shame on his family.
Drysdale is an early feminist. He links hysteria to the fact that a girl is never allowed ‘to go about alone, like a young man’. Subjected to a ‘constant espionage’, she is frequently forced to do things in an underhand manner, to the destruction of her sense of dignity and rectitude. Nor do things necessarily get much better with age. Hysteria, that disease which can take all shapes and any, also attacks the ‘single or widows, or barren women, or such as are indifferent to, or dislike their husbands (which last class in this country of indissoluble marriage is unhappily so large a one)’.
The intolerable Victorian restrictions on women’s movement and desires are in the name of that supposedly great female virtue of chastity. As long as the ideas regarding this so-called virtue remain, it is impossible for woman to obtain greater freedom. ‘Until the difference in “sexual privilige” between man and woman is attended to,’ Drysdale emphasizes, nothing will make much impact on hysteria. ‘If we do not remove the main cause of hysteria, namely, insufficient sexual gratifications’, it is totally impossible to prevent the disease.
Nor is cure by a physician to be anticipated. Like some early Freud recommending a dose of penis normalis, ‘love is the only physician, who can cure this peculiar disease; and it is vain for a medical man to expect to supply his place. The passions, which have been repressed and thrown into disorder, must be gratified, and the proper healthy stimulus given to the sexual organs, so as to restore their nervous balance, before we can have any rational expectation of a cure.’
Reading Drysdale, one begins to think, as Freud might later have done, that Christiana Edmunds’s ‘love-madness’ was an unconscious attempt to initiate a self-cure.
It is not altogether impossible that an educated woman like Christiana, whose life was criss-crossed by members of the medical profession, would have read the revolutionary primer on sexuality that The Elements was. A doctor like Charles Beard, who had travelled abroad and had an experience of other cultures, would probably have read it and might silently have shared its stress on the importance of unrestricted sex for the physical health and mental balance of both men and women, who were more usually idealized in Victorian England as desire-free. The Elements, after all, sold some ninety thousand copies and was translated into eleven languages.
The Victorians, increasing work on the period has made clear, were not uniformly the dutiful, sexually repressed and rampantly moral exemplars they often aspired to be and preferred to portray themselves as. There would have been no treatises against masturbation if self-pleasuring didn’t exist. Many men, from chief justices such as Alexander Cockburn to prime ministers such as Palmerston, kept mistresses, often perfectly respectable ones. These were women worldly enough to ascribe sexuality a place, which wives, worn out by repeated pregnancies, may not have been. What is not publicly spoken about may still be privately lived. Chris
tiana Edmunds, grappling with the tensions and inner conflicts in which her social place enmeshed her as a young woman destined to become one of Victorian England’s redundant spinsters, was evidently tempted by other possibilities, one of which was the mantle of mistress – which might even be a stopping point on the way to wife, if only the existing sposa could be made to vanish.
6. Fashions in Treatment
Short of the extreme recourse to a uterine operation, which could include a form of clitoridectomy, the treatment Christiana Edmunds would have undergone for hysteria would not have differed all that much, whatever understanding of hysteria the doctors she saw held. Althaus speaks of three different categories of treatment. The first is emotional and consists of removing the causes of the hysteria, ‘viz., painful emotions’. This, he notes altogether reasonably, is the most difficult feat of all and often fails to work despite the doctor’s best efforts, since it entails rousing the will of the patient To reconcile her to her position in life, and obtain for her the best possible conditions from those who surround her’. Returning lost fathers or lost suitors is not within the doctor’s usual range. Tact and perspicuity are necessary in treating the patient; and sometimes the recommendation of a total change of air and scene – ‘a voyage to the Cape or Australia does wonders’.
The uterine theorists would not have bothered with the first of Althaus’s headings for treatment, but would instead have replaced it with a physical intervention, such as pressure on the uterine area, a dose of nitrate of silver to the cervix, the use of a vaginal pump syringe or douche, perhaps even the sedative potassium bromide, so much of which was used later in the century at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris for both hysterics and epileptics. Or they might have leapt straight to the second and third of Althaus’s facets of treatment: modifying the constitution and relieving the symptoms. Modifying the constitution is basic to much Victorian medicine and indeed our own, though we would probably replace the term ‘constitution’ with ‘lifestyle’. This usually entailed a type-specific regime which included diet (bland or nutritious), baths (hot or cold), and taking the waters in a variety of recommended spas from Malvern to ‘St Moritz in the Engadin where the highly rarified Alpine air, the carbonated baths, and the chalybeate mineral springs combined often produce marvelous results’.
As for the direct relief of hysterical symptoms, faradization – the conveying of a powerful current to the affected area – was as the century moved on the most common treatment, alongside its galvanic kin. Althaus was a great champion of the electrotherapies (not shock therapies, like the later ECT). The popularity of such treatments – not altogether unlike those used by beauticians and physiotherapists today – can be gauged from the numerous press advertisements that vaunt their efficacy and ever growing variations.
‘Pulvermacher’s improved patent Galvanic chain bands, belts and pocket self-restorable chain batteries’ promise that ‘Galvanism – nature’s chief restorer of impaired vital energy’ – provides ‘effective rational treatment [of] nervous and rheumatic pains, debility, indigestion, nervousness, sleeplessness, paralysis, neuralgia, epilepsy, cramp, and the functional disorders’ (of which hysteria is one). By listing a host of professional supporters for the therapy, including the Paris Medical School and the Royal Society, the ad tries to circumvent the worry that these faradic and galvanic treatments may edge a little too close to quackery or mesmerism, which was touted by some as treatment and considered by others a popular spectacle, like hypnotism just a little later. Some have suggested that these electric treatments were equivalent, or at least akin to, the medical masturbation that doctors also occasionally practised on hysterical patients, bringing them to paroxysm or what we would call orgasm.
Whoever the doctor that she saw in London might have been, it is likely that Christiana chatted a little about herself, was recommended a diet and baths, and was given a course of faradization, thought to be particularly useful for partial paralyses. Talking, touching, tapping, examining, stimulating, alongside the care that a stipulated regime evoked, all helped. It certainly helped more than the punishing and detrimental surgeries that were also undertaken. A side effect of this first course of treatment, however, could be that the doctor all too easily became a love object for the patient, with or without any reciprocity on his side. (Desire being ever a riddle, this sometimes happened even with the more punitive second form of treatment.)
We don’t know whether Christiana developed an attachment to the doctor or doctors who treated her for the hysteria she suffered from in her twenties. Her later passionate obsession with Charles Beard may have been one he, at least initially, reciprocated. They may have kissed, as her letter to him suggests, or even gone further during one of his home visits – the usual way doctors were then seen. It may be that he used and emphasized his married state as an excuse for putting a stop to emotions that on Christiana’s side were growing rampant; and this excuse in turn became her internal justification for attempting to get rid of his wife. Alternatively, Christiana may have aggrandized an ordinary caring doctorly concern, which may or may not on occasion have slipped into physical contact, and transformed it into something other and bigger, something that became delusional – fantasizing that eliminating Emily Beard would bring the doctor to her alone.
There is no record of what kind of ailments Christiana brought to Beard’s attention. Apart from what she chose to convey, it is unlikely that he knew much of her medical history. We can only guess at what he treated her for or whether he had much knowledge of hysteria, though as a medic practising in the affluent quarters of Brighton, he probably had some: hysteria was widely diagnosed for any woman who was visibly chafing at the feminine status quo – as evidenced in her words or her mysterious physical symptoms. During the subsequent trial at London’s Old Bailey, Christiana’s mother mentions in her evidence that ‘even now at times’ Christiana would come to her room and say she ‘had had a fit of hysteria and could not breathe’. Lack of breath and the sensation of a globus, or ball, in the throat, blocking it or causing nausea, were common hysterical symptoms. So perhaps Charles Beard had been called on to treat Christiana’s nerves, amongst other ills, and had in the process generated his own form of electricity.
Hysteria, as Julius Althaus states, is not an easily curable condition, and though it may disappear, its progress ‘is powerfully influenced by the events of life’. Christiana certainly remained in Althaus’s terms ‘impressionable’ and her relationship to ‘self-control’ had gone sensationally askew, as the sequence of poisonings shows. But her hysteria had by then toppled into something the condition did not, by all historical accounts, entail. Hysterics may have converted their unhappy and unconscious thoughts into symptoms, but classically these affected their own bodies, not the bodies of others: actions directed outwards, acts of violence, whether overt, masked or delayed, belonged to some other, graver classification. Whether it was a moral or a medical one was something Christiana’s jurors were to determine.
7. Loving Doctors
Christiana comes into the public record with her love for Dr Beard and the criminal activities it set in train. The passion itself was already criminal enough. After all, Dr Beard was a married man and secret liaisons were hardly condoned in Victorian England. Yet doctors – like their mesmerian kin who provided treatments of an unlegitimated kind – feature regularly in this period as targets for women’s illict, often enough unnamed, desires. These are sometimes reciprocal. It is as if Freud’s understanding of transference love – the love that underpins and makes possible the whole therapeutic relationship and is a slippage from earlier and other loves – should be extended to all medical practice and not just its psychoanalytic variety, that ‘dangerous’ method which had Carl Gustav Jung entangled with his patient Sabina Spielrein.
In a way, Victorian England itself encouraged the potential amorousness of the medical encounter. The emphasis on female purity, which underpinned Victorian morality, meant that middle-class
women rarely had any experience of (unclothed) men or of the body’s sexual vagaries, at least until marriage, and sometimes not even very fully after that. There was no language except a euphemistic romantic one in which to speak of desire. Meanwhile, marriage didn’t come until around twenty-seven – and could, of course, prove unsatisfactory.
Contact with doctors would for some women have been the only time when talk of body and sensation was permissable. The consulting room provided a space of intimacy and confidentiality, akin to a confessional but without the separating grille. For the young woman, the doctor may have been the only male ever to touch her – either with his eyes, that searching clinical gaze, or with his hands. Or with that ancient and in the Victorian era newly rediscovered and controversial gynaecological instrument, the speculum. There was a fear that the speculum, which took on several innovatory shapes at this time and provided the male with a glimpse of what the woman herself would never see, might, with frequent insertion, provoke her desire – or indeed, like the doctor’s ‘examination’ itself, satisfy it. So the doctor could easily become the site of fantasy; or use his privileged access to the advantage of seduction.
Trials of Passion Page 6
