by Sady Doyle
But hysteria didn’t make much sense, even as a mental illness. Not quite epilepsy, not quite insanity, hysteria was what you had when the doctor didn’t know what you had. Women who cried too much had it. Women who laughed too much had it. Women who masturbated at all had it. So did women who disliked sex. Charcot was tasked with bringing clinical specificity to a disease that thrived on not being anything specific. He didn’t succeed, of course. But he did have a flair for public relations. And so, to keep the world abreast of this amorphous yet dangerous epidemic, he resorted to photography, bringing his patients into a professional studio so that he could capture them as they screamed, arched, grimaced, and twitched.
Publicly exhibiting the mentally ill was an old practice; beginning in the 1600s, English tourists could pay a penny to visit the cells of chained lunatics at Bedlam. It was supposedly a morally uplifting reminder to restrain one’s own animal passions, though according to accounts from the time, most of the visitors were laughing. But, where Bedlam imprisoned men and women alike, Charcot’s emphasis on women in peril made him a sensation.
His most famous subject was a fourteen-year-old rape victim named Louise Augustine Gleizes. Louise Augustine was younger, and prettier, than most patients—“the camera likes her,” photographer Paul Regnard explained—and Charcot published photographs of her writhing on a bed in her underclothes (these were her “passionate poses”: “ecstasy,” “amorous supplication,” “erotism”) accompanied by descriptions of the strange states she fell into under hypnosis. (“She closes her eyes, her physiognomy denoting possession and satisfied desire; her arms are crossed, as if she were clasping the lover of her dreams to her breast; at other times, she clasps the pillow. Then come little cries, smiles, movements of the pelvis, words of desire or encouragement.”) All of this was for educational purposes, mind you. Sure, sure. And people visited Bedlam to improve their souls.
In addition to the photography business, Charcot performed his hypnotic treatments publicly, allowing the world to see the power he had over his broken women. Louise Augustine turned in a few performances, but his star in these live shows was Blanche Wittman, “queen of the hysterics”; she could do the most remarkable things under hypnosis, including kissing members of the audience on command. Indeed, there were many remarkable things about Blanche—chief among them the fact that, after Charcot died and the hypnotism sessions ended, she never exhibited another symptom of hysteria for the rest of her life.
Still, despite these little factual infelicities, hysteria was a smashing success. Charcot became the most celebrated doctor in France; he even got his own painting, by Pierre Aristide Andre Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (Painting Number Two). It shows Charcot’s handsome male assistant holding Blanche, who is wearing a low-cut gown and opened corset for the performance, and swooning in his arms as if she’s posing for the cover of a romance novel. A group of rapt young men crane their necks from the stands, trying to get a good look at all the hot, hot mental-health care going on.
And, just as Pinel Liberates the Madwomen hung in the lecture hall of Charcot, a copy of A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière hung in the offices of one of Charcot’s most devout admirers: Sigmund Freud. Doctor Number Three. Freud felt that Charcot, brilliant though he was, had not done enough to emphasize the sexual causes of hysteria; his own studies were dead-set on unlocking the secret carnal desires of women. Freud could be remarkably insensitive about said desires (Dora, perhaps Freud’s most famous patient, relates an incident when an adult man cornered her and forced a kiss on her as a little girl; Dora claims she did not like this; Dora, Freud concludes, is lying about the fact that she did not like this, because Dora is a hysteric; et cetera) and his studies were often, shall we say, suspect in their methods. One woman, who had gone to Freud with leg pain, remembered him only as the “nerve specialist” who “tried to persuade me I was in love with my brother-in-law.”
But, like it or not, Charcot was a mere Obi-Wan to Freud’s Darth Vader: The student became the master, and the contemporary idea of mental illness took shape in Freud’s office, under the watchful cleavage of Blanche Wittman, and inside the long history of broken, exposed and shameful women.
So flip forward. Look at the photos again. Here is a woman unconscious, mouth wide open, head thrown back. Here is a grimacing woman with a shaven head. Here is a woman in a flimsy slip, sobbing, straining against the handcuffs that fasten her to a hospital gurney. Here is a woman starving and half-naked, wandering the street, her face twisted into a rictus. Here is a woman stepping out of a car, her skirt pulled aside to expose her vulva.
Is it starting to look familiar yet? When you envision the tourists at Bedlam, or the demonstrations at La Salpêtrière—the strange, half-dressed girls contorting and flirting, not even in control of their own bodies—can you tell yourself that you’d be too sensitive, too good at heart, to ever find yourself in the stands?
The “hysterics” of Charcot’s time, or Freud’s, would now get different names: They’d have anorexia, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personalities.
But no matter what they had, they would still be spectacles. They belong to the visual history of the Madwoman: half-clothed, unhinged, somehow both sexually titillating and fundamentally abhorrent, grotesquely exposed and irresistibly available. Half the time, with “crazy” celebrities, we don’t even know what these women’s diagnoses are, or whether they have them: Try to prove that Britney Spears has bipolar disorder, or that Amanda Bynes is schizophrenic, and you wind up at a dead end, defeated by doctor-patient confidentiality. Amy Winehouse was undoubtedly an addict. But her emaciated appearance—the source of many, if not most, cruel jokes about how ugly she’d become—was largely due to bulimia, which no one in the media knew she had until years after her death.
But it doesn’t matter that we don’t have a diagnosis. We already have a name for it; we already know what disease you have when the doctor won’t say what disease you have. Add sexual overabundance to emotional overabundance, and throw in an element of danger or death, you have the sum total of what we once called a “hysteric.” Now, we call it a “trainwreck.” And then, as now, the treatment is the same: a few racy photographs, maybe a live meltdown. Now, instead of going to the nerve doctor, there’s a publicist to call in the morning. We never stopped exhibiting these women; we just moved the show, from the hospitals to the grocery-store checkout line. If anything, it’s easier than ever to attend. You had to pay a penny to visit Bedlam, but you can visit Perez Hilton for free.
We need public hysterics because the idea of the “madwoman” is intimately connected to our ideas of womanhood in general. Once we knew that some women had hysteria, all women had it, or at least 75 percent of them. Women who cry, women who laugh. Women who like sex, women who don’t like sex. Drunk, old, poor, queer. Every woman has something wrong with her, if you go looking for it. And while mental illness and addiction violate every rule that a “nice” woman is supposed to live by—rendering her disobedient, abrasive, emotional, ugly—they confirm everything that misogynists suspect women to be at heart.
If all female sexuality is inappropriate, no one is more inappropriate than the woman who rips her clothes off or kisses strangers. If all female emotions are irrational, no one is more irrational than the woman utterly deprived of reason. If all women are weak and need to be protected and controlled by men, no one in the world is more obviously weak than the woman you have to lock up for her own safety. The madwoman is where the trainwreck gains velocity, becomes a phenomenon, not because other women fall short of her sins, but because we monitor women for those sins in order to prove that women are mad.
So, when we get a live one, we parade the evidence: make her a painting, or a photograph, or a live show, or the cover of Star Magazine. By breaking the rules of femininity, these women confirm that femininity is a necessary containment structure; that, if you took the chains off, women would run amok. But, to have a rule, we need rule-
breakers. So we give you Courtney Love. We give you Amy Winehouse. We give you Amanda Bynes.
For men, the point of this is obvious: It keeps them distrustful of women, ready and eager to laugh at or dislike women, and quietly, constantly assured that they don’t really have to take women all that seriously. Which, since most of the culture is aimed at conveying that message anyway, is not surprising. But in truth, men are not the primary beneficiary of all this rule-defining.
The degrading, degraded female images are really aimed at you: Yes, you, the nice, normal girl trying to figure out how to behave in public. We give you a constant stream of images and a whole lot of very good reasons to play by the rules and never, ever let the act slip. Because you aren’t a nice girl who spends one night a year playing dress-up as a monster. You’re a monster who spends 364 nights a year playing dress-up as a nice girl.
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Anatomy of a Trainwreck
VALERIE SOLANAS
“I ask you, ladies and gentlemen,” the talk-show host asked, “have you ever heard anything more sick and perverted than this woman?”
This was 1967, on the set of the conservative Alan Burke Show. The woman in question had shown up, against her friends’ advice, in answer to Burke’s open call for lesbians willing to be interviewed on-air. She had, apparently, kept her cool throughout most of the show, while Burke taunted her with questions about her sexual experience with men: “What’s the matter, Valerie, can’t get one? Didn’t anyone ever take you to prom?”
Valerie Solanas had been sexually abused from a young age. She had borne two children by the time she was fifteen, one of them quite possibly her father’s. We don’t know if she told any of this to Alan Burke; the producers didn’t keep a tape of her appearance. Anything we know about the episode comes from interviews that her friends gave to biographers after the fact. One thing they are all clear on is that, after enough of these questions, Valerie had begun crying and cursing at Burke. The producers cut her mic, and Burke walked off the set.
Valerie chased him across the stage and tried to hit him with a chair.
The frightening thing about The Alan Burke Show, in retrospect, is that well before anyone knew who Valerie Solanas was—before she made any headlines, or did any of the shocking things that would eventually make her a household name—it established her role in public life. From the very first moment she showed up, on Burke’s set and in the living rooms of his viewers, she was a madwoman in a cage; a scary, angry, man-hating lesbian that you could poke with a stick until she lashed out.
By the end of the next year, of course, she would have a résumé to fit the job description. Solanas’s mental health is not really in question: In an attempt to murder Andy Warhol, art critic Mario Amaya, and Warhol’s manager Fred Hughes, she shot Warhol in the gut and Amaya in the hip. The gun jammed while she had it aimed it at Hughes’s head. After the shooting, she spent time in mental institutions, public housing, or homeless. She was paranoid, occasionally violent, and by the end of her life, she was a derelict, known to the local police as “Scab Lady” for her habit of self-mutilating by stabbing herself repeatedly with a fork.
But to say that she was crazy misses the point that she was also a philosopher of craziness. Flash back to La Salpêtrière, and the collection of women housed there: the addicts, the prostitutes, the homeless, the queer. All the women society no longer had a use for. From this cast-off and collected scum of the earth arose the whole idea of the “madwoman.” And from a madwoman (a prostitute, a queer woman, a homeless woman, an eventual addict) arose SCUM.
The SCUM Manifesto—which Valerie was already self-publishing and giving lectures on before she met Warhol—was meant to build a utopia out of the women who had been thrown away, a perfect world run by “those females least embedded in the male ‘Culture’ … too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them, too arrogant to respect ‘Daddy’ or the wisdom of the Ancients, who trust only their own animal, gutter instincts.” The world of ruined women, in her view, was the only world worth living in: “Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the respect of assholes, always funky, always dirty, SCUM gets around.”
It was less a refutation of misogyny than a script-flip. Women were emotional? Well, “having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to ensure a ‘social’ code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace of feeling or upsetting opinion.” Women were led astray by sexual appetites? Behold: The male was “obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a river of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him.” It was an erudite satire, calling on the whole history of women’s mental health—Solanas had done both her undergraduate and postgraduate work in psychology; the Manifesto takes time to flip off Freud by declaring that men’s personal deficiencies are due to “pussy envy”—but written from the other side of the mirror. A tour of La Salpêtrière, with Louise Augustine holding the camera.
In another decade there might have been a place for her to land, or at least a label by which she could be understood: Feminism, queer theory, and punk have all claimed her since. But in the early 1960s, Valerie’s society of dirty, angry, fucked-up women didn’t exist. She was writing to will it into being. She tried to physically incarnate it, by writing a play (the immortally titled Up Your Ass) wherein Bongi Perez—sort of a roughed-up, wisecracking, queer lady street Jesus—heckles “nice,” brainwashed women out of their illusions. At one point, a man tells her that she’s ugly, so she pulls him behind the bushes and fucks him to prove a point; in the grand finale, a frustrated suburban mother strangles her whiny son to death so that she can go pick up chicks with Bongi. It’s that kind of play.
It would have been Valerie’s world, on stage. Made real, and corporeal, and with her at its center. In the story of her life, nothing was so important, not even the SCUM Manifesto. (She’d thrown that to publisher Maurice Girodias in an attempt to get out of a bad contract; he’d wanted a novel, and refused to publish what she gave him—until she was in the news). It was the play that she wanted Andy Warhol to film, that she gave to him, that he tried to make disappear by offering her a movie role instead; it was the play that, finally, Warhol claimed he’d just plain lost, and refused to return to her.
How could he have known what she would do? How could a woman who had already taken so much humiliation—sexual abuse, poverty, losing her children; homelessness, begging, sex with men she hated, to stay on the right side of starvation; being laughed at and booed by a studio audience; a night when Warhol incited a friend to call Valerie a “disgusting dyke” and then sneered when she said she’d been molested—be expected to do anything but take one more insult, a very minor insult, a lost copy, as par for the course?
How could anyone know what Valerie would do, when a powerful man tried to make her work disappear?
But she did it. It was the culmination of her suspicions—ever since the Alan Burke Show—that she was being set up, that someone didn’t want her to be heard, someone was trying to turn her into a joke. It was the Mob, and Warhol and Girodias both worked for it, and they’d taken her uterus and replaced it with a radio transmitter so they could track her everywhere. And, after she did it, she never published another book. She fell into the world of the Mob, the world where Valerie was only Scab Lady, and there fell silent.
But Girodias published the Manifesto; it was Girodias who told the world that SCUM was an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and called her genocidal in his preface. Lucky her, she even became a valid talking point outside the art world. Feminism had been on the rise, and now conservatives could point to its logical outcome: some man-hating, crazy lesbian who wanted to kill all men. You couldn’t say that there were none. One of them made the news. And you couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend that any nice girl get mixed up with the criminal elemen
t. The fame lasted, although, thanks to Girodias’s contract, Valerie never saw a dime: As late as 1977, The Village Voice would call her up and run interviews of her ranting about the Mob.
Valerie Solanas meant to stand for the dirty, angry, fucked-up, thrown-away women of the world. And she did: not as messiah, but as bogeyman. When she was just a writer, no one wanted her. But she was more than marketable as a criminal, and a cautionary tale. Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever heard anything more sick and perverse than this woman?
There is one piece of Solanas’s writing that, unaccountably, never made it to publication. No one has ever published that play. But copies of it can be found online, if you dig for them. Each page is stamped, “From the Collection of THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM.”
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From most vantage points, Valerie Solanas is indefensible. She wasn’t upset or misunderstood or under stress: She was actually crazy. And, though most people fear the mentally ill unless we can pity them, Valerie’s illness never rendered her a passive victim. She was continually cruel, even flat-out abusive, to the people in her life—not just the snooty Factory denizens, but people who were genuinely kind to her, including the feminists who organized to help her during her trial. Her sexual politics were not so perfect that she was beyond criticism; radical as Valerie was, her thoughts on transgender women (something she elaborates on quite a bit in Up Your Ass) could be corrosively ugly and even bigoted. And, oh, yeah, she tried to murder three people. What line of defense can you concoct for that?
Maybe this one: As art critic Catherine Lord points out, eight years before anyone knew the name “Valerie Solanas,” Norman Mailer stabbed his wife to settle an argument at a party. Two years before that, William S. Burroughs got drunk and accidentally shot his wife in the head while attempting to demonstrate his marksmanship. And yet, in your lifetime, you are strikingly unlikely to ever meet someone who informs you that the notorious murderer, William S. Burroughs, also wrote books. Norman Mailer served time in Bellevue, but somehow, an explanation of his life story tends to open with “author” rather than “lunatic.”
