Hysteria, Doctor-Patient Relationships, and Identity Boundaries in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved

Abstract

In her novel What I Loved a fictional autobiography written from the perspective of a male art historian, American author Siri Hustvedt reinterprets the relationship between female hysterical patients and their male doctors at the French hospital La Salpêtrière at the end of the nineteenth century. Hustvedt’s portrayal of the way doctors at the time – most prominently Jean-Martin Charcot – treated their female patients at the Salpêtrière reveals complex negotiations of identities; the author’s examination oscillates between an emphasis on the doctor as the dominating mastermind of the hysterics’ behavior and explorations of hysteria as an escape from a society in which women were overpoweringly restricted. In particular, the representation of hysterical patients in one of the main character’s artwork – a series of paintings and installations on the theme of hysteria – highlights aspects of the doctor-patient relationship emerging as an extreme example of a self mastered by the other. The patient is displayed as an object of study (and photography), trapped by the clinical gaze, and a blank slate to be inscribed by the investigator (dermagraphism). Hustvedt’s works highlight the fragility of identity constructions, always showing the self in relation to the other and emphasizing moments of transgression and undecidability. This paper puts Hustvedt’s notions of self into communication with interpretations of hysteria as a disease affixed to a femininity allegedly characterized by impressionability, susceptibility, and a lack of moral agency.