1830-1890
The modifications of the appetite necessary for the females of lower animals, for the proper nutrition and development of the ovum or foetus, are occasionally reproduced in the pregnant human female as morbid appetites; but perhaps they, like other similar modifications of the instincts, occur more frequently, proportionally, in the young unmarried female.
The hysterical cunning of the young female is traced by Dr. Laycock to the same ovarian source. […] When the young female suffers from irregular action of the ovaria on the system, the natural astuteness and quickness of perception degenerates into mere artfulness or monomaniacal cunning; and it is to this morbid influence of the ovaria on the organ of the mind, that Dr. Laycock attributes the extraordinary instances of monomaniacal cunning in females, on record.
Insane cunning is usually exhibited in attempts at deception, but occasionally in a propensity to steal, or rather to steal slily. It may be remarked, that when it occurs, it may be as much a symptom of hysteria as any corporeal affection wahtever. It is a true monomania, and is most likely to occur in the female who is hysterical from excess of sexual development—one possessing the utmost modesty of deportment, and grace of figure and movement, for the modesty itself springs out of that feminine timidity to which I have just alluded. Sly stealing, however, is most frequently observed in pregnant women.
It is also the marked excitation of this sexual artfulness which renders nugatory all the experiments and labours of those mesmerists, whose principal subjects are young females or youths about the age of puberty. […] Physicians have recorded numerous instances of strange and motiveless deceptions, thefts, and crimes practised by young women, even by ladies of unexceptionable morals, excellent education, and high rank. Fasting women, ecstatica, sly poisoners, pilfering lady-thieves, &c., present examples of this kind; particular instances we need not mention, as they maybe found in most works on hysteria, and often occupy a niche ni the newspapers. When cunning is combined with a morbid excitation of the propensity to destroy, such as is manifested in the females of brutes, the effect is sometimes dreadful, and is seen in the perpetration of secret murders by wholesale poisoning, or in secret incendiarism; and if other natural instincts be perverted, the object of woman’s warmest and most disinterested affections may perish by her hand. It is a singular fact, in natural history, and remarkably illustrative of our views, the parturient domestic animals sometimes suffer from the same morbid condition of the nervous system as the human mother, and they also destroy their offspring. Thus cats, sows, and bitches, have been known to eat their litter; cows to butt their calves to death, hens chase their chickens, &c. When cunning is combined with a morbid state of the temper, the misery inflicted upon domestic peace is inexpressible.
The woman approximates in fact to a man, or in one word, she is a virago. She becomes strong-minded; is masculine in her pursuits, severe in her temper, bold and unfeminine in her manners. This unwomanly condition undoubtedly renders her repulsive to man, while her envious, overbearing temper, renders her offensive to her own sex. If there be such a change in the ovaria that the temper is modified in the way we have described, the ‘Old Maid’ is the pest and courge of the circle in which she moves; and in extreme cases—verging upon, if not actually the subject of—worse insanity, she is little less than a she-fiend.
There is a jouissance that is hers (à elle), that belongs to that “she” (elle) that doesn’t exist and doesn’t signify anything. There is a jouissance that is hers about which she herself perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences it - that much she knows. She knows it, of course, when it comes (arrive). It doesn’t happen (arrive) to all of them.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, VI - God and Woman’s jouissance, trans. Bruce Fink, p. 74.
But it turns out that women too are in soulove (âmoureuses), in other words, that they soulove the soul. What can that soul be that they soulove in their partner, who is nevertheless homo to the hilt, from which they cannot get away? That can only, in effect, lead them to this final term - and it is not for nothing that I call it as I do ὒστερια, as it is said in Greek, hysteria, namely, to play the part of the man (faire l’homme) as I have said, being thus hommosexual or beyondsex themselves—it being henceforth difficult for them not to sense the impasse that consists in the fact that they love each other as the same (elles se mêment) in the Other, for, indeed, there is no need to know you are Other to be there (il n’y a pas besoin de se savoir Autre pour en être).
ibid., VII - A love letter (une lettre d’âmour), p. 85
Hysteria as it is defined by Lacan is a profoundly feminine phenomenon and is characterized by the question, “Am I a man, or am I woman, and what does that mean? ” The hysteric tends to interrogate societal norms at large, oftentimes embodying a subversive attitude that arises in part from a profound suspicion that her own sexed and sexual body is incommensurate to cultural injunctions regarding gender identities. As Ellie Ragland-Sullivan writes, “Lacan saw the hysteric as embodying the quintessence of the human subject because she speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language and being” (164). The hysteric is, in some senses, interested in nothing but the lack that, for example, Dean may be read to circumvent by focusing on the apparent multiplicity of object a. The failure, deadlock, and trauma of sexual difference returns for the hysterical/ feminine transgender subject, irreducibly, in her insistent interrogation of the phallic function and in her very queer relation to the lacking Other.
[…] And as McNulty has noted, “To believe that [the prohibited object is] the mother is a specific symptom, a particular way of resolving castration […] by attributing it to the father and thereby making it ‘avoidable’ through obedience or submission to norms. [In other words,] it also reveals the ideology of norms as a way of avoiding castration” (pers. comm.). On the other hand, for the feminine subject, the point is perhaps even more radical: regardless of her “gender,” the feminine subject is she to whom no prohibition is addressed. No universal can be made of or for her. The relief given the masculine subject, composing prohibitions as limits, does not transpire for the feminine subject. Instead, the nonworking of the prohibition is what ushers the feminine subject toward . . . maybe (who knows?) her brother/half-sister/stepmother/adoptive cousin/grandfather, and definitely toward a contingent encounter with the symbolic.
Shanna T. Carlson, “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference”
That sailcloth, applied to a fissure painted red with mercurochrome, resounded as a fierce flow struck it. First local anesthetic was applied; then the fissure was enlarged with scalpel and shears. Yasuko’s complicated, crimson interior came clearly into the view of her young husband, who was drained of all cruelty. Looking here at the insides of his wife, the skin stripped from them, Yuichi was surprised that this flesh which he had felt to be so much irrelevant pottery was something he could no longer treat as inanimate.
“I must look. No matter what, I must look,” he told himself, attempting to control his nausea. “That system of countless, gleaming, wet red jewels; those soft things under the skin, soaked in blood; those squirming things— a surgeon must soon grow accustomed to things like that:
I should be able to become accustomed to being a surgeon. Since my wife’s body is no more than pottery to me sexually, there is no reason that the inside of her body should be any more than that.”
All the honesty of his consciousness soon betrayed his bluff. The fearful contents of his wife’s body turned inside out were more than pottery. It was as if his feeling for humanity compelled him, even more deeply than the sympathy he felt with his wife’s pain, to see, as he confronted this wordless scarlet flesh and looked at the wet surface of it, his own inimitable self. Pain does not transcend the body. It is alone, the youth thought. But this naked, scarlet flesh was not alone. It was related to the red flesh that indubitably existed within Yuichi; even the consciousness of one who merely looked at it had to be instantly affected by it.
Yuichi saw another, purely gleaming, mirror-like, cruel machine being passed into the doctor’s hand. It was a large scissors device, disjoined at the fulcrum. Where the blades should have been, there was a pair of large, curved spoons. One side was inserted deep inside Yasuko. After the other side was crossed over and inserted, the fulcrum was engaged for the first time. It was the forceps.
There at the utmost extremity of his wife’s body, touching her hand, the young husband keenly perceived the gropings of that instrument, roughly invading with the intent of grasping something in its metal talons. He saw his wife’s white front teeth biting her lower lip. In all this suffering, he recognized that her tender, tender faith in him never left her face, but he dared not kiss her. For the youth did not have the confidence demanded by even so natural an action as that gentle kiss.
In a morass of flesh, the forceps sought out the soft head of the infant and grasped it. Two nurses, one on each side, pressed against Yasuko’s white abdomen.
Yuichi earnestly believed in his own innocence; perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that he prayed for it.
At this time, however, Yuichi’s heart, pondering his wife’s face at the pinnacle of suffering, and the burning coloration in that part of her that had been the source of his loathing, went through a process of transformation. Yuichi’s beauty, that had been given over for the admiration of man and woman alike, that had seemed to have existence only to be seen, for the first time had its faculties restored and seemed now to exist only to see. Narcissus had forgotten his own face. His eyes had another object than the mirror. Looking at this awful ugliness had become the same as looking at himself.
Until now Yuichi had been incapable of feeling he existed unless he “was seen” in toto. His consciousness of existing, in short, was a consciousness of being seen. The youth now reveled in a new sense of existence, an indubitable existence in which he was not looked at. In short, he himself was seeing.
(Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors, Chapter 25)