The female malady: Discourse, power, and sexuality in the eighteenth century

This study reflects the recent Foucaultian feminist interest in the history of a "discourse of truth" and its "representations" as constituting "the political technology of the body" or, more precisely, as "a knowledge of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them." Western medical discourse on hysteria has been remapped by several recent feminist critics to represent a knowledge that is beyond a strictly scientific knowledge of the female body and, therefore, one which represents an ideological attempt to control women for social purposes. Since this recent medico-feminist study of hysteria has been largely confined to nineteenth and early twentieth century, this dissertation attempts to analyze the late seventeenth and eighteenth century hysteria as a discursive/ideological phenomenon as well. It examines late seventeenth and eighteenth century medical treatises on hysteria and five major literary texts of the same period in which "hysterical" femininity is clearly and extensively delineated.