| In this dissertation, I analyze aesthetic representations of hysteria in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in the context of its medical history, and focus on the creativity and enjoyment implicit in the performance of hysteria.; In the tradition of Freud and Lacan, I see in hysteria, which converts sensory enjoyment to symptoms of revulsion, an aesthetics of disgust. Contradicting Kantian aesthetic theory, I assert that the disgusting is an uncanny double of the beautiful: like beauty, disgust is a state of radical yearning, and like pure taste, it eschews actual tasting. In chapter 1, I model my theorization of the hysteric aesthetic on hysterical desire's lack of closure. Drawing parallels between Adorno's conceptualization of the aesthetic sphere, and Lacan's theorization of hysteria, and with examples from contemporary British art, I conclude that hysterical expressionism is not easily interpolated into the socio-symbolic.; In chapter 2, I study Victorian melodrama and early realist theater and see melodrama's “more,” its characteristic overload of affect, as a hysterical inability to limit or close its fictional reality. With examples from nautical melodrama and problem plays, and cross-references to contemporary soap operas, I argue that melodramatic excess disguises its symbolic impotence—the inability to say it all, definitively and officially—and that melodrama is modeled on female sexuation and a feminine relation to jouissance .; The following chapter considers contemporary rewritings of canonical British novels, linking questions of narrative function to those of repetition and return in hysteria. Rewriting shares the ethos of hysteria in that it demonstrates the insistence of radically contentless desire, and the impossibility of closure—a productive impossibility, which necessitates an ethical response to what is excluded, what is other.; The final section of the thesis examines male hysteria and the link between hysteria and trauma through war narratives: Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I develop an analytics of stammering, whereby the interrupted speech is understood at once as a traumatic symptom and an opening to the possibility of history. This chapter further dissociates hysteria from the Oedipus complex, and links it with questions of repetition and the death drive. |
