The Gendered Landscape

Abstract

The claim that mental disorder is a distinctively, though not exclusively, female malady is, as we have seen, common. Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady (1987), for instance, argues that whereas in the eighteenth century madness had a masculine face — the typical representation of the lunatic was of a wild, frenzied beast — from the beginning of the nineteenth century it was increasingly domesticated and transformed into more feminine forms and images. The new image was typified by the Romantics’ vision of suicidal Ophelia. While Showalter’s claim of a feminisation of madness in the nineteenth century can be contested (Scull 1989: 267-79; Busfield 1994), in this century a belief in a close association between women and the broader category of mental disturbance has been widespread. Indeed, the belief that mental disorder is more common amongst women than men is itself both a reflection of, and a justification for, further assumptions about male—female differences. For many, it is linked either to the assumption that women are biologically and psychologically inferior to men and are more emotional, volatile and irrational, or to the assumption that they are, by nature, more vulnerable to the various strains and stresses of daily life and are, consequently, more likely to become mentally disturbed.

It should seem that no chronic disease occurs so frequently as this [hysteria]; and that, as fevers with their attendants constitute two thirds of the diseases to which mankind are liable upon comparing them with the whole tribe of chronic distempers, so hysteric disorders, or at least such as are so called make up half the remaining third part, that is they constitute one moiety of chronic distempers. For few women, (which sex makes one half of the grown persons) excepting such as work and fare hardly, are quite free from every species of this disorder, several men also, who lead a sedentary life and study hard, are afflicted with the same … But it must be own’d that women are oftner attack’d with these disorders than men’ (Thomas Sydenham,… de affectione hysteria, 1682).¹