My Weekly Book

Here are a couple of excellent articles from the New York Times books section for anyone who fancies a bit of feminist inspiration. The first reviews a book by Lisa Appignanesi about the historical collision between women and the mental health establishment:

Diagnosis: Female

…it seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her. As Appignanesi observes, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women – romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination – comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering. Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity” were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion” in which their “nervous depletion” was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,” a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support. And then came hysteria, which “best expresses women’s distress at the clashing demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in the fin de siècle.” Read full article here…

The second takes a look at Germaine Greer’s biography of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. As a great admirer of Virginia Woolf I found the following excerpt, which ends the article, incredibly resonant:

Reclaiming the Shrew

In “A Room of One’s Own,” with its famous riff on Shakespeare’s sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. … What one wants, I thought — and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? — is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; … did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined. Read full article here…

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Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph, they really do love their lists. Here’s a link to the latest – the top 50 cult books of all time.

Worth reading alone for its refusal to take itself too seriously: “What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula “ whacko”; books our children just won’t get… Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.”

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Tags: Anne Hathaway, cult books, feminism, Germain Greer, Lisa Appignanesi, New York Times, The Telegraph, Virginia Woolf

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under 2008 - Ephemera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.