By Dr Olivia Glaze, AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Exeter
References to madness, insanity, melancholia, and hysteria have long plagued the diagnoses of female mental illness. The crazed, raving, and unstable woman is a prevalent trope that has long persisted within Western literature, from Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) and Bertha Mason in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Historically, madness, hysteria, and melancholia have been considered female afflictions due to an assumed inherent feminine proximity to wrecked nerves and sexual disorders – indeed, the word hysteria is derived from the Greek word “hysteron” or womb. In the late nineteenth century, understanding the ‘female’ illness of hysteria was a central focus of studies, led by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at his infamous Parisian asylum, Salpêtrière. Charcot transformed the hospital into an internationally renowned site of neurological teaching, with Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet amongst his students.
In the spring of 1972, the publication of an experimental text entitled Novas Cartas Portuguesas shocked and delighted its Portuguese readership. Co-authored by three well-known Portuguese writers Maria Isabel Barreno (1936-2016), Maria Teresa Horta (1937-) and Maria Velho da Costa (1938-2020), the text critiqued the then Estado Novo dictatorship, wrote explicitly of female sexuality and the body, and was resolute in its promotion of a feminist message. Through a complex and aesthetically experimental weaving of time frames, characters, and styles, Novas Cartas does not follow a lone protagonist or plot, but rather maps various trajectories of men and women through letters, poems, and essays. The text is centred around Les Lettres Portugaises (1669) [Letters of a Portuguese Nun], a collection of five letters then considered to be authored by a seventeenth-century nun named Mariana Alcoforado, writing to her lover, the Marquis de Chamilly, from a convent in Beja.1 The three authors, who later became known as the “Three Marias”, constructed a dialogue with these letters, using historical and political intersections to shed light upon the repression, domination, and injustices suffered by women throughout Portuguese history.
While the portrayal of the powerful and sensual female body is a central and controversial theme in Novas Cartas, which partly led to its censorship by the Estado Novo government, the work also contains a singular and significant reference to the unwell female psyche. The excerpt ‘Relatório Médico-Psiquiátrico sobre o estado mental de Mariana A.’ [Medical-Psychiatric Report on the Mental State of Mariana A.] offers a fictional clinical report on Mariana A., a twenty-five-year-old married woman, who was committed to hospital in a state of ‘hysteria’ after her in-laws discovered her engaged in sexual intercourse with a dog.2 This reference to bestiality was undoubtedly an attempt to shock a conservative Catholic Portuguese readership, whilst adding a layer of absurdity and extremity to the extract. The doctors state that Mariana A. has been living with her in-laws for three years whilst her husband is fighting overseas in the Portuguese Colonial Wars. Since his departure, Mariana A. has been withdrawn and does not eat or sleep:
Nunca Mariana A. ter dado, segundo a família e atestados médicos, sintomas de alienação ou tendência para aberrações sexuais. Tendo desde criança uma cuidada e rígida educação católica, fez seus estudos em colégios de freiras, cumprindo sempre com a rígida moral lá estabelecida. […] Mariana A., durante os primeiros dias recusou-se a fazer quaisquer declarações, chorando, gritando quando não estava sob o efeito de hipnóticos. Em seguida caiu num mutismo que parecia não ceder aos tratamentos a que era sujeita.3
[Mariana A., according to her family and statement from doctors, has never shown any symptoms of insanity, or any tendency toward aberrant sexual behaviour. Since early childhood she has had a careful and rigid Catholic upbringing, and had been educated by nuns in church schools, where she has always complied with the strict moral standards enforced in such institutions. […] During her first few days in the hospital, Mariana refused to make any statement whatsoever, and kept weeping and screaming whenever she was not under sedation. She then fell into a mutism on which the treatment administered apparently had no effect.]4
The doctors state that they do not find Mariana A. ‘alienada’ [insane] or suffering from a ‘tara sexual’ [sexual disorder], but rather from a ‘grave desequilíbrio de ordem nervosa’ [serious nervous imbalance] that requires further investigation. Here the Three Marias critique the patriarchal language historically used by doctors when investigating female mental illness and reference the strict social enforcement of the idealised pious and chaste Portuguese woman. Nurses mention that Mariana A. talks to herself, and doctors request that recordings and transcriptions be made. Through the inclusion of one transcription, we gain access and insight into Mariana A.’s perspective and distress, an affordance rarely given to women being treated for madness, insanity, or hysteria. In keeping with the Three Maria’s general objective to prioritise the female voice in Novas Cartas, this excerpt offers a powerful juxtaposition between the clinical male gaze and Mariana A.’s own voice. Speaking to her imagined husband, Mariana A. laments:
Tu nunca percebeste nunca. A minha mãe dizia é pecado a carne é luxúria e mesmo contigo e era. Foste sempre uma prisão alguma vez pensaste em me ouvir? […] E depois todos estes anos a pesarem-me no ventre todos estes pensamentos estes desejos estas ideias a tua mãe a vigiar-me o teu pai a ler o que eu te escrevia e o que tu me mandavas dizer. E tu como uma prisão sempre como uma prisão e eu criar-te horror a criar-te todo este asco todo este enorme medo.5
[You never noticed, not ever. My mother said that the flesh is sinful it is lustful and that’s the way it was even with you. You were always a prison; did it ever occur to you to listen to me? […] And then all these years that weigh so heavily in my belly all these thoughts these desires these ideas with your mother keeping a close eye on me and your father reading what I wrote to you and what you wrote to me. And you like a prison, all the time like a prison, and me screaming out my horror to you, screaming out all this loathing all this enormous fear.]6
A cautionary note should be made regarding analytical considerations of illness, and care must be taken when reflecting upon traditional presentations of madness and mental instability. Illnesses have all too often been monolithically conflated with female political and societal rebellion, whilst the actual challenges of a reality lived alongside ill-health have frequently been overlooked. When considering unwell protagonists, such as Mariana A., we must interrogate the utility of mental illness as a symbol of female resistance, and explore what is gained or lost by such a metaphor. Turning to Phyllis Cheslar is helpful here. Of the purpose of her book Women and Madness, she states ‘it has never been my intention to romanticize madness, or to confuse it with political or cultural revolution’. 7 Felman, in agreement, adds:
Depressed and terrified women are not about to seize the means of production and reproduction: quite the opposite of rebellion, madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation. Far from being a form of contestation, ‘mental illness’ is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence and of political castration.8
Both Cheslar and Felman’s use of the term ‘madness’ should also be considered, where arguably a slippage of language between madness and mental illness has the potential to limit critical analysis. As Donaldson comments: ‘one could argue, when madness is used as a metaphor for feminist rebellion, mental illness itself is erased.’.9 In extending this reading to Novas Cartas, it is not my intention to position the unwell Mariana A. as a symbolic site of resistance against the gendered trappings of the starkly religious and fascist Estado Novo dictatorship. Instead, I propose that her role in this extract offers a window into the very real challenges faced by Portuguese women in the 1970s, the limited medical vocabulary accessible to unwell women, and the deficient networks available to support them in their recovery.
Dr Olivia Glaze is a Gender Studies and Medical Humanities scholar with extensive experience teaching and researching Lusophone literature, film, and photography. She was awarded her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she has also worked as a Lecturer and Tutor. Her scholarship explores representations of illness, trauma, and disability; coloniality and the legacies of imperialism; and contemporary women’s life-writing.
- Many critics now believe that the letters were, in fact, male-authored epistolary fiction by Gabriel-Joseph de la Vergne, the Comte de Guilleragues, (1628-1684). It was not, however, the intention of the Three Marias to dispute or verify the authorship of the work, but rather to use the content as a springboard. ↩︎
- All Portuguese quotations unless otherwise stated are from Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho de Costa, Novas Cartas Portuguesas: Edição Anotada, ed. Ana Luísa Amaral (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2010), pp. 147-48. All English translations unless otherwise stated are from Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho de Costa, The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters, trans. Helen R. Lane, Faith Gillespie and Suzette Macedo (St Albans: Paladin, 1975) pp. 204-05. ↩︎
- Novas Cartas (2010), p. 147. ↩︎
- New Portuguese Letters (1975), p. 204. ↩︎
- Novas Cartas (2010), p. 148. ↩︎
- New Portuguese Letters (1975), p. 205. ↩︎
- Phyllis Chesler. Women and Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. xxii. ↩︎
- Shoshana Felman. ‘Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy’, Diacritics, 5.4 (Winter 1975), p. 8. ↩︎
- Elizabeth J. Donaldson. ‘The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness’, NWSA Journal, 14.3 (2002), p.102. ↩︎
Works Cited
Barreno, Maria Isabel, Horta, Maria Teresa, & Velho da Costa, Maria, Novas Cartas Portuguesas (Lisbon: Editorial Futura, 1974)
——— The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975)
——— Novas Cartas Portuguesas – Edição Anotada, ed. Ana Luísa Amaral (Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2010)
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1847)
Chesler, Phyllis, Women and Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1974)
Donaldson, Elizabeth J., ‘The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness’, NWSA Journal, 14.3 (2002), p. 99–119
Felman, Shoshana, ‘Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy’, Diacritics, 5.4 (Winter 1975), pp. 2–10
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary (Paris: Revue de Paris, 1856). Serialised from October 1 to December 15
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper (Boston: New England Magazine, 1892)
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (1599-1601), ed. William Farnham (London: Penguin Books, 1970)