Hystoriographic Metafiction: The Victorian Madwoman and Women’s Mental Health in 21st-Century British Fiction — Page 3:
11Through the novel’s continuous and at times tedious representations of the minute details of medical theories on mental illness on the one hand, and its underdeveloped female characters and their always limited or ambiguous powers on the other, Faulks’ novel, as a a contemporary medical narrative, exemplifies – intentionally or unintentionally – the ways in which medicine, particularly in the area of mental health, can overwrite women’s bodies and the stories they tell.
Models, Not Martyrs: Hysteria as Feminism in The Crimson Petal and the White
12Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, set in 1870s London, presents us with a woman whose physical afflictions, like those of Faulks’ Kitty, are misread. Agnes is the twenty-three year old wife of William Rackham, heir of Rackham Perfumeries, who in the course of the story falls in love with a prostitute, the novel’s heroine Sugar, whom he eventually installs in his home as governess of his daughter Sophie. Even before illustrating the nature of Agnes’ suffering, the narrator makes it clear that those practitioners of medicine who consider themselves specialists in women’s health are not to be trusted. Doctor Curlew, Agnes’ physician, is cynically described as completely unqualified when it comes to the treatment of women, or indeed any human. Curlew is
highly skilled, with a long list of initials after his name. To give but one example, he can dissect a pregnant rabbit for the purposes of anatomical study in ten minutes and can, if required, pretty well sew it back together again. He enjoys the reputation, at least among general physicians, of being something of an expert on feminine illness. (80)
Unlike Faulks, Faber is not keen on providing a detailed fictionalised account of the medical analyses which deem his madwoman insane, but instead we are told that, for this story, it is the consequences of Victorian theories on women’s mental health which are important. Where Faulks persists in educating us and, hence, silences his novel’s women, Faber foregrounds the female patient’s experiences rather than the doctor’s theories: “You may be forgiven,” the narrator tells us about Curlew’s medical monologues, “for losing the thread of the good doctor’s thesis, but rouse yourself for his conclusion” (80). His conclusion, in short, is that his concern is not really Agnes’ wellbeing, but rather the influence her illness has on her husband, who may well irrevocably go mad himself if he does not follow Curlew’s advice and rids himself of his hysterical wife by installing her in an asylum; unlike her, Curlew points out to William, “you and I have no womb that can be taken out if things get beyond a joke” (80). Curlew and other practitioners, then, do not work for the benefit of women patients, but for that of their male guardians.
13Once we have thus been indirectly introduced to Agnes through these discredited male voices, we gain insight into her own narrative. His wife’s worst lapses, according to William, have been when she “laughed when there was nothing to laugh about [and] didn’t laugh when there was. Shouted nonsense, warned people against invisible dangers. Crawled under a dinner table once, complaining the meat had blood in it” (296), but we soon learn that there are at least four (partly interconnected) reasons for this behaviour which her husband and doctor label as hysterical: a tumour, her physician, Victorian constructions of middle-class femininity, and a traumatic childhood and adolescence. Similar to Faulks’ Kitty, there is a misread bodily narrative, but this time it is due to medical discoveries which have not yet been made: “Inside her [Agnes’] skull, an inch or two behind her left eye, nestles a tumour the size of a quail’s egg [...]. No one will ever find it. Roentgen photography is twenty years in the future” (219). Apart from this medical explanation for her behaviour, it is not surprising that Agnes’ mental health is withering away slowly but surely, given the nature of the weekly treatments she receives from the ill-qualified Curlew. During his visits, Agnes must not only endure the application of leeches, but also “[roll] onto her side so that Doctor Curlew can reach deeper inside her [...]. He is trying to find Agnes’s womb, which to his knowledge ought to be exactly four inches from the external aperture” (165).
14Many of Agnes’ troubles also originate in her upbringing as a middle-class Victorian woman. Knowing “nothing of her body’s interior” (219), menstruation is a mystery to her and although Curlew could have enlightened her, he “never has, because he assumes his patient can’t possibly have married, borne a child and lived to the age of twenty-three without becoming aware of certain basic facts. He assumes incorrectly” (236). Agnes’ unawareness is a typical product of the “prudery and embarrassment [which] prevented many mothers from preparing their daughters for menarche” (Showalter, The Female Malady 56) and consequently her rationale for her menstrual cycle is that “bleeding is the manifestation of serious illness [...]. The affliction began when she was seventeen, was cured by prayer and fasting and, after her marriage, it stayed away for almost a year” (236-37). Thus left in darkness regarding the workings of her own body, Agnes is, ironically, still expected to perform her duty as a wife on her wedding night and bear William a child. Unprepared for any of this, the loss of her virginity, her subsequent pregnancy and the act of giving birth are all inexplicable and highly traumatic experiences for her, so traumatic in fact that the man responsible for them, William, “loses her trust forever [...]. However hard he tries to win her forgiveness, she can never forgive” (220). Agnes’ diary entries show that she is at a loss for explanations even when the unborn baby is growing inside her: “Riddle: I eat less than ever I did before I came to this wretched house, yet I grow fat. Explanation: I am fed by force in my sleep” (617, emphasis in original). Although William reflects that he “ought to have conceded that she was a flower not designed to open, a hothouse creation, no less beautiful, no less worth having. He should have admired her, praised her, cared for her and, at close of day, let her be” (136), this remorse does not stop him from raping his wife whilst she is drugged into a mixture of unconsciousness and sleep. Climbing into her bed, his apparently tender violation of her is what makes reading this rape scene all the more discomforting:
‘I’m going to ... embrace you now. You won’t mind that, will you?’ [...] He moves slowly, more slowly than he’s ever moved inside a woman in his life. [...] When his moment of rapture comes, he suppresses, with great effort, his urge to thrust, instead keeping absolutely still while the sperm issues from him in one smooth, uncontracted flow. [...] A minute later, he is standing by her bed once more, wiping her clean with a handkerchief. (614-15)
15Agnes’ way of coping with Curlew’s examinations, her distorted relationship with her own body and her husband is her retreat into the imaginary Convent of Health. Transported from consciousness to unconsciousness in a train to the convent, she is received there by gentle nuns who look after her and attempt to restore her health through something she is not provided with in the real world, loving care. Even in her diary, Agnes is unable to describe the traumatic experience of her daughter’s birth through anything but the imagery of this imaginary world. When she feels the child “pushing and lungeing in rage and terror” (617, emphasis in original), she recalls a nun having
a way of causing my belly to open up without injury, permitting the demon to spring out. I glimpse the vile creature only for an instant: it is naked and black, it is made of blood & slime glued together; but immediately upon being brought out in the light it turns to vapour in my Holy Sister’s hands. (617, emphasis in original)
What Agnes remembers as the child having vaporised in her fantasy is, in fact, her refusal to acknowledge any awareness of its existence. Consequently, daughter Sophie explains to Sugar, “Mother hasn’t seen me since my birthday” (541), meaning not the last anniversary of the child’s birth, but the day she was born. As William puts it, “in this house [...] Agnes is childless” (546). Considering that since their wedding night Agnes has refused to sleep in a room with William, it is tempting, here, to read her mental and spatial seclusion from her husband and their child the way Hélène Cixous has read Freud’s female patients, namely as feminist heroines who find in hysteria a way of resisting patriarchal norms and gender roles forced on them. At the same time, though, the numerous illustrations of Agnes’ pitiful life and the tumour afflicting her brain make the behaviour which Curlew and William have deemed mad not appear mad at all, but are rather the logical consequences of her traumatic experiences of menstruation, sex, pregnancy and birth. Her outbursts of anger towards William appear perfectly justified to the reader since we know he rapes her in her sleep and installs his mistress in their family home.