The peasant Margaretha D., noted the asylum log, “often suffers from hysterical attacks, with which she wants to be treated like a distinguished lady . . . She raises herself above her social position and demands great attention and care.” This patient, in other words, though considered mad by the Eberbach asylum, was not a true hysteric: she rather “played” the hysterical lady. Two important issues suggest themselves from this description of feigned illness. The first has to do with the connection between class, gender, and the representation of illness. Madness, it seems, had its class and gender codes. Certain symptoms of hysteria—which in the eighteenth century had become a fashionable illness of privileged women, signifying the pathologies accompanying luxury, leisure, and “civilization”—appeared suspicious in a poor, peasant woman. Secondly, the “playing” of illness suggests (inadvertently) a subtext, normally buried and only implicit in the asylum notes: of illness as strategic behavior on the part of the patient within the social dynamics of the asylum. Margaretha’s symptoms were at least in part the result of a self-presentation to her keepers, a communicative act, with its own aims—attention, better care, and so forth. Both of these issues—the link between class, gender, and illness, on the one hand, and the strategic nature of symptoms, on the other—are at the core of the following analysis of nymphomania. Nineteenth-century physicians interpreted the behavior of nymphomaniacal women as a function of an internal state of being—as pathologically excited genitals—and in this way, they contributed to the construction of a modern conception of sexuality as an innate essence of personality. While no longer a clinical entity in post-Freudian psychiatry, the image of the out-of-control, sex-obsessed nymphomaniac remains very much alive in popular culture and continues to be grounded in a conception of sexuality as inner essence and “drive.” This analysis, by contrast, looks at nymphomania as acts and attitudes, which took place within very specific social contexts: the power dynamics of the asylum and the doctor-patient relationship.
Local Human Development in contexts of permanent crisis: Women’s experiences in the Western Sahara