Foucault

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier/ juin / 2014 -janeiro/junho 2014

Abstract: In The History of Madness, Michel Foucault provides a framework to understand how hysteria was produced by the medical knowledge of the 19^th Century as the characteristic form of female madness. I connect his interpretation with the feminist critique of the social imagery on women in the art of the contemporary artists Louise Bourgeois and Ana Miguel. I suggest that the use of the metaphor of the spider and the web in their works can be interpreted as a feminist critique to misogynist representations of the female body and sexuality.

Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999, bronze and steel, outside Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbera.[2]

“My mother was my best friend: she was resolute, intelligent, patient, reassuring, rational, demanding, sophisticated, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider” says Louise Bourgeois (2004: 326) in dedicating to her the famous installation of the monumental bronze spider, entitled “Maman”(1999), that in other spaces is called simply “Spider”1. “Maman” simultaneously surprises and fascinates for its gigantic size, for the monstrosity of the amplified insect, for the painstaking work in the sculpture of each part of the body, for the daring of the artist, for the impact produced by the contrast of the title with the work. World renowned, it was recently exposed in the Tomie Otake institute in São Paulo, but it was also included in the permanent collection of the Modern Art Museum - MAM, in the Ibirapuera Park, in São Paulo, Brazil, some years ago.

“Maman” says Bourgeois, deceased in 2010 at the age of 98, is a homage to her mother who worked as a restorer of tapestries in Paris and who, she says, admired spiders.“She was a tapestry woman, and like a spider, was a weaver. She protected me and was my best friend. (...) The restoration of the tapestries functioned on a psychological level as well. By this I mean that things that have broken down or have been ripped apart can be joined and mended. My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.”(Interview to Rachel Cooke, The Observer, October 14th, 2007)

Herself a weaver, her mother admired the creativity of spiders differently from ants. Autonomous, skillful and proud, taking the vital substance from their interior, from within their own bellies, the spiders construct their own web, their own shelter, their house, woven minutely and geometrically from a single thread, as was said in admiration by the ancients. Aristotle, even considering the work of the spider to be repetitive, being instinctive, praises the geometrical method used to build the web from the center, defined with perfect exactitude, to move on to the weaving, to the texture itself; Aristotle adds next that: “it is the female that weaves and hunts, and the male shares in the meal”( ARISTÓTELES apud FRONTISI-DUCROUX, 2003: 268).

Seneca too was astonished at what he considered so subtle and regular a work, not to be compared to human weaving; in the old poets the spider is admired for the thinness of its thread and the lightness of its web; Marx parallels it to the weaver, though the spider does not conceive mentally the project of its work, as does the weaver.

“The spider engages in operations similar to the manipulations of the weaver, and the construction of hives by bees could shame, for its perfection, more than one master builder. But there is something at which the worst master builder is superior to the best bee, and this is the fact that, before building, he designs it in his brain” (MARX, 1983: 149).

A homage of Bourgeois to her mother, the enormous impact, between fascination and repugnance, produced by the monumental size of the giant spider is always surprising, as it is associated in our culture to evil, to the power of destruction, to castration, to its capacity to devour those of her own species caught in the web, as well as those of other species.

If the spider as a tireless weaver is praised and associated to men, as a fatal, powerful, poisonous and proud figure it points to the mysteries of female sexuality, seen as overwhelming, uncontrollable and unknown. The “black widow”, among others, is famous for killing the male after the sexual act, and has been used in many literary and newspaper texts to name the “femme fatale” and the prostitute, both of them full of deceit, destroyers of civilization, capable of leading the most rational and controlled of men to madness and suicide. In popular speech the spider is a synonym for the female sexual organ itself. On one hand the excessive and devoted weaver, on the other the threatening and uncontrollable sexuality: the spider is the bearer of numberless symbolic meanings that associate it to the figure of sexual perversion, to hysteria and rebellion.

On rebellion we may speak of the mythic origin of the spider, told by Ovid (1995) in book six of the Metamorphoses. The young and beautiful Aracne is transformed into a spider by Pallas Athena for daring to claim her autonomy and wanting to show her superiority to the goddess in the art of weaving. A rebel, Aracne asserts having learned her métier by herself, being early orphaned of her mother and raised by the father, a dyer. She competes with the gods and dares affirm her desire and is for this condemned, as narrated by Ovid:

“Immediately, stricken by deadly venom, her hair falls and with them fall her nose and ears; her head shrinks; all her body diminishes; thin fingers to do as legs are connected to her flank; all the rest is but a belly, but from it comes the thread still; made into a spider she devotes herself, as of old, to her weaving” (OVÍDIO, 1995: 6).

Anne Creissels (2005) suggests that this rebellion may be interpreted as a wish to escape her condition of mortal woman. For this author, besides,

“If this challenge points, to the Greeks, to Hybris, or overbearing pride, sanctioned necessarily by the gods, it could designate, decontextualized by the eyes of a contemporary, the difficulty of self-affirmation as a subject, as an artist, and a fortiori, as a woman artist” (CREISSELS, 2005: 01).

It is not strange that the spider has entered History as a symbol of rebellion, autonomy and of creation, but also as the bearer of deceit, of ruses, a threat to the survival of the other. The authors of the 19^th Century did not miss the relation of power and dominance it establishes with the male in the sex life and in the destined death after the act. From Darwin to Lombroso, and in the literature and the arts, an extended use was made of the spider to show the dangers of female sexuality, embodied in deviant feminine figures, from nymphomaniacs to tribades, masturbators and lesbians, considered all to be hysterical, perverted and mad.

Medical historians affirm that hysteria, uterus in Greek, was the word used by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to refer to a wide range of diseases of women, based on the interpretations found in Egyptian papyri of 1900 BCE. According to them, the uterus is “a live organism similar to an animal, possessed of a certain autonomy and having the capacity of displacement”, that travels inside the body, provoking headaches, heat flashes, breathlessness and malaise in women (TRILLAT, 1986: 13). Hysteria is considered a kind of “suffocation of the uterus” – a voracious, greedy, errant animal that inhabited women in need and wishing for sexual relations. Plato too considered the uterus an animal hungry for procreation and that, frustrated in this wish, caused disorders in all the woman’s body.

The image of an inner animal inhabiting the female body, an agent of disturbances that should be tamed was reinforced in the 19^th Century, particularly in the context of the entrance of women in the labor market, in social life and with the coming of feminism, that challenged the “dispositive of sexuality” (Foucault, 1976) and the rules of domesticity that aimed at instituting the figure of a chaste, passive and sexless woman. The transgressing and unruly attitudes of women served otherwise for the doctors to set up pathologies, such as hysteria and to make legitimate notions on the physical, mental and moral inferiority of women. As a contrast, they tried to mark the place of the normal woman and the behaviors adequate and acceptable to her.

On this subject, according to the feminist Elaine Showalter (1993), it is much more the sexist and misogynous appropriation of the texts of Hippocrates by the doctors of the 19^th Century, that attributes hysteria to the displacements of the needy uterus, showing a great lack of definition of the symptoms and of the female body it refers to. Hysteria, be it in the form of anorexia, or in the form of neurasthenia was, in this sexist, biological explanation, even for those who lamented the rigidity of the family hierarchy for women, and the lack of opportunities as compared to men, stemmed from a lack of sexual and maternal satisfaction on the part of women. It would be also associated to nomadism, to inconstancy, to an incapacity for sedentary life. Highlighting the gender dimension in the construction of hysteria, Showalter concludes:

“It is not surprising that the metaphors of hysteria should contain double sexual messages about femininity and masculinity, for throughout history, the category of feminine "hysteria" has been constructed in opposition to a category of masculine nervous disorder whose name was constantly shifting. In the Renaissance, these gendered binary oppositions were set up as hysteria/melancholy; by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they had become hysteria/hypochondria; in the late nineteenth century they were transformed into hysteria/neurasthenia; during World War I, they changed yet again to hysteria/shell shock; and within Freudian psychoanalysis, they were coded as hysteria/obsessional neurosis. But whatever the changing terms, hysteria has been constructed as a perjorative term for femininity in a duality that relegated the more honorable masculine form to another category.” (SHOWALTER, 1993: 292).

The Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman agrees with Showalter when he asserts that even as the diagnoses of hysteria suffered several changes along history, “hysteria and witch never lost their close association”, not even in the French psychiatry of the 19^th Century (HILLMAN, 1984: 230). As he puts it, the biological inferiority of women was used to explain the occurrence of hysteria among them and, as the treatment employed in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris was focused on the ovaries, mechanical devices were invented to compress them or involve them in ice. In Germany, on the other hand, more radical methods were in use, such as ovariectomy and the cauterization of the clitoris.

Foucault, in volume I of his History of Sexuality, written in the seventies, analyzing the construction of the “dispositive of sexuality”, highlights the hysterization of the body of women, from the 18^th Century, as one of “one of the four great strategic sets (…) that develop specific devices of power and knowledge on sex”. He refers with this to the manner in which

“the woman’s body was analyzed, - qualified and disqualified – as a body integrally saturated with sexuality (…) integrated under the effect of a pathology supposedly intrinsic to it in the field of medical practice. (…) The Mother, with her negative image, that of the nervous woman, constituting the most visible form of this hysterization” (FOUCAULT, 1982: 99).

In the production of sexuality, according to him, in that context four great characters stand out as the privileged objects of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the pervert adult. Let us keep to the first.

The figure of hysteria, with that of hypochondria had come already within the horizon of the preoccupations of Foucault in his History of Madness, of 1961, more precisely in the chapter “Figures of Madness”. Foucault shows the route followed, from a uterine malady, that is, an irrepressible agitation of the desires, to the image of the female organ that ascended to the chest and to the head, hysteria was assimilated to mental diseases in the course of the 18^th Century (FOUCAULT, 1978: 288).

As is said by Roy Porter, the emergent Gynecology treated the health of women as inextricably bound to the uterus; and, as Yvonne Knibiehler shows, along the 19^th Century they went from the domestication of women to the medicalization of their bodies; this was the context in which hysteria became the great attraction (KNIBIEHLER, 1983: 222). Some doctors considered that it was a case not so much of non-satisfied and thwarted sexual appetite, but of heredity, as shown by the high incidence of hysteria among prostitutes, exacerbated by the excess of alcohol, vices, sleepless nights. Little by little, though, these arguments are extended to all women that move away from the care of home and family and those who refused maternity: they are all suspect of hysteria, as observed by this writer and by Foucault himself, when he says:

“Hysteria was very frequently understood as the effect of an inner heat that spreads an effervescence through the body, en ebullition manifested ceaselessly in spasms and convulsions. Is not this heat a relative of the amorous ardor to which hysteria is so frequently associated in girls looking for a husband and in young widows that have lost theirs?” (FOUCAULT, 1978: 280).

Victorian doctors wondered why so many women, more than men, had difficulties in building their own identities, why they wished to be other from what they were. They ascribed this desire that they associated to inconstancy, to penis envy. Not listening to their answers they invented the “diseases of the nerves” and then the mental diseases typical of women; but for them, says Knibiehler, it was a matter of the patriarchal system that, in shutting them in private life prevented them from building a personal history, individual or collective, and thus of having an identity.

The analyses of Foucault were the incentive to the production of many studies on the female body, at the same time that they set up the conditions for the perception of how the field is constructed from which medical theses, such as that of Dr Alexandre Parent Duchâtelet on the prostitutes of Paris, become absolute truths and undisputed the world over. In 1836, La Prostitution à Paris au XIX siècle was published, many times reprinted and becoming the base for very similar books published in Lisbon, New York, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, among others.[3] In continuing their analyses, decades later, Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, in their La Donna Delinquente e La Prostituta (1895) see the prostitutes as women with a low brow, large jaws, talkative, irrational, selfish, loving extravagant perfumes, spicy foods, strong liqueurs, cats, showing no vocation or wish for maternity (RAGO, 2008: 166). While being capable of solidarity, at least among themselves, they lose, for Parent-Duchâtelet, any positive features at the end of the 19^th Century. And the comparison with the spider, also considered as an excessive animal, reinforces the characteristics of danger and of excess.

Thus it is that in his famous book, when examining the “female in the zoological world” (the title of the first chapter), Dr Lombroso asserts that among the insects the influence of the female is always stronger than that of the male.

“The female spider is bigger and stronger than the male, with the exception of certain species, such as the Argyroneta aquatica (…)” (LOMBROSO, 1986: 37).

This situation will only be changed with the birds and afterwards with the primates, men coming to dominate women, the patriarchy replacing the matriarchy, attesting to the evolution of humanity. Even so some inferior species would continue to exist, witness the criminal women and the prostitutes. Bearing the brand of degeneration, prostitutes supposedly had jaws rather bigger than “honest women”, a male voice due to having a male larynx, the capacity for fecundation smaller, but a sexual precocity bigger even than woman criminals (LOMBROSO, 1896: 313).

In the chapter called “Sexual Sensibility”, Lombroso takes his inspiration from the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing´s famous book Psycopathia Sexualis (1886), and concludes that prostitutes and criminals possess a sexual sensibility superior to that of “normal women”. Most especially the “born prostitute” shows a type of eroticism that brings her nearer to the male, making her different from the “honest woman”. Depravities, such as tribadism, are also more common and widespread among prostitutes, he concludes.

The most influencial theory of criminal anthropology, produced at the turn of the twentieth century, articulated a discourse that added the figure of the prostitute to that of the “born degenerate” and to that of the “moral madwoman”. Lacking the most natural affections, such as love of family, possessed of precocious meanness, of envy, of a revengeful spirit, with no moral sense, lazy, deceitful, lying, unfit for friendship, thus does Lombroso describe the “born prostitute”, the female counterpart of the “born male criminal”, both of them products of the degeneration of the race. Being mad, “A very grave symptom of moral madness (…) is the absence of maternal feelings”, this being the reason why “born prostitutes” abandon their children, says Lombroso (1896: 435). The lack of maternal instincts in this way explains their huge preoccupation with beauty and ornaments.

Biologism allows him to mix the subject of prostitution with that of madness and with the phantom of racial degeneration in an apocalyptic manner. This thinking becomes still more authoritarian and crystallizing than that sketched in the first decades of the 19^th Century. To follow this logic, a psychological and anatomical identity is established between the criminal and the “born prostitute”, both compared to the mentally diseased. They both have “the same precocious taste for evil”, no moral sense and a total indifference when faced with social infamy.

The list of sexually perverted women is progressively extended: the lesbians, their hair worn short, envy men for they would like to have a penis; the spinsters, the feminists, the writers, the blacks and the mulatoes. Close to the spider, threatening and fatal. Mad. The typological parade could go on, bringing onstage the anxious constructions of many other doctors, all of them absolutely concerned with containing women, in defining their identities, in telling them what their place should be. Jacques Le Rider (1992) shows how the debate takes place, in the Vienna of the turn of the century, on the crisis of sexual identities and the phenomenon of the feminization of culture, seen by many as a terrible menace, due to its noxious effects: the softening of the youth, the degeneration and loss of virility of the race, the predominance of women, matriarchy, such as appear in the discourses of Bachofen, Nietzche and many others.

According to Etienne Trillat in his Histoire de l’Hystérie, hysteria has disappeared in our times, replaced by other categories, such as somatization, and, we might add, the “bi-polar syndrome”. As he says, “The set of functional disturbances, connected to hysteria since Sydenham, has entered the roster of ‘psychosomatic diseases’” (TRILLAT, 1986: 271). We can indeed read today with humor the theories of the old doctors, making it clearly understood that that is past, not our affair anymore. But still the image of female perversion, considered by many as devouring and monstrous, retains its force in our social imagination, as we can see: a piece of news of 1 September 2011, taken from Google, says:

“The Justice of the State of Rio de Janeiro has condemned the lawyer Heloísa Borba Gonçalves, known as The Black Widow to 18 years in prison, in closed conditions, last Friday night, the 26^th. She was tried in absence and condemned for the crime of murder in the first degree on account of the death of her husband, the army officer Jorge Ribeiro. The crime took place in February 1992, in Copacabana, where the man was tied and hit with a sledgehammer.

The anonymous crime reporting hotline offers the reward of R$ 11.000 to whomever indicates the location of the Black Widow. This is the highest amount offered by the program, higher even than the amount (R$ 5.000,00) offered to information leading to the arrest of the drug-trafficker Nem, the drug traffic boss in the Rocinha favela, in São Conrado, in the south part of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The service has received 56 calls with information on the criminal. Heloísa is also in the Interpol list of wanted people, the International Organization that cooperates with many countries.”

There is however another possible ending: the one that concludes with the beginning, that is, in feminine art, in its dimension of creative force, it simultaneously being a transgression of the normative impositions, as uncontrollable, immeasurable rebellion. The giant spider of Louise Bourgeois is provoking both by its very monumental dimension and by being abject, qualities both of them far from feminine. The excess of Aracne is taken to its maximum power in the spider, demanding wide spaces for its shelter and to be observed as artistic expression. Animality – “our inner animal” – as says the title of the seminar and of the book, that render problematical artistic creation (SIBONA, 2009) – is lodged in ourselves, savage, terrible, frightening, unknown, as a creative drive, and, may we add, destructive at the extreme limit of our humanity. The installations of the giant spider, or ‘Maman’, the histericised/saturated with sexuality/hysterical, publicly examined and exposed for the amusement of consumers, as the monstrosity of Hottentot Venus revealed in its full excess, might be read as the counter discourse of the figure of female madness so beautifully presented to us by Foucault in his Histoire de la Folie.

Let us for now keep this image of the Brazilian artist Ana Miguel, with her installation named I love you, of 2000. In this all the pillows contain sounds in which this phrase is heard, while the inverted spider web, red, with its ends in teeth, envelops and shelters.

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RAGO, Margareth .2008. Os prazeres da noite. Prostituição e códigos da sexualidade

______Histórias Histéricas. A Histeria e a Mídia Moderna.(2004. Rio de Janeiro:

SIBONA, B. 2009. Notre Animal Intérieur et Les Théories de la Créativité. Paris:

MARGARETH RAGO , History professor at UNICAMP – State University of São Paulo, Brazil; Fulbrigth Ruth Cardoso Program visiting professor at ILAS-COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, for 2010-2011. Main interests of research: anarchism, feminism, sexuality in Brazil based on Michel Foucault’s concepts.

[1] A Portuguese version of this article was published in Muchail, S. T.; Fonseca, M. A.; Veiga Neto, A. O Mesmo e o Outro. 50 anos de História da Loucura, Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2013.

[3] PARENT-DUCHÂTELET, Alexandre. De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris,considerée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et del’administration, (1836) Paris, Seuil, 1981.Also see Alain Corbin, “Introduction” à La prostitution à Paris au XIXèmesiècle, Paris, Seuil, 1981.

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier/ juin / 2014 -janeiro/junho 2014