Medical Muses by Asti Hustvedt

Author:Asti Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Reincarnations

I do know, however, what happened to her photographs and to her story. Augustine was brought back into the world by André Breton and Louis Aragon in 1928. They reprinted six of her photographs in La Révolution Surréaliste, in order to commemorate “the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria.” The “delicious Augustine” was held up as the “perfect hysteric.” I believe that this was the first time since their publication in 1878 that Augustine’s images were reproduced. The adolescent girl was exposed to a new generation of artists, writers, and viewers. In 1928, she would have been sixty-seven years old. I don’t know if she was aware Breton and Aragon had published her photographs, if she knew about the Surrealists, or whether or not she was even alive. Charcot’s work on hysteria was no longer medically relevant at the time, but Breton, who had trained to become a doctor and had studied under Joseph Babinski, the handsome doctor holding Blanche in Brouillet’s painting, was a fan of Charcot’s work.44 Even after he left medicine, he remained fascinated with psychiatry and embraced Charcot’s hysteria as “the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century.”45 Breton and Aragon were also, no doubt, the ones responsible for her becoming known as Augustine rather than Louise.

Since that resurrection in 1928, Augustine’s story and her photographs have been an inspiration to historians, playwrights, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, and filmmakers. For Elaine Showalter, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lisa Appignanesi, and other historians and writers, Augustine, not Blanche, is the iconic Salpêtrière hysteric.46 The feminist artist Mary Kelly borrowed Regnard’s photographs of Augustine, replaced her images with women’s clothing and accessories, but kept the French titles of the passionate poses. For example, “Appel” (Call) shows a leather bag on its side open as if it were a mouth in the act of calling out. In the end, her inanimate objects are more literal depictions of the titles than are Regnard’s photographs. The philosopher Jean-Claude Monod and writer Jean-Christophe Valtat directed a short film called Augustine (2003), a faithful account of the material included in her case history. The artist Zoe Beloff also made a short film called Charming Augustine (2005), which is more imaginative than accurate. Shot in a stereoscopic format, she attempts to link Augustine to early cinema, how to her mind Augustine “supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D. W. Griffith.” Augustine has also inspired choreographers, who interpret hysterical seizures as expressive body language. Fleur Darkin (Augustine, 2007) and Narelle Banjamin (I Dream of Augustine, 2004) have created dance pieces that appropriate hysterical contortions and poses. Dianne Hunter wrote and choreographed a dance theater performance called Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, in which she imagines that Augustine traveled to Chile to become a cabaret performer and impresario. Anna Furse’s play Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991), has Augustine’s time at the Salpêtrière overlap with Freud’s. It ends with Augustine’s escape in men’s clothing, but the garments belong to both Charcot and Freud.47 These are only a few of the works that Augustine inspired.

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