S. Weir Mitchell, 1829-1914 by Nancy Cervetti

Author:Nancy Cervetti [Cervetti Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Wisconsin Press

Virginia Woolf was a brilliant writer and a key figure in the twentieth-century modernist movement. Gilman and Addams, as reformers and feminists, played major roles in creating new theory and praxis. Mason, a wealthy woman who never had children, was a critic and socialite. Wister was an essayist and “homemaker,” but her home was an eighty-two-acre estate called Butler Place, and she was Mitchell’s cousin, someone he referred to as his “kinswoman.” Making generalizations about the rest cure based on a small number of women remains problematic, yet one common element does emerge: intelligent and articulate, these women needed and relentlessly pursued avenues of self-expression and transformation.

As a literary physician, Mitchell understood the value of voice and self-expression as well or better than anyone did. He viewed language use as immensely important and repeatedly recorded a personal need to write; he understood in conscious and explicit ways the personal, social, and professional consequences of having a strong voice and an education. Many of his female patients possessed the same need, but they were stifled in domestic space, struggling to find meaningful outlets for their creativity and intelligence. Evelyn Ender writes that the impossibility of verbal symbolization characteristic of the hysterical patient begins with her inscription into a tradition that relentlessly denies to women the ability to move from impressions to the realm of thought and language. Hysteria is “a vivid reminder of the fact that, for certain categories of subjects, consciousness remains secret not because of a choice but as an imposed condition.”76

At the age of fifty-nine, Virginia Woolf was hearing voices again. Her husband, Leonard, took her to Brighton to see Dr. Octavia Wilberforce. When Wil berforce asked her to undress for an examination, Woolf responded, “Will you promise, if I do this, not to order me a rest cure?” Wilberforce responded that when she had had this trouble before, she had been helped by a rest cure, and that should give her some confidence.77 Even then, in 1941, Mitchell’s rest cure was the most suitable treatment available to Woolf. But her great fear was that she could no longer write, and the day after this consultation she drowned herself in the River Ouse. While there were complex reasons for the suicide, Woolf ’s writing was of the utmost importance to her. Judith Fetterley argues that the “struggle for control of textuality is nothing less than the struggle for control over the definition of reality and hence over the definition of sanity and madness.”78 In the sexist culture of the nineteenth century, the stories that doctors and women told were not merely alternate versions of reality; rather, they were incompatible and could not coexist. An “exile from language” could be devastating. It denied women’s intellect and substituted instead the social imperative called “duty.”79 When Mitchell restored women’s bodies but denied their minds, he contradicted his own theory of the mind and body as one. Unable to recognize the great differences among women as a group, he judged all women according to a single type, and criticized and sometimes harmed those who did not fit his ideal.

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