The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill

Author:Jordan Tannahill [Tannahill, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-05-21T17:00:00+00:00

10

UNTIL THAT EVENING AND MY CONVERSATION WITH ASHLEY on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant. And in the eyes of my family, of those who loved me most, I was now the hysterical subject.

I was the woman in Ancient Greece with a womb wandering through my guts like a feral dog for having sexual desire, or anxiety, or depression, or whatever other feeling was inconvenient for my husband. I was the melancholy woman prone to demonic possession and witchcraft. I was the woman sent to the Alpine sanatorium, when my husband no longer wanted to deal with me complaining about his mistresses. Too much sex. Not enough sex. Too much female seed becomes venomous if not released through regular climax, don’t you know. Too much menstrual blood. Not enough menstrual blood. If I was living a hundred years ago, less even, I think it’s entirely possible I would have been subjected to electroshock therapy for hearing The Hum, and maybe a hysterectomy fifty years before that. And I have the feeling that Paul would have very lovingly and supportively allowed it.

I was the one who first told Ashley the story of the dancing plague. The plague started with a woman, naturally, named Frau Troffea, who on a clear summer morning in Strasbourg in 1518 began dancing in the street. Neighbours gathered to laugh and clap and cheer her on. But it soon became clear that something was wrong. Frau Troffea danced and danced for six days without stop. Her husband and children brought her water, and shoved pieces of bread and cheese into her mouth to keep her alive, for she wouldn’t even stop to eat; and as discreetly as possible, they did their best to clean her whenever she soiled herself. By the end of the first week, more than thirty others had joined Frau Troffea, and by the end of the first month, there were four hundred dancers, most of them women. Some of the dancers dropped dead in the street, sweaty and red-faced, from exhaustion and strokes and heart attacks. At the height of the mania, around fifteen people were dying each day. The doctors of Strasbourg ruled out astrological or supernatural causes, and instead attributed the dancing to ‘hot blood.’ Some prescribed bleeding, but others suggested the only cure was for the afflicted to dance day and night until they had danced out their mania. So the city gave over two guildhalls and the grain market to the dancers, and when these spaces filled up, the city hired a band of musicians and built a giant outdoor stage.

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