Women and madness: the incarceration of women in nineteenth-century France

YANNINCK RIPA, Women and madness: the incarceration of women in nineteenth-century France, transl. Catherine du Peloux Menage, Feminist Perspective Series, Cambridge and Oxford, Polity Press, 1990, pp. 175, £29.50 (0-7456-0454-4). We meet a parapraxis on p. 86: "There is a clear analogy to be drawn between asylums and hospitals and indeed it was a truism for the madwoman." Read asylums and prisons, as the context makes clear. Ripa moreover suggests more than once that the French "special doctors" were a specially backward lot by the scientific standards of the day. Would she say the same of their colleagues abroad? Certainly, Ripa thinks that "there are common attitudes to madness throughout our Judeo-Christian civilization" (p. 43). But elsewhere she shows, more convincingly, how nervousness about politically-active women was not the least interesting legacy of the events of 1789, 1848, and 1871, and, more generally, that the mad-doctor's discontent with civilization acquires a certain edge in a country that remains unique in the Western world for that history of violence in the streets. Surprisingly effective are the quotations from such unpromising-sounding sources as the entry 'Femme' in Panckoucke's Dictionnaire abrege (1821-6): women, "cannot exist in their own right and are forced to use the people around them to strengthen their own lives" (p. 58). Ouch. Ripa is one of the few psychiatric historians to ask, simply, whether the experts believed the astounding rubbish they wrote-she's not sure. More familiar, for example from Roy Porter's writing about John Haslam, is the related notion of how the language of the committal forms can unveil for us the "hidden anguish" and "fantasies" of their medical authors (p. 13). From this point of view, Ripa writes, only "borderline" cases that "show the boundary between normality and madness" are described in the book. Now this is back-door retrospective diagnosis, and that always leads to trouble: here, most notably, in Ripa's assumption that post-partum insanity can be "excluded from the discussion because of [its] physiological basis" (p. 53), which she seems to identify with puerperal fever. Her cool accounts of how society made horrors out of puberty and menopause show that Ripa could have done better by childbirth. This is a model of haute vulgarisation that wears its learning, and a lot of work in the Salpetriere archives, lightly. Lapses into ellipsis and sometimes sheer incomprehensibility are forgivable in a book that has so many interesting things to say about menstruation, washerwomen, and the novels of Eugene Sue (rich sources of madwomen, they were banned from at least one asylum library). The chaper 'Outcasts from the family' utilizes admission and discharge registers to show how La ronde desfolles (the book's French title) was circumscribed by the impossibly self-contradictory agenda laid down for working-class women of all ages by their male relatives and employers in an oppression more crushing than any government, or anguished asylum superintendent, could hope for.