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Combative and provocative, this is a book that stimulates or infuriates according to the readers' relationship to the conditions Showalter diagnoses, or to the groups she criticizes. It has been widely reviewed, so rather than attempting to encompass the large canvas it covers, I shall focus on the book's reception and its delineation of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) as a psychogenic epidemic. As someone who since 1984 has worked with patients presenting with CFS, my concern is whether hysteria is a useful or even accurate diagnosis.
There are three sections; histories, cultures and epidemics. As a literary historian as well as a historian of psychiatry, Showalter has a great deal to offer in the first two sections which cover the history of the concept of hysteria, an examination of narrative representations of hysteria in the context of gender difference, and a critical analysis of feminist interpretations of hysteria. However, Showalter is not simply presenting a cultural/historical analysis. This is a polemical text. ‘I believe our human dignity demands that we face the truth’ (p. 207), she declares, which begs the question, ‘Whose truth?’ Confident assertions of ‘the one truth’ sit uneasily in a book concerned with unconscious processes, and readers' and reviewers' protests have not been slow in coming. The book has had a turbulent reception, primarily from those groups who object to the classification of their physical illness as psychogenic.
Showalter's basic belief is that, ‘In the 1990s the United States has become a hot zone of psychogenic disorders, new and mutating forms of hysteria amplified by modern communication and fin de siècle anxiety’ (p. 4). Under the heading of hysterias of late twentieth century life, Showalter groups together ME or CFS as it is now known, Recovered Memory, Multiple Personality Syndrome, Satanic Ritual Abuse and Alien Abduction. Colleagues familiar with these areas in the United States tell me that her book has particular relev