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Evelyne Ender, who teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, has written an ambitious study of changing concepts of gender in 19th-century fiction that is at once historical and literary. She views her subject through the lens of hysteria, the quintessential “female malady” (to use Elaine Showalter's term), that came to epitomize Victorian notions of the dangers of female sexuality and knowledge but that also proved to be the matrix out of which psychoanalytic theories of the mind arose. Her aim is to demonstrate that gender, far from reflecting natural, sexual differences, is as much a literary construct as it is a political, social or economic one, and that in this period the typical, literary “gender fable” centering on theatrical, hysterical enactments became subjectively internalized as a gendered consciousness.
The book is a complex one, and is written in the opaque, somewhat elusive style of post-structuralist, feminist criticism that at times makes it easy to lose sight of the underlying argument; this problem may also result in part from the fact that the author conceived the work in French but then rewrote it in English. The basic plan, however, is relatively straightforward. Ender begins with the historical context, namely, a survey of early and mid 19th-century French medical writings on hysteria, from Voisin to Briquet, focusing especially on the way they insist on exculpating women from all thought and knowledge of (hereto)sexuality by emphasizing modesty (pudeur) as their fundamental characteristic. The next two chapters are devoted essentially to Henry James's ambivalent, and shifting, attitudes to femininity and sexuality (including his own), first, through his critical writings on George Sand, and then through a discussion of his great novel dealing specifically with the “sentiment of sex,” The Bostonians.