https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.092
HYSTERIA, DEPRESSION, AND CONTROL: MEDICALIZING WOMEN’S EMOTIONS IN LITERATURE
AATHIRA PRAKASH
Guest Lecturer
Department of English
NSS College, Ottappalm
Abstract: The medicalization of women’s emotional lives has historically functioned at the intersection of scientific authority and patriarchal governance. Diagnostic categories such as hysteria and depression have operated not merely as therapeutic descriptors but as interpretive regimes through which female subjectivity is rendered legible and controllable. When women’s emotions exceed socially sanctioned boundaries—when grief becomes anger or ambition becomes defiance—psychiatric discourse frequently translates these excesses into symptoms. Diagnosis thus becomes a mechanism for restoring order by situating emotional distress within the individual body rather than within structural inequality.
This article examines the historical and ideological transformation from hysteria to depression through close readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Though separated by more than half a century, these texts reveal parallel mechanisms of medical authority operating within domestic and institutional contexts. In Gilman’s short story, the nineteenth-century rest cure enforces domestic passivity under clinical supervision, silencing female creativity in the name of therapeutic intervention. In Plath’s novel, mid-twentieth-century psychiatric institutionalization redefines female ambition, alienation, and despair as depressive pathology requiring medical management.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and feminist critiques of psychiatric discourse, this study argues that hysteria and depression function as historically specific but structurally similar technologies of control. Diagnosis, far from simply identifying illness, produces subjects whose emotional lives are regulated according to normative expectations of femininity. At the same time, both texts resist this regulatory framework by narrativizing breakdown as meaningful. Madness emerges not as romantic liberation but as a paradoxical site where suffering exposes institutional violence and destabilizes medical authority. By situating mental illness within gendered cultural contexts, Gilman and Plath transform private distress into social critique, reimagining madness as a fraught but potent form of feminist resistance.
Keywords: hysteria, depression, medicalization, feminist psychiatry, gender and mental health
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