Les motifs visuels hystériques charcotienne
FREN488
Cole Huntley | FREN488, Prof. Gaudry
“Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can, in every respect, be considered a supreme means of expression… (hysteria is) the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the nineteenth century.”
— André Breton, La Révolution surréaliste, 1928
Charcot as Promoter of the Hysterical Image
Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist and director of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for nearly 33 years in the latter half of the nineteenth century, did more than any other artistic or scientific figure to define and popularise the visual characteristics of hysteria. His innovative use of photography and hypnosis as experimental, museological, and pedagogical tools — and their “pathologising” influence (Timpano, 2017) on art, theatre, and dance at the end of the century — is undeniable. The wide dissemination of hysterical-epileptic visual motifs produced by Charcot’s “studio” infiltrated late nineteenth-century cabaret culture through the dances of Sarah Bernhardt and Jane Avril, appeared in promotional posters by post-Impressionist painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and even influenced the work of the German dancer Mary Wigman in the 1930s and the Japanese dance form butoh in the 1960s.
It is this profound influence that led Didi-Huberman to describe Charcot’s work as the “invention of hysteria.” At the same time, Charcot described himself as “nothing more than a photographer,” devoted to the “absolute clinical eye” (Didi-Huberman, 2003). The period’s faith in the objectivity and “realistic representation” of clinical photography thus conflicts with the performative, bodily influence of hysterical visual motifs on dance and art. Contemporary scholars have proposed various interpretations of Charcot’s influence on art and dance; this essay considers two. First, that throughout history hysteria has been established as a gendered performance and spectacle, almost deliberate and linked to the gesture of the arc de cercle; second, a semiotic analysis of hysterical bodily performance as a symptomatic gesture of historical trauma, an expression of a fragmented “otherness of the self” (Marshall, 2021) that resists direct interpretation despite being fully on display.
Guiding Questions
This photo-essay seeks to answer the following questions:
- To what extent did Charcot and photographers of the 1850s develop the photographic and performative characteristics of what Didi-Huberman calls the “invention of hysteria”?
- How did these hysterical visual characteristics appear in international dance, art, and theatre in the decades that followed?
- In what ways do interpretations of hysterical performance and historical trauma differ?
Charcot’s Studio and the “Absolute Clinical Eye”
In this photographic plate from 1885, Albert Londe, then head of the photographic service at the Salpêtrière (Gilman et al., 1993), presents a chronophotographic series of a male patient undergoing a hysterical attack (fig. 1). The staging of each image is more or less consistent. In each photograph, the viewer sees three or four attendants standing around the bed of a nude patient. The attendants move around the bed and enter and leave the frame throughout the series, but notably, their gazes are often directed toward the camera rather than the subject. They often appear not to react to the patient’s attack; their bodies serve only to frame the subject at the centre of the image. In the fourth photograph, for example, all four attendants appear to be looking at the camera or photographer, without acknowledging the patient. In the first, fourth, eighth, ninth, and tenth photographs, the attendant on the far left leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The ninth photograph is an exception: one attendant is seen pointing at the patient.
The bed and the hysterical subject are placed at the centre of each image, in front of a dark backdrop, apparently to emphasise the contrast with the nude body convulsing on and above the bed. The series is staged in this way because of Charcot’s innovation: he turned clinical photography into an objective tool for making the “inner” symptoms of hysteria observable. Didi-Huberman describes this use of photography as an objective archival instrument, as the “museological authority of the sick body … generalising the case into a tableau” (Didi-Huberman, 2001). This authority is underlined by the presence of attendants surrounding the bed in each photograph, looking toward the camera as if presenting the case to us as a picture. The result is a detached, authoritative series of images illustrating the symptoms of a hysterical attack.
Fig. 1: Albert Londe, 1885, Hysterical Attack in a Male Patient, twelve chronophotographs, various sizes
This first chronophotographic series published by Londe at the Salpêtrière highlights the technical aspects of Charcot’s clinical photography that facilitated the popularisation of the visual characteristics of hysteria. As noted earlier, Charcot’s guiding philosophy in using photography was to treat it as an objective tool for therapeutic understanding, archival preservation, and teaching the visual symptoms of hysteria. This approach relied on contemporary assumptions about photography’s absolute objectivity — Londe himself stated that “the photographic plate is the true retina of the scientist” (Didi-Huberman, 2001).
Gilman et al. also describe the prevailing attitude toward photographs as seeing them as an obvious continuation of older means of image reproduction, such as engravings and lithographs (Gilman et al., 1993). We can thus identify an emotional tension between the scientific perception of Charcot and Londe’s clinical photographs as purely objective medical observations and the artistic marks and interpretive implications they carry from the broader canon of visual arts. This tension has led contemporary scholars to attribute to Charcot’s scientific photography the visual characteristics of the “convulsive hysteric,” conceived as a specifically feminine condition.
This chronophotograph also reveals Charcot’s obsession with the hysterical body in motion. On this point, Timpano writes that “male desire was understood as being stirred by the active female body, just as the uterus was historically considered as moving within its own body” (Timpano, 2017). Although this series shows a male patient experiencing a hysterical attack, we can nonetheless see how these visual elements contribute to a photographic framework that emphasises movement and observation. Timpano’s analysis also offers a starting point for understanding the structure of desire surrounding hysterical imagery as performance.
The Bodily Theatre of the Salpêtrière
The boundary between science and theatre was also blurred in the pedagogical functions of the Salpêtrière. This etching by Abel Lurat, after Brouillet’s famous 1887 painting, depicts one of Charcot’s Tuesday lectures, in which he gives a presentation to an audience of male medical students who observe with close attention the hypnosis of his patient Marie “Blanche” Wittman (fig. 2). Because this etching is based on a painting, we can analyse how Brouillet used the vanishing point to draw the viewer’s eye toward Charcot. The attention of the spectators on the left and their semicircular arrangement guide the viewer’s gaze toward Charcot, who stands opposite them. Charcot holds what appears to be a cigar and carries himself with relaxed, assured authority. The image clearly emphasises that he is the centre of the scene, both technically and symbolically.
His patient, Blanche Wittman, apparently under hypnosis, collapses backward into the nurses’ arms. A bed waits, almost out of frame, to receive her. Her eyes are closed and her body arches backward, her hands clenched into fists, mirroring Paul Richer’s 1885 sketch of the “Phase of Contortions (Arc de cercle)” displayed on the far left wall of the lecture hall (fig. 3). This etching illustrates not only Charcot’s authority over the hysterical female body but also his authority over the visual characteristics of hysteria. It also shows the links between Charcotian science and theatrical representation in a dynamic, seductive scene.
Fig. 2: A. Lurat, 1888, Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a hypnotised patient at the Salpêtrière, etching after P.A.A. Brouillet, 1887
This image not only details one of the main visual motifs of bodily hysterical imagery — the arc de cercle — it also highlights how Charcot’s lectures and his use of hypnosis at the Salpêtrière created an association between the pathology of hysteria and what some scholars call the “pleasure” of performance experienced by both the male audience and the hysterical woman during the bodily display of symptoms. In this etching, as in Londe’s chronophotographs, Blanche Wittman and the male patient can be seen exhibiting the arc de cercle — a spasmodic muscular contraction characteristic of “clownism,” the second phase of a hysterical attack, manifested by the arching of the back and an unconscious or detached facial expression.
Timpano writes that this gesture, both as a dramatic faint and as a theatrical (and medical) hysterical arc, was conflated at the end of the nineteenth century to explain a tradition of “spastic” women who did not easily conform to “respectable” society (Timpano, 2020). In another essay, he suggests that the arc de cercle as a visual motif of the “hysterical woman of the Salpêtrière,” within a framework of male desire agitated by the moving female body, became a “temptress figure whose spasmodic and erotic movements simultaneously repulsed and excited male doctors” (Timpano, 2017). This underscores the link between hysterical pathology and performance, which Charcot popularised, if not invented.
The arc de cercle has become a recurring motif in art, dance, and theatre into the twenty-first century. Artists of the Vienna Secession such as Klimt and Schiele, fin-de-siècle Parisian cabaret dancers like Sarah Bernhardt and Jane Avril, Impressionist sculptor Auguste Rodin, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, and contemporary feminist artists like Kara Walker and Louise Bourgeois, among others, have all used this motif.
Fig. 3: Paul Richer, 1885, Phase de contortions – Arc de cercle
Historical Manifestations of Visual Hysteria
In this painting from 1625–1635 by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (fig. 4), we see evidence supporting Timpano’s and Gilman et al.’s argument that Charcot popularised pre-existing artistic motifs of hysterical and mad women. In this large religious canvas (208.3 × 273.7 cm), the viewer sees an Old Testament story in which Esther, the future queen of Persia, “faints” before the king in order to manipulate him, through his male desire, into sparing the Jewish people.
In the painting, Esther and the Persian king (Ahasuerus) are opposed by their bodies: Esther’s body arches backward in an arc de cercle, while her facial expression and closed eyes suggest a hypnotic, unconscious woman. Her retreating movement contrasts with Ahasuerus’s forward motion; it is as if Esther’s backward arc draws both his attention and his body toward her, a metaphor for his conscious and unconscious desire stirred by her pathological movement. Her limp arm reaches out toward Ahasuerus, as if to counterbalance her body’s retreat. This outstretched arm creates a bridge between the two bodies while guiding the viewer’s gaze toward Esther’s face. It can be read as signifying Esther’s awareness of her actions — “pulling” Ahasuerus toward her to achieve her aim.
It is also interesting to note parallels and differences between this painting and the etching of Charcot’s Tuesday lecture (fig. 2). As in the etching, the viewer’s eye is drawn near the woman undergoing a “hysterical” episode; the king’s elevated position and outstretched leg direct the gaze toward Esther’s body and then her face. In this way, Ahasuerus imitates Charcot’s audience, serving as a framing device that directs the gaze toward the female subject. Both images also feature attendants ready to support the collapsing woman, reminding the viewer of the clinical dimension of her crisis. This painting thus represents an early example of the arc de cercle as a striking gesture of theatrical splendour and feminine sexuality.
Fig. 4: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1625–1635, Esther before Ahasuerus
Another central aspect of Timpano’s understanding of Charcotian hysteria and the arc de cercle as both pathological and artistic gesture is his discussion of female hysteria as deliberate performance. Moreover, Timpano and Gilman et al. both claim that although Charcot developed pre-existing artistic bodily motifs of “mad,” “mesmeric,” or “convulsive” women, he “does not invent the act of ‘seeing’ hysteria” (Gilman et al., 1993). Gentileschi’s painting supports both claims: her use of the arc de cercle to symbolise a woman consciously manipulating male desire underscores that the gesture’s feminine sensuality and deliberate theatricality were already established in the visual archive before Charcot’s time.
The concept of the arc de cercle as a sexual and theatrical gesture plays an important role in understanding how art that uses hysterical motifs was pathologised during and after Charcot’s era. Timpano writes that in Gentileschi’s painting the arc de cercle becomes “an incarnation of Esther’s power, not of her inherent femininity” (Timpano, 2020), whereas in Charcot’s photographs it serves as an “articulation of the metaphorical femme fatale who could not escape either her guilt or her femininity” (Timpano, 2017).
Later manifestations of the hysterical arc de cercle highlight the influence of Charcot’s widespread dissemination of hysterical visual motifs on art, dance, and theatre: from right to left, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Jane Avril (1899), Mary Wigman’s Dance of Suffering (1930), and Fred Herrera’s Géant de Sel (2014).
Sources
Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, André Breton, “La révolution surréaliste,” Librairie Gallimard, no. 11, 1928
Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 345–436
Timpano, Nathan J., Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017, pp. 66–86
Didi-Huberman, Georges, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (A. Hartz, trans.), Boston Review, 2003, pp. 29–47
Timpano, N.J., “L’arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620–2020),” in J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021
Marshall, J.W., “Traumatic dances of the ‘non-self’: Bodily incoherence and the hysterical archive,” in J. Braun (ed.), Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, Leuven University Press, 2021, pp. 61–86