Hysteria, Doctor-Patient Relationships, and Identity Boundaries in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved

Hustvedt's portrayal of the way doctors - most prominently Jean-Martin Charcot - treat their female patients at the Salpètriêre reveals complex negotiations of identity boundaries, oscillating between an emphasis on the doctor as the dominating mastermind guiding the hysterics' behavior, on the one hand, and explorations of hysteria as an escape from a society in which women were overpoweringly restricted, on the other. The body of the hysteric is thus located in the midst of a far-reaching debate over feminine identity and social norms.\n (196) Augustine thus epitomizes the complicated constellation of hysterical identity: a subjectivity balancing on the threshold between the language of her unconscious, her culturally determined symbolical value, and the Pygmalian dream of her physician. 18 As Violet tells the reader, Augustine "'escaped from the Salpêtrière dressed as a man'" (73).