Bodies as Stage Props: Enacting Hysteria in the Diaries of Charlotte Forten Grimké and Alice James

In an 1890 diary entry, Alice James, a diagnosed hysteric, describes as a "most amusing scene" the aftermath of a seizure in which she "lay in a semi-faint" (89). In an equally revealing moment, Charlotte Forten Grimké records in her journal her role of "playing the invalid" (151). Using the terms "scene" and "playing," James and Forten the atrically describe their states of ill health. Portraying sickliness as performative, the diarists highlight the drama often associated with female invalidism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. James and Forten's dramatic representations conform to various medical professionals' characterizations of ill women as partaking in grand charades. In an 1890 clinical study, physician Jules Falret denounces hysterical patients as "veritable actresses" (qtd. in Showalter 302). His oxy moronic joining of "true" and "actress" leads to important questions about the complex late-nineteenth-century illness: Were hysterical symptoms manifestations of physical illness? Psychosomatic illness? Or were "hysterical" women simply role-playing? As the term "veritable actresses" suggests, various levels of physical, psychological, real, and imaginary illness could -- and often did -- coexist in the hysterical patient. The simultaneous and inseparable "real" and "performative" aspects of hysteria, then, provide a useful framework for an analysis of James and Forten as invalid diary writers. Both writers enact illness in the genre of the diary and engage taboos against female bodily displays through their use of theatrical modes.(1) Charlotte Forten's diary substitutes for the literary portfolio that she once envisioned. In her seven-hundred-page journal, Forten describes her personal battle with depression and physical illness, her longing for family, her struggle with racism, and her literary aspirations. The diary also provides detailed portraits of art and nature, and social commentary about slavery and Reconstruction. Although the dominant culture's racism and her abolitionist work ethic precluded Forten from identifying herself as an hysteric, she, nonetheless, records manifest symptoms in more than one hundred and twenty separate journal entries. Explanations of her ailments range from the general "not feeling well" to more specific symptoms of hysteria, such as "chronic coughing" or tussis nervosa (118-536). To downplay these physical symptoms, Forten distances her "self" from her flesh, experimenting with the disembodied voi