Table of Contents Economic Policy Causes and Consequences of the Subprime Crisis Brendan Dowling 11

Sarah Messenger

The first important component of the theory of biotic resistance is occupied niches. Joseph Grinnell is credited for the original conceptualization of a niche as the biotic and abiotic factors necessary for a particular species to survive in a given habitat (Cadotte 2006). Elton was the first to redefine this idea as a specie’s “role” or status in its community. Niches are important in relation to biotic resistance because it is extremely difficult for an introduced species to take over a niche occupied by a native species (Cadotte 2006). Elton postulated that habitats with high levels of native biodiversity will have few unoccupied niches for introduced species to fill. Therefore, these habitats will be more resistant to invasion than habitats with less native biodiversity and therefore more open niches (Cadotte 2006).

Niche theory is closely related to the idea of competition which was initially proposed by Darwin. Again, Elton reinterpreted this theory and applied it to invasion biology. In habitats with high levels of biodiversity, there are very few available resources for an introduced species to take advantage of. Additionally, native species have evolved in this habitat making it likely that they are more resistant to invasion due to increased competitive ability for limited resources (Levine et al. 2004). Combined, these two factors make areas with high levels of biodiversity difficult to invade.

A final component of Elton’s theory of biotic resistance is that invasions occur more frequently on islands (Elton 1958). This relates directly to niche theory as islands, which typically have less biodiversity, will therefore have more open niches. Thus, the fact that we do in fact tend to see higher levels of invasions on islands could be interpreted as evidence supporting Elton’s theory of biotic resistance.

Since Elton’s time, biotic resistance has been heavily researched and the theory has been expanded (Levine et al. 2004). Besides competition, herbivory, species diversity, and fungi present, have all been found to be important components of a habitat’s biotic resistance to invasion (Levine et al. 2004). However, research has also shown that while these factors, in particular competition and herbivory, may limit the performance and spread of an invasive species, they are ineffective at preventing or stopping an invasion altogether (Levine et al. 2004). Furthermore, contrary to Elton’s predictions, areas with high native biodiversity are actually correlated with high levels of invasive biodiversity (Stohlgren et al. 2013). This could be because areas with high native biodiversity represent habitats with favorable climate and plentiful resources that may support the establishment of nonnative species.

The correlation between high native biodiversity and high invasive biodiversity suggest that Elton may have been wrong about biotic resistance. This also represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about invasion. There is an assumption that a given habitat can only sustain a set number of species. Thus if the habitat is comprised of many native species, there is little room or opportunity for nonnative invasion. However, the findings of Stohlgren and Levine suggest that this view is incorrect, there may not be a limit to the number of species a habitat can sustain (Simberloff and Von Holle 1999). Elton may have been the first to unify niche and competition theories into a unified idea of biotic resistance however, subsequent studies have found that high levels of biodiversity do not make a habitat less susceptible to nonnative invasion.

The 2015 Weisbrot et al article argues that the measured reduction of fiscal the fiscal austerity program in Greece should be replace with a program of moderate stimulus. While other influences, such as debt cancellation and low interest rates through ECB quantitative easily, moderate stimulus is favored. The article is structured in to three main sections. The first section is an examination of Greece’s economy, which despite its account surplus and new growth, is still experiencing very high unemployment. The authors claim that the current growth is a result of the end of fiscal consolidation rather than the benefits of austerity measures. Furthermore, the current growth is not assured, since non-performing loans and restricting conditions of IMF loan targets are still present⁶⁵. Supporting the claims of the previous paper, the authors claim that recovery in the current account did not come from an increase in exports due to internal devaluation, but rather a decrease in imports. The second section discusses alternative recovery plans, which may be able to improve unemployment at a faster rate than the current troika –sponsored plans. The author’s plan of moderate stimulus involves cuts to sales taxes, temporary cuts to social contribution spending, and increase in government expenditures from 2017 through 2019. The ECB’s quantitative easing program could then contribute to the stimulus-based recovery. While debt forgiveness is unlikely, it would free up government resources to conduct such a stimulus program. Section three concludes that the moderate stimulus plan proposed could help avoid the risks of a slow, prolonged recovery and potential collapse back into recession for Greece.

Weisbrot’s plan for Greece, much like his commentary on Latvia, is based on the success of Argentina’s behavior under fixed rates during crisis. In both the Latvia and 2012 Greece paper’s he makes the point that “Expansionary monetary policy runs counter to the need to maintain the fixed exchange rate”⁶⁶. For Greece, this implies that the motivations behind the austerity programs included keeping Greece within a fixed exchange rate, which is persevering the success of the Euro experiment. Latvia is a similar mentality, since the government has worked to keep rates fixed, at the expense of increasing unemployment and decreasing growth, in order to potentially join the Eurozone. Weisbrot’s point that internal devaluations do not solve the problems of over-valued real exchange rates is present in his argument for Latvia and the real case of Greece, with the effective exchange rate being unchanged in 2011, despite declines in wage levels”⁶⁷.As such, the author clearly seeks to share theories of recovery among developing European nations.

The categorization tool of developing vs non-developing European nations and their reactions to the Euro are also prevalent in Lane’s work. In his assessments of “periphery” states, Lane states, “First, entry into the euro was a much bigger structural shock for peripheral member countries”⁶⁸. Lane claims that these countries saw a much greater decline in real interest rates. However, such s shock could be translated politically as well, like in Weisbrot’s description of the austerity conditions as a method of making Greece’s economy more structurally liberal. His point of asymmetric shocks is also pertinent, since Greece’s attempts an internal devaluation can be negated by shows of strength in the rest of Europe, due to the common external exchange rate. However, Lane’s point that, “…the euro so far probably has acted to amplify cyclical divergences across the member countries”⁶⁹, clearly does not hold in Weisbrot’s work, as Greece and Latvia are pressured into pro-cyclical policy’s which amplify recessionary trends on both a domestic and external level. However, it is clear the looking at the effects of the euro in countries at different stages of economic sophistication has some benefit in establishing points of comparison on which to base productive analysis.

The overall tone of Weisbrot’s work and comparisons to Lane suggest that the winding down of the Greek recession and initiation of recovery was not conducted in the most efficient way possible. Pro-cyclical measures dragged the recession on for a much longer period than necessary, and continued austerity could keep growth sluggish and unstable. As such, it seems that Weisbrot and his coauthors generally call for policies that abandon political goals of maintaining the success of the Euro experiment and preferences for policies based in theory rather than empirical success, in favor of unpopular policies which provide sustainable and measurable benefits for the struggling country.

Pasty White and the Seven Jerks

Once upon this time, there lived a virgin named Pasty White. At the age of eleven, she was locked in a circular, windowless room with a ceiling of filmy, yet impenetrably dense fog, a cold, plastic floor and walls made of rounded mirrors. Her only companion was the Queen, and for seven years, she saw only their reflections.

“Mirrors, mirrors on the walls, who is the most worthless of them all?” “Pasty White.”

Once the Queen was satisfied, she would leave Pasty alone with the mirror and allow her to get dressed and do her makeup. She had a vast collection thanks to the Queen’s generous birthday gifts. At twelve it was nail polish for her chipped nails. At thirteen, powder for her greasy skin. At fourteen, lipstick for her cracked lips. At fifteen, eyeliner for her squinty eyes. At sixteen, mascara for her wispy eyelashes. At seventeen, eyeshadow for her puffy lids. Today, she was eighteen, and her stomach churned with anticipation at what she might receive.

Her throat tightened when she saw the Queen’s reflection approaching her from behind, empty-handed. The Queen placed her elegant fingers on Pasty’s shoulders, sending a tremor up the back of her neck. “Today you are eighteen and a woman. Today I give you an entirely different gift. Today, it is time for you to leave.”

The Queen lifted her hands from Pasty’s shoulders, and with a flick of those long, delicate fingers, one of the rounded mirrors freed itself from the fog ceiling and lowered like a drawbridge. Harsh sunlight scorched Pasty’s eyes and singed her skin. She thrust her arms in front of her face and cowered from the light, seeking solace in the folds of the Queen’s satin skirts. But chilling, bony fingers gripped her arms, yanking her to her feet, dragging her across the room and shoving her into the abyss of light. Pasty slid down the rounded mirror, her skirt twisting around her legs as she tumbled face-first into the dry, cracked earth.

She lay there, breathless, like she’d been punched in the lungs. She craned her neck back to see a wasteland before her. Everything was gray: the dirt, the sky, the tree stumps that were twisted and bent like deformed limbs. Why would the Queen have stranded her here? Pasty had always done everything she’d asked with unfaltering adoration. But if it was time for her to leave, then perhaps that meant it was too late for her to blossom into that beautiful young woman that she was supposed to become. She was utterly hopeless, a complete disappointment, and the Queen was giving up on her.

Pasty’s stomach growled ferociously, and she bit her lip as blood rushed to her cheeks. Sleazy withdrew his arm from around her, his ashen skin now just as flushed as hers, but his expression held no trace of disgust. “Oh how inconsiderate of me; I completely forgot to offer you something.” He rummaged through the empty cabinets with a skittish fervor, then looked back to her with a tense grin. “Eggs and whiskey?” It didn’t sound appetizing, but she the corners of her mouth strained upward.

My interest in gemitus, an inarticulate groan or sigh of mourning, arose out of a curiosity about Vergil’s characterization of Aeneas. To my modern sensibilities it seemed strange to associate the protagonist of the poem and founding father of Troy with sighing, moaning, lamenting, and weeping. However, as I explored the context of gemitus, I discovered Vergil’s association of the word with non-Trojans to be more remarkable than its use to describe Aeneas. Vergil closely relates gemitus to descriptions of the fall of Troy in the first two books of the Aeneid in order to evoke sympathy for Aeneas and the Trojan remnant. However, after carefully linking gemitus with Trojan grief, Vergil uses the word to refer to the dying breath of Turnus, king of the Rutulians, in the final line of the epic. Vergil’s use of gemitus at the end of Book 12 connects Turnus with the Trojans, which implies that Vergil writes to create an Italian, not narrowly Roman, national identity.

Although Aeneas’ explicit retelling of the fall of Troy does not begin until Book 2, gemitus is used three times in Book 1 to describe his response to the memory of his fallen city and comrades. Vergil first uses gemitus when he describes the Trojan’s feast celebrating their arrival at Carthage. “Nunc Amyci casum gemit et crudelia secum fata Lyci, fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum" (Verg. Aen. 1.221-222). This translates as “Now [Aeneas] groans for fallen Amycus and with him the cruel fates of Lycus and brave Gyas and brave Cloanthus.” The memory of his lost Trojans provokes a gemitus from Aeneas. Vergil describes Aeneas as pius in the previous line, 1.220, which lends a positive moral connotation to his expression of grief through a gemitus.

The other two uses of gemitus in Book 1 occur when Aeneas discovers pictures of the fall of Troy on the walls of Juno’s temple at Carthage. First, "Sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani, multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine voltum" (Verg. Aen. 1.464-465), or “Thus he speaks, and feeds his spirit with empty pictures, with much groaning, and wets his face with a plentiful river.” Even pictura inani, or empty pictures, of Troy trigger a hugely emotional response from Aeneas, complete with multa gemens. Aeneas groans because of the memory of Troy, which demonstrates the depth of his grief about the fall of his home and comrades.

Aeneas’ groaning in Book 1 culminates when he sees the image of Priam’s ransom of Hector’s body. "Tum vero ingentem gemitum dat pectore ab imo, ut spolia, ut currus, utque ipsum corpus amici, tendentemque manus Priamum conspexit inermis” (Verg. Aen. 1.485-487). “Then truly he gives a huge groan from the depths of his heart, as he sees the spoils, the chariot, and the body of his own friend, and Priam holding out unarmed hands.” Aeneas’ sighing is modified twice in this description—the gemitum is not simply ingentem, but vero ingentem, or “truly huge.” The intensity of Aeneas’ lament at this particular point in the passage seems to stem from the fact that he sees the ipsum corpus amici, or “body of his own friend.” This indicates that Aeneas’ grief for Troy is increased when he considers the memories of specific fallen comrades. Every time Vergil uses gemitus in Book 1, he connects it to Aeneas’ grief in memory of the destruction of Troy and its people.

In Book 2 Vergil uses gemitus to describe poignant moments of grief during the fall of Troy and as a means of foreshadowing grief to come. In lines 52-3 Vergil describes, “Stetit illa tremens, uteroque recusso insonuere cavae gemitumque dedere cavernae,” or “It stood trembling, and, the womb having been struck, the empty cavern resonated and gave a groan.” The womb in question is that of the Trojan Horse, and Vergil’s use of gemitus to describe an inanimate object foreshadows the human gemitūs that the horse will cause. The next usage of gemitus likewise describes something of Greek origin that leads to the destruction of Troy. The Greek Sinon has approached the Trojans and tells his falsely tragic story. "Quo gemitu conversi animi, compressus et omnis impetus” (Virg. Aen. 2.73-74), or “By groaning our spirits were turned, and every attack ceased.” Sinon manipulates the sincerity of true expressions of grief in order to deceive the Trojans with his false gemitus. Additionally, in line 413 Vergil describes the Greeks as “gemitu […] invadunt,” or “invading with a howl.” Although these groans do not directly reflect grief over the loss of Troy, they are applied to the Greeks who cause Trojan suffering and lament.

After Vergil thrice uses gemitus to anticipate the sorrow that would be caused by the Greeks, he uses it to describe the grief itself in its remaining four instances. Line 288 describes Hector’s mourning as he appears to Aeneas in a dream: “sed graviter gemitus imo de pectore ducens” (Verg. Aen. 2.288), or “gravely leading a groan from his deep chest.” This gemitus from Hector precedes his warning for Aeneas to flee Troy. Lines 323-327 provide Panthus’ description of the fall of Troy:

Vix ea fatus eram, gemitu cum talia reddit:

‘Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus

Dardaniae: fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens

gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos

transtulit; incensa Danai dominantur in urbe’ (Verg. Aen. 2.323-327).

Given Vergil’s carefully structured tie between gemitus and Troy, his use of the word to describe Turnus, Aeneas’ enemy, in the final line of the epic is worthy of note. The last sentence of the poem is “Ast illi solvuntur frigore membra vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras” (Verg. Aen. 12.951-952), or “But the limbs of that man were loosened by cold and the indignant life fled below the shades with a groan.” Vergil uses the same phrase, “vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras,” in 11.831 to describe the death of Camilla, one of Turnus’ allies. Why would Vergil emphasize the dying groans of two enemies of Aeneas and the Trojans? By devoting the final lines of the Aeneid to Turnus and placing a gemitus in his mouth, Vergil primes his reader to feel sympathy for the Rutulian king. This is surprising because Vergil uses a word reserved for Trojans in Books 1 and 2 to define the dying moments of an enemy of the Trojans. The use of gemitus in 12.952 suggests that Vergil is presenting a more complex perspective of the Trojan and Italian conflict than can be seen at first glance. By describing Turnus’ death as cum gemitu, Vergil asks his audience to consider whether the Rutulian’s grief over his death and his conquered people is comparable to the Trojan’s grief over the death and destruction of his people and home. Vergil’s portrayal of Turnus’ death as cum gemitu signals that even the enemies of Troy deserve sympathy from his Roman readership.

Carl P. E. Springer notes that the connection between Turnus and the Trojans goes beyond the use of gemitus in 12.952. Although the ending of the Aeneid is often discussed as startling and abrupt, its format is Homeric. “The conclusion of the Aeneid, and in particular the last line, owes its inspiration to the ending of the Iliad. The last line of Homer’s epic concentrates on the antagonist, not the protagonist, and represents him in a somewhat favorable light” (Springer, 312). Vergil’s choice to mirror the ending of the Iliad in the ending of the Aeneid strengthens the link between Turnus and the Trojans and creates a more specific parallel between Hector and Turnus. Both men symbolize the nations they fight for, and each is the subject of the ending of a poem about his enemy. Perhaps more importantly, both Hector and Turnus die defending their homelands against invading foreigners. In the Iliad Troy is being attacked, but in the Aeneid Troy does the attacking. This shift in attacker complicates the connection between Turnus and Troy because it identifies him with his present Trojan aggressor through Troy’s past defeat. Why does Vergil make such a complicated literary connection that blurs the boundaries between both sides of the Trojan-Italian War?

This strong link between Hector and Turnus is difficult to understand when reading the Aeneid as a story about Roman supremacy, but Katharine Toll argues that Vergil is telling a different narrative. Vergil was a Gaul, and therefore not a Roman citizen until 42 BCE, only 13 years before he began writing the Aeneid. Italians from outside of Rome gained Roman citizenship in 70 BCE. Vergil wrote the Aeneid during a time when Rome absorbed enormous numbers of citizens from many distinct Italian people groups, which weakened the sense of a united Roman identity. Toll argues that Vergil wrote the Aeneid in order to provide a new identity that would encompass both Rome and Italy (Toll, 41). This shifts the focus of the poem from a sense of Trojan, and by extension narrowly Roman, greatness to a conception of a combined Trojan and Italian heritage.

If Vergil writes to foster a dual Roman and Italian national identity, his link between Italian Turnus and the Trojans through gemitus achieves his purpose rather than hinders it. Because Turnus represents the native Italian people, he must contribute to some part of the Roman-Italian national identity. James O’Hara argues that Vergil achieves this contribution through his description of Turnus’ ethical code: “A superficial reading of the poem suggests that only Aeneas represents Rome, but Turnus too is driven by the gods' commands; he fights and dies for what in reality are Roman values” (O’Hara, 84). By linking Turnus and the Trojans, Vergil suggests that the culture of the Romans has its root both in Aeneas’ and Turnus’ pietas, or sense of unending duty to family, comrades, country, and the gods. By tracing back “Roman” values to both Trojans and Italians, Vergil closes the cultural gap between his contemporary Romans and Italians. Turnus becomes another hero who deserves sympathy upon his death in the same way that the fallen Trojans deserve sympathy.

By connecting Turnus to Hector and the Trojans through gemitus in the last line, Vergil emphasizes “Italian-ness” and makes the distinction between the “good” Trojans and the “bad” Latins more ambivalent. In Books 1 and 2 of the Aeneid Vergil uses gemitus exclusively to express grief about the fall of Troy and the death of Trojans. However, the final line of the poem describes Turnus’ death at the hands of Aeneas as cum gemitu. By using gemitus in this line, Vergil asks his audience to feel the same sympathy previously reserved for Aeneas’ homeland for Aeneas’ enemy. This shift in sympathy is difficult to reconcile with a Roman supremacist reading of the Aeneid—why would Vergil portray an enemy of Aeneas, the great Roman pater, in such a sympathetic way? However, as Katharine Toll suggests, when the Aeneid is read as a poem constructing a dual Roman-Italian national identity, Vergil’s link between Turnus’s grief and that of the Trojans seems logical. By seeking sympathy for Aeneas’ enemy, Vergil suggests that the Rutulian king is not so different from the Trojan leader. This link between mythological leaders demonstrates that contemporary Romans and Italians could also find common ground. Vergil’s connection between Turnus and Troy through gemitus serves to reinforce the common “Roman-ness” of both Italians and Romans.

Works Cited

Crane, Gregory R. “Word Frequency Information for Gemo.” Perseus Digital Library 4.0. Tufts University, 2007. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.

Lateiner, Donald. “Affect Displays in the Epic Poetry of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid.” Advances in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Ed. Fernando Poyatos. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1992. 255-269. Print.

O’Hara, James. Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Vergil’s Aeneid. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Print.

Springer, Carl P.E. “The Last Line of the ‘Aeneid.’” The Classical Journal 82.4 (1987): 310-313. JSTOR. Web. 12 Dec. 2015

Toll, Katharine. “Making Roman-ness and the Aeneid.” Classical Antiquity 16.1 (1997): 34-56. JSTOR. Web. 17 Dec. 2015.

Vergil. Aeneid Books 1-6. Ed. Randall T. Ganiban, et al. Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2012. Print.

HERsteria and NeurastHEnia: Hysteria and Neurasthenia as Socially Constructed Diseases in Nineteenth Century America

The word “hysteria” is mentioned frequently in American history, as it is used to describe occurrences in which mob mentality created a sentiment of mass panic across the nation, such as lynching in the South post Civil War, the Red Scare generated by a fear of Communism, and the xenophobia generated after Pearl Harbor resulting in the formation of Japanese internment camps. When “hysteria” is used as a medical terminology, however, the history becomes distinctly female. Just as in the instances of mass panic, the term hysteria illuminates the fears of the American public, and the way that those fears manifest themselves in discrimination against minority groups. These histories are often misrepresented in American history books, as the voices of minorities affected by hysteria go unheard. In her essay, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,” Elaine Showalter explains that it hasn’t been until recently that stories about hysteria have begun to be told by women in addition to men. She maintains that it is important that feminist scholars begin to study the history of hysteria in America, as these perspectives move away from the idea of hysteria as a legitimate medical condition, and instead towards the idea that “hysteria is caused by women’s oppressive social roles rather than by their bodies or psyches” and that its sources lie “in cultural myths of femininity and in male domination.”⁷⁰ Showalter calls this shift in the way scholars talk about the foundations of this disease as the “‘herstory’ of hysteria.” This paper serves as a contribution to this “herstory,” as it seeks to prove that hysteria and neurasthenia in the nineteenth century were socially constructed diseases meant to marginalize women.

One of the main differences in talking about the history of hysteria as opposed to the history of other medical conditions is that the disease has never been explicitly defined, and the symptoms have shifted according to changes in cultural norms. In his essay, “‘A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800,” G. S. Rousseau asserts, “the history of hysteria is essentially a social history.”⁷¹ In order to track the changes in the disease across history, one must look to gendered social norms at the time as an explanation for the process of diagnosis, treatment, and list of symptoms associated with the disease. Because hysteria has never had a set list of symptoms, the symptoms of the disease are defined according to societal perceptions of women, and are often the symptoms of other common diseases. In her essay, “Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates,” Helen King suggests that there are two impediments that prevent medical scholars from discussing hysteria as a historically consistent disease:

The first is that, unlike tuberculosis, epilepsy, and gonorrhea, hysteria is in no way a clearly defined disease entity for which most medical practitioners in our society would draw up the same list of symptoms; the second, that an integral part of the definition of hysteria often consists in its supposed ability to mimic symptoms of other diseases.⁷²

Despite its medical inconsistencies, hysteria has an ancient history in the medical world. In their article, “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health,” Cecilia Tasca, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta, and Bianca Fadda state that hysteria is undoubtedly, “The first mental disorder attributable to women.”⁷³ They maintain that the first depiction of hysteria dates back to 1900 BC, when ancient Egyptians identified “the cause of hysterical disorders in spontaneous uterus movement within the female body.”⁷⁴ Hysteria continues to be referenced throughout history from the ancient medical texts of Hippocrates to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud.

One of the principal examples of the manifestation of hysteria in American culture is in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The symptoms that were used to describe hysteria during this time were, “starting and barred eyes, raucous noises and muffled, uncontrolled jumps, sudden movements, etc.”⁷⁵ These symptoms equate with the Puritanical values of America at this time; the symptoms present as those that Puritans typically associate with possession. Therefore, hysteria is linked to the idea of heresy, and women are therefore linked with the devil through a diagnosis of hysteria. Often, the young women in whom the disease presented were women who were seen as rebelling against the ideals of the Church. As the “treatment” for hysteria at this time was hanging, as hysteria was associated with witchcraft, the disease effectively eradicated all women who were seen as a threat to social and religious norms. In this instance, hysteria was linked directly to female reproductive organs, as witches could only be female. It isn’t until the eighteenth century that hysteria “starts being gradually associated with the brain rather than the uterus, a trend which opens the way to neurological etiology.”⁷⁶ This move towards analyzing the brain can be seen in nineteenth century depictions of hysteria.

Starting in the nineteenth century, hysteria is used as a means of men controlling women’s bodies by pulling from outdated medical histories. The concept of hysteria was a centuries old tradition that hadn’t been accepted as medically sound for many years; however, despite the medical inaccuracy of the disease, it became inserted into medical practices. Helen King describes this shift as a reemergence of the cultural practice of men controlling women’s bodies:

The language may shift – the womb travels, vapors rise, sympathy transmits symptoms through the body – but the message remains the same: women are sick, and men write their bodies. Nineteenth-century hysteria, a parasite in search of a history, grafts itself by name and lineage onto the centuries-old tradition of suffocation of the womb, thus making Hippocrates its adopted father. It is time that father disowned his hybrid child.⁷⁷
This phrase “a parasite in search of a history” accurately reflects the trajectory of hysteria in relation to nineteenth century America. In the nineteenth century, women’s roles were beginning to shift as they became more integrated in professional and public spheres. The rise of hysteria served as a direct response to some of the freedoms that women were gaining in American culture. Hysteria was essentially a pushback against the idea of women rebelling and becoming more involved in educational, professional, and other major institutions. Elaine Showalter suggests that the rise of hysteria coincides, not coincidentally, with a rise in women’s sovereignty:

That hysteria became a hot topic in medical circles at the same time that feminism, the New Woman, and a crisis in gender were also hot topics in the United States and Europe does not seem coincidental. During an era when patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters, one obvious defense was to label women campaigning for access to the universities, the professions, and the vote as mentally disturbed.⁷⁸

Along with these concerns about women becoming more involved in society, there was a concern that women would not produce as many children, or be as active in the household. Because of this, any possibility that women would leave the domestic sphere was stifled, as they were forced for their health (but really for the health of the nation) to remain at home. In his essay, “The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating Hysteria,” Roy Porter argues that it was not only women’s role in the domestic sphere that was men were trying to preserve through diagnoses of hysteria, but also women’s role as a sexual object: “Gynecology and psychophysiology thus joined forces to make female sexuality problematic, highlighting the role of the sexual organs in provoking hysterical conditions widely believed to precipitate moral insanity.”⁷⁹ Making female sexuality problematic shows that not only are women kept from abandoning their role as domestic servants and caretakers, but that their sexuality is also seen as a threat. Repressing their sexuality was suggested to be healthier for women, when really this enable men to prevent women from expressing themselves sexually, thus maintaining their status as sexual objects for men rather than sexual beings for themselves.

In the nineteenth century, practices for the treatment of hysteria varied according to which doctor or psychologist’s method was being followed. Most physicians followed Freud’s model for the treatment of hysteria, which essentially suggested that something dark from these women’s pasts had been dislodged and resurfaced, causing her to undergo fits of hysteria. The influence that hysteria wielded started to be seen in larger institutions such as hospitals and sanatoriums: “Establishments—hydros, spas, retreats, sanatoria, nursing homes—started catering to private patients suffering from hysteriform conditions.”⁸⁰ In his 1906 article, “Recent experiences in the study and treatment of hysteria at the Massachusetts General Hospital; with remarks on Freud’s method of treatment by ‘Psycho-analysis,’” James Jackson Putnam, of Harvard Medical School, details his experiences treating female hysteria patients under Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis. In each case, he attempted to find something from that woman’s past that he could name as the cause of her hysteria. In an explanation of a specific case of a twenty-year-old woman that he treated for hysteria, he cites an accident she had as a child as the cause of her hysteria:

The only discoverable (or discovered) cause for these attacks, even through careful searching with the aid of the method of Freud, … consisted in two accidents, one being a fall down the cellar stairs when she was a girl of ten, the other a still more serious fall into a hole near a railroad embankment.⁸¹

This particular set of treatments in which women were essentially rendered incompetent was directly correlated to the ideals of the nineteenth century. In her article, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19^th-Century America,” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg discusses the connection between the role of the ideal American woman in the nineteenth century and the treatment of hysteria. She purports,

The ideal female in nineteenth-century America was expected to be gentle and refined, sensitive and loving. She was the guardian of religion and spokeswoman for morality. Hers was the task of guiding the more worldly and more frequently tempted male past the maelstroms of atheism and uncontrolled sexuality.⁸⁴
These principles that she refers to belong to the value system of The Cult of True Womanhood – a term that Barbara Welter coined in her 1966 article, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” where she outlines the attributes that a woman must subscribe to according to this structure as “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”⁸⁵ These values, Smith-Rosenberg argues, are what women were escaping by a diagnosis of hysteria. Hysteria essentially disrupted familial and marital structures, making it so that women were the ones being tended to while their families performed the everyday household chores. In this way, Smith-Rosenberg suggests, “Through her illness, the bedridden woman came to dominate her family to an extent that would have been considered inappropriate – indeed shrewish – in a healthy woman.”⁸⁶ This serves as an example of women in American history taking something that was meant to marginalize them and instead using it to their advantage. While women were, undoubtedly, restricted by the diagnosis and treatment for hysteria, they used this diagnosis to reverse gender roles within their family structure, if only temporarily. During this time of rest and recuperation, women were rendered effectively incompetent, and their families were forced to take on their workload. This allowed the men in the family to realize the full extent of a woman’s work, and possibly value her role in the household more than they had previously.

As hysteria has, since its origins, been identified as a feminine disease, seeing symptoms of hysteria presented in male cases was considered ignominious and was often suggestive of homosexual or feminine tendencies in that man. There were still cases, however, where men exhibited these same symptoms, and so,

In the eighteenth century, there was a gender split in the representation of the body, with the nervous system seen as feminine, and the musculature as masculine. Doctors made a firm gender distinction between forms of nervous disorder, assigning hysteria to women and hypochondria to men.⁸⁷
While hypochondriasis started out as a socially acceptable illness that men were not embarrassed to admit to having, it soon too became associated with this stigma of femininity, and therefore, a new “masculine” version of hysteria needed to be established: “In 1873, this gap in the medical lexicon was filled by the term neurasthenia. … neurasthenia was first identified in the United States and was linked with the nation’s nervous modernity.”⁸⁸ Neurasthenia, like hysteria, was comprised of an extensive list of symptoms, including “blushing, neuralgia, vertigo, headache, and tooth decay to insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, fainting, and uterine irritability.”⁸⁹ But unlike hysteria, this disease, which was known to affect both men and women, was said to be caused by overexerting oneself in one’s occupation, and high levels of stress. For working men, this meant that this disease had shifted from a diagnosis associated with ideals of femininity to one associated with an elite lifestyle and good work ethic.

In an article published in a 1915 issue of The American Journal of Nursing, neurologist Edward B. Angell discusses the symptoms and diagnoses of neurasthenia, and the discerning characteristics of the disease. He refers to neurasthenia s the half-sister of hysteria, and talks about the difference between the two disorders:

It is not a mental disorder, the nature of the disturbance being rather one of weakness and lack of vigor than a clouded and perverted tone of the mind. In this respect, it differs definitely from hysteria, its half-sister, insasmuch as the mental tone of the hysteric is not necessarily one of weakness but of perversion, while that of the neurasthenic is indicative of simple loss of power.⁹⁰
While Angell does not explicitly discuss the gendered separation of these two terms, the gendered ideologies are implicit in the explanation of the difference between the two. Hysteria, which is only diagnosable for women, is considered to be representative of a “perversion” of a patient. Neurasthenia, however, which men can be diagnosed with, is associated with a “simple loss of power,” implying that their minds are still stable, and they will return to their former selves after a period of time.

Although neurasthenia came out of a need to form a new masculine nervous identity, this disease is often associated today with femininity. This is largely due to the cultural products we reference today when we talk about neurasthenia. The most obvious example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In fact, there were just as many cases of men diagnosed with neurasthenia as women: “In the United States, equal numbers of male and female patients were reported in the medical journals.”⁹¹ Because neurasthenia is often viewed under the umbrella term of hysteria, modern day scholars often assume that it held the same gendered diagnosis. The diagnosis itself was not gendered; however, the way in which patients diagnoses with neurasthenia were treated differed according to both gender and class.

The prevailing treatment for neurasthenia, an extended period of rest in which the patient was immobile and prevented from leaving bed, was invented by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. This treatment, known as the “rest cure” involved,

seclusion, massage, immobility, and "excessive feeding." For six weeks the patient was isolated from her friends and family, confined to bed, and forbidden to sit up, sew, read, write, or do any intellectual work. She was expected to gain as much as fifty pounds on a rich diet that began with milk and built up to several substantial daily meals.⁹²

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the most well known cultural references to neurasthenia and the process of treating neurasthenia in the nineteenth century. The short story is based off of Gilman’s personal experience being diagnosed with neurasthenia (by her own husband), and the restrictive nature of the treatment that she is forced to endure. Not only is she physically and socially isolated from the world around her, but she is also forbidden from writing and expressing her thoughts: “I am … absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again. … I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.”⁹³ In this way, she is forced to reinvent herself as a woman who is entirely obedient to men, and has no mind of her own. In her article, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Paula Treichler asserts that this is a forced development of “an artificial feminine self who reinforces the terms of her husband’s expert diagnosis: this self attempts to speak reasonably and in a ‘very quiet voice,’ refrains from crying in his presence, and hides the fact that she is keeping a journal.”⁹⁴ All of this isolation and repression is framed under the idea that this was what was best for these women; however, it is the men that benefit from this treatment, as women are confined to a submissive state in which they are completely subservient to and dependent on the men in their lives.

Although this “rest cure” is the better known of Mitchell’s methods (again, most likely due to its popularity in cultural texts about neurasthenia such as Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”), he also treated men diagnosed with neurasthenia. Where his treatment of women diagnosed with neurasthenia was known as the “rest cure,” his treatment of men was known as the “west cure.” In response to diagnoses of neurasthenia in men, Mitchell would send them “out West to engage in prolonged periods of cattle roping, hunting, roughriding and male bonding.”⁹⁵ Showalter explains that this gendered difference in his treatment of the same nervous disorder can be attributed to his philosophies about the physiognomy of men and women. Mitchell was openly opposed to the idea of higher education of women, as he thought that, “the female reproductive system and the brain derived their nourishment from the same source.”⁹⁶ Essentially, he believed that if a woman were to strain her brain, she would also strain her reproductive system. These misogynistic ideologies were clearly implemented in his treatment plans for neurasthenia, and are only further emphasized by the differing treatment plans for men and women diagnosed with the same disease.

Hysteria and neurasthenia became officially removed from the DSM in 1980, long after they were used in commonplace medical practice: “We know that the concept of hysterical neurosis is deleted with the 1980 DSM-III: hysterical symptoms are in fact now considered as manifestation of dissociative disorders.”⁹⁷ This removal of the disease from the DSM, however, did not mean that all socially constructed feminine nervous disorders were disempowered. There are still many examples of contemporary nervous disorders that bear some sort of social stigma related to gender. In Jenifer Dodd’s article, "'The name game': Feminist protests of the DSM and diagnostic labels in the 1980s," she provides examples of ways in which socially constructed psychological disorders and the stakes of labeling something as a feminine disease can impact the status of women. Specifically, Dodd examines feminists within the mental health field through their response to the proposed addition of three allegedly sexist psychiatric disorders in the 1980s. Dodd suggests that it is not only contemporary feminine nervous diseases that feminists should question for the way that they disadvantage women, but also male psychiatric disorders:

For the most part, women’