Female Hysteria as a Strategy of Resistance: The Cases of Eda Zoritte and Amalia Kahana-Carmon

• In Event: Gender and Genre: Power and Proscriptivism of Form in Modern Jewish Poetry and Prose

Abstract

In Eda Zoritte's novel His Alienated Wife (1997) about Julie Herzl, the wife of Theodore, the heroine describes her husband as such: "His is the source of my stubborn and fanatic stance on what I consider my rights. Since I do not believe in my powers of persuasion […], I fight back furiously at my real and imagined opponents with the only weapon at my disposal: hysteria" (Zoritte, 1997, pp. 102, my translation). The heroine's words emphasize this condition’s potential as a force of resistance, as emphasized by many thinkers: Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s (1986 [1975]), for example, understood hysteria as feminine resistance to oppression, and hysterical writing as a potential for creating a revolutionary language; and Daniel Boyarin (1997) showed how the hysteric patient, Anna O., who resisted her exclusion from getting education in Vienna, became the feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim, the first female social worker in Germany. Pappenheim embodies in her unique figure the connection between hysteria and feminism. ever since the publication of Cixous and Clément’s revolutionary book, The Newly Born Woman, female hysteria is understood and defined, paradoxically, as both a powerful force of resistance and life, but at the same time as a death force and an excuse for imprisonment of women.

while Freud’s hysterical patients were oppressed by a rigid bourgeois society and Austro-Hungarian law, most heroines created by Hebrew women writers living in a Zionist society were subject to different laws and classes altogether. In this paper I would like to focus on figures of hysteric women in two stories by modern Hebrew women writers – Amalia Kahana-Carmon (often perceived as the "second advent" of Hebrew women's writing) and Eda Zoritte (one of the most forgotten writers in Hebrew literature) – who started publishing their stories in 1950s, and examine the unique social causes of the heroines hysteria and its double meaning – a disguised resistance under a semblance of obedience. Understanding the social causes of their malady will illuminate their attitude towards women’s place in the Zionist project. This duality will be also seen in the hysteric style that characterizes each of the writers.

Author

• Chen Ester Edelsburg, Tel Aviv University