What I Loved

to calm her. When she was thirteen, the nuns expelled her, and she went back to her mother, who was working in a house in Paris as a chambermaid. The case study doesn't mention what happened to her father. He must have disappeared. It does say that Augustine was hired 'on the pretext' that she teach the children of the house to sing and sew. For her efforts she was allowed to sleep in a little closet. It turned out that her mother was having an affair with the master of the house. In the records, they just call him 'Monsieur C.' Not long after Augustine moved in, Monsieur C. began making sexual advances toward her, but she refused him. Finally he threatened her with a razor and then raped her. She started having convulsive fits and bouts of paralysis. She hallucinated rats and dogs and big eyes staring at her. It got so bad that her mother took her to the Salpêtrière, where she was diagnosed as a hysteric. She was fifteen."
    "A lot of people would go crazy after that kind of treatment," I said.
    "She didn't have a chance. You'd be surprised how many of the girls and women I've been reading about came from similar backgrounds. Most of them were dirt-poor. A lot of them were shuttled back and forth between one parent or relative and another. They were always being uprooted as children. Several of them had been molested, too, by a relative or employer or somebody." Violet stopped talking for several seconds. "There are still psychoanalysts who talk about 'hysterical personality,' but most pyschiatrists don't even consider hysteria a mental illness anymore. The one thing that's left on the books is 'hysterical conversion' or 'conversion disorder.' That's when you wake up one day and can't move your arms or legs and there's no physical reason for it."
    "You're saying that hysteria was a medical creation," I said.
    "No," Violet said. "That's too simple. The medical establishment was certainly part of it, but the fact that so many women had hysterical attacks, not just women who were hospitalized for them, goes beyond doctors. Swooning, thrashing, and foaming at the mouth were a lot more common in the nineteenth century. It hardly happens anymore. Don't you find that strange? I mean, the only explanation is that hysteria really was a broad cultural phenomenon — a permissible way out."
    "Out of what?"
    "Out of Monsieur C.'s house, for one thing."
    "You think that Augustine was pretending?"
    "No. I think she was really suffering. If she had been admitted to a hospital today, they would have said she was schizophrenic or bipolar, but let's face it, those names are pretty vague, too. I think her illness took the form it did because it was in the air, floating around like a virus — the way anorexia nervosa floats around today."
    While I thought about her comment, Violet continued. "Whin we were kids, my little sister, Alice, and I used to spend a lot of time in the barn. The summer after I turned nine and Alice turned six, we were playing with our dolls up in the hayloft. We were sitting across from each other making our dolls talk when suddenly Alice got this strange look on her face and pointed at the little window. 'Look Violet,' she said, 'there's an angel.' I didn't see anything except the little square of sunshine, but I was spooked, and then for a second I thought that there might be a figure there — a pale, weightless thing. Alice fell over and started kicking and choking. I grabbed her and tried to shake her. At first, I thought she was fooling, and then I saw her eyes roll up into her head and I knew she wasn't. I started screaming for my mother, and then I was gagging on my own spit. I was kicking and rolling around in the hay. My mother came running out of the house and climbed up the ladder to us. I was all crazy, Leo. I was yelling so loud I got hoarse. It took my mother a couple of minutes to figure out which one of us was in trouble. When she did, she had to push me out of the way, really hard, because I was holding on to Alice's knees and I wouldn't let go. My mother carried Alice out of there and down the ladder and drove her to the hospital." Violet took a big, shuddering breath and continued. "I stayed home with my father. I was sick with shame. I had panicked. I did everything wrong. I wasn't brave at all, but worse than that, a part of me knew that I had been acting flipped out, and that it was only partly real." Violet's eyes filled with tears. "I went into my room and started counting. I counted