by Anna Vaught
Think.
Think.
Think, Blanche! It’s all mine, what’s in there; in my mind.
I think that there is a place in the body where sorrow must come out; that our minds cannot bear it all and it must have recourse. Tears. My whole life shook, it made no sense. He, Charcot, tried to make sense of what it was, and for that I accord him thanks.
Later, Dr Janet, who had been, I think, Charcot’s most prized student, wrote that my left eye showed complete achromatopsia. I could see no colours, except for saturated red. Yes, and for a while: black and white, like Augustine. Augustine? Remember? It might be important. Hysteric, escaped, dressed as a man, so the story goes. She was my predecessor as Queen of the Hysterics and my friend. Every night, I wonder where she is and what she is. What is her identity now? Does she live among men? Is she pretty, as she was here, or a pretty man? Suited, booted, confident because she tastes a glorious freedom. The windows here are small, but what if those were her feet, running rat-a-tat past me? She runs, in her man suit; she’s so tired of being a pretty girl but never, never, will she tire of running. No-one runs at the Salpêtrière, apart from to get away from a needle, or to restrain one of the mads and then they come with the tough white jacket, arms down dear, nothing to be done: camisole de force. Camisole; sounds almost pretty.
Oh yes: the achromatopsia. I could see only black and white. And saturated red. Or rather Dr Janet, while Charcot nodded assent, explained to others that this is what I could see. I heard him! Certainly, I had seen and sensed things I should not. Such as horrors here, even though it is not, so we hear on the wing, the worst of these places. So. That must have been why the brutal splash of carmine on black and white. Yes. Here I had seen things I should not. In the outside world, too
Epileptid.
Clonic.
Then Delirium.
That was it; me, summed up.
Charcot pressed gold upon me, I am told I swallowed metals—he believed all this—pressed down upon my ovaries, the hysterogenic zones: he blew on my eyes to wake me from this time. I was calm, but exhausted. Afterwards, I lay on my bed, rough sheets and blankets, but clean as they could. My stomach was tender and I felt there; kneaded it with my knuckles and, finding it too tender, lifted my shirts and saw my name blazoned there by a pin. I asked Charcot, although he did not say so much. Not branding, or joke, but observation of an erythemic band, noting how raised my skin would become, calibrating it against hysteria and the health of my nerves, my organs.
He’d scratched my name on my flesh with a pin.
Gilbert Ballet wrote about me—he is there in the painting by Brouillet, you know. The side group by the inner window; he adored Charcot and he was handsome! A well-thought-of man; a doctor whose nascent skill they spoke of. At our salon. I winked at him, between acts, and startled the poor ingénue. Dr Ballet made his Blanche case notes: apparently, I had a hallucination, a phantasy of a bird. I saw it and caressed it. Sometimes I glimpsed it, coup d’oeil! Then, oh it disappeared. And Charcot used metallotherapy. The gold—and I was superbly responsive to copper, too. When he swung the little discs, the bird moved, shifted, flew away; was disappeared. And Charcot tried again. Magnets; forks; electrical currents: aesthesiogens, Charcot called them. I always listened to him, when I could, sane enough: he believed that he could direct the fall of symptoms from one part of my body to another, hands caressing me like the wings of a bird. He believed he was finding tremendous therapeutic things. As I said, he was a great man, the things he found to the good but here... I am not sure. After all, I never left the Pitié-Salpêtrière.
Recovery. That last bit of the doctor’s list, I added; the others were my, our stages, witness the notes. My opinion was that I recovered from whatever it was, but here I stayed.
As I was saying.
I was spectacular, a fine thing, under hypnosis. I convulsed, I calmed, rattled and shook and at each cue, I was just so. No longer plain Marie, but Blanche; after a while, only my stage name was known. It was not a trick. I thought, In years to come, what will they think of this? Am I a gimcrack show; a performer? What, then, will they know about the workings of our minds and bodies?
Oh, but I knew I held the title now: Queen of the Hysterics. And although Monsieur Charcot had others, showy demonstrators, I outclassed them all. Here, he would say, is a picture of you deshabillée, my dear. Shall we show it to the assembled company? and of course I would roar and in my flagrant modesty, I would snatch up the picture and tear it. Later, he would be saying: But it was just a blank piece of paper, so you see, so you see! Suggestible in the extreme, my friends. That is how hysteria is.
There were other times.
Poison in a little vial.
Give it to that gentleman, Blanche, do it now please.
I would go, as directed, to poison him.
And afterwards, I would hear him say: But just a vial of water. So you see, so you see.
In my notes I am told (how do they see and how is this news passed on? We are clever: we distract and then we whisper what we have found out) it said that my skin was white and that I was blonde and of a lymphatic complexion and that my bosom was very large... Just a thought, but my forehead is large, too and I gather that this suggests intelligence.
Charcot, as I said, such a famous doctor. Brilliant as a pathologist, or when travelling the nerves, but missing, missing always, as I later heard. But when I was Blanche they came in troupes to him; if you wanted to study nerves and medicine, then sit at his feet. He looked and looked and did not speak. As a nurse, I saw them, the patients, come to his office, where he would receive them, not on the ward. He did not touch or palpate, but looked and looked and said little—oh but did he see? When Augustine escaped in her man suit, they did not see that, did they? I’m imagining now that this wonderful girl flew in circles round Sacré-Cœur; she could not have been more obvious! Ah. You were paying attention. You queried and I am proud of you. Sacré-Cœur had not been built yet. Still. We learn to be imaginative, when we are caged. And when I hear words, be sure that I will remember them. Now, you remember that.
There was a man, I heard in whispers, who came and studied and wondered. Freud. Going to be a great one, I heard. He saw me. Did he admire me—Queen? It is not for me to say. I understood, in these whispers, that he saw what I had become as of the mind; that was my pathology: a sick mind. I would have liked to know more of what he said, for I do not want you to think that I... that I put it on; that I acted. But my body was strong, then, I secretly thought; at night my pain came up from secret seas and drowned me and I was Marie, death and the maiden, and Father bound over, stilled, contained, in the asylum. He’d been a brute to me. As I told you, he was not a good man, but I had feelings for him and the pain of waking at night, wondering if he were dead or dead, alive, in an asylum, now it was eviscerating. There is a horrid word I like.
Charcot. In his embroidered coat. He was resplendent, confident, but as he watched me, so I watched him and I felt him strange; saw that confidence begin to falter. He was a great man; the years will tell you that. And he believed in art and in keeping records, so the photographs went on for miles: women with mouths wide as boats, agog, hands splayed, rictus-backed. Shrieking and falling back happy and then terrified of Hell.
Once I thought I heard him cry, but then there were many tears, how could I so distinguish? There were eight thousand at the Salpêtrière.
Tears. Oceans of them. Some of them his.
I was the hysteric until a death: his, not mine. Came a man, Dr Janet. The next man. I heard he told the world so much more about the mind, about the ills it caused in the body. Was that how it was? I doubted myself. I did not convulse again. I stayed in the Salpêtrière, because where else would I go? Some thought I would never recover. But I did, I did. That’s why I added it to the narrative, earlier.
Do you have a narrative I can follow? One you think
fitting for me?
Here is one story that was put about and repeated. A story circulated of work and purpose: you know who I was with, then, when hysteria had gone off? When people hear this story, they cannot believe it; I was invaluable to her. The great Madame Curie, who worked in her laboratory near our asylum! You would say I paid for my work, hobbled appallingly as I was by the radium, but I had purpose. Then I was Madame Curie’s confidante and the pitchblende we worked with gave me vast lesions, took my legs and my left arm. But I was not a symbol, not a torso with a tired head and a wooden trolley: I was me and I was complete. All my questions in my little coloured books that I will leave, one day, to be discovered!
No.
Are you observing carefully? I was saying it was a story. Fiction at play. Attend! I was whole; injured by radium, working in the little lab at the Salpêtrière, yes, and the lesions were intolerable, but I was used to intolerable and I was whole—and I could sway and dance.
There is so much more to me than meets the eye: everywhere I went, I thought, I noted. The notebooks. I’ve been hearing I kept them, with lots of detail of Madame Curie, her loves and work. My loves and questions to the universe and Venus Aphrodite? No; they were not real. I confined my words to letters I thought I might send—but to whom?—when I could. Where are they now? And after all those years, I could barely write or read, so you might think a child wrote them. But still they existed. Everything else is the narrative you made for me and not my own legend. The one you accepted for me, not I.
There are stories, wrong, desolate, all over the world. And I think there are unsent letters all over the world. Letters of mad women. True, desolate.
I think there are unvisited graves and burials not as were wanted.
How might a letter begin? Dearest love, do you miss me? Are you coming for me? Come soon. I do not like it here and I am walled up and frightened.
Records file in the cabinet, nurse.
Please listen, my darling. I should like a Catholic burial, full rites and only Catholics present. A simple stone but with a meaningful inscription and scripture about liberty. We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. Or, Under his wings you shall find refuge.
At this, I, Lucia, made Violet break off with the story and I said: Violet, I think that this is your burial wish and your desire for freedom and refuge that you are describing. And she said: There you have me, Lucy Light. I am in the company of such sympathetic women, my deepest wants are unfettered. And you’ll remember, won’t you? About my death and what to do?
So I nodded and she continued so that Blanche could tell us more of those forgotten women, crying behind bars, placed there, often, by their menfolk.
Please dear, remember my funeral wants? The things we spoke about together, before you felt the need to bring me here. I know: I was sharp and difficult and my quarrels were difficult for you; my rage radical and showing I was losing control of my thought, becoming, even, insensate. You asked what else you could have done. Said it was for my own good. Yes, yes, yes, you would visit me, when you could. You would come. To the Salpêtrière, as other husbands you knew visited; took the trip out to Bicêtre and to the other hospitals in the towns and provinces of France. I do know it was worse, far worse, for women who came before me, oh yes. The days of keeping us in chains was over. I don’t mean to be ungrateful. It is said that here, at the Salpêtrière, they choose the attendants with such care! Oh, I think I can tell who’s good at their job. I wonder, too, if Charcot thinks I have made particularly interesting photographs, when I am at my most... excessive? But you’ll come, won’t you? I shan’t be here forever. Oh no, I can tell that I am improving!
Delusions. Poor old thing. Yes, delusions of grandeur, alright. Scratch that. She won’t know and it’s not as if she’ll get visitors!
Please. Husband? Why am I here? Everyone watches me and I can find no peace. I cannot always get things into words, and I tense from being watched, so I draw. Eyes, again and again. That is what it feels like inside my head, inside my body. Please bring me home!
File. She’s drawing eyes again. They are just phantasms; delusions. Poor old thing.
Now Violet speaks only for herself, telling of the campaigns she has planned and the pressure she has, for years, tried to exert: she wants to get out and to go home.
Dear Sir, I beg you to consider my petition. This was to a Prime Minister. I am not so sure why I said these two things, though they came easily to me.
Just tear that up altogether. She’s written hundreds, the same.
When I die, I would like a proper Mass said...
Ha. Nice try, sweetheart.
I keep my things safe.
File: inside mattress cover.
And when I die? Nobody knows where I am going then.
File: be still, my heart.
And now Violet takes up the story of Blanche, Queen of the Hysterics, once more.
I have to tell you that there is so much more to know, for all my life I have been a student and there is nothing that I did not note from the quiet corner of my eye when the world thought I was not looking. I was Marie Wittmann, not Blanche, but I think my stage name suits me better! Remember me as you will, but remember me. Perhaps as a songbird, of true flight and piercing song, with a white ruffle at my throat and plumage orderly, limning the sky, just so. Or a robin, plump and pretty and so very alive. I cannot go out, but my thoughts cannot be caged. I am not even sure that Marie was my name, but a name I heard. What do you think? But I know I am not Blanche. Not wholly. And I am not only a specimen, a case.
The nurse said there was a letter for me, but who would write? My siblings ran; Mother and Father, well…
They cannot have looked closely at this impossible thing. Its date; the stamps! Cockerel, emblem of the French Republic; that was right; my century; my year: but another. I rubbed my eyes, laughing. Hysterical! But no, it was there. From England, said the postmark; 1956 stamped as its date. A pretty queen, cobalt blue, thistles, sceptre, a bird. All this I could read.
But how is this letter possible? Generations and seas away.
What do you know what is possible, who has not been mad?
Who’ll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush, as she sat on a bush, I’ll sing a psalm.
Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.
What?—
These things: they keep coming to me. Like a prompt, or a conversation I started once with a dear friend. Or a momentary insight in childhood, that opened up a door.
Violet rested back on her pillow, and the voice of Blanche ended on the most delicate note of—was it?—uplift and hope. Violet smiled at me, though she was exhausted. She was lying in her bed, back, for her last days, in a better room of her own, not in the communal ward downstairs to which the family had transferred her to save money, with some help from the National Health Service, just eight years old at this point. Yes, the private room was much better for listening and scribing. From this upper floor, we could see birds skittering across the sky and were more aware of the moods of light, in the natural world, beyond. In its way, it was peaceful. My room was near hers. I was glad of that at night, at the worst times. But whether in the day or at night, in a room of one’s own or on the ward with the other feebles, Violet had read and thought about other women, penned up and mistranslated, or just forgotten for who they might really have been. She saw them, she said, in her dreams, too, and at all times, heard their voices and mouthed them aloud; answered back, saving it all in her imagination, which had grown expansive, luxuriant, in confinement.
Tell me, I said, of the other—of the other fine lady you wanted me to know.
She closed her eyes, said: Tomorrow. And slept.
5
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time,
I have been half in love wit
h easeful Death…
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
The nightingale. Bertha’s story, who was Anna O.
It is Vienna. 1882 and we will see, Violet tells me, the office and clinic of Dr Breuer, who treats her there, then at Bertha’s home, accompanied. They also send someone to watch her. You’ll want to know who she was, then who she is. She was a famous patient, examined and put in a book, while Blanche got photographed with the myriad hysterics and painted by Brouillet. Did either consent to such publicity?
Now, I have been learning. As I told you, what I did not gain from Violet, I found out. At St Andrew’s they were kind enough not to show restraint on reading material.
For years, until after her death in 1936, you would not have known the identity of one Anna O, though she was studied by Dr Breuer and taken up by Freud; though she has a foothold, because of her intelligence and her derangement, in the very history of psychiatry and of women like us. But just recently, who she was has come to light. Yes, 1953, a biography of Freud which Violet showed me; she’s been reading it, although she says he’s deadly, Freud. Ghastly. Irreligious. All that regarding-God-as-an-illusion malarkey, our thirst for Him being part of an infantile need for a powerful father figure. Violet finds that offensive. Says she prays because it pours out of her. It is painful for her to believe in God and she aches when she speaks to Mary, but it is a necessity and inescapable, lawful as breathing. Real. And besides which, she says, Freud would say that, wouldn’t he?