The Men inside The Mad House.
or: how Surrealism stole hysteria.
At the end of Nadja, an autobiographical novel written by the founding father of Surrealism, André Breton, writes:
“Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be.”
Beautiful women are either mad, morose, or both. Any in-between casts too mysterious a shadow for the modern mind to comprehend. Nevertheless, André Breton was fascinated by the madness, by the vacillating nature of hysteria, so much so that he believed it to be “the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the nineteenth century.”
One branch of Breton’s surrealist framework was the revolt against rationalism, a call to turn away from the Enlightenment era of hard science that limited the human experience with its idea of there being no basis for spiritual understanding. Surrealism appeared as a sort of Neo-faith, championing the power of the unconscious, and you’d be unsurprised to know that one of Breton’s earliest inspirations—aside from Freud, another unsurprising discovery—was Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor of hysteria who set up a hospital for hysterics…so women. Charcot was known for turning his patients— often working-class women—into public spectacles for male consumption, setting up an exhibition of women whom he would hypnotise to induce these attacks of hysteria. Most notable was the arc de cercle - the arc of hysteria1, in which a woman is seen arching on a bed, her arms and legs exposed but her head hidden. This inspired quite seminal works like Louis Bourgeoisie’s titular arch of hysteria2, where a woman’s form is bronzed into a literal circle. Salvador Dali also incorporated the arch in his 1967 painting, Nude with Snail3, depicting a naked woman arched backwards with a snail on her stomach.
The interesting thing about all of these interpretations of hysteria is that the women themselves were largely unresponsive. They were present, of course; in fact, they were muses, according to Roland Penrose4, but never agents of their own image in the myriad of photos, paintings, or literary works that emerged from the early years of the Surrealist movement. Much like how many male directors and writers portray women, they are merely subjects of the man’s mind, which is to say that their own minds, the woman’s interiority, is just as subject to how any given man chooses to perceive it. How terrifying.
It is both fascinating and depressing to realise, through an era so canon in the history of art and literature, that for a long time we did not know what lived in the minds of those hysterical women. It had been decided for us by men like Breton, who went on to develop said movement from scrutinising the ‘youthful hysteria’ of patients like Louise Augustine Gleizes, a woman who, amidst psychosis, was photographed by Charcot and became his most “celebrated hysteric”5. In the end, Breton, along with his co-author Aragon, came to this conclusion in their manifesto: “hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and may in all respects be considered as a supreme means of expression.”
The mind of a hysterical woman can be metaphorically summarised by Leonora Carrington, who, in response to Breton’s idea of convulsion being the most supreme human state, said in a 1993 profile of her life in El País, ‘not Breton or anyone has ever seen the inside of a Spanish madhouse’.
Carrington was placed in a mental asylum in Santander and frequently had spasms from the medications she was given. Her madness was not ideal nor was it romantic, and yet Breton developed Surrealism based on this romantic idea that madwomen have an affinity for it, for wildness and ferality rather than the madness in question springing from trauma or distress.
Where women are actually considered, there’s a clear re-evaluation of belief. The detached voyeurism of the female form becomes internal as artists like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Césaire allow us access into their imaginations. From the traumatic impact of Freud’s psychoanalysis, to Cahun’s radical self-assertion as a non-binary lesbian part of the French resistance during the Nazi Occupation, and Suzanne’s assertions of the politically liberated state one can assume through surrealism. These women, who at one point would have been victims and subjects and muses, rightfully inserted themselves back into the frameworks that only profited off their ‘peculiarities’.
My reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is what birthed this rabbit hole I dove headfirst into. What we see at several points in The Yellow Wallpaper is the narrator being constrained in the ways she expresses herself. The story follows our narrator as she settles into the room on the top floor of a colonial mansion, isolated and confined, resting after giving birth. In this room is a hideous yellow wallpaper, whose “outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.” It is clear she does not want to be in this room, but it is where she must stay. To her physician husband, the ‘rest cure’ is reasonable. It’s rational. But clearly, as the story progresses, that sort of stifling only increases the intensity of the narrator’s interior. More exclamation marks, more surety that there is, in fact, a woman in the wallpaper. The only way we’re exposed to her interiority is through the words on the page, which are written in an almost epistolary format, inviting us squarely into the imagination of a woman who is being told that to imagine anything is to tire herself out. Her husband doesn’t allow her to write because he doesn’t want her to entertain ‘fanciful’ ideas, unknowingly pushing her further across the barrier of the fanciful and right into the fantastical.
Where Breton and his ideas paint hysteria as the womb growing his larger beliefs about Surrealism, essentially pedestalling women’s suffering as a tool for higher understanding, the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is barred from exploring her imagination for fear of her getting sick, despite her desire to write being the only real outlet in which she’s able to express… well, anything. She’s kept to a routine where she must do absolutely nothing; all matters of agency are taken from her, and she expresses that she should be grateful for this.
“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but a temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”
It’s such a fascinating contradiction, isn’t it? This story was written in 1892, 30-odd years before the Surrealist movement took place, almost as if it were a forewarning of how little agency women would have, even with their own imaginations. What I’ve learnt about surrealism from the eyes of women is that where men found intrigue in hysteria and convulsiveness, women found respite in the private, internal struggle of womanhood. If the narrator were to freely explore these things in her writing, what would have become of her? If she had the support of her husband instead of his restrictive dismissal, a chance to inhabit the emotional turmoil that comes with postnatal depression, would her story have been different?
As I’ve said before, the understanding that men have of the female mind is categorical. It is both entrancing and infuriating, this mind, but first and foremost, it is illogical. The manic pixie dream girl is the reincarnation of Charcot’s ‘young hysteria’. She is the ethereal femme-enfant, a smorgasbord of every romanticised trait that has plagued women for centuries, made flesh—“It is relevant to mention that the language used to describe women suffering from hysteria was not unlike the phrases used against feminists - ‘capricious, coquettish, wilful, and troublemaking’”.6
The manic pixie dream girl is a gateway drug to absurdity, an absurdity she herself never truly expresses because then she would just be a complex human being. No, she is simply the bridge by which a confused young man experiences a bildungsroman to rival all bildungsromans.
I also like to categorise some of these women as charismatic martyrs. They’re often the type to be shown through a film camera or camcorder, splashing water into the lens, smiling and laughing, resplendent in their joy. She exists only through the eyes of a miserable male protagonist who loved her just enough to care about her death for the first thirty minutes of the film, and she is a martyr because death or disappearance is the final act for any woman in a man’s story.
This character has evolved now, though. Everything from the rape-revenge genre7 to Yorgos Lanthimos’s own femme-enfant in Poor Things, we have no shortage of hysterical subjects in modern-day media. Though not directly influenced by Surrealism, the origin of the movement is opaque in how often these characters are used as vessels for a man’s ascension or redemption, despite the lack of individual work done on his part to self-reflect. But that’s the beauty of the hysterical woman. Her disregard of social conventions only works to convince her onlookers that she has come into a man’s life and given him the tools necessary for his betterment. She herself is a tool. She is mad enough to make our down-on-his-luck protagonist feel special for being chosen and morose enough that when her womanly insecurities manifest (because they always do), his ego is sufficiently stroked when she inevitably asks him if he thinks she’s pretty. They’re having a pick-me-off, and no one is winning.
I hope you don’t take this as a denouncing of Surrealism. I love Surrealism, and in fact, I’m currently studying Surrealism across several mediums, but in venturing down this course of study, an understanding of its buried roots is critical. I am always more interested in what women contribute to art and literature, and so it’s unsurprising that many of my favourite works—some of which I mentioned above—expressly cover female interiority. The reclaimation, as I’ve said, has led to many more surrealist works made by women that don’t place themselves at the centre of a romantic idea, but rather at the helm of what was always meant to be an embodied expression of human creativity. I think Surrealism is an innately human movement, one that needed to be fed varying perspectives and failed to recognise the voices of those it took from.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/feb/11/women-surrealists-gender-occult-cats
https://www.thebeliever.net/the-person-attached-to-the-limb/
I am a Yhara Zayd stan account. The first ten minutes of this video dissects the misogyny of the rape-revenge genre, and it is brilliant:
Ennie every one of yours newsletters are so compelling and wonderfully researched and put together, I don’t know if I’ve said that before but I always think it when I see one in my inbox
It's funny. I just read another post that included The Yellow Wallpaper in it. Also included topics of female histeria. I like the idea you present a little bit of romantization in the lack of knowledge of something. Especially of female pains. I think it happens a lot to this day.