The Truth Machine (11 page)

Evolutionary accounts of sexual differences were incorporated into highly prescriptive late Victorian gynecological and psychological theories.
²⁹
The energeticist theory—taken up enthusiastically by Darwinian doctors such as Henry Maudsley and T. S. Clouston—was used to sanction opposition to any activity that threatened the cult of domesticity. The intense scrutiny devoted to the female body did not extend to the male body; men were defined by their rational deeds, not their sexual psychopathology.
³⁰
To nineteenth-century medicine, those uniquely female aspects of a woman's physiology— menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause—determined all of her other physical and social experiences. One physician in 1882 wrote that it was “as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it.”
³¹
Many physicians accepted the thesis that to thwart the demands of the reproductive processes was to risk disease, insanity, and death.
³²

A corollary of the idea that women should be confined to the home was the claim that they were incapable of developing a sense of justice. Because they were thought not to be able to master the requisite capacities for participation in civic life, women were regarded as permanent sources of civic disorder.
³³
For Rousseau (and later, Freud), whereas men could subdue and sublimate their sexual desires, women could not. Women had only the control of modesty, or as Rousseau put it, “a special sentiment of chasteness.” They were creatures of passion, according to Rousseau, and must use “their natural skills of duplicity and dissemblance to maintain their modesty. In particular, they must always say ‘no' even when they desire to say ‘yes.'”
³⁴
As Rousseau wrote in
Émile:
“Why do you consult their words when it is not their mouths that speak? … The lips always say ‘No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie… . Must her modesty condemn her to misery? Does she not require a means of indicating her inclinations without open expression?”
³⁵

Kant was scornful of the accomplishments of “learned ladies,” asserting that “they might awaken a certain cold admiration by dint of rarity, but will at the same time weaken the charms which give them sway over the opposite sex.”
³⁶
Because women, according to Schopenhauer, lacked “reason and true morality,” they represented “a kind of middle step between the child and the man, who is the true human being.”
³⁷
He pointed to their “instinctive treachery,
and their irredeemable tendency to lying.” Nature had apparently “armed woman with the power of deception for her protection.”
³⁸
Man, however, was endowed with a beard in order to help him disguise changes of expression when confronted by an adversary. Woman could dispense with this, because “for with her dissimulation and command of countenance are inborn.”
³⁹
Nietzsche also noted supposed female deceptiveness in his explanation of her disorderliness: “man wishes woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is
essentially
unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour.”
⁴⁰
Nietzsche opened
Beyond Good and Evil
by asking: “Supposing that Truth is a woman: what then?” “But she does not
want
truth” he answered; “what is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, more inimical to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty.”
⁴¹

They have “a mania for lying,” Lombroso said of female hysterics. Hysteria shared many features with the discourse of female criminality.
⁴²
The incidence of the most widely diagnosed female psychological disorder of the time peaked during the years 1870–1900, a period coterminous with criminal anthropology's own rise to prominence. Symptoms of “the quintessential neurosis, the primal pathology” varied widely but could include fainting, breathlessness, palpitations, sweating, dizziness, shaking, fits, paralysis, blindness, emotional outbursts, eating disorders, anesthesia, and convulsions.
⁴³
One midcentury textbook listed “inflammation of the abdomen, loss of voice, hiccup, a peculiar cough, pain in a spot on the breast-bone opposed to one in the back, pressure on the two together being unbearable: pain in the left side, delirium of various kinds, and paralysis.”
⁴⁴
The women who were so afflicted were described by one physician as being possessive of “more than usual force and decision of character, of strong resolution, fearless to danger.”
⁴⁵
Intellectual and educated young women who sought advanced education or political representation were often diagnosed with the condition. Male doctors colluded with husbands and fathers in the diagnosis of wives and daughters, especially those who petitioned for divorce. Known as the “daughter's disease,” hysteria has been interpreted as an embodied mode of protest for women deprived of social or intellectual opportunities.
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Bourgeois Victorian women were caught in a double bind. They had to be feminine objects of courtship, delicate and innocent, and yet strong, pain-bearing, and self-sacrificing wives and mothers. The disorder's symptoms have, therefore, been viewed an expression of what was socially problematic for women at the time, a “psychosomatic protest” against suffocating social conditions. Mutism symbolized
women's “lack of voice” in the wider society; anorexia echoed the “starvation” of women relegated to the domestic sphere.
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Both a product and an indictment of her culture, the hysteric was considered “duplicitous, self-dramatizing, and morally undisciplined.”
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Thought to be a common illness among prostitutes, masturbation was afforded a causal role in the disorder's aetiology. Only in the male could hysteria be considered a truly abnormal state, according to Thomas Laycock, who naturalized the hysteric as a “child-woman.” It was but a short step from extreme nervous susceptibility to hysteria, and from there to overt insanity, claimed Dr. Isaac Ray in 1866. He proposed that pregnancy was a time when “strange thoughts, extraordinary feelings, unseasonable appetite, criminal impulses, may haunt a mind at other times innocent and pure.” The bourgeois hysteric was considered idle, self-indulgent, and deceitful. “As a general rule,” wrote the professor of clinical medicine at Marseille in 1883, “all women are hysterical and … every woman carries within her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a temperament, and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria.”
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As one American churchman put it in the 1890s, “The excessive development of the emotional in her nervous system ingrafts on the female organisation a neurotic or hysterical condition which is the source of much of the female charm when it is kept within due restraint. In moments of excitement, it is liable to explode in violent paroxysms. Every woman carries this power of irregular, illogical and incongruous action and no-one can foretell when the explosion will come.”
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Hysteria was considered nothing less than “a kind of pathological intensification of female nature itself.”
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An acute marker of the pathologizing discourse of the nineteenth-century female body, hysteria shared an explanatory framework with female criminality, whose features included biological determinism, sexuality, invisibility, emotionality, irrationality, pathology, and primitivism. Hysteria was considered such an intense exemplar of female nature that it was itself strongly suspected to be a form of malingering. According to Maudsley, hysterics were “perfect examples of the subtlest deceit, the most ingenious lying, the most diabolic cunning, in the service of vicious impulses.” He denounced the “moral perversion” of young women who “believing or pretending that they cannot stand or walk, lie in bed … when all the while their only paralysis is paralysis of will.”
⁵²
“It is a most extraordinary fact, which it is of much importance to bear in mind,” wrote the author of one midcentury medical textbook, “that there is scarcely a disease to which the human body is liable that is not simulated in hysteria, and it requires a
most severe scrutiny to detect the fictitious and real malady… . Hysteric affection of the joints are very common, as also of the spine; and contractions of the limbs, obstinate vomiting, constipation, and even pregnancy, may be enumerated among the various simulated conditions.”
⁵³

Writing in the
Lancet
in 1855, F. C. Skey argued that the doctor's first task was to distinguish the true illness from the false. “You would imagine this task an easy one, but it is not so. Diseases are feigned both willfully and unconsciously; the first are generally detectible by a discriminating judgment; the second are imitated by the hand of Nature herself, and are not so readily detected. This facetious condition of the body, that mocks the reality of truth,—that not only invades the localities, but imitates the symptoms of real diseases in all the diversity of its forms, deluding the judgment and discrimination of men of even considerable experience in their profession,— is known under the term
hysteria
.”
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“These patients are veritable actresses,” complained Jules Falret, alienist at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1890, “They do not know of a greater pleasure than to deceive… . In one word, the life of the hysteric is nothing but one perpetual falsehood; they affect the airs of piety and devotion and let themselves be taken for saints while at the same time secretly abandoning themselves to the most shameful actions.”
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The suspicion over the veracity of hysteria expressed the long-standing distrust of woman in general. In the same paradoxical way that the female hysteric was both suffering from a real illness and feigning an imaginary one, so the female criminal was saturated with an evident criminality yet exhibited no physical signs of that criminality whatsoever.

The notion that women were located in the middle of a hierarchy that placed “primitives,” children, and the mad at the bottom with white European men at the top was widespread and long-lived. In 1875, W. L. Distant argued that the “form of the skull” and the weight of the brain demonstrated that “women hold an intermediate position between the child and the man.” It was incontestable, he claimed, “that there are physiological conditions which must for ever tend against the possibility of women as a rule arriving at an equal, much less acquiring a superior, position to men in the mental struggle.”
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In 1899, Alfredo Niceforo pronounced that scientific tests had established that female traits were “impulsiveness, fickleness, puerile vanity, love for exterior appearance, and triviality, all the noted psychological attributes, in a word, that are common to women and savages.”
⁵⁷

Having inaugurated the measurement and testing of women from the 1880s, criminology became increasingly obsessed with women, as evidenced
by Lombroso and Ferrero's
The Female Offender
(1895), Salvatore Ottolenghi's
The Sensitivity of Women
(1896), and Scipio Sighele's
The Modern Eve
(1910). Ottolenghi's thesis was an elaboration of Lombroso and Ferrero's claim that “women … feel less as they think less.”
⁵⁸
Although the female offender was depicted as the mirror image of her male counterpart, she was nevertheless thought to possess some unique problematic qualities. Compared to a man, wrote Béla Földes, a woman is “more passive and less educated into controlling her will. She is often merely the intellectual factor, or the instigator, of crime.”
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A woman's culpability would be lessened if it could be shown that her biological state had been a causal factor in the execution of her offence. As Maudsley claimed, “cases have occurred in which women, under the influence of derangement of their special bodily functions, have been seized with an impulse, which they have or have not been able to resist, to kill or to set fire to property or to steal.”
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Whenever a woman has committed any offence, wrote Havelock Ellis, “it is essential that the relation of the act to her monthly cycle should be ascertained, as a matter of routine.”
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Women might not be “given to intoxicants, nor to gambling, nor to roving,” explained D. G. Brinton, but “they are more timid, more religious, more tender-hearted, and their sexuality is more passive.” Brinton was reporting on Ferrero's recent “ungallant conclusion that the woman of to-day is less criminal because less intelligent than the man”: “She is less disturbed by new ideas because she is slow to perceive them. When she is bad, however, she is ‘very, very bad,' surpassing men in callous cruelty amid absence of pity or remorse.”
⁶²
Lombroso and Ferrero quoted Rykère's claim that feminine criminality was “more cynical, more depraved, and more terrible than the criminality of the male.” They also approvingly quoted an Italian proverb that made the same point: “Rarely is a woman wicked, but when she is she surpasses the man.”
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They agreed with the prominent Italian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè, who claimed that rarely “is the daughter of a bad woman honest, the son of a madman sane.”
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Another “terrible point of superiority in the female born criminal over the male,” they concluded, “lies in the refined, diabolical cruelty with which she accomplishes her crime.”
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Most of Lombroso and Fererro's
The Female Offender
was devoted to the discussion of pathology. A relentless encyclopedia of biological anomalies, the book contained chapters including “The Brains of Female Criminals,” “Facial and Cephalic Anomalies of Female Criminals,” and “The Criminal Type in Women and its Atavistic Origin.” It is remarkable how much attention the authors devoted to physical measurements. In chapter 1 alone, for example,
“The Skull of the Female Offender,” the authors presented thirty-nine tables of various descriptive statistics, including measurements of “Cranial Capacity,” “Facial Angle,” “Bizygomatic Breadth,” and “Weight of the Lower Jaw.” In many cases the tabulations were ordered according to type of crime: homicide, infanticide, complicity in rape, prostitution, arson, and so on: “The frontal diameter is larger in prostitutes than criminals. Females guilty of rape and infanticide have the highest frontal index, and thieves and prostitutes the lowest…. The nasal index is inferior to the average of 48, especially among prostitutes, thieves, murderesses, and incendiaries.”
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