Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T12:23:38.606Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hysteria's upheavals: emotional fault lines in Cristina di Belgiojoso's health history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Susanna Ferlito
Susanna Ferlito*
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota, USA
*
∗Email: ferli001@umn.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines a series of ‘patient-letters' that Cristina di Belgiojoso (1807–1871) wrote to her doctor, Paolo Maspero (1811–1895) over the span of three decades. Belgiojoso's notoriously frail health has been crucial to the construction of her unique and heroic position in the panorama of female patriotism in the Risorgimento. This article focuses on Belgiojoso's ‘patient-voice’ as represented in her letters to Maspero and foregrounds her self-diagnosis of hysteria. This diagnosis provides insight into the emotional and physical upheavals of a woman torn between transgression of and compliance with normative female gender behaviour of her time.

Keywords

emotionsBelgiojosohysteriapatient–doctorRisorgimento
Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 17 , Issue 2: Special issue: Emotions , May 2012 , pp. 157 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banti, A.M. 2005. L'onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII secolo alla grande guerra. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Barbiera, R. 1930. Da memorie inedite o rare e da archivii segreti di stato. Revised edition. Milan: Fratelli Treves.Google Scholar
Belgiojoso, C. 1866. Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire. Nuova Antologia 1, no. 1:96–113.Google Scholar
Belgiojoso, C. 1841–1847. Letters to Dott. Paolo Maspero. Archivio Ferrari. Cartella 18, Plico XXX. Milan: Biblioteca delle Civiche Raccolte Storiche.Google Scholar
Beizer, J. 1993. Ventriloquized bodies: Narratives of hysteria in nineteenth-century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Brombert, B. 1977. Cristina: Portraits of a princess. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Brombert, B. 1981. Cristina di Belgiojoso, trans. Hilia, Brinis. Milan: Dall'Oglio.Google Scholar
Campbell, S. 1994. Being dismissed: The politics of emotional expression. Hypatia 9, no. 3:46–65.Google Scholar
De Donato, G. 1983. La parabola della donna. Nella letteratura italiana dell'Ottocento. Bari: Adriatica.Google Scholar
De Longis, R. 1991. Le donne hanno avuto un Risorgimento? Elementi per una discussione. Memoria: rivista di storia delle donne, no. 31:80–91.Google Scholar
Didi-Huberman, G. 2003. Invention of hysteria: Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dracobly, A. 2004. Theoretical change and therapeutic innovation in the treatment of syphilis in mid-nineteenth-century France. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 4:522–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dudden, B. 1991. The woman beneath the skin: A doctor's patients in eighteenth-century Germany, trans. Dunlap, Thomas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Faber, D. 1997. Jean-Martin Charcot and the epilepsy/hysteria relationship. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 6, no. 3:275–90.Google Scholar
Faber, D. 2000. Making distinctions: The contribution of Hector Landouzy to differential diagnosis in relation to hysteria and epilepsy. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 9, no. 1:67–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Flori, E. 1941. Cristina di Belgioioso and Paolo Maspero. Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di scienze e lettere 74:100–47.Google Scholar
Fugazza, M. and Roerig, K. 2010. La prima donna d'Italia. Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso tra politica e giornalismo. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Gattey, C.N. 1974. Cristina di Belgiojoso. Florence: Vallecchi.Google Scholar
Goldstein, J. 1991. The uses of male hysteria: Medical and literary discourse in nineteenth-century France. Representations 34:134–165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Homer, . Odissea. 1845, trans. Maspero, P. Milan: Giuseppe Redaelli.Google Scholar
Jones, A. 2002. The ‘eternal return’: Self-portrait photography as a technology of embodiment. Signs 27, no. 4:947–78.Google Scholar
Landouzy, H. 1846. Traité complet de l'hystérie. Paris: Bailliere.Google Scholar
Luzio, A. 1924. Garibaldi, Cavour, Verdi. Nuova serie di studi e ricerche sulla storia del Risorgimento, con la completa bibliografia dell'autore. Turin: Fratelli Bocca.Google Scholar
Maldini Chiarito, D. 2010. Gli scritti della vecchiaia. In La prima donna d'Italia. Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso tra politica e giornalismo, ed. Fugazza, M. and Roerig, K., 193–220. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Malvezzi de' Medici, A. 1937. La principessa Cristina di Belgiojoso, 3 vols. Milan: Fratelli Treves.Google Scholar
Maspero, P. 1859. Dell'epilessia e del miglior modo per curarla. Milan: Chiusi.Google Scholar
Maspero, P. 1866. Sulle polveri e le acque antisifilitiche del pollini: osservazioni. Milan: Francesco Vallardi.Google Scholar
Micale, M. 1995. Approaching hysteria: Disease and its interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. 2000. Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pisano, L. 2004. Donne del giornalismo italiano: Da Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel a Ilaria Alpi. Dizionario storico bio-bibliografico Secoli XVIII–XX. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Rey, R. 1995. The history of pain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rooney, P. 1991. Gendered reason: Sex metaphor and conceptions of reason. Hypatia 6, no. 2:77–103.Google Scholar
Schwegman, M. 1996. Gualberta Alaide Beccari. Emancipazionista e scrittrice. Pisa: Domus Mazziniana.Google Scholar
Scott, J.W. 1991. The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4:773–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Showalter, E. 1987. The female malady: Women, madness and English culture 1830–1980. London: Virago.Google Scholar
Soldani, S. 2007. Il risorgimento delle donne. In Il Risorgimento. Storia d'Italia. Annali 22, ed. Banti, A. M. and Ginsborg, P., 183–224. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Tatti, M. 1998. La scrittura epistolare di Cristina di Belgioioso e le lettere inedite a Jules Mohl (1837–1868). Franco–Italica 13:63–157.Google Scholar
Tatti, M. 2010. Il personaggio Cristina di Belgiojoso. In Cristina di Belgiojoso. Politica e cultura nell'Europa dell'Ottocento, ed. Conti Odorisio, G., Giorcelli, C. and Monsagrati, G., 221–235. Naples: Loffredo Editore.Google Scholar
Trasforini, M.A. 1982. Corpo isterico e sguardo medico. Storie di vita e storie di sguardi fra medici e isteriche nell'800 francese. Aut Aut Jan–April, no. 187–188:175–206.Google Scholar
Valisa, S. 2008. Gendered quests: Analysis, revelation, and the epistemology of gender in Neera's Teresa, Lydia and L'indomani. The Italianist 28:92–112.Google Scholar
Veauvy, C. and Pisano, L. 1997. Paroles oubliées. Les femmes et la construction de l'Etat-Nation en France et en Italie 1789–1860. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Vercesi, P.L. 2010. La principessa di Belgioioso giornalista, direttore ed editore di giornali. In La prima donna d'Italia, ed. Fugazza, M. and Roerig, K., 83–106. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Whitehouse, H.R. 1906. A revolutionary princess: Christina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio, her life and times, 1808–1871. London: T.F. Unwin.Google Scholar
Wild, W. 2000. Doctor–patient correspondence in 18th century Britain: A change in rhetoric and relationship. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29:47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar