Art Criticism - The State University of New York

Before any discussion of contemporary modes of hysteria can take
place, a historical framework of hysteria in tenns of its nineteenth century
forerunners must be discussed. This contextualization is necessary in order to
understand how the connective tissue of hysteria continues from the modern
to the post-modern and beyond. A key figure in hysteria's discourse is Max
Nordau, who lays out what he believes are the major traits of hysteria in Degeneration.
They include: extreme emotionalism, a highly impressionable
psyche, morbid mobility of mind, excessive excitability ofimagination, irresistible
desire to imitate, tendency to fabricate stories (which the hysteric actually
believes), desire to make a spectacle of him or herself, and intense fear or
hatred of being ignored.
Nordau argues that hysteria is both a by-product of and heavily
influenced by degeneracy, which he defines as a mental condition or malady of
unhealthy impUlses. The hysteric, Nordau argues, seeks to replicate or imitate
what the degenerate has already achieved and delights in their extravagances.
In the following passage, Nordau speaks of his contagion theory, likening
hysteria's communicability to the spread of disease:
Under the influence of an obsession, a degenerate mind promulgates
some doctrine of order - realism, pornography, mysticism,
symbolism, diabolism. He does this with vehement penetrating
eloquence, with eagerness and fiery heedlessness. Other degenerate,
hysterical, neurasthenicaI minds flock around him, receive from
his lips the doctrine, and live thenceforth only to propagate it.4
Moreover, Nordau likens the art of the Impressionists as "visual derangements"
of degenerate or hysterical artists. Nordau writes,
The curious style of certain recent painters - 'impressionists' -
becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches
of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration
and hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and
reproduce nature as they see it speak the truth. The degenerate
artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball,
will, in fact, perceive the phenomenon of nature trembling, restless,
devoid of firm outline ... s
Here Nordau clearly links the fin-de-siecle style of impressionist art to a particular
manifestation of hysteria within the body of the impressionist artists.
Sigmund Freud will later study this very notion of hysterical symptoms somatically
inserting themselves into bodies, manipulating and changing them. As
for the Impressionists, if, as Nordau writes, "[Their] pictures fail to produce a
comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads them in the despervol.
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