Death by Laughter
Gaslighting the libido
Maggie Hennefeld
The following is an excerpt from Death By Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Readers of Parapraxis can order now and receive 20% off with the code CUP20.
LAUGHING DOPPELGÄNGERS OR AFFECT ALIENS?
THE PECULIAR HYSTERIA OF ESTHER WAKEFIELD
The contention is made that no stranger malady than this has ever undergone
the attention of physicians.
—Anaconda Standard (Anaconda, Montana), August 13, 1899
In the spirit of imagining hysteria as a misalignment of laughter, I’d like to turn to Esther Wakefield, an unknown woman from Chicago whose pageantry of uproarious symptoms reportedly gave “a black eye to science” and left the country’s medical physicians “all at sea” in 1899. Wakefield had been lounging in a hammock outside her home on West Monroe Street in Chicago when she was unceremoniously “assaulted” by “some flying insect” that stung her on the lips. The melanolestes picipes (or “kissing bug”) sent her into a “state of hysteria,” characterized by raging fits of boisterous laughter and a “spasmodic desire to embrace and kiss those about her.” Wakefield had been described as “modest, refined, cultured—the last person in the world to give way to . . . femininely nervous impulse.” Yet the pestilent sting contorted her personality into just that— beyond nervousness, her “hysteria assumed a tone of such violence” that she had to be anesthetized by doctors and “given over” to ether for twelve hours.
Like Barbara Barr, the woman who allegedly laughed for eight hours at a corny dentistry pun, Wakefield languished in an unconscious stupor. But thankfully she soon recovered (as had Barr) and quietly returned to her job as a stenographer and typewriter in an office. Her physician Dr. Martin reassured her widowed mother that “the crisis had been happily passed.” Cut to the next day on a streetcar as it entered a tunnel:
Passengers aboard . . . were startled by a sudden burst of laughter, strident shrill, almost uncanny, from a woman’s lips, and by the spectacle of a sudden seizing of the conductor in a fervid embrace and the implanting upon his embarrassed lips of half a dozen swift and burning kisses by as charming a girl as one might find in many a long day.
It was Esther Wakefield! She proceeded to make swift work of the car, accosting other male passengers (including a “fat” man “quite old enough to deserve a better fate”) and “laughing insanely” until the police were called on the scene and she was forcibly committed to an asylum.
It is important to highlight the context in which this story circulated. It was originally reported in the Chicago Chronicle, but various versions appeared in local newspapers as a curiosity item. It would have made the same rounds as many of the “death by laughter” obituaries, such as “Killed by a Joke” and “Last Laugh Was Not Best Laugh.” Wakefield perhaps had more in common with fatal cachinnators such as Bertha Pruett and Polly Jackson than with Josef Breuer and Freud’s exploited, tongue-clacking conversion hysterics. Unlike Pruett and Jackson, however, Wakefield was not consumed by her laughter; instead, she dissociated from it. “And here is what still puzzles physicians and seems to be giving a black eye to science,” according to the Standard, “that she is wholly, completely rational on her days of sanity—is utterly, totally irresponsible on her days of hysteria.” Her revolving door consciousness—swinging from polite decorum to libidinal detonation—lingered in a volatile condition indefinitely (or at least through any surviving record of her escapades).
Miss Esther and Mistress Wakefield: 1899
The trope of an uncanny double or doppelgänger was a subject of intense fascination at the time. It galvanized gothic horror tales of murderous alter egos run amok such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and inspirited fantastic trick films with titles like The Triple Lady (Star-Film, 1898), The Four Troublesome Heads (Star-Film, 1898), and Artistic Creation (R. W. Paul, 1901), in which an artist’s drawing of a woman’s head magically comes to life and gives birth to a child.37 This was the mutating media climate in which unrepressed fancies ran roughshod over suggestible bodily appendages.
The problem of divided selves had a very different flavor in early psychoanalysis, where phenomena also drew on “the symptom pool”: the “permissible symptoms” of distress and desire that circulate “in a given culture at a given time,” as Showalter paraphrases Edward Shorter. Hysteria’s “symptom pool” interlaced contagious bodily mimicry with obsessive cultural imagery, giving somatic form to deep affective crisis. As soon as “a powerful affect interrupts the normal course of ideas,” argued Breuer, it forces its “way into consciousness,” where “hallucinations are introduced into the perceptual system and motor acts are [aroused] independently of the conscious will.” Breuer’s patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) exhibited a “double conscience” that drilled potholes in her personal memories and seized violent control over her waking life. “In Freud’s model of unconscious emotions,” as Sara Ahmed notes, “the affect itself is not repressed: what is repressed is the idea to which the affect is attached.” Unmoored from its cognitive reality, affect takes on a life of its own, wreaking anxiety, shame, depression, fear, anger, and repulsion—or aggressive libido and hell-raising jubilation (à la Wakefield).
This has long been a crux of debate among hysteria’s feminist theorists: to symbolize or to carnivalize?
In Ahmed’s style, we might think of Wakefield as an “affect alien”: a variant of the feminist killjoy, whose disruption of ordinary affect jams the wheels of the grinding feedback loop between domestic reproduction and patriarchal power. Like Wakefield, Anna O. had her world cracked in two after she was repeatedly denied any outlet (other than daydreaming) for her habitual anxiety, boredom, and intellectual frustration. But what if Anna O.’s alienated “second self ” could have laughed loudly and obscenely like Wakefield? In Freud’s terms, jokes liberate the vast psychic energy required to maintain inhibitions—to keep that rising, alienated alternate self at bay—effectively laughing off the “quota” of “inhibitory cathexis” that is “ready to be discharged through laughter.” In contrast, the hysteric’s pathologized alter ego was haunted by nervous attacks, delirious hallucinations, somatic anesthesia, and the loss of necessary words. Her jarring actions proceeded from the unavailability of her inner thoughts.
More of an “affect alien” than an alienated doppelgänger, by every available account, it sounds like Wakefield had an extravagantly good time. She enjoyed her symptoms all too much!
DIALECTICS OF DEADLY LAUGHTER AND HYSTERIC DISSOCIATION
When does a thwarted laugh spiral into a hysterical symptom? In the case of jokes, we have an “indefinable feeling” that correlates with an unsettling sense of “absence,” suggests Freud, and “then all at once the joke is there,” licensing a “sudden release of intellectual tension.” Like laughter, hysteric phenomena arise from the eruption of libidinal energy and taboo flights of fancy. But without a satisfying outlet in waking life, those fugitive impulses turn inward, where their explosive affects smolder, becoming altogether inaccessible to consciousness. Hysteric symptoms, unlike joke laughter, take hold once it is already too late for playful language to give voice to sticky feelings.
Anna O. lost her basic motor functions and powers of speech entirely while under the grip of her secondary state. Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser) suffered deep melancholia, contortions of speech (which caused her to emit sharp, uncanny clacking noises with her tongue), and seizures of terror inciting uncontrollable spasms. Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben) felt an “icy grip” in the back of her neck, a “painful coldness in all her extremities,” an inability to speak, and terrifying delusions that seeped through “the most striking gaps” in her otherwise “wellstocked memory.” She was particularly tormented by hallucinatory visions of rats and mice. Even Dora—the “‘mistress’ of the Signifier,” per Cixous—suffered from nervous coughing, total loss of voice, auratic migraines, and tunneling depression. Although these muffled fragments of “passionate voices” have provoked feminists to read Freud’s authoritative narratives with the “utmost suspicion,” as Toril Moi insists, it cannot be denied: hysteria was utter hell.
The “death by laughter” cases reveal abbreviated alternatives to hysteria’s surreal dissociation into multiple selves. How many women would have preferred acute rhapsody in lieu of vanishing into their bodies entirely, unmoored from their official lives? In the instance of death by laughter, there was always a trigger: maybe a dentistry joke, a culinary gaffe, or an out-of-tune musical instrument. But hysteric symptoms arose without warning—unless directly solicited through suggestion or hypnosis—and then recurred long after initially subsiding. When intense feelings adhere to unlocatable memories, they might never fade if punitively denied a satisfying outlet for discharge, let alone vindication.
An injury “repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently than one that has had to be accepted” or swallowed. “The essence of the talking cure,” argues Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect, consists in “reuniting the repressed with the words that expressed the affect attached to it or which converted the affect from one state to another . . . (as when depression is converted to anger).” Freudian “talking,” however, discouraged political passions such as anger, instead soliciting the revelation of sexual trauma to mitigate maladaptive pathos. “Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong,” preaches Ahmed in the context of sexual harassment. “But in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger.” In other words, it is a vicious circle between the hystericization of anger and its stone-cold denial. Curative talking thus aimed to placate aberrant affect with biographical rag-picking rather than risk unleashing the tumult of its biosocial protest.
Where do we draw the line, then, between signifier and utterance—or symbolic inscription and Medusan volcano—in the business of reparative talking? Do wayward feelings always have to be articulated in sensemaking language to clarify their source and direction? Or are they equally (if not more) powerful when let loose in their sheer affective capacities?
This has long been a crux of debate among hysteria’s feminist theorists: to symbolize or to carnivalize? Laughter opened a field of antiphallic mischief for Cixous’s French interlocutors, but it widely missed the mark of hysteric malfeasance. “Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a sexual repression?” urges Luce Irigaray: “Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter,” which precedes and exceeds the “mask” of hysteria. Irigaray locates the latter (hysteria) as a “stigmatized” pit “where fantasies, ghosts, and shadows fester and must be unmasked, interpreted.” The primacy of laughter, in contrast, can speak for itself. Julia Kristeva opposes “situationist” laughter that merely “places or displaces abjection” to the apocalyptic, piercing, abject laughs that ignite “the spark of the symbolic” until the “desire to speak explodes.” The latter laughter however, differs sharply from hysteria, which “brings about, ignores, or seduces the symbolic,” according to Kristeva, “but does not produce it.” Only abjection can be productive of language.
As a hysteric symptom, laughter lingers in the abyss of bodily signs that are “heard but not yet understood.” Their latency is precisely what invests hysteria’s strange immortality. The laughing female hysteric survived seemingly any degree of violence inflicted upon her. Her hysteric laughter, like any other symptom, represented the word turned into flesh—it did not liberate alienated affect: it tattooed it on one’s body in magically erasable pen.
Death By Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Readers of Parapraxis can order now and receive 20% off with the code CUP20.
Excerpted from Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema by Maggie Hennefeld. Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.