Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Critical Essay by Evelyne Ender

SOURCE: "Nineteenth-Century Hysteria: The Medical Context," in Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 25-65.

In the following excerpt, Ender examines the ultimate convergence between differing explanations of hysteria—emotional/moral and physiological—and concludes that femininity is a predisposition for all of them.