Yesterday’s hysteric becomes the modern period’s schizophrenic girl. Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady, her feminist Foucauldian reading of women in the English asylum: “While the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant.” Even if it’s a madman, Showalter theorizes, his madness is still read as feminine.
