earticle

영어

Hysteria has been defined as a disease caused in certain women, who couldn’t have sexual intercourses regularly with men or not at all and as a disorder accompanying fits, paralysis and so on. Due to this definition, hysteria has developed as the discourse of defining others, especially women. In seventeenth century, however, a few physicians who asserted the possibility of male hysteria appeared, and in the mid and late nineteenth century, the discourse on male hysteria began to be on everyone's lips more frequently than before. In this thesis, analyzing the discourse on male hysteria in British periodicals from 1830 to 1900, I argue that male hysteria was compared with female hysteria, being regarded the same as and simultaneously distinguished from female hysteria. In each chapter, I show with more detail and delicacy that male hysteria was crossed over the categories of gender, class, and race and excluded the others in these categories. In male hysteria discourse, others in gender, class and race intersected in the middle of the categories, while their images were intensified as being much inferior and were used to strengthen the superiority of British white middle class men. I, above all, will point out and prove that not only could male hysteria be defined as the cultural disease which excluded the others of gender, class and race and made them inferior and but also it reflected the superiority of British white middle class men to the others.