13 “I Can’t Leave”: The Iconography of Hysteria and the Anti-superhero

Sorouja Moll

“I watched Jessica Jones and it reminded me of you,” somebody said to me in a public message on Facebook.

—Mo Daviau 2016.

Mo Daviau is not a superhero. She is a survivor. She is also a writer who reflects on the day-to-day implications of living through the haunting torment of an abusive relationship, and on how, even though she is now departed from its physical space, she is never really able to escape. Daviau suffers from the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the suggestion that she watch Marvel’s Jessica Jones perhaps arrived as a salve prescribed to soothe a friend’s pain and to express that she is not alone; there is someone else out there who survived gender-based violence. Yet, Daviau recalls that while sitting on her bed, laptop open streaming the cleverly packaged reanimation of her experienced violence, she related less to Jessica Jones than to the figure of Hope. The two characters (Jessica and Hope) are cut from the same cloth—rape culture. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (2016) argues that the series’s representation of the female anti-superhero serves “a purpose”; she points out that “they [female anti-heroes] might hold up a mirror to our society’s own worst traits,” or “they might offer a story of redemption . . . and some of the best of our anti-heroines also trace their fatal flaws back to their struggles with, specifically, womanhood.” In this chapter, I explore the “purpose” of the anti-superhero exemplar in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. I argue that the gendered, sexualized, and popularized representations of transgression are pooled to reinforce patriarchal hierarchies and hysteria stereotypes with ideological strategies that make the former and latter inescapable. To do this work, I undertake a comparative discourse analysis in order to show that the show’s narratives and visual tropes representing transgression are not a recent phenomenon, but in fact have a long history. They were reanimated, documented, and archived in a nineteenth-century Paris asylum, La Salpêtrière. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology, was a researcher and teacher at the hospital. Known as the “daring Caesar of hysteria” (Showalter 1997, 31), Charcot directed, recorded, and disseminated images of hysteria as choreographed tableaux produced for the public during his leçons due mardi, or Tuesday lectures. Charcot devised, in a way not unlike the Netflix series, performances in which transgression and hysteria are bound as twinned representations of the struggles with womanhood specifically, drawn from examples from antiquity and also the work of William Shakespeare. Comparing these contextual histories with Marvel’s Jessica Jones, I evaluate the repeated objectification and gendered renderings of hysteria amplified by Jones’s fight against, and Hope’s fall within, the apparatus of patriarchy symbolized in the misogynistic arch-enemy Kilgrave. 

I begin by examining the underlying contexts and methods used in the popularized examples of hysteria and their applications appearing in iconic and pedagogical representations of such figures as Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US presidential race. I then carry out a comparative analysis of Jessica Jones, Hope Shlottman, and Charcot’s use of Shakespearean characters with his patient Louise Augustine Gleizes (known as Augustine or “A”) to exemplify hysteria for his audiences. The legacy of this representation reappears in Jessica and Hope. Further, I examine how Charcot evokes the playwright’s figures as an ideological teaching method as they impart the gendered discourses of hysteria in order to demonstrate and sustain inequitable power relations, social hierarchies, and sexual violence. Finally, I argue that the series’s characters are rooted in forms of gender-based violence. The show’s normalization of abuse continues to popularize stereotypical qualities of hysteria as transgressive agency, and thus reinforces rather than transforms a patriarchal apparatus. 

Context and Constructions

Unlike Clea (1964), Ms. Marvel (1968), and Elektra Natchios (1981), Jessica Jones’s character is a recent incarnation of a female superhero. Brian Michael Bendis and illustrator Michael Gaydos debuted Jones’s character in 2001 for the Marvel Max Alias monthly series. The creators are credited with breaking Marvel’s gendered catalogue, which up to that point was typified by overly competent heroines donning shiny, size-zero latex outfits and who use their superhero powers to fight crime (Riesman 2017). Jones, in contrast, lives in a messy, Jim Beam–strewn Hell’s Kitchen apartment. She dresses in androgynous casual wear: tank top, leather jacket, and jeans. She is a loner. Volatile. A short-fused mess. She is a no-nonsense, alcoholic private dick, and makes no bones about being a sexual free agent with a penchant for expletives and a keen sense for one-liners delivered with the flair of a badass film noir anti-hero. David Betancourt (2015) describes the series as part of a “meaner, edgier and more seductive Marvel universe . . . this is an adult show based on adult comic.” The choice to develop the female anti-superhero was considered a break from the established Marvel lineup. For the series’s narrative, Jones’s rogue persona is haunted. She embodies her PTSD as a survivor of aggravated rape perpetrated by the show’s villain, Kilgrave. The manifestation of hallucinations, anxiety, addiction, and anti-social behaviours are integral to Jones’s character development and her divergence from the Marvel norm. The culmination of these elements gives her a purpose: to save Hope. The sexual violence at the series’s core gravitationally coalesces the two characters under Kilgrave’s command; this gender-based violence resonates with viewers because of the prevalence of violence in various social, economic, and political milieus. It affects Mo Daviau. It affects us all. The character Hope Shlottman is an undergraduate student from Omaha, Nebraska, who lives and studies in New York City. She came under the influence of Kilgrave, who used his powers of mind control to kidnap her, rape her, and force her to murder her own parents. Hope is made to serve two life sentences for this crime. Jessica Jones, for her part, is determined to prove Hope’s innocence by forcing Kilgrave to either confess or expose his powers. The “hope” Jones embodies in the act of emancipating Shlottman from her patriarchal prison concomitantly dispatches Jones as a metaphoric and vicarious agent of hope that might save us (faithful series audience) from the intersectional violence encountered in our own lives. Yet how do the unconventional attributes of an “anti-hero” still contain Jessica Jones within the patriarchal lexicon of hysteria?

The language of “hysteria” appears within ancient medical discourse as an abstract Greek noun: hystera, or womb. It reappears in the nineteenth century as a neurosis ubiquitously represented in the female body as a nervous condition or one that appears as an unhealthy emotion or as excessive excitement. When the subject disobeys laws set in stone by the patriarchal order, they are held in contempt, and placed outside of the normalized and opposing state of the feminized obedient body that is deemed civilized, well-behaved, and not nasty. Patriarchy determines the rules of transgression (housed by language); therefore, resistance remains bound within the established structure, even and most especially when excluded from it. The question is: Are demonstrations of disobedience purposeful in order to make intelligible the complexities and contradictions of gendered obedience and thus to sustain it?

During the third and final debate for the 2016 American presidential election, for instance, Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton “a nasty woman.” As soon as Trump delivered his remarks, tweets stormed the Internet with the hashtag #strongwomenarenastywomen. Trump’s misogyny-fuelled rhetoric publicly disparaging a strong, intelligent, and non-compliant woman received blowback in the form of a counter-discourse from individuals who decided to “own it”: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am nasty.” This form of resistance is not new. How, then, is Jessica Jones’s character held within a parallel framework? She, too, “owns” a character type that is “transgressive” because she is categorized as non-compliant within Marvel comic book norms and its constructed narrative. Are these assertions of agency that kick back against patriarchal bombast actually transformative, or are they reiterations of flagrant enunciations that stabilize dominant codes of power—even in their resistance?

Jessica Jones’s character is “nasty” and damaged and scarred. Her hysteria manifests not only in her character’s PTSD but is also projected materially and symbolically in the figure of Hope; both experience the consequences of being captured in Kilgrave’s mind-controlling power and thus centre questions of agency, free will, and concepts of autonomy and resistance. As Maureen Ryan (2015) explains in a review of the show, “these elements allow Rosenberg [the show’s creator] to construct intelligent, well-crafted mediations on the ways in which women are manipulated by social pressures to conform and sacrifice part of themselves to avoid being labeled troublemakers.” The upshot of Ryan’s circular observation is that the stereotype of “troublemakers” is unavoidable because of the “social pressures” from patriarchal constraints. Kilgrave’s insistence that Jones’s character “smile,” as an example, conforms to gendered coding that demands acquiescence and the sacrifice of agency (ep. 1.05, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me”). Resistance does make the structure visible—I agree—but is the structure transformed over the course of the series or does it adhere to a hegemonic model of gendered obedience—again, even in acts of resistance? “Transgression” is an act that goes beyond a law, rule, or command; it is an offence, a violation, a sin. Thus, transgression is hysteria’s handmaiden in that to be cast as hysterical is to break gendered codes of conduct, laws, and rules. Judith Butler (2006) locates “gender in the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (٤٥). Butler further explains that “a political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender” (45). What, then, are the repeated acts being played out in the ontological representation of Jones and her trauma? How does it continue to conform to patriarchal structures even against the intelligent mediations of the show’s director? How has sexual violence imbued and policed ontological states of being to the point that it not only defines subjectivity but also controls act of resistance? 

Michel Foucault (1978) famously described what he called “the law of transgression and punishment, with its interplay of licit and illicit. Whether one attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights, of the father who forbids, of the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states the law, in any case one schematizes power in a juridical form, and one defines its effects as obedience” (84). In the Netflix series, transgression as a gendered act is paradoxically treated as a form of structural obedience that is marked as and combined with sexuality and violence, which is continually governed, dictated, fetishized, and popularized because it is predictable, reliable, and familiar behaviour. “Hysteria,” as Elaine Showalter (1997) describes it, “has come to imply behaviour that produces the appearance of disease,” and there remains an unfixed diagnosis (14). Yet, throughout medical history, Showalter shows, hysteria has been associated with women (15). How, then, do we make meaning, how do these meanings sustain themselves, and why are they necessary? Stuart Hall (1997) contends that “meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable” (21; italics in original).

Acquiring obedience takes time, and so, too, does the nailing of meaning to dependable outcomes. Foucault (1977) examines the implementation of docile bodies and the art of distribution as the technique of disciplining, with the result that “what was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour” (138). After murdering her parents, and at the apex of her hypnotic state under Kilgrave’s control, Hope tells Jessica to “smile”; the action distributes, by proxy, the disciplining of gendered protocols and the transference of power that runs parallel in Trump’s and Clinton’s respective campaigns. During the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton was publicly criticized for her unapproachable manner and her inability to “connect” with the electorate. The feminized and interpersonal sentiments were articulated in the suggestion, so often directed at to Clinton, that she “Smile. You just had a big night” (Zarya 2016). 

The longer history of gendered and socialized coercion is found in the Malleus Maleficarum (1487; see Mackay 2009). This lengthy treatise, written by Catholic clergymen Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, was used as a reliable method to profile, accuse, and persecute individuals suspected of witchcraft. It established the rules of evidence and the canonical measures by which alleged witches were subsequently tortured and executed. Similarly, in his quest to conceptualize madness, Charcot employed techniques used during the witch hunts, such as identifying hysterical stigmata on bodies and “pricking or writing on the sensitive skin of patients” (Showalter 1997, 32). The pedagogical foundation for communicating what constitutes a “witch,” “deviant,” “transgressor,” “whore,” “hysteric,” or “nasty woman” operates through what Giorgio Agamben (2009) describes as the apparatus. Agamben contends that living beings are captured by the apparatus (which comprises education, prisons, governments, laws, language, religion, military, etc.), and that within this “capture” there is a continual struggle. It is through this struggle that the living being is processed as a subject (Agamben 2009, 13–17). In other words, it is the subjectification of us. Objects are used to create a continuum of desires to keep living beings captured and serviced through capitalism, and these include everything from the Internet, microwaves, mortgages, porn, cars, The Real Housewives, love, phones, protests, music, pens, Facebook, bathroom tiles, cars, soy milk, Ritalin, comic books, hope, Netflix, etc. These objects of desire are the power of the apparatus. The subjectified subject then uses their acquired objects and never-ending desires to masquerade as an assumed “identity” and environment—or to declare this is “I.” The subjectification of a living being is within the apparatus’s blueprint, and over time gendered etymologies and ontologies are infused with codes to enforce power relations such as morality and its counterpoint, transgression. Foucault (1978) reminds us that “there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations and serving as a general matrix. . . . One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole” (94). Thus, while Foucault argues that there is no binary, those with a stake in existing power relations use such artificial constructions to reduce and polarize in order to create zones of intelligibility—otherwise known as common ground. Consequently, power relations use established binaries to determine who we are based on assessments of the other, the excluded, and the disobedient. Moral indignation, for instance, is oriented as an ethical compass in the directional process of subjectifying living beings in an effort to locate meaning and self-concept in the apparatus—who I am and who I am not—all guided by capitalism, patriarchy, and gender-based violence. When Jones attempts to explain to lawyer Jeri Hogarth the constraints she confronts when battling against Kilgrave, she identifies aspects of the apparatus: “Hope Shlottman is getting crucified in the media. . . . My story will put me in the same position as Hope.” “Incarcerated,” Hogarth replies. Jones continues, “Kilgrave leaves a trail of broken people behind him. . . . I am busy trying to bring Kilgrave in, change public perception, and victims will come forward” (ep. 1.03, “AKA It’s Called Whiskey”). Jones perceives the apparatus’s interlocking points as a carceral network through which beings flow and bio-power moves. Within the schematic of the apparatus, “this bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (Foucault 1978, 140–1).

An institution that deployed, and indeed constituted, discourses of transgression and hysteria with the insertion of bodies into the machinery was at La Salpêtrière. George Didi-Huberman (2003) calls it “the fair of monstrosities” (235), “a kind of feminine inferno . . . confining four thousand incurable or mad women” (xi). When producing his iconography of hysteria, Charcot reinforced a gendered template with his attitudes passionnelles, using titles such as “summons,” “amorous supplication,” “mockery,” “menace,” “eroticism,” and “ecstasy,” as well as the “resolution” that culminated in the performance of the subject’s redemption (Showalter 1997, 33). The objective was to cure transgression, which necessitated the subject’s obedience toward redemption by being sexually and intellectually exploited. The asylum was famous. Writers saw it as a “museum,” but “Salpêtrière was the capital of smoke screens” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 235). In 2017, and still in 2024, the preoccupation with established gendered stereotypes continues and this preoccupation’s association with the body through varying forms of medical and pop-culture performances. Melissa Rosenberg explains the process by which she adapted Jessica Jones’s Alias comic book to television as follows: “What we did throughout the first 13 hours, you would take a nugget from the comic book and expand upon it . . . so you’re constantly filling in” (Hill 2015). Yet, from which part of the apparatus does Rosenberg draw in order to “fill in” these gaps? 

Augustine and Hope and Jessica Jones

Charcot’s lectures at La Salpêtrière were held on Tuesdays. The asylum’s “mastery over repetition was already highly instrumentalized—and in the sense that it was almost ideally accepted—on these hysteric bodies that had become nearly transparent representative agencies, deprived as they were of resistance” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 232–3). Sigmund Freud called a body deprived of resistance “ideal” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 233).

When Freud’s paradigm is compared to the series, Kilgrave’s instrument of mind control to manipulate individuals as empty vessels follows a routinized patriarchal model. Jones’s refusal to be governed by Kilgrave was not a Freudian “ideal”; nevertheless, she is still within the apparatus. Jones’s investigation into Hope’s disappearance, for instance, doubles as a spiralling excursion into her own present trauma; she is ushered in by the hotel’s concierge as she enters: “Ms. Jones. I thought that was you. Welcome back.” (ep. 1.01, “AKA Ladies’ Night”). The hotel bedroom scene in episode 1.01 is the performative locus that fuses together Jones and Hope. Daviau describes the scene as follows: “I am alone in my bed with the first episode of Jessica Jones on my laptop. I felt fine until we meet the character Hope lying in a puddle of her own piss in a hotel bed, refusing to get up and leave under orders of the villain who has mind-controlled her to stay put” (Daviau 2016). Daviau contemplates the loss of agency as she makes visible the disciplining mechanics of the apparatus. Jones must pry Hope from the bed. The symbolic struggle of wills between the two characters materializes the conflicts against the embodied and externally forced gendered limitations that keep each woman imprisoned. Hope’s repeated declaration, “I can’t leave” (ep. 1.01, “AKA Ladies’ Night”), is emblematic of the perpetual violence that underscores not only her present condition but also her (and Jones’s) historical chains. Hope’s “phase of tonic immobility” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 123) while screaming “I can’t leave!” from Kilgrave’s bed is a repeated act from Charcot’s catalogue of hysteria that resonates for Daviau in the twenty-first century. It is an echo of Charcot’s patient Augustine: “The ‘image’ of hysteria in the nineteenth century—and certainly something of it remains with us today—the vulgarized image of hysteria was the one produced and proposed by Charcot” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 235). 

“Augustine” is the name Charcot used to identify her. She was the most photographed of all of the asylum’s “hysterics” (Showalter 1997, 35). In 1875, Augustine was fifteen years old when her mother left her at La Salpêtrière. Throughout her young life, she endured sexual abuse. Augustine’s so-called hysterical attacks emerged at the age of thirteen after her employer, a man who was also her mother’s lover, raped her (De Marneffe 1991, 88). For five years, Charcot exploited Augustine as he directed her, along with other women and girls, to perform during his Tuesday lectures, where they would pose for the patriarch and his international, multidisciplinary audience (see figure 13.1 below). These actions repeat with Hope when she tells Jones, “he made me jump for hours as high as I could” (ep. 1.02, “AKA Crush Syndrome”). Augustine performed the phases of hysteria from a bed not unlike the bed in Kilgrave’s hotel room that imprisoned Hope. Charcot used photography as the medium with which to repeat his ideological choreography; likewise, in the series Jones discovers Kilgrave’s room plastered with her photographed images (ep. 1.03, “AKA It’s Called Whiskey”). Jones is subsequently compelled to photograph herself in order to maintain Kilgrave’s archive and as a way of policing her behaviour (ep. 1.04, “AKA 99 Friends”; ep. 1.05, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me”).

While Jones’s defiance, disobedience, and brazen sexuality conform to a gendered “disciplinary partitioning” (Foucault 1995, 199), her rebellious character reinforces the apparatus of patriarchy based on a gendered hierarchy and desire. An excerpt from Augustine’s 1878 patient transcript reveals her resistance against Charcot and the containment of institutionalized sexual violence: “I won’t uncross my legs! . . . Oh! You really did hurt me. . . . No, you won’t manage! . . . Help! . . . Camel! Lout! Good-for-nothing! . . . Pardon me! Pardon me, Monsieur! Leave me alone. . . . It’s impossible!” (quoted in Didi-Huberman 2003, 83). Her voice resonates in Jones’s delivery when confronting Kilgrave, from which point she is no longer represented as being under his control: 

Jessica: I told you not to touch me

Kilgrave: God’s sake. Come on, Jessie.

Jessica: Do not call me that.

Kilgrave: We used to do a lot more than just touch hands.

Jessica: Ya, it’s called rape.

Kilgrave: What? Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating in all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted is rape?

Jessica: The part where I didn’t wanna do any of it. Not only did you physically rape me, but you violated every cell in my body and every thought in my god damn head.

Kilgrave: That’s not what I was trying to do.

Jessica: It doesn’t matter what you were trying to do. You raped me again, and again, and again. (ep. 1.08, “AKA WWJD”)

While Jones’s character makes visible the power dynamics of subjugated bodies in the apparatus, her persona replicates the “disciplinary mechanism” (Foucault 1977, 197) that constrains her character as a transgressive woman who is abject, outcast, hysterical, and indifferent; and in this way, the narrative reproduces the familiar exclusion of a strong woman gone awry. The scene identifies the boundary lines as well as the temporal and spatial (exclusion-inclusion) dynamics of being captive in an apparatus that repeats and sustains sexual violence as it perpetually constrains women and girls by guilt and/or shame. The cycle is represented when Jones pleads to the police to institutionalize her because she feels it is her only recourse: “Now I’m confessing. Open and shut. . . . I am sick. I am dangerous and I belong in supermax” (ep. 1.07, “AKA Top Shelf Perverts”). The supermax prison represents the most secure level of custody for those deemed the highest security risk because they pose a threat to both national and global security. Jones’s inability to control her fate is shown in a paralysis that figuratively manifests in the patriarchal “master” Kilgrave, who ultimately controls the system and Jones’s agency.

Showalter examines the role of hysteria in the media and notes that interest in the discourse as a form of resistance surfaced in feminist scholars’ writing on women’s history: “nineteenth-century hysterical women suffered from the lack of public voice to articulate their economic and sexual oppression, and the symptoms—mutism, paralysis, self-starvation, spasmodic seizures—seemed like bodily metaphors for the silence, immobility, denial of appetite, and hyper-femininity imposed on them by their societies” (1997, 54–5). Diane Price-Herndl (1988) suggests that “hysteria can be understood as a woman’s response to a system in which she is expected to remain silent, a system in which her subjectivity is denied, kept invisible” (53). Yet, Jessica and Hope’s articulations of resistance ultimately are captured, iconized, and commodified so as to service popular culture. As a parallel, the patients’ experiences in the nineteenth-century asylum were transcribed to service not only popular culture but also science. As Jones’s friend Trish explains to her when usurping Jones’s plan to respond to systemic violence by volunteering to be incarcerated, “You’ve lost it, Jess, and I get it, I really do, but you are not thinking clearly. . . . You have guilt and shame and it’s clouding your judgment. . . . You can’t do anything in prison. You can’t save Hope. You can’t protect anyone, or yourself” (ep. 1.07, “AKA Top Shelf Perverts”). At the institutional level, her lawyer reinforces the diagnosis of Jones’s hysteria as she removes her public voice: “You have gone off the deep end. I want to have a psych eval. We will be pleading incompetence. . . . Your judgment is severely impaired” (ep. 1.07, “AKA Top Shelf Perverts”).

While Augustine was imprisoned in the asylum, she performed hysteria as directed for Charcot and his audiences; her body, gestures, and refusals were reduced to a sign within a structural hierarchy entrenched in sexual violence. “The sign,” as Jacques Derrida (1982) asserts, “represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp of or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence” (9). In a parallel example, when attributing a “sign” to a living being, Antonin Artaud (1958) speaks about the struggle of language when deciphering life: “When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach” (13). Augustine, Hope, and Jessica are “deferred” beings in search of their “fluctuating center.” In each of their respective transgressions they materialize the ambiguous space in which the iconic image of hysteria floats, lands, and floats again in the pursuit of meaning. Augustine’s representation of hysteria landed in medical, social, and commodity discourses, in such fields as theatre, medicine, mass media, photography, popular fiction, and in adaptations of literary works such as those of William Shakespeare, all of which fed the consumptive desires as “signs” that divert us from that which can never be reached—the being of hysteria, transgression, resistance, and our fluctuating living selves. For instance, “the Tuesday Lectures . . . are written, or rather rewritten, just like plays, with lines, soliloquies, strange directions, asides by the hero” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 243). The lectures were “a site of catharsis (for the actresses even more than the spectators), in the sense in which tradition speaks of the catharsis of humeurs peccantes, which comes from the verb peccare: to sin, to fail, to commit evil and trick others” (244). It was necessary for hysteria as a transgression to be cured, to be put in its place, and to reinforce the power relations that engage gendered hierarchies. To do this work, the ign of hysteria had to be disseminated.

The “Tricks i’ th’ World”: Augustine, Hope, Jessica Jones, and Shakespeare

Charcot’s international audiences comprised approximately five hundred people, including physicians, writers, artists, scientists, and scholars, and he “delighted his largely nonmedical public” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 235). In Charcot’s archived transcriptions, images, and his “theatre of medicine,” Augustine is represented as Ophelia-like. Didi-Huberman describes her transcribed and explicit resistance to Charcot’s science and to the institutionalized court as “an irruption of the past act ‘in person,’ the raw, gesticulated hallucination of the act out of a simple suggestion to remember. A theatre of the return of memory . . . then, like flames rekindled . . . as one reads in Shakespeare” (232). In his description, Didi-Huberman isolates moving parts within the apparatus: 

And indeed the doctor is a full partner in this abrupt rekindling of memory in “his subject.” He is the partner and actor of transference, and the figure of the Master. This is why he needs more than the signifying deposition of the event. . . . He needs, in addition, mastery over the reproducibility of this deposition (its theatre reproduced and repeated in photographic procedures). (232)

Charcot and Kilgrave assume the role of “master” as they circumscribe agency in the practice of sexual violence by subjugating girls and women into the role of the hysteric. Showalter explains that during the late nineteenth century, Dr. Charles Bucknill, president of the Medico-Psychological Association in London, England, observed Ophelia to be among a “class of cases by no means uncommon. Every mental physician of moderately extensive experience must have seen many Ophelias. It is a copy from nature, after the fashion of Pre-Raphaelite School” (quoted in Showalter 1994, 86). Ophelia’s body is reduced to an object of desire in the apparatus for cultural, social, and economic profit, or to be what Jacques Lacan calls “the object Ophelia,” enabling control and furthering patriarchal agendas (Showalter 1994, 77). In a sense, Hope is the series’s Ophelia. Her madness, grounded in sexual violence and patriarchal desire, dramatizes the psychological and material warfare that consumes all characters within the series. Consider how Ophelia is watched as she sings her “mad songs” before the court: 

Says she hears

There’s tricks i’ th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart,

Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt

That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection. (Hamlet act 4, scene 5, lines 4–9)

The word “nothing” appears thirty-one times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Nothing” comes from the Old English nān thing, or “no” and “thing.” Shakespeare teased out the irony of the word endlessly in his plays; for example, Laertes responds to Ophelia’s mad songs with “This nothing’s more than matter,” and as “A document in madness” (act 4, scene 5, lines 172–5). Ophelia, in an earlier instance, verbally spars with Hamlet in a sexualized exchange, which also becomes an arena in which Hamlet can project his misogyny (Greenblatt 2008, 329–30): 

Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. (act 3, scene 2, lines 105–7)

“Country” is also a pun on the word “cunt,” and the wordplay continues in the scene when the word “nothing” suggests female genitals, which is often linked to the shape of a zero (a ubiquitous Shakespearean trope), or “no thing.” The “thing” here represents male genitals, and to have “No thing” (act 3, scene 2, line 109), as Hamlet implies, foreshadowing Laertes’s remark that “This nothing’s more than matter,” is to have a vagina. The female body’s synonymous engagement with madness has a long history. Ancient Egyptians offer early descriptions dating to 1900 BCE in the Kahun Papyrus, which “identifies the cause of hysterical disorders in spontaneous uterus movement within the female body” (Tasca et al. 2012, 110). Cecilia Tasca et al. (2012) explain that in the Greek world, argonaut and physician Malampus deemed the revolt of the virgins as madness “derived from their uterus being poisoned by venomous humours” and “uterine melancholy” (110); furthermore, the authors locate the first use of the term “hysteria” in the fifth century BCE in the works of Hippocrates, who believed “that the cause of this disease lies in the movement of the uterus (‘hysteron’)” (111). The meaning continues to float and land across a historical trajectory leading to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, where several outbreaks of hysteria are recorded during the witch trials (115). Hope’s “delusion” as diagnosed by her lawyer in episode 1.03 (AKA “It’s Called Whiskey”) “as fully formed” runs in parallel with the trials of witches and the judgment of Ophelia, who engages in a counter-discourse, her mad songs, among the institutional powers (police, doctors, lawyers, media, prison officials, the court) and communicates the crimes, tricks, and transgressions that the agents of patriarchy have committed (Hamlet, act 4, scene 5, lines 152–95). While still incarcerated, Hope confesses her “sanity was touch and go for a while there” (ep. 1.10, “AKA 1,000 Cuts”). Kilgrave holds the key. In episode 1.10, “AKA 1,000 Cuts,” Jones engages Kilgrave in a Faustian bargain to locate Hope. As Kilgrave states, “You want what I have. . . . I have Hope. . . . She’s a living embodiment of your guilt, isn’t she?” The concept of guilt is predicated on transgression. Consequently, guilt and its gendered connection to hysteria are aptly located in Charcot’s use of patients to demonstrate the range of madness when staging, for instance, the guilt-ridden figure of Lady Macbeth. Charcot’s electric director, Duchenne de Boulogne, would apply electric shocks to his patients to evoke “expressions of cruelty” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 227) on the faces of women and girls, which were then photographed and displayed as evidence for the public and archive: “ ‘Yet, there’s a spot. . . . ’ While the same Lady Macbeth notoriously reiterates her crime and her guilt, a little doctor, in the shadows at her side, says: ‘Hark! She speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly’ ” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 232).

Another figure Charcot draws from the apparatus’s deep narrative well is Saint Joan of Arc (see figure 13.2 below). He describes her as a “transgressive hysteric” (quoted in Showalter 1997, 32). Slavoj Žižek (2004) argues that “the charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up as follows. In order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she was to (1) disavow the authenticity of her voices, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the church (as the actual terrestrial institution)” (57).

Joan of Arc appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VI,¹ where her depiction could be perceived at either end of the conventional gendered binary: virgin or whore. Joan of Arc’s military intelligence and might played a major role in England losing its war against the French. Unsurprisingly, then, Shakespeare depicts the French warrior as a witch and hysteric, a “fallen woman,” as described by the character Richard, Duke of York: “Strumpet, the words condemn thy brat and thee / Use no entreaty, for it is in vain” (act 5, scene 6, lines 84–5). The duke seals her fate: “Break thou in pieces, and consume to ashes” (act 5, scene 6, lines 91–2). Joan of Arc is burned at the stake. As Jean E. Howard (2008) explains, “The English respond to this powerful but disarmingly down-to-earth peasant girl by calling her a witch and a whore” (293). Joan of Arc is a figure not unlike Jessica Jones. In battle, Young Talbot attributes Joan’s skills to witchcraft, rather than acknowledging her agency and expertise as a leader. Joan of Arc, like Jones, “is an unmarried woman who has turned soldier and assumed the garments of a man.” An unwed woman was perceived as being susceptible to Satan’s will (Howard 2008, 293–4). Shakespeare and Charcot effectively alter the historical narrative of Joan of Arc, transforming her from a powerful French warrior into an abject and unnatural monster of war whose downfall on stage bolsters English pride as military propaganda: “this structure is one of neither drama nor knowledge; it is the point where history is immobilized in the tragic category which both establishes and impugns it” (Foucault 1988, xii). Howard (2008) describes the representation of powerful women as anomalies, and thus potentially iconic, as signifying and satisfying what is desired and what is not: “they could be read as criminals or fiends rather than as miraculous exceptions to their cultures’ expectations concerning virtuous women” (293).

After years of being held against her will by Charcot, and after her many attempts to escape the institution, one morning Augustine dressed like a man and walked out of the asylum’s front doors. Augustine disappeared into the streets of Paris. Her self-emancipation ironically reflected the nineteenth-century trope of the so-called New Woman (who wears masculine attire such as pants), and it points to Jessica’s fantasy of using her agency (power) to escape Kilgrave by leaping from his rooftop and riding away (bareback—another gendered Victorian transgression) on an awaiting white stallion (Rosenberg 2015). Jessica remains. Augustine, on the other hand, was never seen again.

What, then, happens to Jessica Jones? The series concludes with Jones returning to her role as a private investigator for two more seasons. In the comic book series, Jessica Jones marries Luke Cage, and in 2015, Marvel released Secret Wars: Secret Love no. 1. Writer Jeremy Whitley created a storyline that included Jones and Cage as a married couple helping friends to solve their domestic woes (Fay 2015). When reflecting on Jones, Rosenberg has remarked, “What I love about this character is she’s so unapologetically who she is” (quoted in Hill 2015). But is she? I argue that she is a reconstruction of a transgressive subject who maintains gendered hierarchies and hegemonic valuing based on sexual violence. Perhaps this is what we want her to be. Jones telling Kilgrave to “smile” (ep. 1.13, “AKA Smile”) before she kills him is cathartic relief indeed, but the act is merely a reversal of gendered codes of violence and as such is predicated on and governed by the patriarchal expectations and desires of the apparatus. As Foucault explains, “it [madness] is also the most rigorously necessary form of the quid pro quo in the dramatic economy, for it needs no external element to reach a true resolution. . . . It has merely to carry its illusion to the point of truth” (1988, 34). But what truth is being sought in the gendered representation of the transgressive body?

Conclusion

Kilgrave is dead. Hope is sacrificed. Jessica Jones is domesticated. Patriarchy lives on. As Jones explains, “knowing it’s real means you gotta make a decision: (1) keep denying it, or (2) do something about it” (ep. 1.01, “AKA Ladies’ Night”). The meta-discourse germane to Jones’s dilemma necessitates the questioning of what is real. In this chapter, I examined how popular culture constructs the “real” within patriarchal plot lines of the apparatus that depict strong female characters operating through sexual violence rather than transforming the gendered hierarchies and familiar tropes that, not unlike Charcot and Kilgrave, continue to control and dominate them. While Jones attempts to leave the apparatus by “taking myself out of the equation,” we are left to wonder if this is at all possible (ep. 1.07, “AKA Top Shelf Perverts”). Jones’s trauma, hysteria, and resistance repeat a narrative in which viewers like Daviau and myself, not unlike the members of the Kilgrave Victim Support Group, find a kinship as well as perhaps a salve (ep. 1.09, “AKA Sin Bin”). Misogyny and violence are experienced daily within the apparatus: “I couldn’t stop smiling. He wouldn’t let me,” as a Kilgrave survivor recounts (ep. 1.04, “AKA 99 Friends”). Is the elusive masquerade of an assumed self so manufactured and normalized that our living beings and our fluctuating centres are lost to us? Maybe Augustine took herself out of the equation. Maybe I watch Jessica Jones to feel my rage vicariously played out by fulfilling a cathartic desire to escape what is otherwise inescapable. “They say everyone is born a hero, but if you let it, life will push you over the line until you are the villain. Problem is you don’t always know that you crossed that line. Maybe it’s enough if the world thinks I’m a hero; maybe if I work long and hard, maybe I can fool myself” (ep. 1.13, “AKA Smile”). Still, if there is any hope of transforming the apparatus that determines and controls desires with the purpose to incarcerate us, we need to stop fooling ourselves about the roles played, sustained, as well as silenced within the patriarchal system. We need to somehow remove ourselves from the equation and pursue our fluctuating centre. As Jessica explains, “I can’t save you. The whole time he had me, there was some part of me that fought. There was some tiny corner of my brain that tried to get out. But I’m still fighting. I won’t top fighting. But if you give up, I lose” (ep. 1.05, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me”).

Note

1. 1See also “Henry VI, Part 1, Appendix: Joan la Pucelle, or Joan of Arc,” Folger Shakespeare Library, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-vi-part-1/appendix-joan-la-pucelle-or-joan-of-arc/.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Betancourt, David. 2015. “Marvel/Netflix’s Game-Changing ‘Jessica Jones’: A Fanboy’s Five-Point Review.” Washington Post, November 20. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/11/20/marvelnetflixs-game-changing-jessica-jones-a-fanboys-five-point-review/?utm_term=.dfe5bd445e35.

Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Daviau, Mo. 2017. “This Is Not Another Jessica Jones Think Piece Written by an Abuse Survivor by Mo Daviau.” Nailed, February 21, 2017. http://www.nailedmagazine.com/editors-choice/not-another-jessica-jones-think-piece-written-abuse-survivor-mo-daviau/.

De Marneffe, Daphne. 1991. “Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud.” Signs 17 (1): 71–111.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Différance.” In Margins of Philosophy, 3–27. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Edmunds, Joan M. 2008. The Mission of Joan of Arc. London: Temple Lodge Press.

Fay, Matthew. 2015. “Love Is a Battleworld in ‘Secret Wars’: Secret Love #1.” PopMatters, September 2, 2015. https://www.popmatters.com/196919-secret-wars-secret-love-1-2495490873.html.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.

———. 1978. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

———. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2008. “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2nd ed., 323–35. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Hall, Stuart. 1997. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 15–74. London: Sage/Open University.

Hill, Libby. 2015. “ ‘Jessica Jones’ Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg Talks Rape, Adaptation, and Female Sexuality.” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-hc-st-jessica-jones-melissa-rosenberg-rape-female-sexuality-20151120-story.html.

Howard, Jean E. 2008. “The First Part of Henry the Sixth.” In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2nd ed., 287–96. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Keishin Armstrong, Jennifer. 2016. “These Are the Anti-heroines We’ve Been Waiting For.” BBC, July 16, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160707-from-unreal-and-veep-to-jessica-jones-when-women-go-bad.

Mackay, Christopher S. 2009. The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price-Herndl, Diane. 1988. “The Writing Cure.” NWSA Journal 1 (1): 52–74.

Riesman, Abraham. 2015. “Who Is Jessica Jones? And Should I Watch Her TV Show.” Vulture, November 19, 2015. http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/jessica-jones-alias-explainer.html.

Ryan, Maureen. 2015. “TV Review: ‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones.’ ” Variety, November 17, 2015. http://variety.com/2015/tv/reviews/jessica-jones-review-krysten-ritter-netflix-1201636528/.

Showalter, Elaine. 1994. Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism. London: Macmillan.

———. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tasca, Cecilia, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta, and Bianca Fadda. 2012. “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health.” Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health 8:110–19.

Zarya, Valentina. 2016. “There Is Literally No Facial Expression Hillary Clinton Can Make to Please Male Pundits.” Fortune, September 27, 2016. http://fortune.com/2016/09/27/hillary-clinton-smiling-debate/.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. “From Antigone to Joan of Arc.” Helios 31:51–62.