Doctors’ Visits and Adultery in Late Nineteenth-Century Narrative

Nathalie Bouzaglo

Revista Hispánica Moderna, Volume 65, Number 1, June 2012, pp.

1-8 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/rhm.2012.0002

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rhm/summary/v065/65.1.bouzaglo.html

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 Doctors’ Visits and Adultery in Late
Nineteenth-Century Narrative

nathalie bouzaglo
northwestern university


I. Introduction

I n 1865, the state court of New Jersey conducted a trial in the divorce proceed-
ings of Emile C. Berckmans v. Sara E. Berckmans. In its ostensibly ‘‘objective’’
narration of the facts, the court indicates that Ms. Berckmans is suspected of
adultery with the family’s physician, Dr. Randolph Titsworth. Her accuser is her
husband’s mother, who alleges that in June of 1859, the ‘‘transaction’’ (Green
Ewing 127) was carried out in the couple’s living room, at a moment when the
mother-in-law was able to look through the window of the adjacent greenhouse.
The mother-in-law’s testimony reveals that the greenhouse window allowed an
observer to glimpse only the smallest portion of the living room sofa, with its
back to the window. She claimed to have seen no more than a pair of feet resting
on the sofa, and a pair of boots. In her words: ‘‘I saw Dr. Titsworth’s feet, his
boots, and the feet lying on the sofa, on the same side of the sofa where I was
looking through the window’’ (129). Implicit in this allegation is the curious
assumption that Dr. Titsworth’s bare feet on the sofa would be sufficient proof
of the misdeed.
In discussing this allegation, the court stops questioning whether the pair com-
mitted adultery to ask instead whether an observer in the greenhouse would
be able to see the sofa. Curiously, the relationship between the lovers cedes its
protagonism to the physical evidentiary question, in much the same way that the
adulterous relationship cedes its protagonism to the relationship between the
lover and the aggrieved husband in the majority of novels of adultery dating
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Another detail of the
case merits highlighting: the accused wife was a middle or lower-middle class
young woman who had married a wealthy man and, in her defense, alleged that

1
Although I will not explore the notion of rivalry in this essay, I want to note briefly that
in the triangular relationships that adultery creates, the bonds between the rivals are typically
stronger and more passionate than those between the lovers themselves. The adulterous
relationship commonly serves as a pretext to facilitate homosocial relations between the
rivals. In this way, the rivalry itself becomes the protagonist of the story and creates the
perfect space for the production of homoerotic bonds ‘‘between men.’’ See Kosofsky
Sedgwick 21–27.

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2  Revista Hispánica Moderna 65.1 (2012)
her husband’s extreme cruelty caused her to suffer the mysterious sicknesses
that necessitated the doctor’s visits.
The novel Mimı́ (1898), by the well-known Venezuelan writer, lawyer and poli-
tician Rafael Cabrera Malo, relates a ‘‘true story’’2 surprisingly similar to the one
described by the New Jersey court. Mimı́, married to an elderly millionaire who
saved her family from financial ruin, is obsessed with becoming pregnant. Her
husband, however, is either infertile or impotent. Mimı́’s fixation grows until it
becomes an indefinable illness (similar to Ms. Berckman’s) and she is finally
accused of committing adultery with the family doctor.
I will leave further comparisons of the legal case and the novel for the last
section of this essay, where I also lay out why I believe it is fruitful to compare
the North American legal case and the Latin American novel. Although the legal
case functions within a different context, both examples have common themes
and a similar form in which they narrate the desire and impossibility of achieving
order. In this essay, I am interested in examining different nineteenth-century
discourses on the family—and its potential rupture—and how they become a
warning against a sexuality that corrupts the social function of maternity and
family as a biological foundation of the nation.

II. Hysterical Attacks

The protagonist of the novel Mimı́ suffers from a hysterical pregnancy: ‘‘her
stomach grows large’’ and she roams the streets, shouting that she is so fat that
she will ‘‘explode like a bomb’’ (121). She imagines that every child is hers, and
eventually comes up with the idea that ‘‘her son’’ has tragically died during an
operation. Mimı́ suffers from recurrent ‘‘attacks,’’ ‘‘deliriums’’ and ‘‘hallucina-
tions,’’ all symptoms of an illness brought on by ‘‘unfulfilled maternal desire’’
(119). In the doctor’s words: ‘‘crazy, yes; she was crazy with maternal love; and it
was necessary to satisfy the instinct suffocated in her, or die’’ (190; my emphasis).
Hysteria has always eluded definition: it has been viewed as everything from
sexual deviation to religious ecstasy.3 However, during the nineteenth century,

2
Rafael Cabrera Malo insists on the truth of his story in a prologue that is as anxious as it
is clumsily written: ‘‘Believe it . . . My book is—I proclaim it—the naked allegations of real
life’’ (n. pag.). All translations of the novel are mine.
3
Two theories of hysteria coexisted in the eighteenth century. According to the first,
hysteria was the result of abstinence or uterine problems; according to the second it was a
neurological problem. In 1775, William Cullen, one of the first scholars of hysteria, classified
it as a neurological problem caused by uterine disorders. It was thus thought that nymphoma-
niacs were especially vulnerable to the disease. As the century closed, additional causes were
added, including, for example, exaggerated pleasure and certain kinds of reading. The nine-
teenth century, until the 1870s or 1880s, was hysteria’s so-called ‘‘golden age,’’ and the
approach to hysteria changed radically. Jean Martin Charcot attempted to reverse the theo-
retical focus from the uterus to the brain (from the gynecological to the neurological).
Although Charcot sought to leave behind the association between hysteria, woman and
uterus, he was unable to eliminate ‘‘cures’’ that treated the ovaries and mammary glands
(Beizer 1–12).

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 bouzaglo, Doctors’ Visits and Adultery  3
hysteria was associated with sexuality, feminine sexuality in particular.4 By the
late nineteenth century, hysteria was well publicized, available to serve a wide
variety of aesthetic and political purposes, and it was mentioned in every kind
of narrative—fiction, but also newspapers, police reports, surveys and legal and
medical cases. The hysterical woman served as a vehicle for the satisfaction of
physicians’ diagnostic fantasies (and along with them, those of writers, readers
and analysts). The capricious and variable body of the hysteric channeled the
chaos of the era.5
The varied readings inspired by the hysteric may result from her inability to
narrate her own story. Her ‘‘incongruence’’ triggers narration. The possibility of
interpreting her, of decoding the ‘‘clues’’ in her language, is too tempting. This
is especially true for a late-nineteenth-century physician who observes and diag-
noses under the pretense or illusion of scientific interpretation of the ‘‘incon-
gruous’’ spectacle.
‘‘But can there be a spectacle without staging [mise-en-scène]?’’ (Didi-
Huberman 23). Many studies of hysteria, including those by Huberman, Bronfen
and Beizer, have emphasized the mise-en-scène inherent in the ‘‘attacks’’ and the
patient’s own staging of her symptoms. Mimı́ begins to use her ‘‘disease’’ to her
advantage, and even invents ‘‘attacks’’ in order to see her handsome doctor and
former lover, Manuel, more frequently. While the cure for hysteria depends on
a complex relationship of transference, in this story, the complicity between
patient and doctor leads to unimaginable consequences. Thanks to ‘‘infallible’’
medical knowledge, Mimı́ is cured, that is, she becomes pregnant or, as Manuel’s
diagnosis has it, her ‘‘maternal instincts’’ are ‘‘satisfied’’ (174). Curiously, Mimı́
makes the first sexual advance, with such passion that she almost kills the doctor.
This confident, strong and prudent man is depicted as ‘‘defenseless’’ once his
adulterous sexual relationship with Mimı́ begins (204).
The spectacle offered by the hysteric incites her examination and exhibition:
her body becomes another, separate body, one that exists to be studied and
diagnosed. ‘‘Exhibitions, as cultural forms, are the nineteenth century’s genre
of choice, scopophilia its guiding passion,’’ according to Sylvia Molloy (143).
The unstoppable transformation of the world into spectacle turns spaces, sub-
jects and objects into materials for exhibition. When the particular spectacle at
hand is disease, the mechanism of contagion connects different subjects and
makes the risk of conversion into the ‘‘other’’ concrete. The threat of contagion
is ever-present in novels of adultery. Through marriage, all stories of adultery
confront the risk of contagion through (sexual, racial or class-related) contact.
The illicit relationship, although apparently transgressive, reaffirms the familiar

4
According to Sander L. Gilman, the visual representation of hysteria within the world of
nineteenth-century images was always feminine—and hysterical men were always feminizable.
In his study, he compares the hysteric with the Jew, since the latter could also be a hysteric
(as could all ‘‘different’’ or ‘‘sick’’ individuals) (411).
5
‘‘Figure of femininity, label of disorder and difference, hysteria was available for a wide
and often contradictory range of aesthetic and political purposes: instrument of misogyny,
agent of differentiation, magnet diagnosis of society’s multiple ills, emblem of creative frenzy,
identification of the writing self as Other, designation of the century’s marginalized symbolic
center’’ (Beizer 8).

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4  Revista Hispánica Moderna 65.1 (2012)
institution outside of which it exists. Adultery makes fidelity its object of desire.
In this way, what seems to break with the social order, threatening it with wide-
spread contamination, paradoxically makes the social contract possible.
The lovers’ encounter in the novel becomes even more poignant when it chal-
lenges not only social norms, but also obstacles of nature. Manuel, the doctor,
finds himself in the middle of a storm that has dramatically flooded the river
that separates him from Mimı́. He is beside himself, hypnotized, called by a force
he does not understand, a ‘‘demonic incarnation of love’’ (201). As he enters the
cabin, Manuel describes the scene: ‘‘[Mimı́] awaited me there, on the riverbank,
beneath the orange trees . . . and when she spotted me shaking like a drunk she
arose painfully and . . . as if she were telling me to be silent she came toward me’’ (204;
my emphasis). In his reconstruction of the scene, Manuel does not know if it was
actually Mimı́ or an apparition: ‘‘I cannot say yet if what I saw then, under the
trees, was an apparition of the night . . . or the real Mimı́, the impossible and
wept-over lover from my dreams as a student’’ (204).
Is Manuel now sick, hallucinating and delirious? The doctor appears to lose
his diagnostic capability; he is unable to decode the scene, much less his own or
his patient’s mysterious behavior: ‘‘I completely lost consciousness and I aban-
doned myself to the mercy of . . . my delirium’’ (205). According to his vague
but highly detailed recollections, in Mimı́’s—or her apparition’s—face there was
‘‘a painful paleness of death; but her cruel and enigmatic eyes revealed an ener-
getic decision and the movement of her lips, that nervous and instinctive gesture
that I knew so well, clearly denoted the intensity of her disdain’’ (105). When
adultery is finally committed, the narrator describes a nearly unconscious man
and a she-vampire who corners him, silences him and devours him, sending him
into a fainting spell that lasts several days (he wakes in his mother’s bed without
knowing how he got there).
At this point, as in almost all novels of adultery of the period,6 Mimı́’s husband
discovers the betrayal and plots revenge on his rival. Mimı́ overhears her hus-
band’s plan from behind a door, and immediately fakes a hysterical attack in
order to see Manuel and warn him that her husband plans to kill him. But Mimı́
is less concerned with love and with Manuel’s destiny than with her ‘‘cure,’’ that
is, her pregnancy. The physician, on the other hand, has been thrown into a
near-fatal depression that leads him to conclude: ‘‘I am leaving forever, to live in
the country of melancholy’’ (209). Manuel’s insatiable desire for the hysterical
gives him—contaminates him with—the indefinable ‘‘disease,’’ although in a
different form and with different characteristics.

* * *
As shown by the contemporary inquiry into whether a ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘normal’’
body exists outside of its discursive formation, the question of the meaning of
the body continues to produce text. The hysteric’s body, inscribed and (over)ex-
posed, is converted into language. In any event, to understand or penetrate the
body implies the conversion of the woman into a legible and appropriable ‘‘text’’
(Dopico Black 24). As the body becomes the object of language’s desire, the

6
Here I am echoing Tony Tanner (11–17).

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 bouzaglo, Doctors’ Visits and Adultery  5
impulse is to read the body by deciphering the clues on its surface, thereby
turning it into text. What remains is no longer the body, but what one reads
into it.
Along these lines, hysteria can be read within the tradition that seeks to relate
body and expression. This tradition interprets the hysteric’s silent and inarticu-
late gesticulations as an escape valve, a search for expressiveness. The tools to
‘‘communicate’’ come from the very space of ‘‘not communicating’’ (aphasia).
When she is first examined, Mimı́ does not speak: she has fainted, and when she
awakens, appears to be mute. The physician thus confronts the impossibility of
dialogue at the moment that he pronounces his diagnosis: there is no response,
no explanation. Moreover, both Mimı́ (during her hysterical attacks) and
Manuel (when he meets her in the middle of the storm) become quiet and
then faint. Fainting, according to Roland Barthes, is the gestural equivalent of
muteness, and both can be a form of escape, or of blackmail (59).
Although it is tempting to read women’s silence as a form of expression, doing
so idealizes the blockage of expressiveness that hysterics suffered (Beizer 2). Hys-
teria should be viewed as a mediated expression, in Janet Beizer’s terms. In other
words, it is vital to consider how the hysteric ‘‘served the expressive powers of the
others and the reasons for which the nineteenth-century concept of hysteria was
metaphorically useful and even necessary to the era’s narrative discourse’’ (2).

III. Nation and Melodrama

The hysteric’s mise-en-scène is always excessive, a non-linguistic corporeal expres-
sion that desperately attempts to transforms itself into language, into text. In
Mimı́, the narration of hysteria’s (over)gesticulation blurs the parameters of
melodrama, although not necessarily in a conscious manner. For this reason, I
will read the hysteric’s mediated expression as a form of melodramatic discourse.
In his study of the melodramatic imagination, Peter Brooks calls melodrama a
crucial paradigm of expression in modern literature (1–23). The narrative mode
is one of excess, one that intensifies what is represented. The secret to melo-
drama’s popularity lies, according to Brooks, in its ability to produce scenes of
exaggerated, histrionic, hyperbolic gesticulations. It is a mode of expression
born out of the modern compulsion of wanting to say it all in a way that is faithful
to reality. The result is a mixture of excessive theatricality and the disillusion
that results from the impossibility of fidelity to reality (an impossibility found in
language itself ). This occurs precisely at the moment when expression and
reality no longer correspond to one another. Melodrama arises, then, out of a
sort of longing for transparency of language. Grandiose gestures, histrionic mise-
en-scène, music, cries and other nonverbal expressions compensate for the impos-
sibility of saying it all transparently.
I therefore propose reading the hysteric’s element of excess and inarticulation
as a venture into melodramatic discourse. Doing so requires taking the melodra-
matic genre beyond the Manichean and fantastical solutions that tend to resolve
its plots. This is because Mimı́ is not a typical melodrama in which heroes tri-
umph and evildoers are punished. It does not celebrate the virtue of an ideal

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6  Revista Hispánica Moderna 65.1 (2012)
woman (its heroine is far from ideal), or expose adultery as vice. In fact, as
Paulette Silva Beauregard has indicated, Mimı́ may be the most scandalous Vene-
zuelan novel of its era: ‘‘[T]o the adulteress comes the natural right of being a
mother, and the problem is not her behavior but rather the law which does not
permit divorce’’ (243).7
The suspension of judgment until the end of the novel points to a legal
vacuum, similar to the one demonstrated by the legal case discussed at the begin-
ning of this essay. In both the legal case and the novel, the woman’s disease, in
addition to turning her into an object of interpretation, presents the possibility
of agency. The legal case analyzed here, in fact, is the second court case related
to the Berckmans’s divorce. The first, brought by the wife, alleged domestic
abuse and remained unresolved. The husband and his mother then brought a
new case, defending themselves and accusing the wife of adultery. As mentioned
above, the court devoted many pages to the question of whether it was possible
to see the doctor’s boots through the windows. The court considered various
reflections of light at different hours of the day. Numerous witnesses were called
to testify. Still, no conclusion was reached. As a result, the judge sent two experts
‘‘of equal respectability’’ (127) to measure and reconstruct the scene, taking all
variables into account. One expert testified that it was indeed possible to see a
small portion of the sofa from where the accusing mother stood; the other testi-
fied that it was not. The judge concluded:

This seems to me incredible, assuming that the observations in both

cases were made under the same conditions and were fairly made
and stated; and physically impossible, if the measurements furnished to
the court were accurate. I confess that I am totally unable to reconcile this
conflict in the testimony except upon the hypothesis, either that there was some
change in the relative elevation of the floor of the green-house and the parlor,
so that the position of the observer and altitude of the point of vision
was changed, or that a change was made in the sofa itself. (Green
Ewing 128; my emphasis)

In refusing to choose between the two sides, the judge abdicates the judicial duty
to find facts in the face of conflicting evidence and contradictory stories. The
judge’s manipulation of the floor’s elevation as a variable calls attention to the
law’s equivocal approach to an adulterous situation and the effect of point of
view on the search for truth. It also highlights the difficulty of finding the words
and evidence necessary for the narration of adultery. The divorce case therefore
remains unresolved (as does the issue of Mimı́’s guilt in the novel) for lack of
‘‘satisfactory’’ evidence (140), although the court does conclude that ‘‘the visits
of her physician are too frequent and too long, and that, having no father, or
brother, or friend, to whom she could have recourse, she resorted to that physi-

7
Although ‘‘divorce’’ first appears codified under Venezuelan law in the 1873 National
Civil Code, the statute required legal justification before the court could grant a divorce
petition. Mimı́’s experience would have provided neither the moral nor the legal justification
for a divorce.

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 bouzaglo, Doctors’ Visits and Adultery  7
cian for counsel and guidance, when she was about to fly from her husband for
his alleged cruelty’’ (143).
In neither the legal case nor the novel is the woman punished, unlike the
majority of nineteenth-century cases of female adultery. In each, the lack of a
masculine figure (or the fact that men are sterile and, therefore, emasculated)
justifies the ‘‘crime.’’ Without such justification, the adulteress and her lover
would have been harshly punished, as in almost all cases of female adultery of
the era.8
Comparing law and melodrama (or reading a legal case as melodrama) might
seem misguided. Melodrama is a literary genre associated with the feminine in
relation to an emphatic dispersion of emotion; law is a system of social control
served by rationality (Louis 149). At first glance, law and melodrama converge
only in the use of conceptual oppositions (conflicts between good and evil) as a
mode of representation, but as I have shown here, these oppositions do not
necessarily endure in either genre.
At times, Mimı́ seems to become an unresolved trial. This may reflect Rafael
Cabrera Malo’s experience as a lawyer and statesman. It is tempting to conclude
that, in consonance with his national project, he writes this didactic novel,
repeatedly emphasizing in the prologue the risks and implications of an unpro-
ductive sexuality that corrupts matrimonial stability and therefore works against
the family as the nation’s biological foundation. However, the narrator contra-
dicts himself. For all his eagerness to condemn adultery, he falls for Mimı́’s illicit
behavior and winds up taking a certain pleasure in its justification. The novel’s
‘‘objective’’ narration of ‘‘real-life facts’’ includes the relation of Mimı́’s sexual
excesses and ‘‘disease’’ in painstaking detail. As a result, this narration inevitably
resorts to melodrama.
Although the legal case functions in a different context and is governed by
different codes, it, too, permits an examination of the narrative of adultery as a
threat to order. Both texts respond to the realities of matrimonial law (or the
necessities of divorce), but their narrations, loaded with allusions and allegories,
are less transparent than they appear. They share common subjects, and engage
with nineteenth-century ideas of gender, mental illness, bourgeois codes of
decency and the institution of marriage. Moreover, perhaps because of their
pretensions to objectivity, these narratives resort to melodrama to voice the
impossibility of delimiting, controlling and classifying bodies. What is significant
is that, in both stories, the adultery narratives remain unresolved. That is, the
melodramatic themes do not conclude in a stable opposition between guilt and
innocence, good and evil. This is surprising, given that these narratives belong
to a historical moment that aspired to truth and linguistic transparency. For this
reason, the melodrama’s attempt to present what other, more measured narra-
tive forms cannot grasp only emphasizes that very impossibility. Adultery contam-

8
In both cases considered here, the feminine diseases are the result of a particular
context, rather than a consequence of an ‘‘illicit’’ behavior. Had the latter been the case, the
protagonist’s illness would probably have been taken as a didactic example of the risks of
‘‘sin.’’ In ‘‘Monstruo y nación: una lectura de El hombre de hierro,’’ I analyze the need for the
adulterous woman to fall ill or turn monstrous in Latin American narratives of the era.

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8  Revista Hispánica Moderna 65.1 (2012)
inates not only the adulterous bodies of the characters but also the codes
governing their narration.
The role of melodrama in these two cases leads me to ask: how does melo-
drama revise the narrative of the construction of the nation and its legal codes?
And how does melodrama in a novel contribute to the formation of the nation?
I will conclude by proposing that melodrama, despite its apparent focus on the
personal sphere, in reality presents the necessity of sociopolitical change.9
Through its narrative and linguistic excess, melodrama points out the blind spots
in the legal discourse, and thus contributes to its revision and perfection, which
is vital to the formation of the nation. Because of its ability to express fin de siècle’s
contradictions and adulterations better than any other genre, melodrama plays
a privileged role in the creation of the nation in post-independence Latin
America.

works cited
Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Performing Arts Journal,
1983. Print.
Beizer, Janet L. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1994. Print.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1998. Print.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of
Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Print.
Cabrera Malo, Rafael. Mimı́. Novela Nacional. Caracas: El Pregonero, 1898. Print.
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Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York:
Columbia UP, 1985. Print.
Louis, Anja. Women and the Law: Carmen De Burgos, an Early Feminist. London: Tamesis, 2005.
Print.
Molloy, Sylvia. ‘‘The Politics of Posing.’’ Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Ed. Sylvia Molloy and
Robert Robert McKee Irwin. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 141–60. Print.
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de fin de siglo (1880–1910). Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello, 2000. Print.
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1979. Print.

9
‘‘Both law and melodrama . . . converge in their potential for social change and their
focus on the conflict of human relationships’’ (Louis 149).

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