Going against the tide and speaking out against unfair treatment, some women in the 19th century faced accusations of hysteria while seeking to survive and reclaim agency. This spirit of resistance echoes in the way Jean Martin Charcot, a forerunner to Freud, gathered attention for his pioneering work that reshaped European thought about the mind and body. The narrative threads through a period when women repeatedly faced judgment and misrepresentation, yet they persisted in voicing their experiences and carving out space for healing and understanding.
These women were often labeled and dismissed as hysterical, even as their courage to challenge oppressive norms grew. The hospital at La Salpêtrière became a focal point in this history, illustrating a system where patients were examined through a lens that sometimes reduced them to spectacle rather than treating their suffering. The tension between medical curiosity and the human need for dignity is a recurring motif in the historical record, and it shaped how society perceived madness and femininity alike.
Lola Blasco’s inquiry into this era follows the arc of feminization of madness and the enduring questions about hysteria, a term historically tied to the womb and to women’s bodies. The exploration extends beyond Paris to cultural institutions that shaped the arts, including a modern residence used for screenwriting and a cultural ministry that supported scholarly work and creative exploration. There, Blasco traced how the era’s debates fed into theatrical expression, culminating in a project planned for a major national company in 2024 that reframes these debates as a living theatre experience.
Authorship and direction
The Alicante-based playwright assumes the role of director for this project, with Juanjo Llorens contributing to lighting and Luis Crespo handling set design. The creator expressed enthusiasm for telling the story in a way that aligns with their vision, explaining that the text remains true to its core while inviting other directors to interpret the material in their own voice. This approach reflects a deliberate choice to maintain authorship while embracing collaborative interpretation. Blasco notes that the work engages with the origins of psychoanalysis and its persistent ties to gender and hysteria, pointing to the historical context in which women’s experiences were framed and interpreted through a clinical lens.
Blasco underscores how the early psychoanalytic project intersected with questions about femininity and hysteria, highlighting the connection between medical discourse and gendered language used to describe women’s conditions. The discussion centers on how these themes have influenced both medical and cultural understandings of madness through the decades.
A metatheatrical story
La historia de las locas is a metatheatre exploring how a theatre company stages a play about insanity and confinement. In the end, the production reveals that the performers themselves can echo the roles Charcot once directed, illustrating the blurred lines between observer and participant. The performances invite public audiences to experience sessions as if they were part of a show, echoing the dynamics of historical lectures that captivated spectators, including luminaries such as Sarah Bernhardt. The piece turns the theatre into a space for examining medical history and the social grammar of madness, while offering a contemporary lens on how the past informs present artistic choices.
Blasco also reflects on contrasting figures such as sculptor Camille Claudel and painter Vincent van Gogh. He notes that the hospital context reveals extensive clinical histories and drug regimens, while Van Gogh’s legacy appears through the surviving works themselves and the narratives surrounding his period of treatment. This layer of archival material enriches the storytelling by grounding it in concrete historical records and artistic testimonies that continue to resonate today.
In recognizing this historical continuum, Blasco and the creative team acknowledge a national prize for dramatic literature and the ongoing conversation about how a century of perceptions about madness, femininity, and creative genius has evolved. The piece invites audiences to consider how descriptions of hysteria have shifted, and how the language used to describe women’s experiences has shaped medical, artistic, and cultural responses across time.
Hysteria has long carried charged meanings about gender, sexuality, and power. The artists remind audiences that the way madness has been understood often mirrored cultural anxieties about women and their bodies. The narrative presents these themes with a provocative honesty that encourages reflection on how far medical and artistic discourses have come, and how much farther they must go to ensure more nuanced, compassionate understanding.