The art of nerves: A quantitative and qualitative analysis of drama at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth century

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this article was to investigate the influence of medical discourse of the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries through a case study of dramatic works of the Polish modernism. It was based on a detailed analysis of ninety plays randomly selected out of all performances staged between 1890 and 1913 at two major theatres from Krakow and Warsaw. The author analysed the ways of dramatizing symptoms of hysteria and compared the language used in describing disorders in female and male characters, combining quantitative and qualitative methods of text analysis. Almost all the plays included the symptoms of hysteria; most of them presented characters prone to hysteria. The number of symptoms and hysterical characters increased in periods when new medical theories had gained popularity. The image of hysteria that emerges from the surveyed works both defied the stereotype of hysteria as a specifically feminine illness and confirmed these stereotypes. Dramatic works could have played an important role in the process of popularizing hysteria.