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    Hysteria: A Collection of Madness
    Hysteria: A Collection of Madness
    Hysteria: A Collection of Madness
    Ebook171 pages59 minutes

    Hysteria: A Collection of Madness

    By Stephanie M. Wytovich

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    Asylums once used to confine those deemed mentally unfit linger, forgotten behind trees or urban development, beautiful yet desolate in their decay. Within them festers something far more unnerving than unlit corners or unexplained noises: the case files left to moulder out of sight, out of conscience. Stephanie M. Wytovich forces your hands upon these crumbling, warped binders and exposes your mind to every taboo misfortune experienced by the outcast, exiled, misbegotten monsters and victims who have walked among us. The poetry contained in Hysteria performs internal body modification on its readers in an unrelenting fashion, employing broad-spectrum brutality treatment that spans the physical to the societal, as noted in Stoker Award winner Michael A. Arnzen’s incisive introduction.
    “Wytovich is nothing short of stupefying in her mastery of blunt impact verse. Even those jaded to the violent extremes of despair and rage in contemporary dark literature will find Wytovich piercing deep into the dark and unmapped vulnerabilities of her readers. Hysteria is a devastating debut.”
    —John Edward Lawson, author of The Troublesome Amputee and SuiPsalms

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRaw Dog Screaming Press
    Release dateJul 2, 2013
    ISBN9781935738497
    Hysteria: A Collection of Madness

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      Book preview

      Hysteria - Stephanie M. Wytovich

      Acknowledgements

      Dedication

      This book is dedicated to the madness inside us all.

      The madness we know is there, and the madness we don’t.

      Author’s Note

      I first met

      Hysteria a year ago. She came to me at night with madness in her eyes and pain etched in the corners of her cheeks. She wore a flowing, white dress stained with saliva and tears and when she spoke, I could hear her shake. Her lips were painted with dried blood and she rubbed her hands together like Lady Macbeth as if she’d already committed the crime without me.

      Hysteria was a muse unlike any other that I’ve worked with, and she crept inside my mind like an ever-present nightmare that I couldn’t get rid of. We spent insomnia-fueled nights together in the asylum as we explored the breaking points of the mind. We looked into the eyes of a killer, played inside the head of the deranged, and explored the psychosis of the truly insane. She held my hand as we walked down the wards and into the treatment rooms so she could shock me full of reality. Hysteria showed me the truth about people, and more importantly, she showed me what they were capable of.

      Madness lives inside of us all.

      It’s just a matter of finding it, and knowing how to keep it hidden.

      Stay Scared,

      Stephanie M. Wytovich

      The Muse Beneath the Madhouse

      An Introduction to Hysteria

      by Michael A. Arnzen

      Hysteria, as you

      probably know, is a word we sometime use to describe raving madness. We go hysterical when we lose our minds and make a spectacle out of ourselves, excessively lashing out at the world. The term—which rose to popularity in psychoanalytic circles of the 19th Century psychoanalysis—might be common enough nowadays to be the title of a Def Leppard song, but psychology has abandoned the term, as it is something of a catch-all diagnosis that means everything and nothing—and more often than not has simply been a word that says crazy or emotionally out of control. This wouldn’t be a problem, if the word wasn’t almost exclusively used in reference to women. Hysteria is a women’s disease—a mental illness ostensibly originating naturally from a woman’s body—in particular, the womb. It’s been a word used to label women as crazy maybe when they’ve been guilty of being nothing more than women. And this may also have led many women with real, curable mental disorders over the past century or so to be misdiagnosed, or even worse, cured by the only natural method one would ultimately choose: through an unnecessary hysterectomy.

      I’m not here to write the history of this term, but if you want a good one check out Elaine Showalter’s book, Hystories.

      But do that later. For now, clutch the book you hold tightly and prepare to be horrified. The pages that follow have many sick and satanic surprises in store for you, but at the center of them all is Stephanie Wytovich’s unblinking treatment of a woman’s broken psyche. Her title is a sign of her overarching purpose: to reclaim the term hysteria, and to use it as a way to explore a woman’s madness through the lens of horror. She probably thinks it is simply a horror poetry book, but in it I see much more than that. In her introduction, we learn that Hysteria is the name Wytovich has given her dark muse. And what a nasty muse she is, for these pieces ask us to see through a madwoman’s eyes quite often, with unthinkable results. And just as often, in page after page of this book we’re attacked by the words and left to feel the sting in order to comprehend the depth of a woman’s pain or a woman’s desire that are often hidden or veiled by most representations of the feminine. I don’t want to go so far as to say this is a feminist book, since it has higher ambitions than just being some kind of tract asking us to overthrow patriarchy. Instead, I’d like to think that it is more interested in madness itself. Wytovich is exploring gender reversals, and feminist ideas, but she’s doing it in a way that may be just as skeptical of feminist claims as it is of anything else, as this is what the irrationality of madness can do: challenge our assumptions, sometimes by cutting right to

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