Women's Work:

Representing the hysterical body in the late sculptural fabric works of Louise Bourgeois
Anna Souter
Thesis, MA Art History: ‘Twentieth-Century Sculpture – Production and Perception’
Courtauld Institute of Art, 2014
--

“I don't want my objects to depend on my presence. The sculptures have to last long after me.
They have to have a value outside of people, outside of history. They have to have an intrinsic
value, otherwise they are not successful.”1

“For me, sculpture is my body. My body is my sculpture.”2

“I could not have been a painter. The two dimensions do not satisfy me. I have to have the reality
given by the third dimension.”3

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, I will explore the sculptural representation of the hysterical body in some of Louise
Bourgeois's late fabric figurative works made around the turn of the twenty-first century. I will do this
initially through a chronological examination of the subject matter of hysteria, both in its historical and
representational heritage as Bourgeois knew it, and in its development in her own words and sculptural
work. I will then analyse how and why she made sculptural fabric works depicting the hysterical body
like Arched Figure (1999) and Arch of Hysteria (2000) at this time. These fabric works, despite, or
perhaps because of, being executed late in her career, are some of the most powerful in her oeuvre,
carrying an intense psychic force that I argue is derived from their insistent bodily and material
presence and their emphatic three-dimensionality. The corporeality of these female figures speaks to
what she termed a concern with the body, which manifests itself in all Bourgeois's works. In the late
1960s she went so far as to present that concern as the content of her work:

Content is a concern with the human body; its aspect, its changes, transformations, what it
needs, wants and feels – its function. [...] All these states of being, perceiving and doing are

1
Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Louise Neri, 'The personal effects of a woman with no secrets', Louise Bourgeois: Oeuvres
Récentes (Bordeaux, 1997) pp.81-87, p.86
2
Louise Bourgeois, 'Self-expression is sacred and fatal', 1992, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father:
Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, eds Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London, 1998) pp.222-30, p.228
3
Bourgeois, 'Arena: Edited transcript of interviews with the artist for 1993 BBC documentary film', 1993, Destruction of the
Father, pp.253-62, p.255

1
 expressed by processes that are familiar to us and that have to do with the treatment of
materials, pouring, flowing, dripping, oozing out, setting, hardening, coagulating.4

This link between the body, the sculptural subject and sculptural process is one with which Bourgeois
is concerned throughout her life. However, the materials and processes she employs change
dramatically. The 'pouring', 'dripping' and 'oozing' described here clearly relate to her innovative work in
latex and plaster in the 1960s; by the end of the 1990s she has developed a new sculptural language,
one of cutting, stitching and stuffing. In her fabric works, Bourgeois begins to employ processes and
materials borrowed from a gendered craft tradition to create figures in a way which, I argue, is
especially apt for representing the female body in extremis and the hysterical body in particular. To
understand Bourgeois's engagement with hysteria, it is essential to understand its physical and
material (that is, its sculptural) terms. In my following argument, I hope to unravel these terms in order
to create a clearer picture of Bourgeois's exploration of this complex subject with a long socio-cultural
history.

Bourgeois's works are surrounded by a large and ever-growing body of literature, generated both by
the artist herself and by a throng of critics seeking to engage with the huge variety of her artistic output
and with her personality and personal history. The textuality of these statements, explorations and
(psycho)analyses often acts to distract and detract from the insistent materiality of Bourgeois's
powerfully bodily works. Such a textual focus also often results in the eight decades of Bourgeois's
exceptionally long career being telescoped and presented as the front of one undifferentiated practice
and point of view, rather than charting and allowing for the inevitable changes in thought process and
artistic practice that accompany a long and constantly productive life. Her own words often act to
muddle the picture, since she frequently contradicts herself, whether her statements are made fifty
years or fifty words apart. Indeed, as she states as early as 1954: 'An artist's words are always to be
taken cautiously.'5 I hope, by focussing instead on Bourgeois's use of materials and her sculptural
processes, to avoid some of these pitfalls and to form an account of her work and its relation to
hysteria from the facts and material resources I have available to me. Bourgeois only revealed her
account of her childhood traumas (as she saw them), to do with her relationships with her parents, and
with the double 'betrayal' she found in her father's extended affair with her English governess Sadie, at
the time of her 1982 retrospective at MOMA, when she was seventy years old. Much of the critical
literature since then, particularly surrounding the fabric sculptures on which I wish to focus, has made
use of this biographical information. However, to focus on her biography is to distract from the physical
substance of the works. Her fabric sculptures are 'successful' in the way Bourgeois describes in the
quotation which opens this essay, and do not depend on the imaginary or bodily presence of the artist.
To chart how and why they are successful and powerful, I hope to focus instead on the sculptures
themselves.

In order to do this, I will turn away not just from the biographical literature, but from the most recent
developments in it, which see Bourgeois's processes of production as playing primarily psychic roles. I
intend to depart from the psychobiographical approach taken by Philip Larratt-Smith and Donald
Kuspit in The Return of the Repressed (2012), where the psychoanalysis undergone by Bourgeois with
Dr Henry Lowenfeld for over thirty years, and the notes and diaries she made during that time, are

4
Bourgeois, 'Form', late 1960s, Destruction of the Father, pp.75-76, p.76
5
Bourgeois, 'An Artist's Words', 1954, Destruction of the Father, p.66

2
used as a lens for studying the artist (first) and her work (second). Philip Larratt-Smith argues that:

In the face of her depression, Bourgeois's principal defence lay in making art that allowed her to
enact the ritual movement from passive to active of which she often spoke and wrote. The
process of making art also enabled her to channel and transform her dammed libido and her
aggression against others and herself into symbolic form and through symbolic actions such as
cutting, drilling, carving and pouring.6

Although Larratt-Smith is interested in the processes of making Bourgeois employs, he cites them only
in a 'symbolic' context as a psychic release, overlooking their actual role in producing her artworks and
their significance in their own right. I don't believe that Bourgeois's relationship to making is as
straightforward as this quotation suggests. It is not a question of a simple transference of emotions;
although the catharsis brought about by these aggressive actions may well have been therapeutic, it is
important not to ignore their sculptural results and her role as a prolifically creative producer. For
Bourgeois, it is not so much a question of 'symbolism' as of a complex interchange between self and
sculpture, body and mind, physical and psychical. The title to Larratt-Smith's essay, 'Sculpture as
symptom', is echoed by Donald Kuspit in his contribution to the book when he writes that Bourgeois's
sculptures 'in whatever medium, are symptoms of her suffering.'7 To my mind, this is reductive; to
designate Bourgeois's works (especially with the sweeping phrase 'in whatever medium') either
symptoms of or cures for her psychological problems is to turn her works into a series of textual
abstractions and to ignore their insistent material presence and, in many cases, their figurative physical
form. I prefer instead to explore Bourgeois from a perspective informed by the approach of critics such
as Robert Storr (Bourgeois's lifelong friend) and Linda Nochlin, set out by each in short essays.8 Storr
puts it succinctly: 'To accurately take stock of her sculpture is […] to inventory the substances, tools
and procedures that gave rise to them, paying special attention to the distinct resistances or
determining limitations of each.'9 In her 1976 collection of essays From the Centre:Feminist Essays on
Women's Art, Lucy Lippard writes that 'Bourgeois actually has a very literal imagination', a statement
taken up and applied more thoroughly by Anne Wagner.10 I similarly hope to draw out this literalness in
my study of Bourgeois's sculptural works.

HYSTERIA THROUGH HISTORY: DOCTORS, ARTISTS AND FEMINISTS

Hysteria has a long and intriguing history of affliction, recognition and treatment, surfacing in different
cultures at different times with an astonishing variety of symptoms and manifestations, responding to
the moral codes and oppressions of the society in question. Bourgeois engages with hysteria as a

6
Philip Larratt-Smith, 'Introduction: Sculpture as symptom', The Return of the Repressed, ed. Philip Larratt-Smith (London,
2012) pp. 7-16, p.8
7
Donald Kuspit, 'Louise Bourgeois in psychoanalysis with Henry Lowenfeld', Return of the Repressed, ed. Philip Larratt-
Smith (London, 2012) pp.17-27, p.19
8
Namely Robert Storr, 'The matter at hand', Louise Bourgeois, ed. Peter Weiermair, exh. cat. (Frankfurt, 1995) pp.18-21;
and Linda Nochlin, 'Old-age style: Late Louise Bourgeois', Louise Bourgeois, ed. Frances Morris, exh. cat. (London,
2007) pp.188-96
9
Storr, 'The matter at hand', p.20
10
Lucy Lippard, 'Louise Bourgeois: From the inside out', From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York,
1976) pp.238-49, p.248; Wagner quotes Lippard's statement about Bourgeois's 'literal imagination' and writes 'I think it is
more literal than the critic herself was prepared to spell out.' Anne Wagner, 'Bourgeois Fantasy', A House Divided:
American Art since 1955 (Berkeley, 2012), pp.158-82, p.172

3
topic which she inherits and has access to through her position as one of many intellectuals of her
generation interested in the subject, and as a French artist engaging with a distinctly French artistic
heritage. Hysteria was particularly studied and popularised in the late nineteenth century, especially in
France, where the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot set up a clinic for hysterics at La
Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. It is this period which provides us with the main visual and socio-cultural
resources on hysteria, which were widely disseminated, adopted and adapted by a broad range of
members of society over the following century. This is also apparently the only era of hysteria which
interested Bourgeois. Indeed, she seems to equate the whole historical epoch with the disease and its
treatment: 'I find this period of the end of the nineteenth century – the period of Charcot, the
Salpêtrière, you know – mysterious.'11 Bourgeois finds this period 'mysterious' in spite of the fact that
there are so many visual and textual resources relating to the Salpêtrière. I think this sense of mystery
stems from the opacity of many of these resources, such as the photographs I discuss below.
Nominally tools for scientific study, they conceal as much as they reveal, theatrically enacting gendered
roles in a complicated interplay of subject and object. I believe it is these complex representations of
female identity and the female body in extremis that Bourgeois found both fascinating and mysterious
in this period. For these reasons, I will use these resources as a starting point for my study of
Bourgeois's representations of hysteria.

Hysteria is a highly complex condition. Lisa Appignanesi writes that in Charcot's France the term
'described a sexualised madness full of contradictions, one which could play all feminine parts and
take on a dizzying variety of symptoms, though none of them had any real detectable base in the
body.'12 The condition and Charcot's research were made famous through the individual hysterics who
lived at the Salpêtrière and whose hysterical symptoms were displayed and analysed in sessions open
to members of the public. In these sessions and in his written works, through 'focussing on the
individual case, Charcot spoke what he saw and made a spectacle of diagnosis.'13 The methods of
diagnosis and treatment at the Salpêtrière were all highly visual, creating a sort of theatre of hysteria, in
which the (often young and pretty) hysterics acted out their symptoms as if by rote. Charcot asserted
that men also suffered from hysteria, but, as Juliet Mitchell points out, in these cases Charcot noted
'the prevalence of traumatic accidents as precipitators; his male subjects had usually suffered from
work- or violence-related accidents.'14 His more famous female patients, however, like the dramatic
and attractive Augustine, were treated differently, in a manner which played to stereotyped gendered
characteristics; their symptoms and behaviour were traced back to their sexuality and their gendered
biology.

One of Charcot's innovations was to set up a photography studio at La Salpêtrière in order to

document the physical symptoms of his patients. These images were then widely disseminated in Paul
Regnard and Desiré Bourneville's Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière (1875-77), providing
both a visual record of the pretty and often scantily clad hysterics, and a manual of hysteria and its
symptoms to be assimilated and mimicked by its readers. Appignanesi points out that 'if today the
Salpêtrière photographs of hysterics can look melodramatically posed, and hardly useful as

11
Bourgeois, 'Mortal Elements: Pat Steir talks with Louise Bourgeois', 1993, Deconstruction of the Father, pp.234-38, p.237
12
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.143; this book also inspired a recent exhibition of the same title at the Freud Museum,
London, which featured works by Louise Bourgeois
13
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.145
14
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human
Condition (Harmondsworth, 2000) p.54

4
instruments for contemporary diagnosis, it is worth noting that their status in their own time was not
unlike brain scans or magnetic resonance imaging today.'15 It is important to bear in mind that part of
the power of these images was derived from their presentation, and subsequent acceptance, as
scientifically accurate visual documents. The camera takes up the position of a detached but
voyeuristic observer, with the hysterical subjects only looking at the lens and engaging directly with the
image-making when they are photographed in their 'normal' or 'sane' moments. When engaged in the
throes of an hysterical attack, the women are apparently oblivious of the camera's presence, revealing
parts of their body which Victorian decency would otherwise hide from view. In a photograph depicting
the arc de cercle, or the 'arch of hysteria' as Bourgeois would later take it up, the female subject
contorts her body so that she is resting on her feet and shoulders. Her head is entirely hidden in a
pillow, whilst her shapely legs and feet are almost completely revealed as her short shift rides up. The
relative distance of the camera and the profiling of the subject suggest that this photograph is taken to
give the impression of scientific 'truth', but also simultaneously to place the (assumed male) viewer at a
voyeuristic remove from the depicted woman. The photographs act to transform the bodily suffering
and performance of their female subjects into two-dimensional images for both scientific study and
visual titillation.

Sigmund Freud was a student of Charcot, as Bourgeois knew, and first became well known for his
Studies in Hysteria (1893-95), authored with Josef Breuer.16 Dianne Hunter points out that 'in his
obituary of Charcot, Freud describes him as a visuel, someone for whom sight is the dominant channel
of knowing.'17 This privileging of sight and the visual is fundamental to our understanding and
recognition of 'hysteria' as an entity, and to my argument regarding Bourgeois's reception of its history.
Bourgeois was also versed in Freud's understanding of hysteria. She writes in her diary on 22nd
February 1949:

Washington's birthday.
Self-destruction under the form of destruction of my marriage -
The etiology of hysteria by Freud -
Hysterical symptoms can always be traced to repressed sexual memories usually having
occurred (experiences).
1. The memories may become conscious much later, at puberty – My father walking around in
his nightshirt holding his genitals.18

Bourgeois seems to be suggesting in this early diary entry that she detects hysterical symptoms in
herself which can be traced back to disturbing 'sexual memories' of her father, in much the same way
as Freud tried to achieve with his patients. However, the 'talking cure' which Freud developed was
supposed to eliminate symptoms by rooting out the repressed memories which were their cause;
Bourgeois seems to recognise her memories, and yet to maintain her hysterical symptoms. For her, as
a mid-twentieth century hysteric, these symptoms perhaps included her constant self-diagnosis. This
chimes with the often-noted mimetic quality of the condition, which meant that patients frequently

15
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.146
16
Bourgeois wrote of Freud: 'He was a doctor, a neurologist, a disciple of Darwin, a student of Charcot, a materialist and a
determinist.'; 'Freud's Toys',1990, Destruction of the Father, pp.186-90, p.186
17
Dianne Hunter, The Making of Dr Charcot's Hysteria Shows: Research through Performance (New York, 1998) p.1
18
Bourgeois, 'Diary Notes 1949', Destruction of the Father, p.56

5
created new symptoms as quickly as others were 'cured'.19

Charcot's hysterics, Freud's work on hysteria and the Salpêtrière photographs provided a wealth of
cultural materials for the Surrealists, and Louise Bourgeois's artistic formation is at least in part rooted
in the practices of these artists. Soon after she moved to Paris in 1936, André Breton opened his
gallery Gradiva on the ground floor of the building in which she was living.20 This was where the
Surrealists showed their innovative new work and where Bourgeois recalls talking to them and learning
about their beliefs and ideas.21 In a letter of 1938 to a friend, she describes her whirlwind romance with
Robert Goldwater: 'In between conversations about Surrealism and the latest trends, we got married.'22
A month later, she wrote again:

Fortunately in New York I shall be joining artistic circles. Othon Friesz is there at the moment, so
is Fernand Leger. Chirico and Salvador Dali are Robert's friends and will be in our house
regularly. Picasso and Andre Breton will also be there.23

Her historical association with and knowledge of the Surrealists and their work is evident. However, she
has repeatedly stated that despite some formal affinities, she was not a Surrealist herself. Much later, in
1984, she stated that 'I was not influenced by the Surrealists', but rather that 'it was my first experience
of reacting against a group.'24 In 1939 she had described the Surrealists and their work as 'theatrical',
criticising this because 'theatre is the image of life' rather than a 'reality'.25 This sense that the
Surrealists were interested in 'image' rather than 'reality' can be seen particularly in their
representations of female hysteria, which drew heavily on Charcot's photographs.

In 1928, André Breton and Louis Aragon published an article in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste
which contains the famous Salpêtrière photographs of Augustine and expresses the Surrealists' desire
'to celebrate here the quinquagenary of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the
nineteenth century'.26 They continue:

We who like nothing so much as youthful hysterics – the perfect example of which is furnished by
observations relating to the delightful X.L. (Augustine) […]. Does Freud, who owes so much to
Charcot, remember the time – confirmed by the survivors – when interns at the Salpêtrière
confused their professional duties and their taste for love?
Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can be considered in every respect a
supreme means of expression.27

19
Mignon Nixon describes hysteria as 'a mimetic disease' and points to the prevalence of such interpretations within its
historiography; Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)
p.50
20
Much later, she described this as the place in which Breton 'held court'; Bourgeois, 'Native Talent', 1994, Destruction of
the Father, pp.271-74, p.271
21
Louise Bourgeois, Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York, ed. Judith Olch Richards (New York,
2004) p.76
22
Bourgeois, 'Letter to Colette Richarme', 1938, Destruction of the Father, p.30
23
Ibid. p.32; it is interesting to note that she imagines Picasso would be there, since he did not in fact leave Paris during the
war
24
Bourgeois, Inside the Studio, p.76
25
Bourgeois, 'Diary notes', 6 March 1939, Destruction of the Father, p.40
26
André Breton and Louise Aragon, 'Le Cinquantenaire de l'Hysterie (1878-1928)', La Révolution Surréaliste, 11 (1928) 20-
21; translation quoted in Anna Furze, 'Introduction', Augustine (Big Hysteria) (Amsterdam, 1997) pp.1-15, p.10
27
Ibid.

6
The Surrealist sexualisation of the photographed 'youthful hysterics' like the 'delightful' Augustine is
evident. They see hysteria as a state in which poetic expression can run free. However, these female
hysterics are not given a voice but instead made into the subject of voyeuristic two-dimensional
images. Breton's novel Nadja was also published in 1928 and an excerpt from it appears in the same
issue of La Révolution Surréaliste. In his book Breton writes 'Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not
be.'28 The phrase refers to the 'convulsive' throes of an hysterical attack, suggesting a state of
sexualised, uninhibited passion, seen as 'a supreme means of expression.'29 José Pierre argues that
'when he states in 1928 that beauty should be “convulsive”, Breton clearly meant that all of Surrealism
should make itself, or recognise itself as, “convulsive”.'30 However, whilst to be 'convulsive' or hysterical
might be empowering for the male Surrealist artists, it is less so for their female subjects, whose
passion only makes them weak. Mary Ann Caws aptly describes the disempowerment of the Surrealist
woman:

Headless. And also footless. Often armless too; and always unarmed, except with poetry and
passion. There they are, the surrealist women so shot and painted, so stressed and
dismembered, punctured and severed: is it any wonder she has (we have) gone to pieces?'31

Dismembered and vulnerable, the women represented by the Surrealists are almost invariably the
subject of the male voyeuristic gaze. Salvador Dali's photomontage The Phenomenon of Ecstasy
(1933) is an assemblage of pictures published in Minotaure, depicting the faces of women in hysterical
states. As in the Salpêtrière photographs, none of the women make eye contact with the camera, but
either shut their eyes or stare into the distance in the grip what looks more like erotic pleasure than
pain. David Lomas notes that Dali 'does not use actual clinical photographs of hysterics as Aragon and
Breton did; rather hysteria, the female malady, seems to be the condition of femininity in general.'32
Disembodied, they look vulnerable in their 'convulsive beauty' and their femininity, intended to be
gazed upon by men.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS'S HYSTERIA

As Mignon Nixon explains, Bourgeois's 'historical predicament' in the 1940s, as she was first being
exposed to hysteria through her study of Charcot and her acquaintance with the Surrealists, 'was to be
caught between the Surrealist celebration of an outmoded hysterical femininity and the more mundane
sexism by which “hysteria was made woman”.'33 As Bourgeois was beginning her sculptural career,
hysteria was disappearing as a commonly-used medical diagnosis, as its symptoms were separated
into discrete mental illnesses, such as multiple personality disorder and anorexia. However, it remained
in use as a colloquial term. Juliet Mitchell explores why this might be the case, suggesting that 'unlike
most other “mental illnesses”, no one has yet proposed that one can treat hysteria with a drug, which

28
André Breton, quoted in José Pierre, '“Such is Beauty”: The “convulsive” in Breton's ethics and aesthetics, Andre Breton
Today, eds Anna Balakian and Rudolf Kuenzli (New York, 1989) pp.19-27, p.20
29
Breton and Aragon, 'Le Cinquantenaire de l'Hysterie', trans. Furze, Augustine (Big Hysteria), p.10
30
José Pierre, '“Such is Beauty”', Andre Breton Today, p.20
31
Mary Ann Caws, 'Seeing the Surrealist woman', Surrealism and Women, eds Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen
Kaaberg (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) pp.11-17, p.11
32
David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, (New Haven, 2000) p.53
33
Nixon, Fantastic Reality, p.33

7
may therefore account for making it a particularly suitable candidate for “disappearance” from
psychiatry and for its prevalence in the colloquial.'34 She further argues that hysteria's 'disappearance'
might also be 'an illustration of its mimetic ability', whereby its symptoms become normalised by their
repeated copying:35

It may have moved from being a disease to becoming a characterological trait. […] That it is no
longer diagnosed as a disease does not necessitate that there is no longer hysteria. […] As a
characterological trait it is easily absorbed into the general culture – particularly where
performance is valorized.36

I believe that Bourgeois thought about hysteria more in terms of a characterological trait than of a
disease with specific symptoms. She never seems to find it problematic that she diagnoses herself and
others with an outmoded and old-fashioned clinical term. I argue that Bourgeois did not see hysteria in
terms of an 'illness', as something separated from normal existence as a dimension of the exotic 'other'.
This is the version of hysteria captured in the distancing two-dimensionality of the Salpêtrière
photographs, which are simultaneously detached and voyeuristic. Instead, hysteria was for her a
condition of existence, an anatomical destiny for women and whose bodiliness is deep-seated and
physically experienced as a part of everyday life.

She seems to echo Simone de Beauvoir's belief, repeated several times in The Second Sex, that
'woman's body is singularly “hysterical” in that there is often no distance between conscious facts and
their organic expression' and 'because of the close connection between endocrine secretions and
nervous and sympathetic systems commanding muscles and viscera.'37 However, whilst de Beauvoir
sees woman's inherently hysterical body negatively, as a weakness, Bourgeois sees hysteria as a fact
of life, or as a reminder that one is alive, and as a powerful means of representing female bodily
experience. In 1979 she spoke about a period around 1944, 'the time when I thought I couldn't have
any children.'38 It was only after she adopted her first son, Michel, that she became pregnant:

It is the case of the hysterical woman who cannot procreate because she is hysterical. It is a
standard case. The fear of not having children made me hysterical, it made me emotionally
upset. This is tangible proof that I am a normal person.39

Here an association between hysteria and pregnancy, motherhood and childlessness begins to
emerge which she will reference repeatedly for the rest of her career.40 As is typical of hysteria, in
Bourgeois's case a psychological problem (here the 'fear of not having children') has a physical
manifestation in the body (her infertility). For Bourgeois, this is 'tangible proof that I am a normal
person', suggesting that for her hysteria is part of the natural bodily experiences of being a woman.

34
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relationships on the Human
Condition (Harmondsworth, 2000) p.113
35
Ibid. p.116
36
Ibid. p.116-17
37
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (Paris, 1949; repr. London,
2011) pp.417, 672; see also p.356; Bourgeois was acquainted with de Beauvoir's works – she notes in her diary ‘I read
Simone de Beauvoir and I approve. I feel like a sister. What she says is true’. Bourgeois, 'Interview with Anne Gibson',
1982, quoted in Frances Morris (ed.), Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London, 2007), p.118
38
Bourgeois, 'Conversation with Deborah Wye', 1979, Destruction of the Father, pp.123-5, p.124
39
Ibid. p.125
40
See, for example, Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, pp. 174, 250, 287

8
When she made this statement in 1979, the socio-cultural associations of hysteria had changed
considerably since she made her 1949 diary entry on her understanding of Freud.41 The feminist
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly within academia, sought to appropriate the condition
as a rebellion against the patriarchal system. As Juliet Mitchell puts it,

The feminism of the 1970s was very largely responsible for the reappearance of hysteria in the
academies. The women's liberation movement of the late 1960s had protested against the
prevalent stigmatization of women as hysterical by accepting and then overturning its
implications: the hysteric in her many guises – as a witch or as Dora – was a protofeminist
heroine protesting against patriarchal oppression.42

Bourgeois had a complicated relationship with the feminist movement, often contradicting herself in
her statements as to whether or not she considered herself a feminist.43 However, she was
undoubtedly involved with and informed about the movement, and was taken as a feminist figurehead
by many others.44 In many ways, the feminist position on hysteria championed in the 1970s was clearly
a problematic one. Lisa Appignanesi writes that

Hysteria, rebellion and feminism, as women's liberation was quick to underline, were intricately
linked: their sources lay in the same discontent. To express their anger at the circumscription of
their lives, women got ill or got organized. Sometimes they did both in turn.45

However, even if hysteria was a way for women to 'express their anger', their bodily act of rebellion was
repeatedly turned into two-dimensional voyeuristic images for the titillation of men, as we have seen in
relation to both Charcot and the Surrealists, while the sufferers were often incarcerated in institutions
and subject to physical restraint. For Bourgeois, hysteria was an issue which was both political and
personal, and one which she developed between the late 1970s and early 1990s in her writings and
drawings. As Marie-Laure Bernadac points out, drawings from the early 1990s 'clearly show the
development of the tense arch of hysteria, a body ultimately hanging by a thread in a position
suggesting both elevation and collapse.'46 For example, in Altered States (1992) Bourgeois uses red
ink to depict a mother holding the arched body of a child. The facial expressions of the two figures are
both impassioned, suggesting that both are hysterical; Bourgeois questions whether the mother
imparts her hysteria to the child or vice versa. In Triptych for the Red Room (1994), Bourgeois explores
this issue more fully, presenting three similar images of hysterical pairs in different formations. In the
central image we see the hysterical woman hanging by the navel in what Bernadac aptly describes as
'a position of elevation and collapse'; it is this hanging position in which we find the hysterical body in

41
See above, p.8
42
Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, p.120
43
Some of her contradictory statements include: 'My feminism expresses itself in an intense interest in what women do. But
I'm a complete loner.' (1988); 'I am not altogether a feminist. I am a woman, but I am not so sure I am a feminist.' (1994);
'I'm a woman, so I don't need to be a feminist.' (1995); all Destruction of the Father, pp. 164, 266, 309; all these
statements were made some time after the initiation of the feminist movement, suggesting that many of her ideas were
formed after a gap for reflection
44
For example, the Guerilla Girls claim in an interview that 'Louise had been an icon for the Guerilla Girls. She was the
subject of one of the lines in our “the advantages of being a woman artist” poster.' Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The
Mistress and the Tangerine. Dir. Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori. Zeitgeist Films, 2008. DVD.
45
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.421
46
Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois: Sculpting Emotion, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris, 2007) p.73

9
both Arch of Hysteria (1993) and in the later fabric arched figures. For Bourgeois, the hysterical body
is a site of ambivalence, one which simultaneously rises powerfully from the bed and hangs, collapsed
and caught, from a string at its navel.

THREE DIMENSIONS: REPRESENTING THE HYSTERICAL BODY THROUGH SCULPTURE

In 1992-93 Bourgeois made two works which constitute her first attempts at representing the
hysterical body in sculptural form: Cell (Arch of Hysteria) (1992-93), part of a series of installations,
and Arch of Hysteria (1993), a bronze cast hanging piece. In order to create her hysterical figures, she
borrowed the anatomy of Jerry Gorovoy, her long-time assistant, and instructed her foundry to make a
cast of his body. Gorovoy explains in an interview how he was lifted onto a high-sided mound and laid
down so his body curved automatically, before plaster was poured around him to set, which was a
process he found very painful.47 Bourgeois used this mould in order to make a plaster cast of his body.
For the version in Cell (Arch of Hysteria), she cut off the arms, as if with the Victorian bandsaw that
shares the cell. To make the bronze figure she also altered the cast to make the arch more extreme.
For both works she cut off the head, visually recalling the photograph of the arch of hysteria, or the arc
de cercle, in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, where the woman's head is hidden
and visually cut off by her bedding. In relation to this piece, Bourgeois claims that cutting 'means being
in total control. Accepting the total control of whatever happens and it is quite aggressive.'48 This
statement is self-contradictory, suggesting a dual control by both the artist and by the artistic process
she employs. She goes on to say 'you certainly cannot be hysterical and use – if you want to keep all
your fingers – and use power tools.'49 This is an example of Bourgeois being characteristically 'literal' in
her explanations of her works. The implication here is perhaps that at a personal level Bourgeois's
process of cutting is a way of controlling her own hysterical tendencies, or that sculptural production is
not possible whilst one is hysterical, so control is required.

However, this personal aspect is certainly not the only, or the most important, factor at play in these
works. Gorovoy recalls Bourgeois saying that

Charcot always liked to see women go into the arch of hysteria, but men did it too. But [Charcot
and his colleagues] preferred, since most of them were men, to see the women do it, and she
said that she wanted to do the opposite, to see a man in that position.50

Similarly, Bourgeois herself stated that 'with the Arch of Hysteria, I thought I could become a Charcot
and make a beautiful young man exhibit himself in torsade.'51 This suggests that Bourgeois was aware
of the culture of voyeuristic visuality which, as previously noted, surrounded hysteria and its
representation. David Lomas argues of Cell (Arch of Hysteria) that 'seen from above, this installation

47
Jerry Gorovoy, in How Louise Bourgeois made the “Arch of Hysteria” with Jerry Gorovoy as a model. Proa TV, 2011. Video
(online).
48
Bourgeois, 'Interview for BBC film Arena', 1993, Destruction of the Father, pp.253-62, p.255
49
Ibid.
50
Gorovoy, in How Louise Bourgeois made the “Arch of Hysteria”. Proa TV, 2011
51
Bourgeois, quoted in Donald Kuspit, 'Louise Bourgeois in psychoanalysis', Return of the Repressed, p.138; a 'torsade'
refers to a twisted ribbon or cord used as a trim in sewing (here we see an instance of Bourgeois using the language of
sewing before she began to employ stitching as a sculptural method, perhaps as an artefact of her time spent helping her
parents in their tapestry restoration business)

10
resembles a large eye or aperture of a camera, alluding to the regime of visuality that reigned at the
Salpêtrière, while the gesture of changing the sex of the hysteric points up one of its blindspots: an
inequality of gender and power between those doing the seeing and the object of their fascinated
gaze.'52 The work thus points to the 'regime of visuality' and spectacle surrounding hysteria at the
Salpêtrière and in its subsequent manifestations. Arch of Hysteria similarly speaks to the visual
qualities of these resources; the shiny bronze, which Bourgeois praises for its 'polished, reflective
quality', forbids a haptic encounter, since any touch would leave a mark on its surface.53 In these
works, her method of undermining this one-sided voyeurism is to make her hysterical subject a man.

However, an inherent contradiction lies at the root of these works, which arguably makes them less
powerful than her later fabric works. In an interview of 1993, Bourgeois states that Cell (Arch of
Hysteria)

is really about tension, the body. The fact that it is a man is not terribly important. It is a remark
about the hysterical, and in the time of Jean-Martin Charcot, any ill, any disease, was attributed
to hysteria, to be precise, and hysteria was attributed to women, which is absurd. This is all it
means.
[Interviewer's question]: So it's just a little feminist humour on the way. But I'm still curious about
the hysteric as a man.
Bourgeois: Yes, well, you're asking too much. If you say, Louise, how is it that this is next to that;
what's the relation? Or you ask me precise questions about the visual, I prefer this to the
interpretive attitude of the art critic.54

This defensive response is probably partly an expression of Bourgeois's personal annoyance at critics
over-analysing her work and projecting their own imprecise interpretations onto it; once again she
expresses and advocates a very literal interpretation of her work. However, it is significant that she
claims that the changed gender of her hysteric is not the most important factor of the piece. She does
draw attention to the gendered systems of La Salpêtrière and representations of hysteria, as I have
suggested above. Nevertheless, as she points out, the real importance of this piece lies in her
representation of 'tension, the body'. In exploring hysteria through sculpture, Bourgeois gives her
hysteric a physical and three-dimensional manifestation, imbued with the muscular energy of a real
individual through the casting process. Presencing the hysteric through a material and sculptural
process in this way allowed her to come closer to realising her understanding of hysteria in sculptural
form. However, hysteria for Bourgeois is a particularly female experience, as I have suggested.
Although changing the gender of her hysteric allows her to point up some of the problems involved in
representing hysteria, it fundamentally lies at odds with her personal understanding of the condition.
Making these works involved the artist turning a blind eye to the gender of the body she used (which
was in all likelihood simply the body she had easily at hand), and this irreconcilable difficulty means
that, in my view, these works are less successful than they might be.

THE FABRIC WORKS – HYSTERIA MADE MANIFEST

52
David Lomas, 'Psychic disturbance and interiority in Surrealism and contemporary art', Subversive Spaces: Surrealism
and Contemporary Art, ed. Sam Lackey (Manchester, 2009) pp.13-64, p.15
53
Bourgeois, 'A conversation with Bernard Marcadé', 1993, Destruction of the Father, pp.248-52, p.251
54
Bourgeois, 'Mortal Elements: Pat Steir talks with Louise Bourgeois', 1993, Destruction of the Father, pp.234-38, p.236

11
It is in some of her powerfully expressive fabric figures made around the turn of the twenty-first century
that Bourgeois's hysteric becomes assertively three-dimensional and bodily in its manifestation. Here
sewing and stitching become part of her sculptural vocabulary for the first time, even though they have
been part of her language and thinking all her life. In Arched Figure (1999), a woman's body hangs
suspended from the navel by a wire, formally recalling the earlier bronze Arch of Hysteria; she arches
her back in an ambiguous state of either pleasure or pain, or some mixture of the two. She is made of
a patchwork of pink fabric which recalls human skin in its colour and texture. The material is identified
as 'terry towelling' (a sort of flannel) by Rozsika Parker and according to Jerry Gorovoy and the
Bourgeois studio, came from 'a remnant bolt given to Louise by a friend.'55 The criss-cross fraying
seams give the impression that the doll is made up of random scraps crudely pieced together.
However, this is not the case: despite the unrefined appearance of the stitching, the crafting of the
figure is actually very sophisticated. The pieces of fabric are cut and stitched to determine the shape
and structure of the figure, rather than sewn onto a pre-constructed form. Gorovoy confirmed for me
that 'there is no internal armature, apart from the hanging device, which pierces the torso.'56 The
figure's form is dictated by the crafting of its surface 'skin'. Hannah Westley suggests that 'Bourgeois's
sculpture is above all a sensual art. Surfaces and textures are as integral to her work as the form or the
concept.'57 Further than this, I would argue, surface and texture establish and inform the structure and
concept, and vice versa, in a complex interplay of materials and process.

To make Arched Figure, Bourgeois employs carefully-chosen pieces of fabric in order to create
tumorous breasts, stumps where arms should be, and facial features: unseeing pink eyes and an open
mouth which also resembles female genitalia. The doll lacks all of the usual cultural indicators of
gender, such as hair and clothes, but it is unmistakably female, even if one ignores the
disproportionately large breasts. Bourgeois stated in 1992 that 'pink is feminine', and here this
gendering is enforced by the bodily softness of the material.58 Arched Figure is suspended in a
museum-style display case, which it shares with a large free-standing mirror, reminiscent of an
instrument of medical scrutiny or a woman's vanity mirror. The case acts to distance us from the figure
inside, whilst the visual reference of the mirror reminds us of the two-dimensional spectacle of the
earlier representations of hysteria I have already examined. However, the mirror's positioning also
serves to point out the physical materiality and three-dimensionality of the figure by showing parts of it
which would otherwise be hidden. With these devices, Bourgeois draws attention to her insistent
breaking away from two-dimensionality. I am reminded of one of the quotations with which I began this
essay, where she claims that 'the two dimensions do not satisfy me. I have to have the reality given by
the third dimension.'59 The 'reality' of this 'third dimension' is embodied in this work and gives a powerful
resonance to a version of hysteria as something real and experienced, rather than theatrically staged
and watched.

As Frances Morris points out, fabric 'is not an obvious choice of material with which to make works in

55
Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984; repr. New York, 2010) p.xviii;
Jerry Gorovoy via Maggie Wright, 'Re: Courtauld Thesis: Louise Bourgeois Research'. Message to the author. 02 June
2014. Email.; Maggie Wright of the Louise Bourgeois Studio replied to a series of my questions saying 'I spoke to Jerry
Gorovoy regarding your questions and he responded as follows.'
56
Gorovoy via Wright, 'Re: Courtauld Thesis'. Email.
57
Hannah Westley, The Body as Medium and Metaphor (Amsterdam, 2008) p.166
58
Bourgeois, 'Self-expression is sacred and fatal', 1992, Destruction of the Father, pp.222-30, p.222
59
Bourgeois, 'Arena', Destruction of the Father, p.255

12
three dimensions. Its innate properties are hardly sculptural.'60 And yet, through stitching together
fabric to make a figurative work like Arched Figure, and stuffing it to the point of tension so that it is
nearly bursting at the seams, Bourgeois creates a piece which is unmistakably and inescapably
sculptural. By leaving the marks of her making so visible, Bourgeois deliberately draws attention to her
artistic processes of cutting and stitching. Discussing Arch of Hysteria (2000), a similar work to Arched
Figure, Linda Nochlin describes the 'deliberate ferocity of its bad sewing – basting, more accurately.'61
Nochlin suggests that the figure is 'basted' or tacked in places, rather than carefully machine-sewn.
Tacking is a stitch that is intended to be removed, used to attach fabric together temporarily. The
impermanence of these very visible stitches in both Arch of Hysteria and Arched Figure draws
attention to the figures' existence in the present moment and makes their physical presence all the
more insistent. This is in sharp contrast to the earlier Arch of Hysteria (1993), made in bronze, praised
by Bourgeois for its 'durability'.62 Although, as Nochlin points out, the figures are sewn badly, this is a
deliberate move. Bourgeois employed a professional seamstress to assist her with her sewn works.63
She also owned a series of books pertaining to techniques of needlework, including The New
Dressmaker (1921), Manuel Methodique et Pratique de Couture et de Coupe (1910), Dritz Guide to
Modern Sewing (1964) and Instructions for Using Singer Electric Sewing Machine (undated).64 Her
ownership of these manuals on the practical elements of pattern-cutting and sewing gives some
indication of the studied skill which went into these works. Marie-Laure Bernadac proposes that 'for
Bourgeois, the art of cutting and stitching is the equivalent of sculpture.'65 I would argue that cutting
and stitching weren't simply an 'equivalent' of sculpture for her, but rather that they constituted a whole
new genre of sculptural production.

Bourgeois's move to creating sculptures in fabric at this time is a telling one. In 1999 Bourgeois was 88
years old and just starting on one of the most interesting phases of her artistic output, often revisiting
themes from within her existing oeuvre. As Robert Storr remarks, the fabric dolls bring us to a place 'in
which the possibilities for changing materials, introducing previously untried technical possibilities,
recombining existing symbols, and the imaginative declension of old motifs into fundamentally new
ones seems wide open.'66 This, he writes, is a 'remarkable position' for an artist of her age to be in. To
return to old ideas and to remake them in fabric (exchanging bronze for pink flannel, for example) is to
draw attention to the gendering inherent in our conceptions of materials, in which hard bronze and
marble are seen as traditionally masculine, whilst soft fabric is seen as feminine and as a 'lesser'
material. Artistic materials and categories are subject to a gendered hierarchy, which Bougeois's fabric
works both indicate and forcefully subvert. This comes across particularly strongly in relation to
hysteria, whose history is steeped in issues of gender, creativity and representation. Fabric speaks
directly to the female condition and to the female body. As Rozsika Parker suggests, 'Bourgeois's work
brings out the deeper meanings of textiles' evocation of women' because 'in her work fabric is
associated directly with female sexuality, the unconscious and the body.'67 Fabric's softness and

60
Frances Morris, Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time (London, 2003) p.23
61
Linda Nochlin, 'Old-age style: Late Louise Bourgeois', Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., ed. Frances Morris (London, 2007)
pp.188-96, p.191
62
Bourgeois, 'A conversation with Bernard Marcadé', p.251
63
Morris, Frances, 'Re: Louise Bourgeois Thesis Research'. Message to the author. 23 May 2014. Email.
64
Paulo Herkenhoff, 'Louise Bourgeois: Of unmentionable, blades, fabrics and fashion', Louise Bourgeois: Oeuvres
Récentes (Bordeaux, 1997) pp.99-109, p.102
65
Bernadac, Sculpting Emotion, p.154
66
Robert Storr, 'Survey', Louise Bourgeois, eds Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman (London, 2003)
pp.26-93, p.88
67
Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984; repr. New York, 2010) p.xviii

13
malleability, along with its tactile similarity to skin (particularly in Bourgeois's pink fabric), associates it
both with sensuality and with childhood recollections of maternity and its material comforts, and
therefore with the feminine. Fabric's evocation of female bodily experience therefore makes it an apt
material for the representation and manifestation of the hysterical body, which, for Bourgeois,
represents a normal part of female existence.

Bourgeois is a woman artist making works which are inherently and self-assertively 'feminine' in their
subject matter, colour and materials. By using sewn fabric as her medium for artistic expression, she is
drawing on a long association between women and the craft tradition. The 1970s feminist movement
did much to revive interest in female craft traditions as a means of rebellious self-expression, much as
it did with hysteria. From the 1970s onwards there was a steady stream of women artists working in
fabric using traditional craft techniques within the 'fine art' tradition as a challenge to the dominant
privileging of 'masculine' materials and artistic processes. Bourgeois did not start working with fabric
until some considerable time after the main thrust of the feminist movement, perhaps allowing her a
gap for reflection, echoing that suggested by the relative lateness of her sculptural explorations of
hysteria. However, Bourgeois is certainly not the only female artist working with fabric around this
time.68 Glenn Adamson argues that feminism spoke so effectively to the craft discourse because craft
constitutes 'the expression of subcultural identities'.69 He further suggests that 'feminist theory has
been important in its contention that craft is best seen as a pervasive, “everyday” activity, implicated in
the contingent flux of modern life.'70 I have already argued that the hysteria embodied by Bourgeois's
arched figures is part of lived, everyday female experience, at a remove from the voyeuristic spectacle
depicted in earlier representations of hysteria.71 The quotidian nature of the craft tradition, and its
historical role as an important part of female existence, similarly allowed Bourgeois to engage with the
'contingent flux of modern life', as Adamson puts it, despite being drawn from a culture that is centuries
old. Adamson defines craft in simple but broad terms, as 'the application of skill and material-based
knowledge to relatively small-scale production.'72 He sees craft as an open discourse and as a part of
modern life, in that it is engaged with by contemporary practitioners across a wide range of disciplines
and social classes; Bourgeois's relationship to craft is similarly open-ended.

Much of the critical literature on changing perceptions surrounding craft is informed by Rozsika
Parker's 1984 book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. In this seminal
work, Parker examines the historical distinction between art and craft and its gendered implications,
using embroidery as an example of women's complex relationship with and responses to an art form
which has long been closely associated with the feminine. She explores

the contradictory forms of embroidery, demonstrating how it has been both a source of
pleasurable creativity and oppression. Embroidery has been the means of educating women into
the feminine ideal, and of proving that they have attained it – witness the history of samplers, for
instance – but it has also proved a weapon of resistance to the painful constraints of femininity.
[…] Limited to practising art with needle and thread, women have nevertheless sewn a
subversive stitch, managing to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to

68
e.g. Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas, Karine Jollet, Moira Chester, Melissa Ichiuji, Mary Tuma, Laura Ford, Annette Messager
69
Glenn Adamson, 'Introduction', The Craft Reader (Oxford, 2010) pp.1-5, p.4
70
Ibid.
71
See above, pp.13-14
72
Adamson, 'Introduction', The Craft Reader, p.2

14
 foster polite self-effacement.73

Women's relationship with sewing has always been a complicated one. Parker does not present
embroidery as an outright act of rebellion, suggesting that it both enforced domestic roles and
accepted definitions of femininity, but also simultaneously provided an artistic and discursive space
within which women might take the opportunity to express themselves. She argues that 'the art/craft
hierarchy suggests that art made with thread and art made with paint are intrinsically unequal: that the
former is artistically less significant. But the real differences between the two are in terms of where they
are made and who makes them.'74 That is to say, art made with thread is produced by women in a
domestic context (traditionally for a domestic purpose) whilst art forms such as painting and carving
are historically usually produced by male artists within studios or the academies.

Louise Bourgeois and her sculptures such as Arched Figure hold a highly unusual position within this
discourse. Frances Morris suggests that 'like drawing, […] sewing involves hand and eye and is simple
to accomplish at the kitchen table', where she spent most of her time during the period in which she
produced her stuffed fabric figures.75 These small dolls were produced in the home by an elderly
woman, playing to traditional associations between the craft of sewing, the feminine and the domestic.
However, much as the bad stitching belies the sophisticated sculptural technique, the situation is more
complex than this. Bourgeois worked from her home throughout her career and had a studio in the
basement of her Chelsea brownstone. As Jerry Gorovoy puts it, 'the whole house was a studio. Louise
was not into domesticity at all.'76 Bourgeois combined the home and the studio in a unique way.
Photographs of her house after she died show a tall pyramid of gifts where biscuit tins and whiskey
bottles are sculpturally stacked in order of size, much like her fabric pyramidal sculptures such as
Untitled (2001). In the basement hang huge dismembered limbs sewn in pink fabric, surrounded by
tables covered with spare fabric, spools of thread and domestic items like a radio, a dustpan and an
iron, which was presumably used to remove creases from fabric before she transformed it into
sculpture; her sculptural tools during this period are also those used for household chores. Morris has
pointed out that although Bourgeois had a studio in Brooklyn from the early 1980s, by the mid-1990s
she went there infrequently, being too old for the travel.77 Working from her kitchen table suited her
age, her working method and her type of production. Jerry Gorovoy has confirmed that the dolls were
indeed made in her Chelsea townhouse and that they were 'hand sewn by the artist.'78 For Bourgeois,
whose art is both personal and universal, the spheres of domesticity and artistic production are
inherently linked.

In Lucy Lippard's 1978 essay 'Making Something from Nothing', the feminist critic and champion of
Bourgeois explores the separations between art and craft, “high” craft and hobby, and how those
definitions relate to gender and class. She describes a contemporary revival of 'our mothers', aunts'
and grandmothers' activities – not only in the well-publicized areas of quilts and textiles, but also in the

73
Rozsika Parker, 'Foreword', The Subversive Stitch, exh. cat., ed. Pennina Barnet (Manchester, 1988) pp.5-6, p.5; In her
foreword to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition entitled The Subversive Stitch, inspired by Parker's book, she
presents a summary of her arguments
74
Parker, The Subversive Stitch, p.5
75
Morris, Stitches in Time, p.23
76
Jerry Gorovoy, quoted in Nicholas Wroe, 'At home with Louise Bourgeois', The Guardian, 18 Oct. 2013
77
Morris, 'Re: Louise Bourgeois Thesis Research'. Email.
78
Gorovoy, via Wright, 'Re: Courtauld Thesis'. Email.

15
more random and freer area of transformational rehabilitation.'79 She suggests that 'on an emotional as
well as a practical level, rehabilitation has always been women's work.'80 This chimes closely with how
Bourgeois saw sewing as a sort of emotional 'reparation', whilst also acting in a 'transformational'
capacity.81 Rozsika Parker writes in her introduction to the 2000 reprint of The Subversive Stitch that,
had Bourgeois begun working with fabric earlier, she would have been the subject of a good proportion
of the final chapter of the book.82 She suggests that 'her work, to my mind, associates stitching not only
with reparation but also with aggression and destruction', comparing this to 'the dual face of
embroidery', which acts as a running theme in her book.83 Lucy Lippard also seems to be speaking
presciently to Bourgeois's much later works in fabric. She ends her essay by saying:

It seems all too likely that only in the feminist art world will there be a chance for the “fine” arts,
the “minor” arts, “crafts”, and hobby circuits to meet and to develop an art of making with a new
and revitalized communicative function.
[…] Visual consciousness raising, concerned as it is now with female imagery and,
increasingly, with female process, still has a long way to go before our visions are sufficiently
cleared to see all the arts of making as equal products of a creative impulse which is as socially
determined as it is personally necessary.84

At first glance, it would seem that Lippard's vision for a feminist 'Utopian realm' in which all forms of
making are considered equal has been realised in Louise Bourgeois. Certainly, her hysterical bodies in
fabric are deeply concerned with the female condition, 'female imagery' and especially 'female
process'. Few would claim that they are lesser art forms than her earlier works in various traditional and
non-traditional materials; through these varied processes she has created a series of very different
works which are generally accepted as 'equal products of a creative impulse.' However, it seems
unlikely that Bourgeois would have been able to make and exhibit these works if she didn't have her
hugely long career behind her, during which she had worked with almost every available material,
including traditionally masculine bronze and marble. She also had the accolades of the artistic world to
her name, particularly in her retrospective at MoMA in 1982. She displays Arched Figure in a
traditional museum display case, placing her hand-crafted piece within an institutional context, and
suggesting that these fabric works exist at a complex intersection between art and craft, feminism and
femininity.

Whereas Arch of Hysteria (1992) borrows the anatomy of a grown man, the Arched Figure and Arch of
Hysteria in pink fabric are small, causing them to resemble a child's toy or doll. However, just as the
crude, child-like stitching hides a sophisticated sculptural process, the doll-like appearance of the
figures brings to our attention, through a jarring juxtaposition, their highly sexual corporeality. They are
by no means childlike, with their swollen appendages and their flayed-looking skins. The soft fabric

79
Lucy Lippard, 'Making something from nothing (toward a definition of women's “hobby art”)', 1978, The Craft Reader, ed.
Glenn Adamson (Oxford, 2010) pp.484-90, p.488-89
80
Ibid.
81
For example, she said in 1999 that the needle's stitch acts 'to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness.' quoted in Brooke
Hodge, 'Sewing', Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., ed. Frances Morris (London, 2007) p.266; similarly note her rehabilitation of
a remnant bolt of fabric given to her by a friend (see above, p.19)
82
Parker, The Subversive Stitch, p.xviii; 'Perhaps the artist whose work has done most to restore fabric and stitching to their
place within “high art” is Louise Bourgeois. Had she frequently employed embroidery and fabric prior to 1984, I would
have allocated a large section of the last chapter of the book to her work.'
83
Ibid.
84
Lippard, 'Making something from nothing', p.489

16
brings to mind comfort and childhood, but this sensation is also simultaneously destroyed by its ripped
and frayed construction. As Bradley Quinn argues, 'as she deconstructs textiles to basic forms,
[Bourgeois] intentionally subverts the soothing tranquillity traditionally associated with textiles.'85 The
softness of the fabric seems to invite a haptic encounter and sensations of touch are evoked, but the
dolls are simultaneously somehow repulsive. With their psychically-charged presence, they feel
reminiscent of dolls used in therapeutic play. Many of Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theories stem
from her ideas about play therapy for children. She stated 'my work with both children and adults, and
my contributions to psychoanalytic theory as a whole, derive ultimately from the play technique evolved
by young children.'86 Bourgeois knew Klein's work well, as Mignon Nixon explicates, and even
considered becoming a child psychologist herself during the 1960s.87 In play therapy, dolls allow
children to reveal their unconscious through play, much in the way that free association works for
adults; Klein wanted to be able to analyse children as she analysed adults, using toys to allow the child
the express their imaginative unconscious. In more directive forms of play therapy, dolls allow children
to act out scenarios which might be too embarrassing or confusing to verbalise, and are particularly
(although sometimes controversially) used to help children express their experiences of sexual abuse.

Dolls for therapeutic play currently in circulation range from anatomically-detailed plastic babies, to
clothed wooden 'families', to soft and malleable 'cuddly' figures. Many of these bear little resemblance
to Bourgeois's dolls, but these latter soft figures are certainly comparable. Eva-Maria Simms points out
that 'in the history of psychotherapy the doll of play therapy has become the “anatomically correct doll”
in recent years, and the controversy rages over whether these dolls are an appropriate tool for
discerning sexual abuse in children.'88 She goes on to say that here 'the focus is on the doll as a
representation of the sexual body which allows the child's play to enact (or imagine?) sexual
relationships symbolically, and allows the therapist to discern precocious and disturbed sexual
knowledge in the child.'89 The dolls of play therapy are 'representations of the sexual body' (at all ages)
but not of the sexualised adult body in the way that Bourgeois's fabric figures are. The company Teach-
A-Bodies sells play therapy dolls which are around the same size as Bourgeois's figures. They are
made from 'a polyester knit and stuffed with polyfil which makes them soft and cuddly' and come
wearing simple modern clothes.90 However, on removing the clothes, the adult couple's bodies are
found to be fully sexual; the male dolls are designed with 'chest hair, underarm hair, pubic hair and a
circumcised penis' whilst the female dolls have a 'clitoris, underarm hair, pubic hair, and vaginal
opening.'91 An additional pack including a 'baby in utero with attached umbilical cord and placenta' can
also be purchased; these fabric foetuses look strikingly similar to some of Bourgeois's works, which
frequently feature babies which are external to the mother's body but still attached with an umbilical
cord.92 To the adult mind, these therapy dolls are rather terrifying; their softness, intended to make
them 'cuddly', seems at odds with the anatomically-correct, if rather sterile, sexuality of the doll hidden
beneath its clothes. Bourgeois's dolls, by contrast, do not hide their sexuality. Indeed they do not seem

85
Bradley Quinn, 'Textiles at the cutting edge', Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, ed. Nadine Monem (London,
2008) pp.8-23, p.19
86
Melanie Klein, 'The psychoanalytic play technique: its history and its significance', Envy and Gratitude and Other Works
1946-1963, ed. Hanna Segal (London, 1997) pp.122-40, p.122
87
Nixon, Fantastic Reality, chapters 5-6, passim.
88
Eva-Maria Simms, 'Uncanny dolls: Images of death in Rilke and Freud', New Literary History, 27. 4 (1996): 663-77, p.664
89
Ibid.
90
'Adult Dolls', Teach-A-Bodies.com, n.p., n.d., Web. 30 May 2014
91
'Baby in Utero', Teach-A-Bodies.com, n.p., n.d., Web. 30 May 2014
92
See, for example, Bourgeois, Do Not Abandon Me, 1999

17
to hide anything: their whole process of making is visible in their 'skins'. Their intended audience is, of
course, made up of adults rather than children. They imply touch and a tactile encounter but they are
not actually intended to be touched or played with. The softness that is necessary in the dolls to entice
the child to play with them in the first place is, in Bourgeois's works, rather an evocation of childhood
and of a psychically-charged and personal past in which dolls held a great significance.

The therapy dolls, like Bourgeois's, are attractive and repulsive at the same time. The doll must be
something to which the child can relate and onto which she/he can project her/his imagination.
However, because the doll is intended to be used as a form of catharsis, it must also be something the
child can ultimately reject and abandon after memories, experiences and unconscious imaginings have
been played out. Alex Potts and Eva-Maria Simms both explore the psychological significance of dolls
through the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. For Rilke, the doll is something frightening. The child pours
love and a projected personality onto the doll, only to find after a time that it will never respond. As
Potts puts it,

The doll angers because, after presenting itself as another being that can respond without
reserve to us, it stands revealed in its “soulless and utterly irresponsible material”, as alien and
indifferent. As such, it alienates us from ourselves: “We could not make a person or anything of
it,” explains Rilke, “it became a stranger to us; and all the confidences we had poured into and
over it became foreign to us.”'93

Rilke sees the doll as the first thing to subject on the child the terrors of the larger universe, and as a
reminder of death: 'At a time when everyone was still intent on giving us a quick reassuring answer, the
doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us
repeatedly out of space, whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence.'94 The doll is
unsettling, both known and unknown, living and dead. Simms further suggests that the doll's
'unresponsiveness' simultaneously 'supports and destroys the imaginative reality of the child's play.'95
The child both reaches out to the other being embodied in the doll, and is also forced to examine
him/herself, recognising that the make-believe is self-derived. For the adult viewer, being faced with
one of Bourgeois's dolls provokes a similar moment of simultaneous reaching out to the other and
introspection induced by its unresponsiveness.

Potts argues that the paradoxical attitude towards the doll explicated by Rilke is one that can be
applied to a viewer's experience when faced with a piece of sculpture. This 'contradictory response to
sculpture […] is one that alternates uncomfortably between the sense of identification we have when
we see a sculpture as a charged auratic presence, and the sense of alienation that results when it is
exposed as the ordinary inert object it literally is.'96 Bourgeois's works, as both insistently sculptural and
insistently doll-like, doubly embody this idea of simultaneous identification and alienation. Their
'charged presence' is undeniable, as their similarity to (and distance from) the female body in a state of
distress imbues them with a power which is both psychical and physical. Potts further argues that
'convincing sculpture thus can only come into being by enacting a radical contradiction within its very

93
Alex Potts, 'Dolls and things: The reification and disintegration of sculpture in Rodin and Rilke', Sight and Insight: Essays
on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London, 1994) pp.355-78, p.372
94
Rilke, quoted in Potts, 'Dolls and things', p.375
95
Simms, 'Uncanny dolls', p.673
96
Potts, 'Dolls and things', p.355-56

18
processes of production – the sculptor has by some impossible imaginative leap to transform the petty
materiality of the well-made luxury object into the auratic charge of the true work of art.'97 This is
interesting in relation to Bourgeois's Arched Figure or Arch of Hysteria, since the 'auratic charge' of
these works arguably lies in the very 'petty materiality' of a sculpture which is ostensibly neither a
'luxury object' nor appears to be 'well-made'. Nevertheless, there remains a complex and paradoxical
issue at the heart of these works. As sculptures they teeter between being 'ordinary inert objects' and
being actively 'charged auratic presences', raising questions about their process and deeply
challenging conceptions of the sculptural object. As dolls, they occupy a similar threshold, on which
the viewer remains unsure whether they are best seen as identifiable personages relating a shared
experience, or as indifferent and unresponsive matter, the screaming open mouth of Arched Figure
conveying that empty 'tremendous silence' which so terrified Rilke.98 Hanging in the air, displaced in
their environments, they hover uncomfortably between sensations of childhood and adulthood,
between nursery plaything and sculptural object.

Bourgeois's dolls, such as Arched Figure and Arch of Hysteria, offer up the possibility that they can
act, intentionally or otherwise, as a form of therapy. Their resemblance to people and their stripped-
down appearance, undifferentiated in terms of cultural indicators such as hair and clothes, allows them
to receive the imagined projections of the viewer; like the dolls of play therapy, they seem to be
presented as sites for psychic encounters. The visibility of their stitching raises the possibility that their
production also acted as a form of therapy for the artist. Of course, as I have already suggested, not
even if we had a record of every word ever spoken by the artist could we really know whether or not
this was the case. Nonetheless, whether used specifically as the tools of play therapy or as the
contents of an ordinary toy box, dolls act as surrogates for emotions, providing a form of catharsis at
various levels. Bourgeois's dolls, in their highly adult physicality and their presentation in a museum
context, offer up the possibility that they can act with a similar sort of surrogacy; in particular, I believe,
as a surrogate therapy for hysteria, which the dolls suggest by their nominal and formal references to
the condition. This is of course problematic because of hysteria's varied symptoms and its non-
currency as a contemporary diagnosis; it is also impossible to be certain whether this therapy is
intended for the artist or the viewer, or both. Nevertheless, the dolls offer a version of hysteria enacted.
I do not mean this in the two-dimensional theatrical sense, as exhibited by Charcot's and Surrealism's
version of hysteria; rather, the viewer is presented with a sculptural and bodily manifestation of
hysteria, which is both psychically charged and physically recognisable. The simultaneous sense of
identification and alienation elicited by these sculptures makes the process of viewing them cathartic,
in which the viewer can both identify and reject the symptoms of a hysterical tendency.

CONCLUSION

Over the last fifteen years of her life, Bourgeois made, by my calculation, around 50 doll-like figures in
fabric.99 Ten of these works relate directly to hysteria, either titularly or because they are

97
Ibid. p.358
98
Rilke, quoted in Potts, 'Dolls and things', p.375
99
The absence of a catalogue raisonné for Louise Bourgeois makes it difficult to reach an exact number; however, in my
research I have come across 50 such works: figurative sculptures made in fabric, from torsos to maimed bodies to
complete figures. For these purposes I have disregarded the series of heads and any non-figurative sculptures she made
during this period.

19
representations of arched figures. Many others depict further aspects of female bodily experience,
such as sex and childbirth: there are twelve which represent copulating couples and seven which are
concerned with pregnancy, childbirth or a mother and child. Several of the works which are not
ostensibly about the condition nevertheless seem to make formal reference to the arching body of
hysteria which so fascinated Bourgeois. For example, in Do Not Abandon Me (1999) Bourgeois
presents a representation of a woman giving birth, arching her back as she does so, in the same pink
fabric and bold stitching as her Arched Figure and Arch of Hysteria, made around the same time. For
Bourgeois, the female body in extremis, whether in hysteria or childbirth, is a lived part of the bodily
experience of being a woman. Indeed hysteria (etymologically connected to the womb) is a 'normal'
accompaniment to the facts of female existence, such as maternity, as we have seen.100 Simone de
Beauvoir similarly notes the innately hysterical nature of the female body particularly in the context of
female experiences such as sexual initiation, menstruation and pregnancy.101 It is this distinctly female
body, of sensual sexuality, pregnancy and maternity, that Bourgeois employs to represent her hysteric
in these later works. As manifestations of the elision of psychic states with their bodily signifiers, these
works are intensely powerful; hysteria, with its symptoms which have no physical origin, provided
Bourgeois with a subject through which to address these inescapable anatomical destinies of being a
woman.

Over the course of her career, Bourgeois drew on two fundamentally different models of hysteria. The
first is embodied in her 1992-93 works, Cell (Arch of Hysteria) and Arch of Hysteria, and is more
traditionally sculptural both in its heritage and in its execution and materials. It is connected to the
voyeurism and theatrical visuality of the photographs of hysterics taken at the Salpêtrière under Jean-
Martin Charcot, which defined how hysteria was viewed for much of the twentieth century. Bourgeois
accessed this version of hysteria through her connections with the Surrealists and with psychoanalysis.
The other model of hysteria, with which she engages through her later fabric works, makes use of
alternative means of production which are connection to the domestic, the doll and a gendered craft
tradition. In this version, hysteria is a condition which involves a deep-seated and lived bodiliness. It
relates to a much wider vision, concerning the fundamental physical functions of being a woman.
Hysteria in this form has its source in various channels; it comes from Simone de Beauvoir and the
feminist movement and the active application of psychoanalysis in therapy, particularly in play therapy.
It also stems from Bourgeois's own personal experiences of being a 'hysterical' woman, in her roles as
artist, wife and mother. It is this latter model which provides Bourgeois with the freedom to begin
making sculptural works in an anti-sculptural material (fabric) and to raise powerful questions
concerning the nature of the sculptural object. By using traditionally feminine methods of production to
explore the female body in extremis in this way, Bourgeois problematises the representation of the
female body and invites the viewer to consider the inevitable lived bodily experiences of women.
Through these fabric works, Bourgeois opens and contributes to a discourse in which representations
of the female body can be identified with and understood through the sculptural and material terms of
their making, allowing new questions to be asked about women as viewers, as viewed subjects, as
bodies and as artists.

© Anna Souter, 2014 | www.annasouter.net

100
See above, p.13-14; see also Bourgeois, 'Conversation with Deborah Wye', p.124
101
De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp.356, 417, 672

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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21
 (Bielefeld, 1999)
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22
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