Paul Regnard, ‘Attitudes Passionnelles “Extase”’, 1878
Paul Regnard, Attitudes Passionnelles Extase, 1878, photograph, 10.3 × 7.1 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.
In this photographic plate from Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, the woman’s raised hands, her eyes turned heavenward and her tilted head bathed in an unseen light – all features of the ecstatic stage of hysteria – are offered up as symptoms of pathology. The volume from which the photograph was taken was prepared by students of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot is best known for the diagnostic criteria he developed for hysteria, which he used to identify both contemporary and historical cases of the disease.
The pose struck by the patient was familiar from religious paintings. In L’hystérie dans l’art, a document compiled by one of Charcot’s associates, reference is made to the Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona by Giovanni Lanfranco, where the central character raises her hands and eyes while tilting her head towards a Christ descending from the heavens (Paul Richer, ‘L’hystérie dans l’art’, in Études cliniques sur la grande hystérie ou hystéro-épilepsie [Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1885], pp. 914–56 [p. 956]). Margaret was a reformed sinner in the tradition of Mary Magdalene. These sexual overtones are carried over from the painted canvas to the photographed patient insofar as the anonymous young woman is as undressed as she is distressed. Her thin nightgown rides up to expose her naked thighs and slips down, too, at the shoulder. A male photographer coaxes and captures her performance for the perusal of his peers. Ecstasy, the stage of hysteria captured in the image, is more familiar from religious or sexual contexts than medical ones. The connection was not lost on Charcot and his followers. The similarity between the hospital photographs and religious iconography provided warrant for Charcot’s retrospective diagnoses of mystics and saints, a key pillar of the medical profession’s struggle with the church for power and status. Charcot re-read Christian iconography, arguing that mystics and saints were driven by not faith but rather a disease of the nerves. He portrayed the church’s claims to truth as at best naïve.
Modernism and Religion examines how religious practice in the age of modernism was transformed by Charcot’s hermeneutical approach to mystics and saints. In portions of T. S. Eliot and H.D.’s work, the suggestiveness of Charcot’s schema serves as a challenge to visionary elements in their work that nonetheless remain present. One of the distinctive features of modernist religious poetry – this study argues – is that it is neither poetry of the assured believer nor the poetry of materialist for whom religion has long since served its purpose. It is, somehow, both of these poetries at once.
