Victoria Mason The Mad Women’s Ball: ‘My Book Is A Fiction.
in any case, horrible things truly happened to ladies in Paris 200 years prior.’
The creator converses with Helen Brown about her prize-winning presentation novel, the abuse of ‘hysterics,’ French and anglophone woman’s rights, and growing up the little girl of a pop star.
In the initial pages of Victoria Mas’ introduction novel, The Mad Women’s Ball, a 16-year-old young lady is spellbound by a 65-year-elderly person. “Shoulders back, chest forward, head held high,” the young lady strolls gladly into a talk theater at the Pitié-Salpêtrière medical clinic in Paris to play out her craziness for the understudies of her “lord,” Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.
The collected men lean forward as Charcot swings his pendulum before the young lady’s still blue eyes, and she tumbles to the floor. Squeezing her head and feet against the exposed sheets, she makes an ideal bend with her back as “the demeanors all over veer from joy to torment, her distortions accentuated by throaty breaths.”
“My book is a fiction,” says Mas, “yet it depends on occasions that truly occurred in nineteenth-century Paris. Awful things that truly happened to numerous ladies in the Salpêtrière 200 years prior, when the slender line between clinical treatment and voyeurism was obscured.”
On a video interface from her home in Paris, the bashful, 31-year-old girl of Eighties French electropop star Jeanne Mas reveals to me she just found out about the “hefty history” of France’s biggest clinic in 2017. “I dropped a companion at A&E and understood the spot resembled an unassuming community, with its roads, park, and sanctuary. I was roused to look into the set of experiences.
That is the point at which I found out about Jean-Martin Charcot and the numerous ladies who have secured up there his consideration, frequently because they were solid-willed or badly designed. They were detainees as well as the subject of such a lot of interest. The world-class of Paris would come to see Charcot’s talks.
A year there was a yearly ball at the Salpêtrière with the cream of society welcome to come and view the frantic ladies, looking sharp like the stars of an oddity show. Photos of the ladies encountering ‘insane fits’ were additionally well known. Those photos are as yet interesting. Their appearances spooky me until I needed to expound on them.”