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4 - The Uses of Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
Summary
In my childhood I often happened to see and hear these ‘possessed’ women in the villages and monasteries. They used to be brought to mass; they would squeal and bark like a dog so that they were heard all over the church. But when the sacrament was carried in and they were led up to it, at once the ‘possession’ ceased, and the sick women were always soothed for a time. I was greatly impressed and amazed at this as a child; but then I heard from country neighbours and from my town teachers that the whole illness was simulated to avoid work, and that it could always be cured by suitable severity; various anecdotes were told to confirm this. But later on I learnt with astonishment from medical specialists that there is no pretence about it, that it is a terrible illness to which women are subject, specially prevalent among us in Russia, and that it is due to the hard lot of the peasant women. It is a disease, I was told, arising from exhausting toil too soon after hard, abnormal and unassisted labour in childbirth, and from the hopeless misery, from beatings, and so on, which some women were not able to endure like others. (Dostoevsky, 1998 [1879], p 94)
In his novel Brothers Karamazov (1998 [1879]), Dostoevsky makes a detour with this portrayal, combining several themes that occur when one addresses the entanglement between culture and mental disorder. Disputed meanings of ‘madness’ are at stake here, present in three coexisting interpretations of women's distress. Some say the ‘possessed’ women suffer from a medical condition, a disease to be treated by doctors. Others speculate that these really are in fact cases of possession, and the women should be cared for by the starets. Or perhaps instead they simulate such affliction to avoid work. Dostoevsky anchors his description to a particular sociocultural context: exhausting peasant work, childbirth in difficult conditions, and additional hardships, misery and beatings, supposedly typical of Russia, which might generate this singular state of being. Although similar troubles exist elsewhere, what is ‘cultural’ here is left to interpretation.
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- Information
- Explaining Mental IllnessSociological Perspectives, pp. 90 - 116Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022