The History of Hysteria: A Guest Post by Meagan Church
She tries to be the perfect wife, but life has other plans. When the lines between truth and imagination start to blur, one woman must come to terms with the reality of her seemingly perfect suburban existence. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Meagan Church on writing The Mad Wife.
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The Mad Wife: A Novel
The Mad Wife: A Novel
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Paperback $17.99
From bestselling author Meagan Church comes a haunting exploration of identity, motherhood, and the suffocating grip of societal expectations that will leave you questioning the lives we build—and the lies we live.
From bestselling author Meagan Church comes a haunting exploration of identity, motherhood, and the suffocating grip of societal expectations that will leave you questioning the lives we build—and the lies we live.
As a writer, I’m always on the hunt for a good story. One day, I stumbled across a grainy psychiatric training video from the 1960s. The six-minute clip certainly violates modern HIPAA regulations. In it, a neatly dressed and carefully composed woman sits before her therapist. She presses her finger into her cheek, crosses her legs tightly, and in a measured tone mentions childhood abuse, a desire to divorce her husband, and how she needs to get her nerves straight. Almost matter-of-factly, she says, “I just get scared when it gets quiet.” Her diagnosis? Hysterical personality disorder.
I watched that video over and over. Her restraint. Her longing. The way history had dismissed her as little more than a case study. She stayed with me. And soon I began to wonder about the larger focus that had silenced her and so many women like her.
That’s when I fell into the history of hysteria. Dating back to ancient Egyptian and Greek times, doctors believed a woman’s womb could wander around her body and cause her to be “out of sorts.” The explanation stuck for centuries, shaping a catch-all diagnosis that excused away women’s complaints and left conditions like depression, postpartum psychosis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and more undiagnosed. Shockingly, the diagnosis remained on the books into the 1980s.
The deeper I went, the more I thought of Betty Delford, a 1960s mother from my earlier novel The Girls We Sent Away. Some readers saw her as a villain, but I always believed she was a woman crushed by expectations. Betty, the haunted woman in the video, and the silenced history of hysteria wove together and Lulu Mayfield emerged—a 1950s housewife who collects green stamps, makes Jell-O salads, and, from time to time, smells colors.
Once I knew Lulu, the story tumbled out. Her voice was so insistent that I couldn’t ignore it. Writing The Mad Wife often felt less like creating a character and more like transcribing a testimony complete with her frustrations, longings, and fears.
In shaping Lulu’s story, I drew inspiration from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Push by Ashley Audrain, and Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn, along with countless stories of women dismissed under the banner of hysteria.
Through Lulu, I wanted to give voice to those women, the truths they navigated, the crushing weight of silence and expectation. I hope readers feel her urgency and recognize in her story not just the myth of perfection, but the vital need to be seen and heard.
