THE TROUBLE WITH MS. SHOWALTER'S ANALYSIS

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THE TROUBLE WITH MS. SHOWALTER'S ANALYSIS:
A CRITIQUE OF "P.S. I LOATHE YOU"

by
Judith Fleet Wisdom, M.A.

Elaine Showalter (ES) has entered stage left again, now trying to be cloaked in "allure." I'm not aware of who reads the magazine called ALLURE (where "P.S. I Loathe You" appeared in its February 1998 issue), for this magazine is outside my reading orbit. But it seems unlikely that Ms. Showalter has selected for her present hostile diatribe a publication that has as its focus a devotion to issues of freedom of speech, the nature of illness, or literary criticism.
Which is not to denigrate ALLURE'S purpose, its editors, or its readers. I have no reason to. In fact, this is not about denigration at all (except to explicate Ms. Showalter's denigration). Instead it's about the relationship between scholarship when it is used as a gloss for irresponsible inquiry, and how it thus can so easily fail to connect with concrete reality. And in the process hurt and obscure rather than edify.
Once the word about the piece in ALLURE had gotten out to PWCs (people with chronic fatigue syndrome), just as with her original book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, and her promotional readings and book signings, we PWCs, a diverse group of people united only by the fact that we have the same diagnosis (just as with diabetics, people with cancer, strep throat, etc.), responded. For we have one of the medical conditions she treats as one of her hysterical epidemics. Our reactions, to date, have taken many forms: speaking up at her public forums, letters and emails written to her and to editors, and on "public" podiums less lofty than hers, like in cyberspace, where we have applied our wit, intellectual analysis, and comprehension of this medical condition and the serious clinical and laboratory research of it to her "argument." In so doing we have not only outdone her, we have outraged her. For we have jumped off her pages, where she wanted us to remain, as her objects--objects of her clever and "sexy" academic twist of an analysis. That, rather than become the real people we are that she never bothered to study as subjects.
Apparently that "transition," which is really no transition at all except in her rather desperate set of expectations born of her effort to construct an argument unrelated to reality, has surprised her. Apparently she's surprised and angry to think that calling people hysterics--based on no direct study of us or the serious medical literature about our condition--has evoked a reaction. Apparently, she thought we'd read her book and fall upon our couches in a dead l9th century swoon, too hysterical to make cogent commentary, write letters, or appear in electronic print or at bookstores. Appropriately angry rather than having our maids and attendants fan us and soothe us. (This reaction of ours she calls "hate mail.")
Many of the posts and letters that have appeared on the PWC lists that I read or participate in have very piercingly, insightfully, in various and sometimes quite eloquent ways, pinpointed what ES did in her book and now does in her reaction to our estimation of it: it depicts her work as a wantonly meanspirited and ill- informed portrait of an illness (CFS) and those who are afflicted with it.
Why then write do I write something further? So much turf has already been quite adequately and even more than adequately covered. But as I went over the whole long ES episode in my mind, and again thought about why ES wrote that book in the first place and why she is now so surprised that she received such vehement objections to it (her characterizations of our reactions have earned her as being dubbed paranoid by some, though I think we have to be careful not to stoop to her level by diagnosing her--even though ES felt quite free to diagnose us!).
Many theories have been put forth as to why ES wrote that book. And though some if not all might be correct, I don't think we need to get into her motives; her early childhood; her personal insecurities.
Besides, you are on dangerous ground attributing motives to people. It is risky because you enter the area of data that you, as a stranger to her psyche, are likely to only have very partial and hypothetical knowledge of. As she does of us! And no matter how good you are at figuring out what makes people tick, this sort of parlor psychiatry--though fun and often insightful--can also be wrong and ultimately cruel. (Though I have no lost love for ES.)
So, as I thought further about this burst of outrage on her part in her ALLURE article, I realized it (her outrage) really is of a piece with the book itself. It has to do with what I always lamented as a trend within academia, though I myself loved the academic world of ideas and loved and still love some of its staunch inhabitants. (Yes, some of my dearest friends are academics, though, happily not all of them are.)
But that trend within academia and beyond it among intellectuals is what drove me from pursuing a career in the groves of academe, and, instead, led me to find work teaching in medicine, which itself isn't immune to some similar tendencies, but with a difference. And this is at the nub of my particular analysis of Ms. Showalter's book and now her being so incensed at our reactions. Reactions which reveal that her hysterical objects are real people, with good minds, hard lives, a real illness, and broken hearts.
What she did comes from a kernel of intellectual and moral rot in academic intellectual circles that ES has been drawn into. There is a whole body of intellectual production, from within academia and even outside it (though the outsiders are often people whose training is deeply academic) that is not concerned with the search for the truth but, instead, a search for a new spin, a clever grab at a theory that allows the author to put things together in a bold, even shocking way, that will seduce readers, their own intellectual cronies (not true peers), and the publishing entrepreneurs they depend on (and who, in turn, depend on them).
This tendency does not produce honest and searching analysis, it is narcissistic glitz under the cover of academic or journalistic inquiry. It does not move anything forward but the coffers of the publishers (sometimes) and the reputation of the author (sometimes). It does not make life more understandable. It does not point to remedy. It does not advance comprehension of complex issues. In ES's case it doesn't even connect with a corpus of already extant work on the subjects she purports to speak to, even if only to responsibly refute them! It has to do only with ego, competition, and a form of greed, both of reputation and money.
Which is why I've always seen this kind of behavior and "idea explosion" or "sexy spin" as entrepreneurial. The intellectual as the petty bourgeois. The small businessperson trying to become a J. Paul Getty. Or even try to move into the big store on the corner.
One of the reasons I never could remain in academia once I collected my education and degrees (though I knew and met in academia some very good and very smart people), was that this tendency always disgusted me. I loved the life of the intellect. But I couldn't stand that tendency despite the fact that it wasn't the only one I found there. But it has a way sometimes of taking over. Of creating a dominating ambience. A corruption. I saw it in several departments in top-flight universities.
I sometimes felt it would be easier to be honest and remain close to the concrete, real world were I to open a button store, sell yard goods, yarn for knitting, produce.
So, why I was drawn to teaching in medicine. Because even though you see some of the same corruption there, the patients, illness, death, recovery, families coming together, splitting apart, mortal struggle gave me enough of a world that insisted on staying real and not weaving tales. A surrounding in which I could keep myself grounded. I could immerse myself in the world of illness and healing and stay away from the academic and very "clever" attempts to be showy. Often to the annoyance of my boss! (He would have liked me to work less hard with patients and physicians in training and publish.)
In the world of ideas, which is, perforce, separate from concrete goods and services , the entrepreneurial drive often is the cause for spinning disembodied, dishonest, disconnected-from-the world yarns. I wonder if that is where the word "spin," used so often to describe public relations acts of disinformation in government, comes from?
ES is part of that "grand" tradition of this corrupt intellectual entrepreneurial tendency.
For us, PWCs, on the other hand, occupied, as we must be, with the search for cause, remedy, and cure for our suffering, what draws us to productions like hers is our outrage that she'd use us, our hard, cold reality, which we live with night and day, to further her own career while making not one effort to connect with what this illness is really about.
Having made no such effort to learn of the body of research about CFS or her other "hysterical epidemics" or even learn about us first hand and in depth via the age-old technique of the interview (but then we'd be real subjects and not disembodies objects), it is no wonder she can so easily dismiss with such outrage our opposition to her. We became REAL! I am quite sure she is very likely even surprised at the reasoned decency in many of the so-called hate mails she received from us. I'd even venture a guess that at night, when the lights are off, or in the morning when she faces the mirror, she knows or suspects that many of those emails and letters are not the product of viciously defensive fakes but real people hurt and angry by her irresponsible act of disinformation. But once dressed and ready to face her well-established and defended academic life and well- incomed career those thoughts fade.
Or am I giving her too much credit? That, I simply can't know. Maybe she never cares. But what I do know is that she still has a lot of work to do to produce an honest bit of analysis of the texts of our lives, be they in print, on the Internet, or best of all the result of intensive interviews analyzed in the context of the vast literature that moves our illness way, way out of the realm of hysteria and somaticization and into the area of a complex and often devastating physiological illness with also often awful interpersonal psychological, social, and financial consequences as with any long-term and oft-disabling condition. Consequences that deteriorate us with time. If she got those stories, those real stories, she wouldn't have gotten her "hy- stories."
January 27, l998

Published originally on the Internet List, CO-CURE, which publishes essays, hard copy medical abstracts and articles, transcripts of medical interviews, and world wide web information dedicated to the investigation, findings, general medical and social thought concerning chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as CFIDS and ME. This article can be found on the web at http://www.best.com/~cfids/wisdom/allure.htm, and has been published on the Internet list called "Sasyfras," which is a discussion list for PWCs (people with chronic fatigue syndrome), where discussions range from issues in medicine to the social and political factors that surround having a chronic illness like CFS. The original title of this piece, when it first appeared on CO-CURE on January 29, l998, was "Thoughts About Elaine Showalter and The Fate of PWCs." Certain changes were made in the text because of the diffence between an audience of PWCs only to a general readership of people not afflicted with this illness.

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