Jordyn’s Reviews > The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story > Status Update

To do another “well actually” piece: Freud at this time, I think, would have proposed (initially) that women suffering from hysteria likely suffered childhood abuse (later changed to appease the masses and got victim blamey about it) but it’s not shocking with how they’ve spoken about Freud that they wouldn’t take him seriously and fall back on “women go crazy without men” type shit

Also mind you “the greatest poets have been men” 1)fuck it— while not widely accepted, there’s a theory Homer could have been a woman 2) women were not ALLOWED to read let alone write for hella long 3) Women commonly published under male pseudonyms at this time (my loves George Eliot, George Sand, The Brontës (Ellis, Acton, and Currer Bell), and Louisa May Alcott (A.M. Barnard))

Mind you, the women writers that “they don’t have” and “aren’t read” at this point (1913) have been: Murasaki Shikibu, Sappho, Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Mme de Stael, George Eliot, Ann Radcliffe, George Sand, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning… not exhaustive of course… just Western lit too…

My one tiny complaint is that during the Victorian Era (Industrial Rev/Transatlantic Slave Trade), gender roles switched, so no one thought of women as hypersexual beings anymore. By 1913, women ESPECIALLY were thought to be asexual, mechanical homemakers that had no taste for being in public. These mens’ views align more with Shakespeare’s time.

“a maid of Lesbos” lord almighty

Freud subtweeted

The pencil parallel with Mann, I am stoked dude

Genuinely this is how you do a feminist retelling. Not that “turning every woman into a slighted femme fatale girl boss” shit everyone keeps writing.

In my opinion she is doing Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” proud. It’s a beautiful recall to that world while also making it her own. And so far… I’m lowkey creeped out.