I

INFANT

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

LinkedIn.

Have you ever noticed how many I-words have the in/im prefix? These clarify what something is not.

Thus, in-nocent, in-nocuous = not harmful (the same root as ‘noxious’), im-potent = not powerful, in-capable = self explanatory; &c.

Infant is one such, but cleverly concealed by an unexpected etymology. Along with its archaic variants (enfaunt, infaunt), it derives from the Latin infans, which is the Greek ‘phemi’ in its plundered Roman form, ‘femi’, plus the Latinate negative (in- = ‘without’).

And phemi / femi? ‘To make known one’s thoughts, to declare’ or, simply, ‘to speak’.

Don’t Speak.

So an infant is ‘without speech’; or, as its first definition clarifies, ‘a child during the earliest period of its life (or still unborn)’ – Shakepeare’s ‘Infant, Mewling and puking in the Nurses Armes’.

Mew.

Newborns / kittens must indeed rely on ‘mewling’ for their day-to-day needs, but paradoxically such speechlessness gives them a symbolic potency that rings in the ear.

Indeed, they (babies, not kittens) have ‘spoken’ throughout history, from whistleblowing on promiscuous parents to confirmation of marital fidelity.

But hold on just one gosh-darned minute: that’s female fidelity, of course. The maternal connection is the only one you can prove, sans DNA testing. Male extra-curricular activity is neither here nor there.

And history is full of those awkward occasions when ‘speaking likenesses’ gives rise to speculation about what the child’s mother was up to nine months previously.

Mother’s Ruin.

Strangely, the infant’s own inevitable silence simply compounds the seeming power of what ‘they’ are saying: you’re hearing with your eyes rather than your ears. Or just reading.

Indeed, Paulina, the faithful lady-in-waiting in The Winter’s Tale would prove her mistress’ daughter legitimate by pointing to her book-like qualities: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father…’

Well into the seventeenth century, the village gossip could also deduce parental naughtiness through something as seemingly random as a child’s constitution: weakness or disease suggested either that the parents had been having too much sex to copulate at their full vigour, or else that conception had happened during menstruation. You slags.

And it didn’t stop there: infants could also tell tales through the very time of their arrival. It was commonly believed that young’uns entered the world nine months to the day after their conception. Consequently, no child born on a Sunday could be christened until its parents had made a public apology for their desecration of the Lord’s Day. Busted.

Even a child’s existence could be disastrously significant.

To sea, To sea…

In 1741, the retired sea-captain Sir Thomas Coram set up London’s first Foundling Hospital, whence came unfortunates from all walks of life to ensure that their screamingly ill-begotten infants would be cared for and kept from incriminating them (not necessarily in that order).

In many instances, such abandonment was the alternative to killing the child or leaving it to die. So Coram was hardly acting on a whim: the social repercussions of Sin were severe, poverty and gin dependency rife (a woman’s problem, and also a means of inducing abortions – why else ‘Mother’s Ruin’?) and the streets covered with child corpses.

Infantine... 'The Angel In The House', photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron

So Coram’s critics accused him of fostering sin, by giving it a Hospital wherein to hide: to offer succour to bastard infants was to shield the sinful and encourage further debauchery. Let the wages of sin speak loud and clear.

Speak Now, Or Forever Hold Thy Peace.

In its second meaning, infant becomes more defined: it does not simply signify a speechless-screaming babe-in-arms, but also ‘a person under legal age; a minor’ (someone who has not ‘completed their twenty-first year’).

Here it is law-based, in reference, for example, to all those boy-kings of our early royal history (how many can you name????) – whose legitimacy is the most important thing of all, taking priority over minor considerations such as… oh, I don’t know, BEING OLDER THAN SIX.

Infant in this sense connotes something like having yet to earn freedom sui juris; the legal understanding that a person is fit to govern themselves (and, in royal cases, a country), and consequent emancipation from the rule of parent, guardian or Lord Protector.

Among Spanish royals – to this day – children who are not the direct heir to the throne have the title Infante / Infanta; presumably giving us English our third definition for infant (‘a youth of noble birth’), these are princes of the blood, but they ain’t ruling nothing.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

It is also worth considering the more direct fate of infants’ mothers: ‘The very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during marriage’ wrote William Blackstone in 1765. A financial, legal and social dependent – like the children she bore – a wife could be ‘infantine’ through her official speechlessness, than which there is no more perfect example than Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854-62):

He’s never young nor ripe; she grows

More infantine, auroral, mild,

And still the more she lives and knows

The lovelier she’s express’d a child.

Yet, like the screaming infants littering Coram’s Fields, the silent appendage speaks vicariously: dress, jewellery and inactivity declare her husband’s wealth and status; ‘mildness’ and ‘loveliness’ (like youth and innocence) embody the ideals men battle to protect, with smatterings of the overpowering Rightness of the domestic sphere.

She remains, of course, firmly on her pedestal, and statues, as we know, do not speak (unless they are late Shakespearean and have the rather badass Paulina fighting their corner).

So being infantilised does not mean saying nothing; rather, it means saying what those around you choose to hear.

NEXT WEEK: J is for Jade 

H

HYSTERIA

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246

No Reason To Get Excited

In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781

But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.

Oh, Mother.

So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’

She’s Lost Control.

The development of  the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).

One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa

There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.

It’s Not Easy Being Green.

One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.

Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.

Pervert Doc Caged

In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).

This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.

NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.