ARTICLE:

     In the philosophy and history of aesthetics, the conjunction of drama with reality has traditionally been formulated in the concept of mimesis, broadly defined as imitation, reflection or representation. The term goes back to the earliest articulations about art by the Greek philosophers and has since, over a period of more than two thousand years, enjoyed wide currency and acceptance to theorize the various forms of Western theatre and drama. For all its re-interpretations, salient already in the famous difference between Plato and Aristotle, mimesis is most generally conceptualized as a process of mirroring. Some of the most decisive claims of theatrical mimeticism have, in fact, declared this process to constitute the very function of the art form - as when Hamlet advises the players at the court of Elsinore that "that purpose of playing, whose end (...) was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nautre" (Act III, Scene 2, l. 20 ff). Dramatic language and theatrical performance are here understood as media to construct and enact plausible fictions which, in the act of reception, become the site of recognition for an audience and help to make sense of their social reality at large. A great number of the topics presented at this conference on "Drama and Reality" may be understood in this sense, defining the stage as a representational arena on which prevailing social practises are being rehearsed and re-enacted.

     On the other hand, we have come to interpret social reality itself as a construct of dramatic forms, with role models, performance acts, status props and costumes making up a repertoire of relevant devices that are employed in the constitution and management of societal relationships. Thus, the concept of mimesis has increasingly been investigated for its engagement in forms of social control, in particular with regard to its politics of representation and its power to marginialize any alternative agenda that would not comply with the dominating scrip. In terms of Hamlet's analogy, this critical move towards mimesis may be articulated in questions such as: Who is holding the mirror? Who determines the angle and focus of the reflection? How is the mirror surface shaped and what refractions might occur? By way of such a questioning of mimetic functions, the relation of drama and reality turns out to be a question of power, engrained in the process of signification  i.e. inherent in the very language and the signifying systems we use for communication.

     This power may well be discussed with reference to the traditional psychoanalytic construction of hysteria and the cultural meanings that this particular predicament has acquired and generated over the last hundred years.The year 1995 marks the centenary of the Studies on Hysteria, the book jointly published by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, which is notable in this context for a number of reasons. Not only does it contain some of the seminal ideas that later were translated into crucial concepts of psychoanalysis, it also presents, among the theoretical reflections, some five descriptions of female hysterics and of their treatment by Breuer and Freud, thereby reinforcing the classic notion prevailing since antiquity (and articulated even in the naming of the phenomenon) that hysteria is a specifically gendered disease, a female malady. But finally, and for the current context most importantly, the study initiated the intriguing and paradoxical literary form of the case study, a genre that would also seem to hover somewhere at uncannily between the claims of drama and reality. The critical ambiguity of mimetic mirroring, briefly outlined above, holds true with equal, and perhaps greater, force for this textual undertaking of narrating the lives and emotional developments  of psychic patients that oscillates between relating their stories, interpreting their deeper meanings and establishing the truth of science. Freud himself was haunted by his ambivalence between literary and scientific discourses and repeatedly addressed this point in his writing. In the Studies on Hysteria, when he sets out to discuss Fräulein Elisabeth von R's case, he admits:

It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they  lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. ¹

     Freud's "detailed descriptions", however, have since come to be questioned precisely for the kinds of insights they convey,  not only into the course of the hysteric affection but even more into their own underlying cultural and political assumptions about "Women" - such as when Freud, in the famous Dora case history, plainly declares that an emotionally healthy and normally developed adolescent girl would surely feel erotic stimulation when violently kissed by a man twice her age.²  The Greek physician Hippocrates who first described the disease named it hysteria, the wandering womb, and thereby attributed it to a supposed dissatisfaction of women with their unemployed procreative organs. The traditional cure prescribed, therefore, was marriage and motherhood,³ thus relegating women to their roles in patriarchal systems and subjecting them to male control.

     As a consequence of such cultural concepts and clinical practise, feminist re-inscriptions of the traditional model abound. Hysteria has clearly become one of the prime sites for feminist theory and political intervention on the question of gender relations and their inherent power structures,⁴  not least by using the arena of the theatrical stage. From the numbers of plays which take up the challenge of re-interpreting Freud by means of drama, suffice it here to cite Hélène Cixous's Portrait de Dora (1976) ⁵ and the dance theatre performance jointly created by Leonora Champagne, Judy Dworing and Dianne Hunter, Dr. Charcot's Hysteria Shows (1988/1989), ⁶ which both aim to counter-act the authority of make discourses on "Women" by employing such strategies as dramatic irony, masking and contextual framing.

     This paper will focus on two more recent plays  which set out to achieve this end and which both enjoyed successful runs in the London 1993 season: Dora: A Case of Hysteria by Kim Morrissey was produced by Hen & Chickens Theatre (Operating Theatre Company, director: Christine Hoodith) and opened on the London fringe in March of that year; ⁷ and Hysteria by Terry Johnson, premiered at the Royal Court in August, where it formed the immediate successor to the British premiere of David Mamet's Oleanna and was meant, as director Phyllida Lloyd told the Guardian, "To do something to address the imbalance" of that play.⁸  In the present context Morrissey's and Johnson's plays merit consideration for three reasons: They invite comparison in that they both feature the real Sigmund Freud as well as some of his historical patients and interlocutors as dramatic characters on stage. Secondly they encourage analysis under the auspices of "drama and reality" because they explicitly use historical settings and biographical circumstance as well as amply quote from some of Freud's best known writings, i.e. present elements of a recognizably familiar reality as means to their theatrical purposes. Thirdly, they invite critical attention in the context of mimesis - its problematics as well as potentialities - in that they feature acting as action and thereby show how theatrical performance may become a strategy of effective resistance even while the prescribed roles of the mimetic script are acted out.

     Both authors have previously undertaken similar projects whereby familiar figures and narratives are re-interpreted through unfamiliar combinations and new discursive framings. Terry Johnson's greatest success was the comedy Insignificance (1982, subsequently filmed). Kim Morrissey, a Canadian writer now resident in England, is perhaps best known for two polyphonic poetry collections that re-examine and rewrite accepted cultural scripts: Batoche (1989) engages in a multivocal exploration of a decisive colonial battle against Native Americans which has since become a founding myth of the Canadian nation; Poems For Men who Dream of Lolita (1992) invents a voice for Nabokov's female archetype to tell her version of the story about the notorious Humbert Humbert.

     In what follows I shall first establish a theoretical framework for analysis by raising a few salient points about mimesis, hysteria and the theatre, then consider the two plays in some detail and compare their different strategies of critical adaptation, and, in a third and final step, I will briefly comment on whether these might bee seen as paradigmatic for renegotiating the boundaries of drama and reality by making the theatre a site on which the patterns of social realities are redrawn. The leading question, therefore, is how mimesis can become, for all its problematics, an agency of critical intervention and of political action.

     To begin with, one must realise that in modern literary theory mimesis as a critical concept has for some time now been dismissed. The age of Erich Auerbach, who could canonically subsume all Western Literature under the umbrella term of Mimesis (first published in 1946), seems to be long over.¹⁰ With the move towards post-structuralism and deconstruction this once proud tenet of literary theory has come to be dismantled and rejected, for it has then been seen to proclaim a privileging of the referent over the signifier, positing a truthful relation between the sign and the world, and subsuming all semiotic potential for difference under the postulate of sameness. The current claims raised against the tradition of mimesis are succinctly put by Rodolphe Gasché who, in The Tain of the Mirror, writes on the Derridaen critique of the philosophy of Western Literature:

The interpretation of mimesis as subject to truth, as a mimetologism that proclaims the priority and precedence of the imitated over imitation, subjects literature to a status of metaphoric secondariness. Accordingly, literature posses no specificity of its own and  is reducible to its signified, its message, the truth it expresses. (...) The specificity of philosophy and literature alike rests on this systematic curtailment of the signifier. Consequently, reading is in essence always a transcendental reading in search of the signifier.¹¹

     The charge is based on the hierarchial relation that mimesis sets up and that constitutes the power of mimetic rendering. The move to subvert it must therefore begin with foregrounding the medium of signification and focus on the actual material by which the mirror image is being constructed and transmitted and through which certain meanings might be produced rather than merely conveyed.

     This is particularly relevant for feminist theory and the problem of performance. If mimesis in the theatre turns on the issue of representation, in this case of women in the largely male defined domain of drama, how can the stage be possibly redefined to become a site on which female agency is acted out? As Janelle Reinelt has pointed out, women artists in the theatre have struggled against such forms of representation which previously inscripted them in drama as mere projections of male desire, gendered as "Woman" and rehearsed in a series of homogeneous role. Significantly though, the search for new and liberating roles has hardly led them beyond mimesis. The theatrical movement of the sixties and early seventies may have resulted in a larger number of female protagonists in the theatre, also in a greater proportion of women's narratives to be presented or women's voices to make themselves heard. "However," as Reinelt continues, "the underlying theories of representation behind much of this early theatre practise relied on a positivist epistemology and a reflection theory of mimesis. The mirror of the stage was seen to be clear, enabling women to speak their own voiced or bodies, once given stage space",¹²  her implications being, as one might add, that for a truly liberating move women performers would have to go beyond mirroring and create new forms of theatrical immediacy.

   In prouncements such as these a deep distrust of mimesis is implied, and for good reasons too: the axiology of the mimetic relation, and the upholding of truth against any secondary modes of transmission - all this would seem to conspire with the gender-based and biased epistemology that proclaims one neutral, timeless essence as a way to myustify its own ideaological stances. Such misgivings notwithstanding, it is crucial, however, to remember the other side of mimesis and to explore how difference, too, can be re-inscribed through imitation.

     On the basis of recent studies it may be possilbe to reinvest mimesis with critical power. This revision has, in fact, been undertaken for some time now in cultural theory where mimesis has regained attention as a functional concept ranging in its scope from the arts to social formations and shifting its focus from sameness to difference. Michael Taussipg's Mimesis and Alterity is of particular relevance here. Written from a background in cultural research and ethnography, it investigates mimesis in a context of empowerment. "The wonder of mimesis lies," as Taussig states at the outset, "in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and power."¹³  Even if traditional theory holds that some original referent attains its priveleged position precisely through becoming the object of a mimetic operation, there is no way of safeguarding that privilege once mimesis has set in. Once imitated the referent is no longer singular and must yield its power to the extent that it has to uphold its claim for truth against competing and conflicting versions: authority imitated is authority lost. As Taussig argues:

Once the mimetic has sprung into being, a terrifically ambiguous power is established; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask, and pose. The two powers are inseparable.¹⁴

The foregoing discussion of mimesis and its ambiguity does not merely serve as a prelude to the following analysis of the drama of hysteria but points to its actual core, for in the Freudian reading, hysteria consists of mimetic enactment. Throughout Freud's writings on the subject, references to drama like the following abound: "psycho-analysis has shown that they (i.e. hysterical attacks) are mimetic representations of scenes",¹⁵ or more comprehensively:

When one carries out the psycho-analysis of a hysterical woman patient whose complaint is manifested in attacks, one soon becomes convinced that these attacks are nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor spheres, projected on to motility and portrayed in pantomime.¹⁶

The passage suggests how, in the master's version, doctor as well as patient are cast into specific roles. If, as Freud argues, the mimetic representations inherent in hysterical attacks are nothing but phantasies translated into body language, then the psychoanalyst's task consists in re-translating this performance back into conceptual meaning and expounding the suppressed significance that is being communicated by them. The decisive point here is the fact that the hysteric's performance is declared a pantomime, i.e. as verbally mute. In articulating its secret meanings and forming them into a coherent narrative, the doctor can give voice to voiceless phantasies of patients and thus act as retrospective scriptwriter to the hysteric's dramatic enactment.

     Freud was clearly aware of how theatrical language and practice pervade psychoanalysis. Even his most famous psychoanalytical discovery, the Oedipus complex, is named not just after a hero of Greek mythology, but after the protaganist of a specific drama. When Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, first introduced the concept he explicitly referred to the Sophoclean tragedy and did not use alternative sources of the myth, precisely because "the action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and every-mounting excitement - a process that can be likened to the working of psycho-analysis."¹⁷ The repeated likening of analyst to dramatist would only raise the problem more acutely if there is a way to establish some "reality" behind all the histrionics. Without subscribing to naive epistemology, we cannot afford to dismiss this question, even less so if we are committed to the project of rereading and rewriting Freud from a changed and, possibly, feminist perspective. The questions are: can we retrieve Dora's voice from the palimpsest of patriarchal interpretation? Can we retrace the intertextual layers of case history, mimetic representation, dream narrative and drama back to the figure of Ida Bauer (as was Dora's real name)? Can we trace her agency? In the words of Claire Kahane, this means to inquire "how a woman comes into possession of her own story, becomes a subject, when even narrative convention assigns her the place of an object of desire. How does an object tell a story?"¹⁸

     This encapsulates the crucial question for my reading of the two plays which I will now turn to - with a slight, but decisive, shift of focus: my interest lies not with narrative and telling, but with drama and acting. If the woman-as-object, as Kahane suggests, might not be able to tell her story in the given discourse of control, maybe she can act herself and thereby change the parameters of power.

     How do the plays proceed in this? Kim Morrissey's Dora: A Case of Hysteria, set in Vienna in 1900, assumes the form of a public lecture delivered by Freud. As the single controlling figure, he dominates the stage and converts it into an academic auditorium, standing at his rostrum and directly addressing the audience. As he enters, his first words are:

FREUD: Good evening, gentlemen. (Bows, clicks heels) ¹⁹

In this way, the discourse here initiated immediately casts the spectators into specifically gendered roles: as male voyeurs of the imminent spectacle. This policy of male address, which may at first sight appear a rather too obvious point, on the author's part, about the patriarchal gaze on hysteria, is in fact a direct quote from Freud's "Aetiology of Hysteria", a lecture he delivered in Vienna at the Verein fur Psychatrie und Neurologie in April 1896. Moreover, the discursive production of an all male audience who subjects a female hysteric to their homogenizing gaze, reproduces the iconographic structure of a famous lithograph depicting Charcot's lecture at the Salpetrière. The picture, a copy of which hung in Freud's consultation room above the notorious couch, shows a hypnotized half-nude woman surrounded by attentive men who eagerly watch the master Charcot, founder of modern psychiatry and teacher also to Freud, wielding his power over the female body. As in this representation from the archive of the science of souls, Morrissey's play sets out by establishing the discursive format of a public space which objectifies women and, in fact, excludes their agency.

     But the monologic voice of scientific authority and expert interpretation only constitutes the frame for what is to follow: the dramatic enactment of a number of encounters between Freud and Dora. She enters the stage at his prompting and assumes her role, jointly defined by her father who hands her over to the doctor hoping he will teach her reason, and the psychoanalyst who proceeds to search her dreams and reveal what secret desires they encode. As the play unfolds, the lecture monologue yields to the mimetic rendering of some of the actual analytic scenes recorded in Freud's case history, and, at some points, written out by him in dramatic dialogue. Morrissey's play thus operates on a double level of representation: the authoritative discourse of Freud's lecture is continuously ruptured and supplemented by the dialogic scenes in which the Dora figure makes her appearance and lets her voice be heard. Her counter-presence and counter-interpretations set against Freud's produce a twofold layer of meanings which mutually subvert and ironise one another. This can, for instance, be witnessed in the following excerpt:

FREUD: According to her father, the patient had developed neurotic symptoms by the age of eight: bedwetting, thumb-sucking, chronic dyspnoea. By the age of twelve (...) she began to suffer one-sided - or more precisely,m half-sided -- which is to say -- unilateral head-aches --

DORA: Like my Papa.

FREUD: No. Not like your Papa. (TO AUDIENCE) Unilateral headaches --

DORA: Exactly like Papa.

FREUD: --in the nature of a migraine...

DORA: ...And nervous coughing.

FREUD: (Corrects her) Tussis nervosa.

DORA: And I lose my voice. And dear Papa said --

FREUD: Sit down, please.

DORA: But Papa ...

FREUD: Sit down. Sit down. This is my lecture, young lady. Not yours. ²⁰  

     But whereas here, at the outset, the figure of Freud still succeeds in asserting himself and silencing Dora's voice, her presence becomes ever more insistent as the play progresses and the dynamics of transference unfold. At the end, it may still be Freud's lecture, but, as I will presently show, through the power of mimesis it has become Dora's play.²¹

     Hysteria by Terry Johnson starts off in quite a different manner. The play is set against a grim historical background in November 1938, towards the end of Freud's life and career. Nazi pogroms in Austria and Germany have forced him to emigrate to London, where we now find him in his study putting the finishing touches to his final manuscript, Moses and Monotheism. The whole play is pervaded by a sense of ending, politically motivated by the imminent world war as well as biographically expressed through the onslaught of Freud's fatal illness. His hermit-like solitude, however, is interrupted by a number of unexpected visitors. His doctor Yahuda comes to treat him for cancer and injects morphium to alleviate his pains. The Spanish painter Salvador Dali insists on paying a visit to the great Freud whom, like the surrealist artists, he considers a trader in dreams (what seems like a piece of dramatic ingenuity on Johnson's part does, in fact, go back to a historical encounter of the two). And a young woman named Jessica keeps invading Freud's privacy with most unwelcome determination. After assuming various implausible disguises she finally turns out to be the daughter of Rebecca S., another one of the female patients treated and described by Freud, who thereby become, as Jessica puts it "a successful case history" in the psychological literature, whereas in life she simply was "A suicidal hysteric" ²²

     With this configuration of characters Johnson's play proceeds in the manner of a brilliant farce, contrived and delivered with all the belligerent force and critical edge that Tom Stoppard has given theis genre. All the classic elements occur: hilarious cross-conversations and misunderstandings, witty repartees, layers of discrepant awareness, a striptease routine, trousers lost at awkward moments, a naked woman in the closet - Johnson commands the full array of conventional comedy devices with great satirical ease. Moreover, his play is self-consciously styled in the guise of West End Theatre: the spatial confinement of the Hampstead study with closet adjacent and French windows opening to the garden backstage, as well as verbal references to Ben Traver's Rookery Nook ( a performance of which the real Freud did apparently attend during his final months) reveal this theatrical repertoire as yet another layer in the ironic and metadramatic play with conventions.

     At the same time, however, all this is employed in order to level a very serious charge against Freud and launch a severe attack on his thoery of hysteria. The play argues that Freud, during his early years in the founding period of psychoanalysis, opportunistically suppressed his own previous findings which suggested that hysteric symptoms result from child abuse by near relatives, mostly fathers. Betraying his own earlier conclusions, Freud shunned the social scandal, retracted the controversial statements in 1897 (the year his own father died) and since declared all his patients' memories of sexual violence as wish fulfilling phantasies of infantile desires. This charge against Freud has, in real terms, been made by Jeffrey Masson²³ who, on the basis of Freud's correspondence to Fliess, alleged that the decisive shift from sexual abuse to sexual phantasy was not only motivated by increasing social pressure from the Viennese bourgeois establishment but also by personal embarrassment: Freud might have wanted to safeguard his father from public disgrace for what seemed to amount to hysterical symptoms in his own family. Johnson's play rehearses this argument in a torturous Second Act, in the course of which the figure of Freud is made to confront the hidden truths about himself and acknowledge the political unconscious of his theories. In this confrontation the plot of Hysteria, for all its farcial masking, is driven by as much revelatory zeal as any Ibsenite battle against a person's Lebenslüge, trying to unveil the unacknowledged causes of present predicaments. There is even a sense in which the whole play may be seen as an ongoing analysis and presentation of Freud's guilt-ridden conscience, a hysterical phantasy of his tortured psyche induced by pain and circling around the repressed memories of his own life.

     What should have become clear from this brief outline of Johnson's as well as Morrissey's drama of hysteria is the simple point that both plays would indeed t seem to stake their claims on some "reality" in a committed and political sense. Despite their ironies and comic self-referential allusions, they both set out to contest the version of reality that has been established through Freudian discourse and has subsequently come to be accepted in the wider social field. But both stage this contest, as I would like to argue, by appropriating the dramatic means that psychoanalysis has itself been using, most importantly the ambiguous power of mimesis.

     Central in the operation of both plays is the process of enactment. In Hysteria, the crucial scene in which Freud's treatment of Rebecca S. is revealed assumes the form of a play within the play acted out, owever, not according to Freud's version set down in the published case history, but according to an unauthorized script: the personal record kept by the patient herself. This unacknowledged version of Freud's encounter with Rebecca S. is now impersonated, for want of better alternative, by Dali and Jessica:

JESSICA: We are going to reconstruct one of the Professor's case histories. You sit here (...)

DALI: Is a deal. I am to be the fraud of the great Freud, yes? (Dali sits in the tub seat)

FREUD: No. I will not tolerate this.

DALI: Ah.

JESSICA: What anxieties are prompting your objections, Professor? Read the passages marked with an F. (...)

FREUD: Very well, if you insist. Get it over with.

JESSICA: From the top of the page.

DALI: So. "As you speak to me you will notice ideas will occur that you feel are not important, are nonsensical, not necessary to mention. But these disconnected things are the things you must mention." Dali knows this; he has read this from the book.²⁴

Thus, the mimetic rendering begins with a policy of citation and verbal repetition. But in the course of this scene, citation yields to appropriation and to authorial displacement. The book known to Dali, as to all readers of Freud, is now acted out and thereby subjected to a process of dramatic mimesis the power of which not even Freud can resist. Whereas before he only featured as an unwilling spectator, he is successively drawn into Rebecca's play until finally taking over from Dali and assuming his own professional part in it - but with a difference: Freud now plays himself in the role that his former patient and object of his case history scripted for him. He becomes himself the object whose voice is spoken for by others. This results in a complete reversal of the power relations inherent in analytic discourse. What emerges from the ensuing metadramatic dialogue, for all its farcial elements (such as when Dali confuses the deictic reference of "my breasts"), is a process of empowerment through gaining control of language. Freud's helpless pleas here only echo what he otherwise theorised as his patients' resistance to confront their own repressed memories:

FREUD: Where is this leading? What is your point?

JESSICA: I need to take this step by step. (...)

FREUD: I refuse to cooperate any further.

JESSICA: We're almost there. ²⁵

Morrissey's Dora too comes to act her own role and to fashion out a position of power for herself, and she does so even more explicitly through a strategy of mimetic imitation. Consider the following dialogue succeeding an analytic session in which Freud identified a little reticule that Dora had been playing with as symbolically representing her vagina and indicating her secret masturbation. Now Dora has brought the reticule again, but makes rather different use of it:

FREUD: Still wearing your little reticule, I see.

DORA: Ah, Herr Professor, you see everything, don't you?

FREUD: In time, Nora, in time. Please lie down.

DORA: I think not today, Herr Professor. I have a head-ache.

FREUD: If you do not co-operate, I must, of course, inform your father.

DORA: Perhaps I will tell him myself .... I think he would be very interested ... to see what use you make of purses.

FREUD: Are you threatening me?

DORA: Not at all. I only wanted to show you my little birthday present from Papa ... my little bag ... my little reticule, as you say.

FREUD: What do you mean?

DORA: Nothing. Nothing at all. I only have brought you your fees for the month .... The bills are very large, aren't they? ... They fill it right to the brim .... If we go on much longer, it will be stretched all out of shape.

FREUD: What do you mean, Dora?

DORA: What do you think I mean?

FREUD: Do you know what you are saying?

DORA: But look .... Feel how soft!

FREUD: (shocked) Dora! (recovers) You should keep your money in your pocket.

DORA: Oh, no, Herr Professor, after all, what are purses for?

FREUD: You are playing with me.

DORA: Not at all. Papa has asked me to pay you ... and I shall ... to please Papa ....What, are you shy? ... Come, come, Herr Professor ... it won't bite, will it? .... It's only a purse ...

FREUD: You know very well ---

DORA: Oh, I know very well you've been watching me ... opening it ... shutting it ... playing with it ... putting a finger into it .... Oh yes, and I've been watching you watching, haven't I? ²⁶

Whereas before Freud succeeded in imposing his meanings on Dora and constructing a narrative for her to which she had to conform, she is now actively reversing the process of interpretation by apparently accepting his symbolic code. In the dialogue cited above Dora does nothing else but imitate Freud, that is, mimetically reproduce his analytic discourse which she finds herself in but which, by drawing on its repertoire, she can now redirect and turn around. In her mimesis of the Freudian model, the reticule is first complemented with a phallus and then redefined as the target of Freud's sexual desire, which is not just a comic repartee but a demonstration of semantic domination. By way of such appropriation Morrissey's Dora is foregrounding the politics of interpretation and is reinvesting her own former status as female receptacle of male meanings with a new power of  authorial control. Significantly though, these powers originate from within the very discourse they contest: Dora has internalized the analytic script previously pressed upon her from without and can now manipulate it by means of imitation. Therefore she no longer plays a part subjected to the male controlling gaze, but initiates her own performance casting Freud into the role of the interpreted. Her rejoinder "I have been watching you watching" clearly indicates this resisting move by which the look of surveillance is returned as the displacing gaze of the disciplined.²⁷

     But the observer not merely becomes the observed, he finds himself the object of a sustained mimetic activity and is thus made a model which, in Taussig's sense, is robbed of its once singular power by its very imitation. It is here that the process of theatrical mimesis yields subversive force, and it is through forces such as this that hysteria may act out its potential as a specifically female strategy of resistance. The latter point has persuasively been suggested by Elin Diamond, who argues for a slippery ontology of mimesis and, drawing mainly on Luce Irigaray, shows how its powers may result from long standing patriarchal anxieties of hysteria, the wandering womb, as a space for producing uncontrollable chimeras of signification:

Understood this way, mimesis has little to do with the stable mirror reflection that realism inspires, but rather suggests - if we follow Platonic anxiety to its limits - a trick mirror that doubles (makes feminine) in the act of reflection. What I am proposing is that theatre is a privileged site for feminist analysis because of, not in spite of, its long association with mimetic practice and theory. (...) mimesis can be retheorized as a site of feminist intervention.²⁸

In the two plays under discussion, this intervention becomes manifest in the scenes of play acting that undermine the Freudian model simply by making it a model for mimicking and imitation. However, while both Johnson's Hysteria and Morrissey's Dora: A Case of Hysteria agree in their subverting move, it is equally important to briefly note their fundamental difference in dramatic shape. Johnson's play, in the manner of farce and in the tradition of the theatre of the absurd, proceeds in a circular fashion so that the ending leaves us off exactly where we started: with the old Freud alone in his study, who may, after all, have experienced the whole drama as merely a phantasy of his pain-tortured mind. Morrissey's plot, by contrast, follows a linear development so that, in the end, Freud is again alone at his rostrum but with Dora having moved out of the lecture space set up by him. He is left to merely remember her and make her the target of his nostalgic longing, but has no longer the means to exert his authority over her. He is, like the audience, simply left behind in the confinements of the lecture theatre. Whereas Johnson's ending-as-beginning suggests an endless and senseless circling though stages of escape and retribution, Morrissey's ending compels us, the audience, to now consider our own roles and, like the heroine, start questioning the codes that have controlled us. Central to Morrissey's strategy is the policy of citing and re-citing Freudian texts, adopted in the play throughout and urging us to reconsider their airs of familiarity. As the playwright as well as the actors have reported, ²⁹  in most performances of Dora the greatest laughs from the audience invariably come at points where the dramatic text gives a direct quote from Freud. Recontextualised through drama and placed in the arena of mimetic representation, the well-known scripts are defamiliarised and thus produce ironic and subversive meanings. In this way, the stage may indeed become, as Diamond says, the trick mirror that, like hysterical mimesis, doubles and differs in the act of repetition.

     The foregoing discussion may justify the conclusion that resistance through mimesis means empowerment from within. Even while remaining in and on the stage of domination can the hysteric retrieve her agency, precisely by acting out the theatrical potential that she has been invested with in the Freudian case history. Perhaps it would not even be unwarranted to say that, as a result of this agency, the case histories themselves can no longer be entirely subsumed under Freud's authorial control. The archive of hysteric treatments would indeed provide some very real evidence for the liberating power of dramatic talents. As Elaine Showalter³⁰  and others have shown, one of Charcot's most famous female patients used her status as photographic model and abilities as hysteric performer to disguise herself and stage her escape from the institutional confinement. Similarly, Dora and her sisters are likely to have imbued the scientific script with greater carnivalesque energies than we have hitherto acknowledged. The textual controlling of hysteria or, as a recent critic³¹ calls it, the Framing of the Shrew may altogether be more ambiguous than traditional readings would suggest.

     As an icon of these ambiguities between feminine image and female agency, and as a final comment on the double edge of drama and reality, I would like to end with references to Raphael's celebrated painting of the Sistine Madonna, one of the greatest treasures of the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden. Dora, or rather Ida Bauer, saw the painting and spent two full hours contemplating it. As Freud notes in his case history, this image of the immaculate Virgin and Mother was bound to have impressed itself on Dora's guilty conscience so strongly that she subsequently reworked it in her dreams. However, the image also offers a different reading that did not occur to Freud in his dream interpretation. The painting of Raphael's Madonna self-reflexively frames itself with a massive curtain, painted as if drawn to the side but clearly present as a signifier, rather like quotations marks, that places the familiar representation of womanhood and motherhood right into the ambiguous site of mimesis. This theatrical device, on the painter's part, may finally remind us that the stage has a function in both drama and reality and does indeed serve as arena of mimetic acting as well as of political action.

^{1 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and Edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955ff. vol. II, p/160f.}

^{2 Standard Edition, vol. VII, p.28.}

^{3  Berheimer, Charles, "Introduction, Part 1", in Charles Berheimer & Claire Kahane (eds), In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, New York: Columbia UP, 1985, 1-18, 3.}

^{4 Two of the most seminal studies are Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément, La jeune née, Paris, 1975, and Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, transl. Gilliam C. Gill, Ithaca, 1974; for a useful recent survey see Lena Lindhoff, Enführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie, Stuttgart, Metzler 1995.}

^{5 The English translation by Sarah Burd appeared in diacritics, 13, (Spring 1983), pp. 2- 32.}

^{6 Cf. Hunter, Dianne, "Representing mad contradictoriness in Dr. Charcot's Hysteria Shows," in James Redmond (ed.) Madness in Drama, (Themes in Drama 15), Cambridge UP, 1993, pp.93-118.}

^{7. The play, an earlier version of which was published in Canadian Theatre Review, 65 (Winter 1990), was first produced in 1987 by Wheatland Theatre (Regina/Saskatchewan); it was also broadcast as a radio play by BBC Radio Three in November 1991.}

^{8 The Guardian, 31 August 1993, p.6.}

^{9 Among Johnson's subsequent plays are Cries from the Mammal House (1984) and Imagine Drowning (1991), which the critic Lyn Gardner described as "unfashionable, curiously unsettling, emotionally charged, dark and tender comedies", ibid.}

^{10 This, of course, is a sweeping generalization of a rather complex terminological history, the most noteworthy exception in English Studies being Robert Weimann's Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis, Berlin, Weimar, 1988; for a comprehensive historical survey of mimesis-theories see Gunter Gebauer & Christoph Wulf, Mimesis. Kultur-Kunst-Gesellschaft, Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, 1992.}.

^{11 Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986, p. 256.}

^{12 Reinelt, Janelle, "Feminist Theory and the Problem of Performance", Modern Drama, 32, (1989), pp. 48-57, 48.} 

^{13 Taussig Michael, Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses, New York, London: Routledge,1993, xiii .}

^{14 Taussig, 42f.}

^{15 "The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest", Standard Edition, vol. XIII, p. 172.}

^{16 "General remarks on hysterical attacks", Standard Edition, vol. IX, p. 229.}

^{17 Standard Edition, vol. IV, p. 261f.}

^{18 Kahane, Claire, "Introduction, Part 2" in Charles Bernheimer & Claire Kahane (eds.) In Dora's Case. Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, New York: Columbia UP, 1 985, pp 19-32, 21.}

^{19Morrissey, Kim, Dora: A Case of Hysteria, London: Nick Hern Books, 1994, p.1.}

^{20 Morrissey, 2f.}

^{21 It should be noted in parentheses here that the double level of lecture and dialogue is opened up by yet another layer of signification in the play: the acting out of two dream sequences in which both Dora and Freud feature differently and which, in the London production, were performed at the far side of the stage. Here, a rich theatrical presentation breaks in from the margins to punctuate the war of words. While the centre stage stays empty, a starkly sensuous dream language of sounds, images and bodily movements momentarily releases the verbal theatre of lecturing.}

^{22 Johnson, Terry, Hysteria, London: Methuen, 1993, p.66.}

^{23 In The Assault on Truth. Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory,  New York, 1984.}

^{24 Johnson, p. 47f.}

^{25 Johnson, p. 52.}

^{26 Morrissey, p. 26f.}

^{27 These formulations deliberately echo Homi K. Bhabha's analysis of the strategies of colonial resistance, especially in his essay "Of Mimicry and Man" (in The location of culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 85-92), which is highly pertinent to the present discussion.}

^{28 Diamond, Elin, "Mimesis, Mimicry, and the True-Real", Modern Drama, 32, (1989), pp. 58-72, 62}

^{29 personal communication.}

^{30 Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980, London: Virago, 1987, p. 152ff.}

^{31 Hadjukowski-Ahmed, Maroussia, "The Framing of the Shrew: Discourses on Hysteria and its Resisting Voices", in David Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects 9, Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993.}

email: tdoering@zedat.fu-berlin.de

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