Trauma Takes a Spa Day
...as we develop a 21st-century neurasthenia
The performance of trauma and anxiety has moved to the center of American culture, as wounded souls use social media to pour out their agony.
The moment is familiar, in ways that suggest what it means.
The Second Industrial Revolution created an urbanized and cosmopolitan managerial class in a nation that had been relatively rural and agricultural. To put that a little differently, the incorporation of America made a leisure class, with time and money on their hands – and that leisure class soon began to suffer. Doctors reported growing numbers of “seemingly healthy men and women, usually living in cities, who experienced physical pain, emotional distress, and profound exhaustion.” One of those doctors, the New York City neurologist George M. Beard, wrote a detailed and lengthy report in 1881 on “American Nervousness,” or the form of mental exhaustion that was known as neurasthenia.
“Nervousness,” Beard wrote, “is strictly deficiency or lack of nerve force.” It was wholly a feature of the 19th century, it was prevalent in the major cities of the American northeast, and it was caused by “modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics: steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.”
As medicine, Beard preached “the gospel of rest.” The exhausted, and particularly women and girls, needed to slow down, to take light exercise and fresh air, and to stop thinking so much. The good doctor was especially concerned that schools were teaching girls knowledge they weren’t prepared to carry, crippling brains that weren’t meant to function at modern speed and in the face of heavy intellectual demands. It’s time, he warned, to protect children: “we must drive them away from schools as our fathers drove them towards the schools.” It was time, in short, to protect the human mind:
"An army to make swift marches must dismiss its heavy baggage and take only what is imperative for a day; so the brain that is to do its best must forego or forget impedimental facts that have been forced into it."
Beard’s view of the limited human mind – and more particularly his view of the delicate female mind – would echo for decades, in a growing scholarship of human sexuality that would warn about the inescapable fragility of women. Almost thirty years later, placing an argument for labor regulation before the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon, the Brandeis brief famously used social science and medical research to warn the justices that “long hours of labor are dangerous for women, primarily because of their special physical organization.” That idea would become a prison, a trap for women protected from knowledge and activity – a circumstance most famously depicted by the social reformer Charlotte Perkins Stetson in a short story about a room with yellow wallpaper.
But it also became something else. One of the growth industries of the late 19th century was the resort hotel – a place not meant for passing from Point A to Point B, but for lingering over deliberate and sustained comfort. The American luxury resort was born as a kind of leisure hospital, a place for urban neurasthenics of the managerial class to fix their broken minds. Wounded in the nerves, corporate managers could take elegant meals and healing waters, while their broken wives and struggling children could shelter in comfort for whole seasons. Most importantly, neurasthenic members of the urban leisure class seeking their mental restoration in a resort hotel were sheltering in the countryside, adjacent to nature and its slower clock. They escaped the cities, places of fast living and injury, for hotels where they could take long meals with others of their own class, then stroll the grounds in silence – and save themselves.
They were in pain, so they needed luxurious leisure.
The declaration of social and emotional woundedness is a time-out, a call to stop the clock and let a player step out of the game. It prevents evaluation, it blocks criticism, it carves out a space for rest and leisure. Pick a highly ranked university or an expensive liberal arts college: It has resources to help student activists perform self-care. Because Self-Care Can Be Social Justice, doncha know.
But above all, the declaration of emotional trauma in the face of stupid rednecks and their idiotic Trumpery that doesn’t respect your pronouns is a declaration of social status; it claims a place in a hierarchy: credentialed, sophisticated, high-status. For an infamous example, students at Yale are outraged – outraged – that their idiot professors are hurting them with their stupid and insensitive speech; the dude driving a forklift at the Walmart warehouse is not similarly triggered, because he doesn’t have the time or the audience that will flatter him with sustained attention.
Being traumatized and anxious is a power move, a claim of alliance with the American ruling class. Nineteenth-century neurasthenics didn’t work in sweatshops. Neither do ours.
The problem of the second Gilded Age is the problem of the first: You can’t pretend to be something without becoming it. Performative trauma is internalized as, you know, trauma.
The room with the yellow wallpaper beckons.