Sentimental Texture
My project, “Sentimental Texture,” explores the intersection of fashion, psychiatry, and agency through archival research and artistic practice. Drawing from historical medical archives, photographs, and textile objects created by institutionalized women—most notably Agnes Richter’s embroidered jacket and Jane Avril’s biography—this project investigates how textile becomes a medium of resistance, memory, and legibility. By reinterpreting historical fragments through abstract threadwork and layered fabrics,, I respond to the suppressed yet resilient voices of psychiatric patients from the late 19th to early 20th century. The resulting textile samples embody tensions between visibility and concealment, pathology and performance, aiming to reclaim agency for marginalized bodies and reimagine institutional narratives through fashion.
Sentimental Texture
I Plunge Headlong into Disaster
Delicately and chaotically, a cacophony of unrecognizable cursive letters were stitched inside and out of Agnes Richter’s seemingly unassuming jacket made of coarse linen. Red, black, blue and yellow threads melted together with pinkish discoloration of sweat stains, to reveal fragmented phrases among a mess of indecipherable texts:”my white stockings,” “the body is,” “I plunge headlong into disaster,” and “583 Hubertusburg.”“583 Hubertusburg” was the laundry number given to Agnes Richter, during her 26 years of institutionalization at Hubertusburg Asylum for diagnosis of paranoia since 1895 (Rosner). Richter lived a rather peaceful life as a seamstress, until she grew paranoid of being robbed and started to contact the police frequently, which led to her arrest in 1893. According to the Prinzhorn Collection, where the jacket was collected, Agnes Richter has "sew[n] reminiscences from her life into all of her undergarments and clothing.” Th sleeves are sewn the wrong way, and the sweat stains on the jacket's seams does not match up with each other, suggesting that Richter might have "turned the torso of the jacket inside out," so that "the embroidered text would no longer be legible from the outside, and she could begin stitching again" (Prinzhorn Collection). While the jacket is the only object that survives till this day, she had evidently labored in the language of needlework, painstakingly sewing, altering, and embroidering her voice onto the pieces of uncouth hospital gowns distributed to her to give them a sense of warmth.
I was immediately captivated by Agnes Richter's jacket the second I saw it. I was struck by how much warmth and weight of personal voice it carries, compared to the coldness, sterileness, anonymity and erasure of individual identities we typically associate with clothing enforced in psychiatric institutions. Just picture a straitjacket: as a constrictive garment traditionally used in psychiatric institutions, the straitjacket features long sleeves that can be wrapped around the body to restrain the wearer's movement by fastening the buckle belts and lacings on the back. Often made of heavy canvas or leather, its materiality is designed to be coarse and stiff so that the patients are unable to rip it apart. While the straitjacket connotes the cruelty of institutional power and a loss of physical freedom, Agnes Richter's jacket embroidered with autobiographical texts somehow subverts that structure of power with its unique personal voices and subjectivities.
Stitched inside and out, replete with sweat stains and tears, Agnes Richter’s jacket addresses the question of presence despite the absence of her body. Like many people who were institutionalized in the psychiatric hospitals during that time period, we do not have much access to the substance of her personal life–her laughs, her tears, her pains, her happiness–besides the few pages of her treatment records and the embroidered jacket she left behind in of Prinzhorn Collection’s storage room. Her identity seems illegible, just like the faintly illegible poetic fragments of her sewn diary. Yet Maybe it is precisely this illegibility of Agnes Richter’s identity and script that makes her work so powerful–maybe this illegibility is something that she finds comfort and safety in, shielding her away from the surveillance of rigid psychiatric institutions. I imagine her hunchback on an armchair, body leaning forward to the pieces of cloth and carefully sewing her streams of consciousness thread by thread. When the asylum guard came forward to ask what she was embroidering, she said, “nothing,” as she smirked and flipped the jacket inside out to hide her writing. Then she began stitching again, out of sight of others. The act of writing in coded language, which is only readable to the writer itself, is perhaps inherently agential. The jacket Agnes Richter painstakingly embroidered with her own hands and voice makes present the power of those who were confined in the space of hospital, “with the aid of merely a thread… to suspend the given spatial structure, to have an impact on the unequal power relation that were inscribed in this place, or simply to create a new spatial situation” (Ankele). As she skillfully stitched “written record of her suffering” onto pieces of coarse linen hospital gown provided to her that is a “symbol of her institutionalisation,” she somehow completely transformed the meanings of it into an act of her agency and presence (Rosner).
An Orchid in a Frenzy
A large, idiosyncratic ostrich feather hat almost falling down from her head, Jane Avril flexibly bent backward, as if she was twisting her body to evade the snake that wrapped her around. Her upward looking eyes, playful smile, and over-exaggerated gesture to adjust the brim of her hat however suggested that she was probably unbothered by the snake. Instead she was there, with her eccentric movements, to excite laughter. This is not a moment implicating immediate threat and subsequent frenetic efforts to mitigate it, but rather, a moment of intentional comicality.
Depicting her comical bodily movements, Paul Sescau’s publicity photograph taken of Jane Avril perfectly captured her well-known quirky character, as a French Cancan dancer headlining at Moulin Rouge and the Jardin de Paris during the Belle Époque. Dubbed as "an orchid in a frenzy,” “an exquisite creature, nervous and neurotic, the captivating flower of artistic corruption and of sickly grace” by her admirers–Jane Avril was especially known for her unusual and neurotic dance movements in the Paris nightlife scene (Chapin). She appeared frequently in the paintings and poster illustrations of French illustrator Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was obsessed with painting Jane’s dance moves throughout his artistic career. Paul Leclercq, one of Lautrec’s friends, depicted the scenes in which Lautrec was totally captivated with Jane Avril’s performances along with the crowds of her audience:
“In the midst of the crowd there was a stir, and a line of people started to form. Jane Avril was dancing, twirling, gracefully, lightly, a little madly; pale, skinny, thoroughbred, she twirled and reversed, weightless, fed on flowers: Lautrec was shouting out his admiration” (Jones).
Producing a multitude of posters capturing Jane Avril’s unique movements, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec contributed to much of her publicity through his relentless self-prompted advertising. Images of Jane Avril energetically dancing with flaming red hair and thin parted lips, body flexibly twirling like a snake, were forever imprinted on the minds of customers frequenting Paris nightclubs at the turn of twentieth century.
Jane Avril’s much-celebrated eccentric dance movements were inspired by her experience of institutionalization in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, a part of her darker past that seemed to stand in contrast to her glorious celebrity as a much-adored dancer. Avril was born Jeanne Louise Beaudon in 1868 in an impoverished neighborhood of Paris. At the age of 14, she ran away from home to escape her abusive alcoholic mother who intended to turn her into a prostitute. She was later admitted to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, an institution known for the treatment of “female hysteria,” for diagnosis of “Saint Guy’s dance,” a condition characterized by neurotic writhing and abrupt, uncoordinated bodily movements (Bonduelle and Gelfand). In her memoir published in 1933, Avril recalled fondly of her dancing in celebration of Mardi Gras at the hospital, a place she described as an “Eden”: "disguised as Descente de la Courtille in a costume furnished by Mlle Jeanne Charcot," she so felt "carried away by an instinct which, up to that moment, [she] had never suspected to be in [her]." That night, she danced so energetically, to the point in which she exclaimed, "Alas, I was cured!" It was perhaps from this experience in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital that she decided to pursue a career in dancing, later becoming the “Orchid in a frenzy” known for her “a little madly” bodily movement (Chapin).
Institutionalizing many women like Jane Avril, The Salpêtrière hospital acts as a “theater of hysteria”, shaping popular cultural discourse of madness through its voyeuristic spectacle staging the "hysterical female” (Stephenson). Under the leadership of Jean Charcot, the Salpêtrière hospital frequently staged public demonstrations and lectures on hysteria, drawing attention of Prisian elites, literaries, and artists (Stephenson). During the lectures, Jean Charcot would perform hypnosis, electric shock, or pressure on the ovaries on his female patients to induce their hysterical symptoms, followed by his treatment to relieve them (Stephenson). The oil painting by Pierre Andre Brouillet, "A Clinical Lecture by Dr. Charcot at the Salpetriere in 1887," captures the moment of voyeuristic spectacle epidemic in Charcot's staged demonstrations. The painting shows a crowd of male audience, gazing in concentration on the woman patient who is clearly in a coma, her breasts half-exposed from a loosely-fitting blouse that falls under her shoulder. The overall effect of Charcot's performance is largely sensualized, and the patient, unaware of her surroundings, seems to have become the object of the voyeuristic gaze of the onlookers. The Salpêtrière hospital, through its frequent voyeuristic performances, makes present the "deeply material, gendered history" that was inscribed onto its space (Marshall). "Located on the problematic border between psychosomatic and somatic disorders", female hysteria, of which the Salpêtrière hospital staged its public performances, represented Victorian-era "confusion of real and imagined illness" that ultimately linked the female bodies to a site of ungraspable pathology (Hustvedt).
If the Salpêtrière hospital was symptomatic of a voyeuristic theater that linked femininity to dramatized pathology, then the women living in it seemed to have mastered in speaking its language and getting rewarded. As documented in Jane Avril's memoir, the female patients not only willingly participated in the Salpetriere Hospital's lectures staging hysteria, they also went to great lengths to purposefully perform their madness, and even control how their performance of madness would look like to their audience. Avril recalled a patient requesting her to "be sure come to [her] bed and press hard on [her] ovaries," so that to "interrupt the attack immediately, permitting the ‘patient’ – recovering her wits – to have a conversation with the special person of the moment." Impressed by the extent of measures the female patients wrote to garner a state of stardom, Avril continued to write:
"There were those deranged girls whose ailment named Hysteria consisted, above all, in simulation of it... How much trouble they used to go to in order to capture attention and gain stardom. That prize went to the one who would find something novel to overshadow the others when Charcot, followed by a large group of students, stood at the bedside and observed their wild contortions, ‘‘arcs de cercle’’, various acrobatics, and other gymnastics...When they sensed that the time of Charcot’s visit was approaching, several threw a fit and I, now that the time had arrived, cooperated by doing what they had requested of me...For me it was a comic show to see these crazies come away so proud and delighted to have been chosen and pointed to by the 'master’. In my tiny brain, I was astonished every time to see how such eminent savants could be duped in that way, when I, as insignificant as I was, saw through the farces."
Through comically contorting, dancing, laughing, and fainting, the women at the Salpêtrière hospital have mastered the art of performing madness. They had unquestionably recovered parts of their agencies, by excelling in profiting from the spectacle that dramatizes and pathologizes her body. Before she faints under Charcot's hypnosis, I see a witty grimace forming in the corner of her lips.
I want to highlight the in-between space that many female patients like Jane Avril were situated in: one one hand, they were victimized by the systems of power that medicalizes and pathologizes their bodies; on the other hand, they became adept in navigating that very system, adapting and using it to their own ends–possessing the agency to perhaps subvert the unequal power relations inscribed onto both the physical and cultural space of psychiatry. Jane Avril’s account is important, as it provides an entry point into understanding the lives of many “hysterical” women who were institutionalized during the Victorian era, as well as the alternative history of subversiveness that might come out of it.
The Queen of Hysterics
Flipping through copies of L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, I was intrigued by the bizarre images I saw: women in hospital beds laughing, screaming, dancing, staring were put into the crude spotlight of a nineteenth century photography studio. Twirling their bodies, raising their hands, eyes looking upward and mouth wide-open to imply a sense of hysteria, their body gestures appear to be so exaggerated, much to the point of comical more than disturbing.
A collection of photos and texts showcasing female patients at the Salpêtrière hospital under Jean Charcot’s leadership, L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière produced an abundance of medical imageries of “female hysteria.” The publication was meant to document the symptoms of patients during their hysteric attacks or epilepsy. To the eyes of the modern viewer like me, however, the photographs of the collection seem so staged, exaggerating, and performative to the point of laughable, that there is no way that these photos are actual documentation of the patients’ conditions.
An interesting figure, Louise Augustine Gleizes, came to my attention as I was looking through L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. She had appeared for multiple times in the book, and her photogenic, euphoric expressions in almost every photo fascinated me. In a photo labelled as "Attitudes Passionelles," Gleize was seen sitting on a messy hospital bed, her hands in the air, looking upward while joyfully laughing. In another photo, she turned her head to gaze intensely into the camera, with white bed sheets wrapping around her body and slightly pulled to reveal her shoulders. To me, Gleizes's body gestures in these moments look no different than a Vogue model posing for a modern fashion photoshoot. I would even say that she was the creative director of the photos seen in L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière– I imagine her jumping around the hospital bed, excited to come up with creative posing ideas in which she would appear more “mad.” Her laughs are probably genuine, and I believe she was really having fun in Jean Charcot’s photoshoots. In doing so, she had transformed moments of medicalized narrative that supposedly documented her pathology and suffering, into moments of joy and self-expressions.
I am so intrigued by the various eccentric movements enacted by Jane Avril, Louise Augustine Gleizes, and many other women at the Salpêtrière Hospital, as a site of their corporeal subjectivities, “a performance archive…manifested via the muscular action and spasmodic extremes of flesh, bone, and limb” (Marshall).”
mes of flesh, bone, and limb” (Marshall).”
The movement of French Cancan Dancer, which Jane Avril becomes after her release from the Salpêtrière Hospital also fascinates me. Featuring high kicks, jump splits, and lifting up of the dress to reveal underwear underneath, the dance exudes an explosion of sensuality and energy. To me, the act of lifting the petticoat represents a gesture of revealing suppressed voices, much like the women at the Salpêtrière reclaimed their narratives through performance and self-expression.
Works Cited
Ankele, Monika. "The Fabric of Seclusion: Textiles as Media of (Spatial) Interaction in Isolation Cells of Mental Hospitals." In Material Cultures of Psychiatry, edited by Monika Ankele and Benoît Majerus. Bielefeld, 2020.
Avril, Jane. Mes Mémoires. Paris-Midi, 7-26 août (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris: R. Suppl.1644), 1933. Translated by Michel Bonduelle and Toby Gelfand.
Bonduelle, Michel, and Toby Gelfand. “Hysteria Behind the Scenes: Jane Avril at the Salpêtrière.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 8, no. 1, Apr. 1999, pp. 35–42.
Brouillet, Pierre Andre. A Clinical Lecture by Dr. Charcot at the Salpetriere in 1887. 1887.
Chapin, Mary. Weave "Review: Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril". Print Quarterly. 29 (4): 478–481, 2012.
Bourneville, Désiré-Magloire, and Paul Regnard. Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1876-1880.
Hustvedt, Asti. Medical muses: Hysteria in nineteenth century Paris. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Jones, Roger. “Toulouse-Lautrec at the Courtauld: Just beyond the Moulin Rouge.” The British Journal of General Practice vol. 61,589 (2011): 524. doi:10.3399/bjgp11X588565
Marshall, Jonathan W. “Traumatic Dances of ‘the Non-self’:: Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive.” Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, edited by JOHANNA BRAUN, Leuven University Press, 2020, pp. 61–86.
Rosner, Isabella. “‘I plunge headlong into disaster’: Unstitching Agnes Richter’s Jacket.” The Polyphony, 2021.
Stephenson, Barry. “Charcot's Theater of Hysteria.” Journal of Ritual Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2001, pp. 27–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44368585. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.
Prinzhorn Collection. “The Little Jacket (1895) by Agnes Richter.” Die Sammlung Prinzhorn ist eine Einrichtung des Universitatsklinikums Heidelberg. https://prinzhorn.ukl-hd.de/exhibitions/aktuell/precious-item-of-the-week/jacket/?L=1.