Hysteria?
Suffocation, trauma, craze, fear, neuroticness, emotional distress – all indications of hysteria. Classified from a series of signs, hysteria has come to define the behavior of women immensely in Los Angeles. Many works depict this nature of women, yet leaving room for “self-reflexive exploration”, such as Tara Ison’s Cactus and Todd Haynes’s film SAFE. Though both approach the matter through different perspectives, they both convey the concept of hysteria in women.
Fixated upon closed walls any “normal” person would most likely develop psychological and/or physical problems. This gushes through the works of Ison and Hayne. Carol, the central focus of Haynes film, portrays the typical housewife. Not wishing to remain useless, Carol searches to fill up her time in redecoration, gardening, and housekeeping – a common factor in most housewives. Carol carries out these “hobbies” in order to sense significance, since she feels unimportant. While in her car, she listens to a Christian radio station, and noticing the dangers around, such as the smog from a truck in front of her, she displays of paroxysm and exaggerated lack of air. Through her behavior around her husband she exhibits an eminent insecurity of herself. During the length of the film, she reveals that whenever she feels alone, isolated, or excluded she will suffer attacks, progressively worsening. Eventually, she seeks answers from a doctor, psychologist, and a group proclaiming a “chemical-free environment.” Ultimately, her condition heightens and leads to her destruction.
However, Ison illustrates a more likely Angelino woman and her dilemmas. Holly states her comfort zone – her house – because all the essentials present themselves there. In fact, she states that she can “plant [herself] safely” in her house. Holly protests on going outside because the “vastness” makes her feel “aimless and lost.” Hitherto, she fears being unattended and feeling unimportant. In fact she reinforces her fright of insignificance when she proclaims, “I realized it was [Josh’s] horizon that worried me; his was getting too big and far away for me to be more than a speck in it” (Ison 121). Yet, she experiences relief when she realizes that Josh needs her and felt her necessity for him when she “breathe in the having him to hold on to, what always made me feel found and unbound, blessed…I lived on, drank from, him…without him I would shrivel up to a small, withered, petty thing, and die” (Ison 128).
The two females, Carol and Holly, possess various attributes that make them related to each other. Primarily, they encompass the fear of feeling rather small and unimportant. Consequently, they strive to do anything in their power to feel lofty or maybe even just noticed. In Carol’s case trying out new things and Holly’s battle to pull Josh closer to her. Secondarily, they both depend on someone else to change their sense of insecurity and give them significance. Carol chooses to unearth this in her friends and family, but does not prevail. Holly, on the other hand searches deep within her boyfriend, succeeds temporarily, but ultimately looses this security, too.
However, the roots of these problems differ in Carol and Holly. Carol’s problem arise from the fact that her marriage is fallen apart because a time lacks when she and her husband could be intimate and honest with each other. Therefore, she hunts for ways for her husband to succumb to her, but in the end just ends up hurting herself. In addition, she cannot adjust to the Angelino lifestyle, because in Texas things were different. Holly, on the other hand, traces her quandary to her childhood because she states that her “parents were always off being very busy, always leaving [her] to go off by themselves” (Ison 132).
Many Angelinos go through the same situation as Holly, but apparently the long-term effects show up more in women. Most likely, because women are encaged in the same place most of their time since an early age, the memories are more fresh, and a feeling of insecurity evolves. Truly, this evolves into the case of Holly, having her parents gone as a child, and as an adult, having her boyfriend leave her for prolonged times. Therefore, her security diminishes as these times alone prolong and they find no replacement for their protection.
Perhaps their insecurity and constant need of someone reassuring them of their significance results in their minds going berserk, after they lose that person. In Holly’s situation the effect of losing her boyfriend, her security, is quite evident. She consorts to living in a bathtub and making it her “safe” place. She misses so much the importance she felt in Josh that she resorts to giving herself to the cactus, a replacement of Josh, as she states, “the cactus needs me. It finds me significant, and I embrace it back, hard, to feel its spines enter and become mine” (Ison 134). However, Carol goes bananas because she loses all connections to her world gradually and opts to situate herself in a chemical-free environment to feel the stench of security and significance.
What makes these women hysterical? The fact that they embrace their security and importance as the vital objectives in their lives, leads them to their destruction. The mentality of these women might be comprehendible, but because of the fleeting quality of their tangible security, they often lose substance of life.
