The Mad Women's Ball
by Victoria Mas
(Translated from the French by Frank Wynne)
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The Mad Women’s Ball, originally published in France as Le Bal de Folles, is a debut novel by Victoria Mas which earned its author rave reviews, literary prizes and critical accolades. It is now being published in an English translation by Frank Wynne, bringing the work to a wider audience.
The novel is set in Paris in the mid-1880s and presents us with two strong female protagonists. On the one hand there’s Genevieve, senior nurse at the Salpetriere, an asylum which houses various madwomen, hysterics and outcasts. Its director, Dr Charcot, experiments with hypnotism on some of his high-profile cases during public lectures which feed the public’s thirst for voyeurism. Genevieve, is a firm believer in the power of science, personified in Charcot and his associates in whom she has full and unconditional faith.
However, Genevieve’s beliefs are challenged when she meets Eugenie, an independent-minded young woman from a bourgeois family, who has been conveniently locked away at the Salpetriere after claiming to converse with ghosts. Is Eugenie delusional, or is she the victim of a patriarchal society, a society which wants to get rid of uncomfortable women?
The “Mad Women’s Ball” of the title is a yearly event held at the asylum during the Lenten period: a costumed ball which gives a rare opportunity to high class society to mingle with the dangerous females of the asylum. Besides becoming itself a metaphor for the abuse suffered by the Salpetriere patients, the ball provides the perfect set-piece for the novel’s denouement.
The Mad Woman’s Ball is an atmospheric work which combines fictional and historical elements (Charcot, as well as some other characters in the book did exist), and its Gothic and supernatural overtones add some frisson to the plot. However, I must admit that I was disappointed overall, and that I expected more from a worked dubbed as a “literary sensation”. While the two protagonists are well drawn and there are some interesting figures in the “supporting cast”, most of the other characters, particularly the male ones, are there merely to serve the plot or to highlight the general nefariousness of the male sex. Indeed, one of the problems of this novel is that it seems to be continuously underlining and highlighting its “message”. Here’s a typical paragraph:
The sole purpose of the corset was clearly to immobilize a woman’s body in a posture considered desirable – it was certainly not intended to allow her free movement. As if intellectual constraints wee not sufficient, women had to be hobbled physically. One might almost think that, in imposing such restrictions, men did not so much scorn women as fear them.
Don’t get me wrong. The novel’s feminist message is laudable, but I think readers should be expected to be intelligent enough to get the point without it having to be explained to them.
Perhaps the real problem
is that there are several very good, and some great, works of feminist Gothic
and historical fiction available in English – by the likes of Evie Wyld, Sarah
Waters, Alison Littlewood, Sarah Perry and Susan Fletcher, to name but a few –
which cover the same territory. The
Mad Women’s Ball faces stiff competition and while an entertaining and interesting
read, I do not feel it is original enough to make it memorable.
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