Hysteria (2011 film)

Hysteria is a 2011 British period romantic comedy film directed by Tanya Wexler. It stars Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal, with Felicity Jones, Jonathan Pryce, and Rupert Everett appearing in key supporting roles. The film, set in the Victorian era, shows how the medical management of hysteria led to the invention of the vibrator. The film's title refers to the once-common medical diagnosis of female hysteria.

Plot

Set at the end of 1880, the film depicts the invention of the vibrator. Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a young physician who has difficulty with his occupation due to constant arguments over modern medicine. He gets a job assisting Dr. Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose practice specializes in the treatment of "hysteria", a popular diagnosis for women of that time. Medical practitioners like Dr. Dalrymple tried to manage hysteria by massaging the genital area, decently covered under a curtain, to elicit "paroxysmal convulsions", without recognizing that they were inducing orgasms. Granville meets Dr. Dalrymple's daughters, Emily (Felicity Jones), and her older sister Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a premodern feminist who runs a settlement house in a poor section of London.

2011

2011 (MMXI) was a common year starting on Saturday (dominical letter B) of the Gregorian calendar, the 2011th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 11th year of the 3rd millennium, the 11th year of the 21st century, and the 2nd year of the 2010s decade.

2011 was designated as:

It was marked by a wave of revolutions in the Arab World known as the Arab Spring, including the beginnings of several unresolved protest movements and armed conflicts.

Events

January

Film

A film, also called a movie, motion picture or photoplay, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to the phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to the industry of films and filmmaking or to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations.

The process of filmmaking is both an art and an industry.

Hysteria

Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. Generally, modern medical professionals have given up the use of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" , the most dangerous and effective type, to "conversion disorder".

History

For at least two thousand years of European history until the late nineteenth century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus (from the Greek ὑστέρα hystera "uterus"), such as when a newborn child emerges from the birth canal. The origin of the term hysteria is commonly attributed to Hippocrates, even though the term is not used in the writings that are collectively known as the Hippocratic corpus. The Hippocratic corpus refers to a variety of illness symptoms, such as suffocation and Heracles' disease, that were supposedly caused by the movement of a woman's uterus to various locations within her body as it became light and dry due to a lack of bodily fluids. One passage recommends pregnancy to cure such symptoms, ostensibly because intercourse will "moisten" the womb and facilitate blood circulation within the body. The "wandering womb" theory persisted in European medicine for centuries.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Margalit Ruth "Maggie" Gyllenhaal (/ˈdʒɪlənhɔːl/; born November 16, 1977) is an American actress. She started her career as a child actress in films directed by her father, Stephen Gyllenhaal. Her younger brother is actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

In 2002, she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance as Lee Holloway in Secretary. In 2006 she was nominated for her second Golden Globe Award for her performance in Sherrybaby. Her other films include Donnie Darko (2001), Adaptation (2002), Happy Endings (2005), World Trade Center (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). For her performance as Jean Craddock in the musical-drama Crazy Heart (2009), she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2014 she made her Broadway debut in a revival of The Real Thing, and also starred in the television mini-series The Honourable Woman. For her performance as Nessa Stein in the latter she won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award.