The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences

by Frederick Treves

I am a neurotic woman. In that capacity I have been the subject of much criticism and much counsel. I have been both talked to and talked at. On the other hand I have detailed my unhappy symptoms to many in the hope of securing consolation, but with indefinite success. I am afraid I have often been a bore; for a bore, I am told, is a person who will talk of herself when you want to talk of yourself.

My husband says that there is nothing the matter with me, that my ailments are all imaginary and unreasonable. He becomes very cross when I talk of my wretched state and considers my ill-health as a grievance personal to himself. He says—when he is very irritated—that he is sick of my moanings, that I look well, eat well, sleep well, and so must be as sound as a woman can be. If I have a headache and cannot go out he is more annoyed than if he had the headache himself, which seems to me irrational. He is often very sarcastic about my symptoms, and this makes me worse. Once or twice he has been sympathetic and I have felt better, but he says that sympathy will do me harm and cause me to give way more. I suppose he knows because he is always so certain. He says all I have to do is to cheer up, to rouse myself, to pull myself together. He slaps himself on the chest and, in a voice that makes my head crack, says, “Look at me! I am not nervous, why should you be?” I don’t know why I am nervous and so I never try to answer the question. From the way my husband talks I feel that he must regard me as an impostor. If we have a few friends to dinner he is sure to say something about “the deplorable flabbiness of the minds of some women.” I know he is addressing himself to me and so do the others, but I can only smile and feel uncomfortable.

I have no wish to be nervous. It is miserable enough, heaven knows. I would give worlds to be free of all my miseries and be quite sound again. If I wished to adopt a complaint I should choose one less hideously distressing than “nerves.” I have often thought I would sooner be blind than nervous, and that then my husband would be really sorry for me; but I should be terribly frightened to be always in the dark.

I get a good deal of comfort from many of my women friends. They at least are sympathetic; they believe in me, know that my complaints are real and that what I say is true. Unfortunately, when I have described certain of my symptoms—such as one of my gasping attacks—they say that they have just such attacks themselves, only worse. They are so sorry for me; but then they will go on and tell me the exact circumstances under which they have had their last bouts. I am anxious to tell them of my other curious symptoms, but they say that it does them so much good to pour out their hearts to someone, and I, being very meek, let them go on, only wishing that they would listen to me as I listen to them.

I notice that their husbands have for the most part just the same erroneous views about nerves that mine has. Some of them say that they would like to make their menfolk suffer as they do themselves. One lady I know always ends with the reflection: “Ah, well! I shall not be long here, and when I am dead and under the daisies he will be sorry he was not more appreciative. He will then know, when it is too late, that my symptoms were genuine enough.” I must say that I have never gone to the extreme of wishing to die for the mere sake of convincing my husband of obstinate stupidity. I should like to go into a death-like trance and frighten him, for then I should be able to hear what he said when he thought I was gone and remind him of it afterwards whenever he became cynical.

It is in the morning that I feel so bad. I am really ghastly then. I wake up with the awful presentiment that something dreadful is going to happen. I don’t know what it is, yet I feel I could sink through the bed. I imagine the waking moments of the poor wretch who has been condemned to death and who is said to have “slept well” on the night before his execution. He will probably awake slowly and will feel at first hazily happy and content, will yawn and smile, until there creeps up the horrible recollection of the judge and the sentence, of the gallows and the hanging by the neck. I know the cold sweat that breaks over the whole body and the sickly clutching about the heart that attend such an awakening, but doubt if any emerging from sleep can be really worse than many I have experienced.

I can do so little in the day-time. I soon get exhausted and so utterly done up that I can only lie still in a dark room. When I am like that the least noise worries me and even tortures me almost out of my mind. If someone starts strumming the piano, or if a servant persistently walks about with creaky boots, or if my husband bursts in and tries to be hearty, I feel compelled to scream, it is so unbearable.

It is on such an occasion as this that my husband is apt to beg me “to pull myself together.” He quite maddens me when he says this. I feel as full of terror, awfulness and distress as a drowning man, and how silly it would be to lean over a harbour wall and tell a drowning man in comfortable tones that he should “pull himself together.” Yet that is what my husband says to me, with the irritating conviction that he is being intelligent and practical.

I cannot walk out alone. If I attempt it I am soon panic-stricken. I become hot all over, very faint, and so giddy that I reel and have to keep to the railings of the houses. I am seized with the hideous feeling that I can neither get on nor get back. I am not disturbed by the mere possibility of falling down on the pavement, but by the paralysing nightmare that I cannot take another step.

If anyone were to put me down in the middle of a great square, like the Praço de Dom Pedro at Lisbon, and leave me there alone, I think I should die or lose my reason. I know I should be unable to get out. I should fall in a heap, shut my eyes and try to crawl to the edge on my hands and knees, filled all the time with a panting terror. A man who finds himself compelled to cross a glassy ice slope which, twenty feet below, drops over a precipice, could not feel worse than I do if left adrift, nor pray more fervently to be clear of the abhorred space and safe. My husband says that this is all nonsense. I suppose it is, but it is such nonsense as would be sense if the jester were Death.