The Page 69 Test: "The Madwomen of Paris"

Saturday, August 5, 2023

"The Madwomen of Paris"

Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of twenty-one countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris (2023),

Wunderland (2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (2007).

She is the recipient of the 2014 Asia Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award for fiction, and was longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.

Epstein applied the Page 69 Test to The Madwomen of Paris and reported the following:

The Madwomen of Paris is a Gothic novel with true-to-life horror overtones. Set in the Salpêtrière women’s asylum in 19th-century Paris, it draws from a surreal chapter in medical history, one in which Jean-Martin Charcot—the founder of modern neurology—routinely hypnotized women he’d diagnosed with hysteria before performing bizarre experiments on them, often in front of huge audiences, aided by other legendary men of medicine like Sigmund Freud and Georges Gilles de la Tourette. But the novel actually centers around Laure Bissonnet, a lonely asylum attendant, and Josephine, the alluring amnesiac Laure takes under her wing after Josephine is dragged into the asylum covered in blood. Josephine’s beauty, sensitivity to hypnosis and spectacular hysterical symptoms (think hair-raising hallucinations, dual personalities and even something like telepathy) quickly make her a favorite of both the doctors and the Parisian public. Soon, though, all that hypnotizing jars loose a memory of something so dangerous it might actually kill her—that is, if her overzealous doctors don’t first.

On page 69, though, Josephine is still languishing, memory-less, in a padded cell, while Laure goes about her daily life as a ward worker. In this way the excerpt isn’t representative of one of the book’s central plot points, the close-but-precarious bond between the two women. What the page does do is tee up the real-life horrors of the asylum, since it describes two of Laure’s asylum duties: delivering the body of a dead hysteric to Charcot so he can dissect its brain, and tightening the screws on a (live) patient’s “compressor”—a medieval-looking device Charcot invented after concluding that hysterical fits could be interrupted by putting sharp pressure on a hysteric’s ovaries.

These grim assignments both help establish the asylum’s dark ethos and explain Laure’s desperate desire to escape the place. More subtly, though, page 69 also marks the moment when Laure decides to visit her late father’s notary to ask for help in that escape. Compared to corpse deliveries and ovary squishings, this might seem like a non-event. But it sets into motion a chain reaction that will put both Laure and Josephine in dire danger—and lead Laure to make one of the most catastrophic decisions of her life. So in that way, the page is actually pretty essential to what makes the novel tick.