Deciphering historical rules for performing female madness on screen requires a bit of cryptography. While the gestures and expressions associated with imitating hysteria in early cinema may be especially legible, the coded meanings are also more fluid, as approaches to screen acting were in flux. Actors in silent film utilised embodied practices to represent mental distress that referenced networks of meaning. Unravelling these threads reveals a residue of centuries-old connections between madness and the savage that glazes a racialised lexicon of emotional gesture imagery, coding certain expressions and parts of the body as excess, animalistic and heathen. In this essay, I examine some of the facial codes expressing female madness in their transition from texts featuring medical or pseudo-scientific illustrations and photography, through embodiment on theatrical stages, to early cinema featuring ‘madwomen’. Across the long nineteenth century in the US, representations of mad faces intersected with racialised tropes rooted in subjugation. As Therí Alyce Pickens argues in Black Madness :: Mad Blackness: ‘In an ideological construct of white supremacy, Blackness is considered synonymous with madness or the prerequisite for creating madness.’ Enacting white female hysteria on stage and in early cinema required the player to follow different but overlapping rules of expression. The actor was expected to resist ‘melodramatic ranting’, while theatricalising mental distress enough to demonstrate and preserve the actor's sanity. These gestures made it possible for the spectator to decipher codes rooted in white supremacy that preserved the whiteness, sexual purity and reason of the mad heroine.

Curiosity surrounding historical representations of female hysteria sprouted in the late 1970s – a century after neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot's notorious lecture-demonstrations at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Scholars in fields including cinema studies, feminist history and psychology embraced the symbolically fertile photographs of the performing hysterics. An urgency to decode the meaning of these images and gestures persists. In the 2020 volume Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, editor Johanna frames her analysis within the mission of the ‘New Hystorians’: scholars engaged in ‘coaxing out the representations of hysteria, rhetorically searching for its metaphors and metonymies, visually following its iconographic relations and imagery – all this out of a belief in the significance of the cultural representations of illness within society’.