ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The Private Life of the Nerves in Villette and Daniel Deronda, Victorian studies like hero in Much Ado about Nothing, Hermione is reborn the chaste woman she always has been; unlike the women in the book analysis, her child Perdita is not written to be fatally lost in her delivery. As Elaine Showalter has suggested is relevant to Ophelia's representational history, the history of fits or hysterical disease arguably helps to attend closely to what the two Hermione's share and what divides them over a span of several centuries. Play acting Hermione in the late nineteenth century looks remarkably as it does in the early seventeenth century, but these surface similarities tell less than the whole story. The book sets out how a scene focused on Hermione unites two texts yet reveals in their several iterations markedly different ideas about women's hysterical ailments.
