Tarantism

//__**Tarantism: Mass Hysteria That Causes Dancing?**__// Scientists looked back at a poisonous spider outbreak in Italy around the fourteenth century which started the movement of the tarantella dance. Entomologists,or people that study insects, searched for spiders that could've have caused such a rise in venomous bites. However, such a spider could not be found in the areas where the outbreak was most concentrated. This leads them to believe that the cause of such a huge blowup in spider bites would be tarantism. What is tarantism you ask? Psychiatrists have dubbed tarantism as "an epidemic hysteria--a mania in which people infected each other with a compulsion to dance and continue dancing until exhausted. This dancing mania was assumed to be a classic example of hysteria induced by some sort of social stress". Could this be more of Ibsen's symbolism? Nora started going hysterical due to the pressure from Krogstad. "Mrs. Linde: Nora, Nora, you aren't yourself at all!" (Ibsen 89). Maybe instead of experiencing a tarantula bite from Krogstad, Nora is experiencing a bout of socially induced hysteria.