For this blog post I asked ChatGPT the prompt of “Summarize “Menopause and Hysteria in Victorian Medical Texts and Rhoda Broughton’s ‘Mrs. Smith of Longmains’ “. The tool did somewhat okay with summarizing this text. It was able to pull out the most important overarching points, however the summary it provides is almost exactly similar to if the reader just read the abstract of the paper. It does not handle the complex academic arguments that well
ChatGPT does not handle the complex academic arguments that well. A strong part of the writer’s argument in this text is that “Mrs. Smith of Longmains” challenges the deeply rooted Victorian era understanding of hysteria by providing a counter narrative that challenges those long standing medical beliefs. ChatGPT really gives the bare minimum summary for this part of the text. While it describes how Robert Branes and Henry Maudsley were spearheading the push to re-characterize hysteria as being related to puberty and menopause rather than the nervous system during the 19th century, it does not provide details on how this medical ideology is deeply rooted in societal understandings of women’s bodies. ChatGPT does not truly grasp the argument this text gives that hysteria “had always implied the inherent instability of women’s bodies, and these new discussions mirrored broader cultural debates around gender and power” (James 202). Even when ChatGPT provides its key interpretation of the article, it does not discuss the historical implications of the world hysteria and the way that “Mrs. Smith of Longmains” challenges the persistent desire by society to control women’s bodies. While it does summarize that the story “highlights how women internalize and resist patriarchal medical ideologies”, it does not relate this to the greater societal implications that James is getting at. ChatGPT’s summary is unable to understand the underlying implications of the text’s argument in that it is relating hysteria and medical diagnoses of women’s body to the larger patriarchal desire to control women’s bodies and the power that women’s bodies hold.
ChatGPT did get right the main points of the text as it looks like the summary came directly from the abstract portion of this article. It was right in noting that by the late 19th century hysteria was classified as a nervous system disorder, but that Barns and Muadsley, and other male doctors were pushing to reexamine puberty and menopause’s affect on hysteria. AI was also correct in stating that the narrator of “Mrs. Smith of Longmains” experiences physical discomforts and anxieties that blends supernatural elements with their internal anxieties that are framed as hysteria, but when her dreams come true she is view, not as being hysteric, but as having the power to predict the future. ChatGPT did not include how “Mrs. Smith of Longmains” talks about the theme of biological determinism. It does say that women internalize and resist patriarchal medical ideologies, however it does not include how the pathologising of female behavior inhibits their agency. It also does not include how the story challenges cultural myths about “reproductive capacity and redundancy” (James 201). Another major thing that ChatGPT did not includue was that while the narrator of “Mrs. Smith of Longmains” does have instances of imaginative power, it is because she has a dream that turns out to predict her servant murdering someone. That is a major part of the story and the reason why the notion of hysteria is challenged yet it is not included in ChatGPT’s summary at all.
The prompt I gave shaped the result by giving the bare minium summary of the text. Since I didn’t ask for quotes to show which part of the article the main parts of the summary were coming from, all of the summary points appear to have been pulled from the Abstract. When I re-read the Abstract of the paper, almost every summary point from ChatGPT came from there. When I asked for direct quotes with my summary I was given a bit more information, but the quotes I was given were only about a sentence long at most. The quotes were primarily a few words. I was given no longer quotes which continued to make the main summary points be pulled from the Abstract.
I might use AI in my research to quickly determine if the article I am looking at has any main points that fit with my research. Based on this summary I just used, AI can be good to quickly pull information from the Abstract without needing to read it all. This could be helpful when the Abstract of the paper if fairly long. However, I still don’t really like using AI when I research but I personally don’t find it very helpful. Based on this summary all I was given was facts from the Abstract and a few sentence long quotes, I feel that I didn’t get much more help out of this than if I only skimmed the page on my own.
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