Once upon a time, fainting was a sign of politeness. And of modesty. Well-bred women in the West, two centuries ago, fainted when they encountered something unsavoury, such as a man in a nightshirt. But what were they up to really?

The novel was a great place to swoon in. In Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), written by Samuel Richardson and regarded as the first true English novel, the heroine Pamela

is extremely prone to fits. She is a maid- servant in the household of Mr B, who is constantly trying to seduce or molest her. When he attempts to rape her, she suffers a grand fit, which she describes as a “deplorable State of Death”, and because she faints, and proves her virtue, she eventually marries Mr B himself.

Critics of Pamela pointed out that fainting was her strategy to land the right man, turning virtue into seduction. Not for nothing has the novel been called a bourgeois phenomenon that coincided with the rise of modern capitalism. Things could not get more sordid.

But they could. The following year, Henry Fielding wrote the novel Shamela, a robust parody of Pamela, in which the heroine Pamela, who is actually revealed to be Shamela, is openly a sham. As Mr B enters her chamber with evil intent, Shamela “faints”, too, but confesses: “O what a Difficulty it is to keep one’s Countenance, when a violent Laugh desires to burst forth.”

Eventually she also marries Mr B. A few years later the novelist Jane Austen, loved for her ironic gaze, advised one of her early heroines: “Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint.” Fainting, therefore, was a morally ambiguous and socially acceptable form of feminine behaviour, and gender roles dictated that the two could go together.A century later, fainting was so widespread that it had evolved its own infrastructure, materials and ceremony. And fashion.

Victorian establishments had fainting rooms with fainting couches. Sal volatile, or smelling salts, would be at hand. As would vinegar. Ladies would carry vinaigrettes on their persons in intricate boxes. Fainting could be elegant: the begowned lady would fall slowly and gracefully, on the floor, into the couch or into a man’s waiting arms. Opera singers were trained how to faint while singing. Illustrations of falling Victorian ladies abound.

One suspects that when men were busy and women were only left to look after the home and the hearth, fainting was an effective form of attention-seeking. Clothes helped. The Victorian corset squashed the organs and cut off blood supply, which aided fainting.

Women, in any case, were supposed to be hysterical. The word hysteria originates from “hystera”, the Greek word for uterus. Hysteria was considered to be an excess of emotion caused by “a wandering uterus” leading to fainting.

But by the end of the nineteenth century bloomers had been invented, the Suffragettes were marching and Sigmund Freud had written his Studies in Hysteria (1895). Fainting was beginning to lose its aura. Marching women had to be upright.

In this part of the world, too, fainting was a social phenomenon, but perhaps less gendered and more democratic. And, as with most things, less documented than in the West.

In Thakurmar Jhuli, the collection of Bengali fairytales, a simple peasant faints when two full-grown princes hatch out of two eggs. In Sukumar Ray’s brilliant play Lakshmaner Shaktishel, Ravan strikes down Lakshman with the deadly Shaktishel. Lakshman faints. The stage direction says “patan o murchha”, standard instruction for fainting acts. (In this play, Ravan then picks Lakshman’s pockets; Hanuman catches him in the act and insults him.)

And we have a collective memory, from cinema and literature, of benign mother-figures fainting as the patriarch disinherits the rebel son, or the young brother-in-law decides to leave the family, or the daughter chooses to marry for love. Or the heroine fainting on hearing of the hero’s death.

But we have less of fainting now. Modern medicine and contemporary cool have been good cures. Women, or men, don’t need to faint to register shock or seek attention today. We have Facebook.