Monomania: the Life and Death of a Psychiatric Idea in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1836-1860
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Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Monomania: The Life and Death of a Psychiatric Idea in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1836-1860 Thesis How to cite: Stewart, Lindsey (2018). Monomania: The Life and Death of a Psychiatric Idea in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1836-1860. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2017 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000d93a Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk MONOMANIA: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PSYCHIATRIC IDEA IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION 1836-1860 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lindsey Stewart Department of English, The Open University October 2017 i Abstract This thesis is about the nineteenth-century psychiatric idea, monomania, in medical, literary and popular discourse from 1836-1860. I examine patient case-notes from the Bethlem, York Retreat and Surrey County Pauper Asylum to establish that the experiential or ‘real’ narratives of monomaniacs confirm the category’s initial confusion with melancholia, and then its conflation with social commentary. Used sparingly in clinical practice, physicians account for a range of anti-social behaviour with its deployment as a diagnosis. However, I argue that it is in the literature of the day that the idea is most widely celebrated. Demonstrating its variant, unstable meanings, the texts I read use monomania explicitly. They include works by the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, neglected thriller pieces by Dinah Craik, the pseudonymous ‘Thomas Waters’, and an anonymously authored story from The Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance. These works all pre-date monomania’s more well-known later incarnations by Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade. I argue that the idea’s popularisation followed a temporal arc which had three phases: in its rising phase (up to the McNaughtan trial in 1843) it generally referred to a pathological excess of passion, at its peak it was inflected with ideas of moral decrepitude, criminality and incarcerable insanity, and its demise saw it coupled with notions of monstrosity and an inverse, mechanistic lack of emotionality. I examine its parallel literary utilisation in constructing ideas of disproportion and transgression in relation to the emotions, as well as the construction of pathogenic environments (notably in Mary Barton (1848)) which gave rise to what the Victorians styled as ‘diseases of the mind’. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), the condition was reprised to evoke both period detail and the self-disciplining agendas of their heroines. A novelistic ‘diagnosis’ of monomania is a point of crisis in these texts, drawing attention to attempts to silence ‘extravagant’ emotion. In its second phase, I contend that its courtroom utility associates literary monomania with masculine, controlling behaviours. Periodical stories use it to signal topicality and educate readers on this new ‘contagion’, modifying the disease’s symptoms to suit their readerships. Unlike the pre-nineteenth-century trope of melancholy as a too-feeling subjectivity (which is still in evidence in the Brontë sisters’ novels), this ‘second-phase’ monomania suggests that too much masculine feeling might quickly disrupt the domestic space. The idea’s afterlife as a form of degenerative criminality, can be traced through to stories such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Six Napoleons (1904) in which the villain’s alleged monomania co-exists with abnormal simian agility and an outsized jaw. ii Dedication For Duncan, Olly and Alex iii Acknowledgements My thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Consortium for the Humanities and Arts in the South-East for funding my research. I am also grateful for the expertise and help I have received from librarians and archivists at The Open University; the British Library; the Wellcome Library; the Bethlem Museum of the Mind; the Brontë Parsonage; Bromley Public Libraries; the Surrey History Centre; the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York; Goldsmiths, University of London Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library. I am thankful to the Bethlem, the Open University, the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, and the University of Exeter Centre for Medical History, for the opportunity to speak and test my ideas with enthusiastic audiences. For their various acts of help and kindness at crucial moments before and during the production of this thesis, I thank in particular: Ruth Abbott, Kay Allott, Chris Baldick, my much missed friend Rachel Barnett, Francesca Benatti, Georgina and Lilly Coulthard, Fiona Doloughan, Jeni Fender, Constance Fulmer, Colin Gale and all the staff at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Cath Georgulas, Roberta Garrett, Jonathan Marshall, George Mind, Lindsay Smith, Hermione Stewart, Yvonne and Bill Stewart, Andrew Thomson, and the late Doreen Williams. Conversations with Jo Proctor of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust about her psychiatric work in Europe’s ‘psychosis triangle’ (Camberwell, Brixton and Peckham) helped to develop my interest in psychopathology and culture – for these and for a valued friendship, heartfelt thanks. I owe an extraordinary debt to Delia da Sousa Correa and Nicola Watson for their wonderfully generous supervision from the very beginning of this thesis and for the customary acuity with which they have read my drafts. They have made the work of this PhD a pleasure. I am also privileged to have had Sally Shuttleworth and Sara Haslam as examiners for this thesis and I am extremely grateful to them for their excellent advice. I have been blessed by the support of my brother Phillip, my mother Carole and my late father, Rex Mind. Finally, my enduring and loving thanks go to my husband Duncan and our sons Oliver and Alexander. iv Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ iii List of Illustrations .................................................................................................................................. v Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: ‘A new and fierce disorder’s raging’: Mary Barton (1848) ....................................... 40 Chapter Two: Monomania as modernity: Romantic love in Wuthering Heights (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Shirley (1849) ............................................................................................ 57 Chapter Three: Protestant perseverance to treat monomania in Villette (1853) ......................... 66 Chapter Four: ‘The Monomaniac’: Topical villains in The Ladies Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance (1836) and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1852) .................................................................. 87 Chapter Five: The monomaniac next door: Marital crisis in Dinah Craik’s ‘The Double House’ (1857) ................................................................................................................................................... 102 Chapter Six: Monomania as a (mis)representation of passion: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) .......................................................................................................................................... 117 Conclusion........................................................................................................................................... 135 Appendix (i): Table showing works of fiction in English using the words ‘monomania’ or ‘monomaniac’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ................................................... 142 Appendix (ii): The Double House ................................................................................................... 143 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 177 v List of Illustrations Figure i: Stipple engraving of Esquirol by Ambroise Tardieu in Des Mentales Maladies (1838) .... 8 Figure ii: Entry in the Dictionnaire Des Médecine (1814) ....................................................................... 9 Figure iii: Ambroise Tardieu, Patient with lypemania ..................................................................... 12 Figure iv: Portraits of Monomaniacs by Theodore Gericault 1822-23 showing across from top left Kidnapping, Stealing, Grandeur, Gambling, Jealousy.............................................................. 13 Figure v: Miss A.A. shown before (above) and after (below)