Male Madness in Victorian Fiction

M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page i Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs: ‘THE MOST DREADFUL VISITATION’: MALE MADNESS IN VICTORIAN FICTION LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES, M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page ii Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page iii Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Job ‘THE MOST DREADFUL VISITATION’: MALE MADNESS IN VICTORIAN FICTION VALERIE PEDLAR LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page iv Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs First published by Liverpool University Press Cambridge Street Liverpool L ZU Copyright © Valerie Pedlar The right of Valerie Pedlar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act . All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN --- cased ISBN- ---- cased Typseset in Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed and bound in the European Union by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page v Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs: To the memory of my parents, Geoffrey and Marjorie Robinson M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page vi Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page vii Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Job Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction Insurrection and Imagination: Idiocy and Barnaby Rudge Thwarted Lovers: Basil and Maud Wrongful Confinement, Sensationalism and Hard Cash Madness and Marriage The Zoophagus Maniac: Madness and Degeneracy in Dracula Conclusion Bibliography Index M519 DREADFUL PRE M/UP 9/11/06 8:32 AM Page viii Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jo Acknowledgements During the many years it has taken me to produce this book, which started life as a PhD thesis at the University of Liverpool, I have received help and encouragement from many friends and colleagues. I owe thanks to the anonymous reader for Liverpool University Press whose report suggested the focus on male insanity, and also to Robin Bloxsidge and Andrew Kirk for help and encouragement at critical points along the path to publication. I am particularly grateful to Simon Dentith, Brean Hammond and David Seed (my PhD supervisor), who at various times read and com- mented on parts of my manuscript and I should like to express my appre- ciation of the stimulating and supportive conferences run by the British Association for Victorian Studies. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for the shortcomings of the book. Friends and family have sustained me when the going got tough, though there must have been times when I tested their patience with my complaints and anxieties. My greatest debt, as always, is to Arthur, my ever-supportive husband. M519 DREADFUL TXT M/UP 9/11/06 8:30 AM Page 1 Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs: Introduction In , whilst he was staying in New York, Charles Dickens visited a lunatic asylum on Long Island or Rhode Island (‘I forget which’). He depicts the scene graphically: The moping idiot, cowering down with long, dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails; there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.1 In part his horror at the sight of these mad people is inspired by the dreary, dirty, ill-ordered conditions in which they are kept. These inmates are people on whose minds has fallen ‘the most dreadful visitation to which our nature is exposed’,2 and they need and deserve a wholesome and stimulating environment if they are to be restored to full humanity. Madness for nineteenth-century writers was both an alien state of mind and some- thing that could afflict ‘our nature’ at any time. Imaginatively, therefore, it offered opportunities to explore the extremities of human mental and emotional suffering, uniting the fascination of the strange and the abnor- mal with the familiarity of the known and the shared. Since madness denotes a dissonance between the individual and society, it provides a channel for the exploration of moral dilemmas, focusing on the issues of egoism and self-control. But since it also denotes individual suffering, moral judgement must be qualified by sympathy, respect and understand- ing. ‘Madness’ is a term more common in literary than in medical usage, but the conditions it describes are not simply literary conditions. Imaginative representations of madness are inevitably influenced by cultural conceptions of insanity, whether they are medical, juridical, philo- sophical, or a composite that has entered into popular currency. In this book I shall be looking at a variety of fictional texts which figure mad men. My main focus is on the way that madness functions in the texts and on what the representation of madness in men reveals about contemporary M519 DREADFUL TXT M/UP 9/11/06 8:30 AM Page 2 Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs: fears, insecurities and ambiguities concerning the state of manhood. This introductory chapter provides the background for that investigation, sum- marising the changes in nineteenth-century concepts and treatments of insanity, the gendering of madness and the way in which the representation of madness is related to fictional genres. Nineteenth-century conceptions of insanity In John Haslam, who had been apothecary at the famous Bethlem Hospital, in London, published A Letter to the Right Honourable, the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect in which he defined three types of insanity: idiocy, lunacy and unsoundness of mind. This threefold definition was given legal recognition in the important Lunatics Act of , the three classes being subsumed under the generic term ‘non compos mentis’. An idiot was described as a person ‘whose mind from his birth by a perpetual infirmity is so deficient as to be incapable of directing him in any matter which requires thought or judgement’. A lunatic was someone who enjoyed lucid intervals and sound memory, but sometimes was non compos mentis. A person of unsound mind was ‘every person, who, by reason of a morbid condition of intellect is incapable of managing himself and his affairs, not being an idiot or lunatic, or a person merely of weak mind’.3 Although there was a recognition by the early s of the need for specialist provi- sion for ‘idiots’, they were still being classed as ‘insane’ in, for instance, Forbes Winslow’s On Obscure Diseases of the Brain in .4 I shall be saying more about conceptions of idiocy (or idiotcy) in Chapter , but the main distinction between idiocy and other types of insanity was that it was a condition from birth and it was a perpetual infirmity. Although the other types of insanity may be the result of heredity, and may in fact show early signs in childhood, they only became established later in life and could, in theory at any rate, be cured. Different types of mental disorder might be classified according to symptoms or causes. Basing his nosology on symptoms, Jean Etienne Esquirol, the influential French physician, recognises four categories in addition to idiocy: ‘lypemania’ or melancholy, ‘mania’, ‘dementia’ and ‘monomania’.5 Monomania, ‘in which delirium is limited to one or a small number of objects, with excitement, and predominance of a gay, and expansive passion’, was an important addition to the lexicon of madness and became a term that entered the general vocabulary.6 It M519 DREADFUL TXT M/UP 9/11/06 8:30 AM Page 3 Gary Gary's G4:Users:Gary:Public:Gary's Jobs: describes obsessive behaviour and thinking, such as could be seen in people who were otherwise conducting a normal life, and, since it was also described as ‘partial insanity’, it raises the endlessly difficult question of the borderline between madness and sanity. Nor is this question evaded in a nosology based on causes. Here, as Esquirol recognises, the situation is complex: ‘The causes of mental alienation are as numerous, as its forms are varied. They are general or special, physical or moral, primitive or sec- ondary, predisposing or exciting.’7 They included climate, the seasons, age, sex, temperament, profession and mode of life. I should like to focus particularly on the distinction between physical and moral causes, which was adopted by many clinical writers in their taxonomies of mental disease. Moral causes had to do with the passions, which could be excited by unre- quited love, domestic troubles and grief, as well as economic hardship; madness lay in excessive response, in fact, to the trials of life. But the notion of excess already involved an appeal to normative standards and thus undermines any idea of diagnosis as a straightforward assessment of facts. The physical causes listed by early nineteenth century writers might encompass disease to the brain, but would also include drink, fever, mas- turbation, injury to the head and even over-study.

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