Abstract
In The Female Malady published in 1985, Elaine Showalter notes that representations of madness in literary texts are not simply reflections of medical and scientific knowledge, but are part of the fundamental cultural framework in which ideas about insanity are constructed. Writing from a feminist perspective on women, madness and English culture, Showalter draws extensively upon women’s diaries, memoirs, and novels in order to include women’s voices as well as the male views set out in medical literature. One of her first examples is Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronté’s well-known novel, Jane Eyre. While Showalter describes Bertha’s violence, sequestration, and regression to an inhuman condition as a powerful model of female insanity for Victorian readers, she never mentions Bertha’s Jamaican immigrant background. Yet ethnic identity, or the immigrant experience, is a vital aspect of the cultural framework that literary texts both reflect and help to shape and is thus significant in an understanding of ideas about insanity.
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Notes
- 1.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985), 61–8.
- 2.
Olivia Chow, My Journey (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2014), 23–7.
- 3.
There is an extensive international literature on the significance and interpretation of memory in history. For this study I am also drawing in particular on Margaret Atwood, In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction, Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies, University of Ottawa, 21 November 1996 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, nd).
- 4.
See Lorna R. McLean and Marilyn Barber, ‘“In Search of Comfort and Independence”: Irish Immigrant Domestic Servants Encounter the Courts, Jails, and Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ontario’, in Marlene Epp et al., eds., Sisters or Strangers? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 148–151 for examples of Irish women in the Rockwood Asylum for the criminally insane opened in Kingston in 1856.
- 5.
McLean and Barber, ‘In Search of Comfort and Independence’, 134; Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 525–6.
- 6.
Susan E. Houston, ‘The Role of the Criminal Law in Redefining “Youth” in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada’, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’Histoire de l’Éducation, 6: 3 (1994), 39–55, cites collected archival and newspaper evidence regarding Grace Marks.
- 7.
Charlotte Gray, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (Toronto: Viking, 1999) explains the background and immigrant experiences of the Strickland sisters.
- 8.
Susanna Moodie, Life in the Clearings (Toronto: Macmillan, 1959) 157, 169.
- 9.
Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 158.
- 10.
Atwood notes that the influence of Dickens’ Oliver Twist—a favourite of Moodie’s—is evident in the tale of the bloodshot eyes. Alias Grace, 556.
- 11.
Grace Marks was admitted by warrant to the asylum in May 1852. Archives of Ontario, RG10-20-B-1, Admission Orders Nos. 1182 and 1183, Grace Marks and Bridget Maloney.
- 12.
Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 170.
- 13.
Canada, Sessional Papers, 1873, No. 75, ‘Return of Pardons for 1872’.
- 14.
Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 224.
- 15.
Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 226.
- 16.
Towards the end of Life in the Clearings, Moodie wrote, ‘It was likewise very cruelly and falsely asserted, that I had spoken ill of the Irish people because I described the revolting scene we witnessed at Grosse Isle, the actors in which were principally Irish emigrants of the very lowest class … The few Irish characters that occur in my narrative have been drawn with an affectionate, not a malignant hand.’ (Life in the Clearings, 277).
- 17.
Atwood, In Search of Alias Grace, 23–6.
- 18.
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1996), 308.
- 19.
Atwood, Alias Grace, 116.
- 20.
In her ‘Author’s Afterword’ in Alias Grace, 558–9, Atwood states: ‘The Spiritualist craze in North America began in upper New York State at the end of the 1840s with the “rappings” of the Fox sisters, who were originally from Belleville—where Susanna Moodie was by then resident, and where she became a convert to Spiritualism … the movement spread rapidly and was at its height in the late 1850s, being especially strong in upstate New York and in the Kingston-Belleville area’. See also Joseph McCabe, Spiritualism: A Popular History from 1847 (London: Unwin, 1920) and Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England (London: Virago, 1989).
- 21.
Atwood, Alias Grace, 558.
- 22.
James Moran, Committed to the State Asylum: Insanity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Quebec and Ontario (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), Chapter 5, ‘Criminal Insanity: The Creation and Dissolution of a Psychiatric Disorder’, 141–51.
- 23.
See McLean and Barber, ‘In Search of Comfort and Independence’ for other examples.
- 24.
Nellie McClung, The Stream Runs Fast: My Own Story (Toronto: Thomas Allen and Son, 1965), 69.
- 25.
Nellie McClung, Clearing In The West: An Autobiography (Toronto: Thomas Allen and Son, 1976), 181–2.
- 26.
McClung, Clearing in the West, 172.
- 27.
Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis, Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1993), 103.
- 28.
Nellie McClung, ‘The Neutral Fuse’, in All We Like Sheep (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1926), 106.
- 29.
‘The Neutral Fuse’, 113.
- 30.
‘The Neutral Fuse’, 121–2.
- 31.
‘The Neutral Fuse’, 126.
- 32.
Nellie McClung, Sowing Seeds in Danny (Toronto: Thomas Allen, seventeenth edition, 1947), 176.
- 33.
Nellie McClung, The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories (Toronto: William Briggs, 1919), 62.
- 34.
Nellie McClung, ‘You Never Can Tell’, in The Black Creek Stopping-House, 167–8.
- 35.
Nellie McClung, Painted Fires (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1925), 59.
- 36.
Painted Fires, 222–3.
- 37.
Sinclair Ross, The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 13–23.
- 38.
Hallvart Dahlie, Varieties of Exile, The Canadian Experience (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), Chapter 8 ‘Emigrés and Academics’, 192–4.
- 39.
Denis Godfrey, No Englishman Need Apply (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965), 71–2. See also George Melnyk, The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two: From The End of the War to the End of the Century (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1999), 24.
- 40.
Godfrey, No Englishman Need Apply, 219.
- 41.
Chow, My Journey, 23–5.
- 42.
John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness, Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008).
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Barber, M. (2016). Stories of Immigrant Isolation and Despair: Canadian Novels and Memoirs Since the 1850s. In: Harper, M. (eds) Migration and Mental Health. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52968-8_7
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