Abstract
In the eighteenth century, the realm of madness was a locus of intensity in terms of the perception of women. Characteristics that were attributed to women multiplied in degree when madness was on the horizon. If women were viewed as passive and sexualized, mad women were viewed thus to a much greater degree, for, in and of itself, madness was perceived as having the same features. As such, we may regard eighteenth-century madness as a gendered affliction: what characterized women also characterized madmen. This topic I will outline shortly with reference to the treatment of the mad in madhouses. First, however, I will delineate the connection between madness and women as it is established by one of the most famous — and, indeed, most influential — female writers of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft. In her political works, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Men from 1790, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman from 1792, and in her novels, such as The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, published in 1798, Wollstonecraft illustrates that eighteenth-century women were encouraged to adopt the same characteristics as those that were widely recognized as typifying madmen.1 By reading these different modes of Wollstonecraft’s literary output in conjunction, it becomes apparent that Wollstonecraft presents popularly conceived womanhood as an afflicted gender.
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Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), ed. Ashley Tauchert. 2nd rev. ed, London: J. M. Dent, 1995, and
Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman (1787, 1798), ed. Gary Kelly, London: Oxford University Press, 1976.
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. David M. McCracken, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 210.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, Blue Guitar 2: 1976, p. 135.
Helen Small, Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. viii.
Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose, London: University of California Press, 1997, p. xiii.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, London: William Pickering, 1989, Volume 4, p. 29.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 145.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747–48), ed. Angus Ross, New York: Viking, 1985, p. 890.
Vivien Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, eds Stephen Copley and John Whale, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 181.
Robert Kaufman, ‘The Madness of George III, By Mary Wollstonecraft’, Studies in Romanticism 37.1: 1998, p. 22.
Anne K. Mellor, ‘Introduction’, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), by Mary Wollstonecraft, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. xi, xii.
Virginia Sapiro, ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy: “Being Bastilled”’, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, p. 40.
Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 74.
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000, p. 427.
Roy Porter, Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. London: Athlone Press, 1987, p. 95. Wollstonecraft herself differed in opinion as to the possible mental states of those who commit suicide. She wrote to Gilbert Imlay, regarding her own suicide attempt, that it was ‘one of the calmest acts of reason’ (Letters, p. 317). However, her very assertion of her sanity during this act indicates Wollstonecraft’s understanding that her audience would readily assume one to be insane during a suicide attempt.
R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade, London: Macmillan, 1974, p. 54.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, p. 68.
Michael Donnelly, Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, London: Tavistock, 1983, p. 107.
Cited in Allan Ingram, ed., Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, p. 241.
Cited in Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683–1796, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997, p. 135.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, New York: Pantheon, 1985, p. 10.
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 71.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 153.
William Cowper, The Task, and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook, London: Longman, 1994, ll. 537–8, 545–47.
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers, London: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 23, 26, 25, 26, 27.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy, New York: W. W. Norton, 1992, ll. 2–3, 29–32, 69–70.
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William Wordsworth, ‘The Thorn’, William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, ll. 117–18, 122–32.
Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 698.
Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England, London: Allen Lane, 1979, p. 75.
Eckbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 38.
Mary Alcock, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, ll. 64, 67–72.
Mary Robinson, ‘Poor Marguerite’, Romantic Women Poets, 1788–1848, ed. Andrew Ashfield, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, ll. 49–56.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 78.
George Cheyne, M. D., The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers &c., London: G. Strahan and J. Leake, 1733, pp. 260, 261.
Anne Finch, ‘The Spleen’, The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1903, ll. 64–73.
Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian, Mrs. Hannah Allen (1683), in Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683–1796, ed. Allan Ingram, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997.
Yet, Alan Bewell has cogently argued that Martha’s community suspects her of having ‘entered into a compact with the devil and murdered her child at the sabbat’, an interpretation of the poem that would put Martha into malevolent company with Hannah Allen (Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in Experimental Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 165). For the purposes of the present argument about female madness, though, I emphasize the most direct explanation for Martha’s mad behaviour that is offered in the poem, which is that the father of her child left her.
R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 87.
Houston, pp. 86–7. Hilary Marland confirms that ‘“puerperal insanity” was propelled into the medical arena’ ‘in the 1820s and 1830s’ in ‘At home with puerperal mania: the domestic treatments of the insanity of childbirth in the nineteenth century’, in Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750–2000, ed. Peter Bartlett and David Wright, London: Athlone Press, 1999, p. 45.
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© 2005 Michelle Faubert
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Ingram, A., Faubert, M. (2005). A Gendered Affliction: Women, Writing, Madness. In: Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510890_6
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