Neo-Victorian Madness

Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media

Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030465810
• eBook ISBN: 9783030465827
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were "mad." Such portraits demand a "rediagnosing" of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. E. Maier, B. Ayres (eds.)Neo-Victorian Madnesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind

Brenda Ayres¹ and Sarah E. Maier²

(1)

Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, USA

(2)

University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada

Brenda Ayres (Corresponding author)

Sarah E. Maier

End Abstract

In any given university in 1990, clusters of graduate students were discussing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) alongside The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and pondering the parallels between Charlotte Brontë ’s Bertha and Jane as drawn by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and their composite daguerreotype of oppressed women everywhere (356–62). In Gilbert and Gubar’s words: “Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at Lowood), madness (at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End)” (339). Gilbert and Gubar pitched Bertha as Jane’s evil or, to use their term, the “monitory image” of Jane (361). Perhaps Brontë was simply being “Victorian” in depicting a Creole as the uncivilised, demonic, sensual woman who must be suppressed and harnessed, a dangerous creature who must be locked up in the attic of any proper woman’s being, but for those doctoral candidates who were hot on the trail of postcolonial atrocities, this treatment would not do.

The scholarship of the nineties was on a feminist cusp of rewriting great wrongs to women and championing writers like Jean Rhys who adjusted the cosmos by giving voice to the female, Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea.¹ Rhys’ was a more “authentic” story that had once been silenced by Brontë, that unwittingly imperialistic coloniser from the moors even if she herself had been an oppressed woman. Rhys gave voice to one of the most famous sulbaltern of all literature, Bertha. In Rhys’ account, the Creole woman’s confinement in the attic was not to be construed as the unfortunate trial for the impotent and to-be-pitied Edward Fairfax Rochester and the hapless impediment to the happiness of one long-suffering white, British governess, Jane Eyre. Rhys described the purloin of Antoinette’s name and identity as the beginning of a woman’s forced descent into darkness, a usurping of persona that led to her insanity, imprisonment and death. Bertha/Antoinette was the casualty from a collision between cultures in which the man had the power of the coloniser, and the woman had no power, not only because of her gender but also because of her race. Never did this attic inmate get to say with Jane’s hope, happiness and promise of a happy-ever-ending, “Reader, I married him”; rather, for Antoinette Mason, he married her and stole her future. If she ever did say it, think it or hope it, savvy modern readers would only shake their heads and murmur, “Poor subaltern .”

Little did those graduate students think that one day, someone like Sarah Shoemaker would rewrite the stories of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Mason Rochester from a sympathetic point of view of the quintessential patriarcha l bully, Mr. Rochester, which ends (before the epilogue) with “Reader, she married me,” spoken humbly, gratefully and sincerely (2017). Those graduate students in the nineties would not have read anything yet that clearly articulated postfeminism as a consideration of gaps, contradictions and what Amelia Jones would argue to be a “monolithic entity” (1994, 57) of second-wave feminism. Doubtlessly they would not have thought about privileged patriarchy as a system that could and did disfranchise, marginalise and silence a white, British gentleman of property and wealth such as Edward Rochester. Neither would they realise that a new genre of literature was being hatched that would be designated “neo-Victorian.” They would have still been wrestling with a definition of Victorianism.²

Inclined to reject any scholarship by men from earlier decades, nevertheless, those students would have appreciated that Jerome Hamilton Buckley still carried vital currency when he made a statement in 1951 that it was impossible to define “Victorian.” He suggested that Victorian explorers work with a term that was even more slippery but could serve as an approximation, and that is “Victorianism,” foregrounding the unknowability and variation in post-Victorian understandings of the past era.

The students might have deferred to that Victorian of Victorians, Charles Dickens , who attempted to describe his time in what would become one of the most well-known introductions of any novel:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (1868 [1859], 1; emphasis added)

A Tale of Two Cities opens in 1775 with this metafictional introduction in its looking back to another era that can speak to the same problems that irritated the Victorians. Clearly, paradoxes detected by Dickens in his own age are captured in Buckley’s definition of Victorians who were

torn by doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They were crass materialists, wholly absorbed in the present, quite unconcerned “with abstract verities and eternal values”; but they were also excessively religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past, and ready to forego present delights for the vision of a world beyond. Despite their slavish “conformity,” their purblind respect for convention, they were, we learn, “rugged individualists,” given to “doing as one likes,” heedless of culture, careless of a great tradition; they were iconoclasts who worshiped the idols of authority. They were, besides, at once sentimental humanitarians and hard-boiled proponents of free enterprise. Politically, they were governed by narrow insular prejudice, but swayed by dark imperialistic designs. Intellectually and emotionally, they believed in progress, denied original sin, and affirmed the death of the Devil; yet by temperament they were patently Manichaeans to whom living was a desperate struggle between the force of good and the power of darkness. (2–3)³

Another male scholar with currency in the nineties was Gordon Haight. Since graduate students in America usually teach lower-level classes, they might have read to their classes from Portable Victorian Reader (1972) Haight’s own struggle with defining “Victorian”: “The time is long past when Victorian meant everything prudish, sentimental, and conventional. Now that we know more about them, we can see that the surface of respectability the Victorians presented was often only a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our own” (xi). Haight knew that the Victorians, in general, were not what they seemed. To study them invites the utilisation of tools of theory that operate like those under a magnifying glass: the scalpel, the tweezers, the file, or maybe more like the pick shovel or, more drastically, the sledgehammer or even a jackhammer. To exhume the Victorians then and now requires digging. Dickens certainly warned us that when it came to the Victorians, “All that glitters is not gold,” as Shakespeare whispered from his grave.⁴ In Our Mutual Friend, readers are thrice removed from seeing people as they really are; they are told to view “the company” in “The great looking-glass above the sideboard” that “reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy—a kind of sufficiently well-looking veiled prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs. Veneering; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory, conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself. Reflects Podsnap” (1884 [1864], 11). Significantly, in the world of the Veneerings, “All things were in a state of high varnish and polish” (6). With the reflection in the looking-glass and the veneer that covers a multitude of sins, compounded with the story told through a narrator who is doing the looking, and with the story being read by a sesquicentennial or so later, it is no wonder that in this novel no one knows who anyone truly is. The looking-glass and rear-view mirrors⁵ necessarily both reflect the readers even though they seek clarity of the human condition from another time or place.

Identities and their portent of outcomes were even more mystifying in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a novel that Linda Hutcheon described as “historiographic metafiction,” identifying it as “intensely self-reflexive yet paradoxically also lay[ing] claim to historical events and personages” (1988, 5). William Stephenson, in the 2007 introduction to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, explains the novel’s literary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind
• 2. “I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre
• 3. “We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse
• 4. The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish’s Strange Music
• 5. “A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club Novels
• 6. Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I
• 7. “Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White
• 8. The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and Ripper Street
• 9. Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Its Adaptation
• 10. Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful
• 11. The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock
• 12. Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives
• Back Matter