The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes
Is like the Scorpion girt by fire
In circle narrowing as it glows
The flames around their captive close
Till inly search’d by thousand throes
And maddening in her ire
One sad and sole relief she knows,
The sting she nourish’d for her foes
Whose venom never yet was vain
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain. (Lord Byron , The Giaour, 422–452)
In both British and American Romanticisms, the “brooding” mind, the mind that obsessed over an idea, was, surprisingly often, connected to the image of the scorpion . In a still-debated myth dating from the time of Paracelsus, a scorpion will sting itself to death when surrounded by a ring of fire. This vivid image is woven through Romantic-era literature concerned with obsessive thinking, such as John Keats ’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil , Lord Byron ’s The Giaour, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci, and my book uses it as a central metaphor for sustained, destructive thinking about one central idea. Biologist J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson writes that “this [myth] must be nonsense, because no animal, other than man, could possibly have the imagination to realize that by self-destruction it might avoid unnecessary pain.”1 One might read “self-destruction” here as suicide, but the mind also attempts to avoid “unnecessary pain,” paradoxically, through self-destructive ideas.
The self-destructive imagination is a popular Romantic-era trope, especially after 1810, when Etienne Esquirol coined the term monomania . In his 1819 play The Cenci, Percy Bysshe Shelley refers to Orsino and Giacomo as “scorpions ringed with fire.” “What,” they ask, “should we do but strike ourselves to death?”2 Here, as Stuart Curran argues, the scorpion becomes symbolic of self-defense in an evil society. While this self-defense does become obsessive, resulting in Beatrice’s suicide, Byron ’s The Giaour (1813), quoted at the beginning of this introduction, refers more closely to obsessive thinking. Here, instead of the mind being besieged by “foes” or by Satan, the brain takes “the sting she nourish’d for her foes,” its ideas, and uses them to cure its own “pain.” Ideas become destructive and the imagination, far from being the celebrated object of Romanticism, becomes diseased.
Other scholars have extensively studied the pathologization of the imagination. The field of Romantic literary studies owes much to psychoanalytic literary theory; Julianne Buchsbaum, Thomas Frosch, and Charles Rzepka have contributed valuable readings of authors like William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge .3 Diane Hoeveler’s work has particularly loomed large, exploring ideas ranging from the fetish to the uncanny to beating fantasies. However, I wish to diverge from a psychoanalytic approach as well as the approach taken by Joel Faflak in his 2009 Romantic Psychoanalysis, in which he positions the “discovery” of what we now call psychology in the Romantic era. While the Romantics were interested in the science of mind, this progressivist account does not accord enough attention to the Romantics’ own, unique medical discourse. Most akin to my approach is that of William Brewer, who argues for a Romantic-era conception of psychology as opposed to our own.4 I, too, argue that the Romantics viewed psychology, or what they might have called the “science of mind,” differently than we do today. However, I wish to expand on Brewer’s work by not writing about the “passions ” writ large, but by focusing on the discourse of obsession.
In my use of the word obsession, I mean to use a modern-day term to gesture to a multiplicity of Romantic discourses, all centered around a sustained idea. The words they use, namely “frenzy ” or “phrenzy ,” “mania ,” “melancholy ,” and, later, “monomania ,” all betray their own cultural and discursive contexts, but they point to what I argue is the Romantic pathologization of a common human condition. In this book, I argue that understanding what came to be known as a “condition” helps us reflect on some of the anxieties shaping Romantic-era England…and how some of these anxieties have shaped our modern construction of obsession.
Part I: Origins—Demonic Possession
The first use of the word obsession, in 1548, was as “the action of besieging a place” (OED), and this place most often related to a religiously constructed human soul, not the brain. “Obsessio ,” a term used by the exorcist Johann Joseph Gassner in 1774, was related to sorcery; witches and sorcerers could summon the devil to “obsess” an unwitting victim.5 Even, according to Erik Midelfort’s perceptive study, “long after witchcraft ceased to trouble the waking and sleeping hours of most Europeans, demons and the devil were taught to be independently active in this world.”6 If one’s heart was “pure” and demons could not completely “possess” him, they could still “obsess” him (or her), the difference being that the victim would be aware of but unable to control disturbing thoughts and physical ailments.7
Historians of literature often view Romanticism itself as a shift: a shift from rational to imaginative or from religious to secular. Yet, as Diane Hoeveler argues in Gothic Riffs (2010), the supernatural did not immediately become secularized or even pathologized. Hoeveler convincingly asserts that, when “nature” displaces the supernatural, we are left with the uncanny, the inexplicable: the “demonic.” “But,” she writes,
rather than force people to choose exclusive allegiance to either the immanent order or the transcendent, the rise of ambivalent secularization actually allowed modern Europeans to inhabit an imaginative space in which both the material (science and reason) and the supernatural (God and the devil) coexisted as equally powerful explanatory paradigms.8
Hoeveler’s study of this interstitial space between “immanent order” and “the transcendent” works to explain the “uncanny,” or, more specifically, the popularity of the Gothic . Like a monster, most often monstrous due to its hybridity, the Gothic exists in a neither-nor space: neither the Enlightenment nor the Romantic era, neither religion nor science.9 This unresolvability characterizes not only the Gothic genre, but also the human mind, which nineteenth-century physicians attempted to control, to normalize, by pathologizing socially unacceptable thought patterns. It is precisely this evolving notion of the “norm” which, as Lennard Davis argues, was coined around 1840, that constructs the notion of “disability,” here mental disability.10 The Romantic era is of interest precisely because these notions were still evolving, because ordering, nosology, and “the transcendent” coexisted in an uneasy partnership.
We all know the obsessed scientist trope from Mary Shelley ’s Frankenstein , and the reader can only wonder at the Romantic-era proliferation (in prose as well as poetry) of lovers, readers, soldiers, and others consumed with a repeated, terrifying but magnetic, idea. This idea still has its room in the “transcendent” or spiritual; we see this in Mary Shelley’s critique of “enthusiasm ,” John Keats ’s use of ghosts and supernatural tropes, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Christian references and footnotes. And nowhere do we see the old idea of demonic possession more clearly than in “actual” accounts, from Bedlam and other asylums, of female patients.11 Because woman, especially in the nineteenth century, is often reduced to her body, even her obsessive thoughts are bodily, featuring fears of poisoning or death. Completing the circle of possession, women were then seen, in popular accounts, as witches or as aligned with the devil, retaining a connection to the supernatural.
Part II: Proto-Psychology
Even though demonic possession still finds its place in the discourse of obsession, we do see a Romantic-era move toward placing the “disorder” in the material body. As asylum keepers and medical practitioners interested in what Alan Richardson calls the “science of the mind” began to observe patients in mental asylums, a new nosology of symptoms, a creation of a disease-state, was born.12 The late eighteenth-century and earlier nineteenth-century writers categorized patients broadly, pronouncing them frenetic or melancholic. As Joanna Baillie ’s 1798 Plays on the Passions attest, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas about repetitive thinking also focused on the idea of the “passion,” here the “ruling passion ,” a significant term in light of the “rule” of reason and the “rule” of the “mad” King George.
The conflation of the ruling passion and the overly passionate ruler could not have evaded British and American citizens. King George III had suffered “bilious” a...