Vol. 30 | March 2022 | Comprehension and Care of the Ailing Mind: Modernity’s Predicaments in Interpretation and Representation of Madness | Bini B S

Abstract

The paper analyses the phenomenon of ‘madness’, which accommodates a rich array of connotations other than ‘mental illness’ in its transition from the Victorian to the modernist era, by drawing insights from cultural and literary representations. Through a Foucauldian lens, madness is viewed as an epistemic and experiential field that is constructed by attitudes of a highly stratified society and its prejudices, clinical approaches, and literary imaginings. Patriarchy and misogyny misconstrued certain forms of mental illness as female maladies, a prejudice that led astray the clinical as well as the psychiatric gaze. Such prejudices coloured the perceptions on madness in the Victorian as well as the modernist era, resulting in stigma and wrongful confinement, especially of women. There has been a perceptual shift in madness when care and healing became the reasons necessitating institutionalization of the mad. Confinement was not limited to the exclusion of the mad as social outcastes anymore. Institutionalization also meant clandestine exercise of State power on the bodies and selves of the mad. The trauma of World War I created the category of ‘shell-shock’, a male form of hysteria explored by both Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, writers who could know madness and suicide through observation and lived-experience. The notions on madness were further problematized in modernist representations by anxieties about collective insanity resulting from the trauma of WWI, dehumanizing mechanization of the industrial society and alienation of human beings. The romanticized version of madness as creative frenzy or symptom of a highly evolved mind prevailed. The paper captures these nuances of madness to illustrate how madness in its modernist representations defy categorization and conclusive theorization as it is inevitably an indeterminate epistemic and experiential phenomenon influenced by complex socio-historical processes.

Keywords: Madness and mental illness, madness as female malady, madness in Victorian literature, madness in modernist literature, perceptual shift in madness.

Introduction

The notions of normal and normative in mental health have always been a launchpad for multidirectional explorations in medicine, psychiatry, social sciences, gender studies and literary imaginings. The representations of madness in modernist literature provide a glimpse into epistemic constructs spread across these domains of inquiry. I use the term madness instead of mental illness in the paper to set free the idea from a restrictive medicalization of the experience. The term ‘madness’ captures the protean essence of an ailing or a perverse mind; it also accommodates minds in a state of inventive or imaginative turmoil bordering unreason.[1] Cultural and literary depictions are abound with myriad associations and representations of madness. Madness as a term can better accommodate cultural perceptions and prejudices surrounding mental health and illness. The study analyzes a range of responses to the non-normative to make sense of the social and experiential underpinnings of madness and traces a literary trajectory of how madness evolved as a montage of disjunct images through Victorian to Modernist literary expressions.

The analytical pursuit in this study is not limited to madness in the modern age or in the modernist literature. The paper examines the twilight zones of transitions of definitions and scope of madness over a certain period of time that gave the modernist view its character and complexity. Focusing on the remarkable contrast in interpreting and representing madness in the literary texts of the Victorian era and early modern period, the study captures indications of a tangible shift in perception. I argue that the perspectival shift in literature points to corresponding shifts in various other epistemic domains and social equations in terms of classes and genders. The new developments in medicine, psychiatry, economic theory and social sciences contributed to a reconceptualization of madness. Feminist and Marxist ideological undercurrents and exponential growth of psychoanalysis further accelerated this paradigm shift in conceptualizations and imaginings around madness, the signs of which can also be read in literary works.

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, which attempts a historical and contextual overview of the idea of madness and points-of-view associated with it in Europe constitutes the theoretical skeleton of this study; the practices and affect concerning madness flesh out through an exploration of literary depictions. Coming to the experiential, from the classical age to the modern, the journey of the mad was from boundless Quixotic free wanderings to spaces of confinement, segregation and marginalization. The era of proliferation of the houses of confinement coincided with European states extending increased control over the bodies and the selves of citizens. The desire to control, classify and define people became the driving force behind the modernist attitude towards madness and management of the mad within the space of the asylum. Confinement and control in dealing with the mad population had economical and moral implications as it amounted to keeping unproductive and morally degenerate beings away from domains of social life occupied by the ‘normal’.

As a trope, madness is not limited to the workings of a sick or disabled mind. A mind with a pattern of development and manifestation different from what is considered normal also got described as mad. Eccentricities of those who were deemed supremely intelligent and creative were also referred to as madness – a connotation that soared above stigma and elicited awe in modernist literature. One may also observe an interest in the mechanisms of authors’ minds, their traumas, fears and suffering to make sense of their works and characters. Although the residues of previous centuries wherein perception of madness was entrenched in gender stereotypes, medical myths, superstitions about dark forces, destructive violence and gothic imagination lingered on, madness was slowly emerging as a field with a much more nuanced semantics and social implications in modernist literature.

Shaping of Madness: The Nexus of Psychiatry, Social Stratification and Literary Imagination

It is safe to start with a few preliminary observations. Although the oversimplified and stereotypical readings of mental illness are aplenty, the ailing mind has also been interpreted as incomprehensible and inexplicable in the modernist literary imagination. Workings of the minds that deviate from the norm or reach out beyond the normative limits have intrigued medical professionals and creative writers, resulting in a plethora of discursive possibilities and practices. There is indeed a remarkable transformation in the modernist idea of madness from how Victorian novels and American literary works of the late nineteenth century viewed, imagined and represented it. As Madness and Civilization maps the major shifts in the status of madness in European imagination and culture, I use the insights from this text to interpret the change in the perception of madness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Foucault elaborately discusses a tangible transition from wrongful confinement to fear of moral degeneracy that required institutionalized separation and care, happening with the rise of modernity. The notion of institutions of care necessitates provisions of segregation of the mad from the sane and creation of new types of social spaces to contain the mad. Slowly, with the changed socio-historical atmosphere of the war-torn Europe, the rise of industrial capitalism and decline of colonialism, madness assumed dimensions of trauma, alienation, defeat and displacement. This moment reaffirmed that madness, while being intensely private, can also manifest in the collective.

A more variegated portrayal of madness and complex indeterminateness surrounding it in the modernist literature can be partly attributed to new advances in medical science and psychiatry, reforms in healthcare and novel ways of looking at social phenomena. The scars left by the World War I provided a deeper insight into collective and individual trauma and impending horrors. The modern age, sandwiched between the terrors of two World Wars, was dogged by mindless mechanization and alienation triggered by Industrialization.

Following the Foucauldian analysis, this study captures the transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wherein wrongful confinement of the mad was condemned as inhuman and social mechanisms for freeing the confined were explored. It is a moment exemplifying the furtive mechanisms of power. The care for the mad was in fact a ploy for implementing increased control over them through incarceration and surveillance by the State. In modernist perception, madness was slowly gaining an identity of its own, which distinguished it from other such forms of perceived deviance needing segregated confinement as leprosy or criminality. Even when spaces of confinement got replaced by the care of the asylum, the mad were still looked at as social and moral outcastes. Madness became synonymous with a unique moral deprivation in Europe wherein the connotations of confession and redemption became reinforced through Freudian psychoanalysis. While Freud’s attempt opened a space for dialogue for the mad, we cannot say that the mad had finally found their voice.[2]

The era called for new modes of theorizations and readings of mental illness in literature across genres. The awareness generated by psychiatry and social sciences did not completely get rid of the prejudices or stigma around mental illness. Stigmatization of mental illness coexisted with romanticization of it as a manifestation of genius and creativity. One may argue that the black and white understanding on madness and sanity that resulted in brutal forms of incarceration in asylums slowly gave way to a more sensitive and informed way of incorporating the discourses of care, reintegration and healing into the perceptions surrounding ailments of the mind. Such privileges of care were regulated by modes of social stratification, especially class and gender.

The views on madness cannot keep the references to gender at bay, as gendered perception has been a prime influence in cultural and literary representations. In Victorian and modernist literatures, madness in men is often portrayed with such subtle hues that they are not conspicuously different from ‘sane’ men whereas madness in women is flamboyant and distinct, complete with suggestions of viciousness, dysfunctionality and self-destructive tendencies. Male trauma gets subsumed by the ideal of tight-lipped and brave masculine suffering. Madness in man in literary representations turn out to be as charming as an idiosyncrasy and impressive as an expression of quirky prodigiousness. Female madness is represented as tarnished by emotional overindulgence and violence, which needs taming and regulating of cerebral activity. The madwoman trope seldom has anything attractive about it as the madwoman disrupts the rosy picture of demure and docile femininity. Painted with hues of unimaginable dread and insubordination, the madwoman remained a menacing and subversive presence in literary imagination.

Hysteria, etymologically and through medical prejudices, got attached to the female persona, condemning her further with undertones of fury, lunacy and irrationality. Madness in woman was a pretext for making her invisible, invalidating and silencing her. Madwomen’s experiential insights were expunged as inconsequential fantasies of an unreasonable mind. If she ever became visible and heard, it was by demonizing and villainizing her. In the eyes of psychiatry and through the lens of literary representations, all female emotions seemed to be precariously at the brink of immoderation. Women’s overwhelming jealousy, passion, grief or revenge may erupt into madness any moment. In pre-modern practices of psychiatric care and literary imagination, containment, in metaphorical and symbolic sense, is what the madwoman seemed to need because her state invariably turned her into a force irrepressible, like nature.

The fact that madness has been conceptualized as a feminine malady for centuries prove how social prejudices distorted the medical gaze. The biased conceptualization of deviance is evident in the persecution of witches, abandoning of women in madhouses, wrongful confinement at home imposed by husbands, depriving women of erotic pleasure by clitorectomy, removing the reproductive organs to control their insane urges, prescribing lobotomy for curing female madness and imposing rest-cure that prevented women from indulging in any cerebral activity such as reading and writing. Ophelia, defiled, lovelorn, rejected, and suicidal formed an enduring archetype of madwomen whom we meet in several guises in literatures of all times across the world. She connects to the carnal and the natural in life and death, drowning in grief of male rejection and then singing her way to the flowery-watery grave.

The Victorian era witnessed a reaffirmation of the feminine ideals of being virtuous, delicate, pure and domesticated. Consequently, any deviation from the ideal was interpreted as the root-cause for psychological and physical maladies. Victorian gothic fiction used incarceration of the mad woman as a metaphor for making her invisible and silenced in such a way that her ‘deviance’ could be restrained and kept hidden. The trope of the silenced, confined and hence contained femininity is explored in several texts, Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and The Woman in White (1852) by Wilkie Collins being the most familiar examples. Madness in women was believed to be originating from their sexual and reproductive organs and for this reason, unfulfilled or unharnessed sexual desire was considered a major reason for madness. Incarcerating the woman was recommended as it also meant regulating female desire and sexuality. As new findings in psychoanalysis emerged, the influence of Freud paradoxically challenged and reaffirmed such a restrictive biological model and provided diverse tools for interpreting madness.[3] There has also been a corresponding revision of gender roles, sexuality and power relations in society. In the twentieth century, a combination of biological and psychological frameworks was in place to interpret madness, as a result of which madness began to accrue shades of resistance and protest in feminist readings.

The connotation of madness as moral degeneracy informed Charlotte Brontë’s depiction of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847). The author seems to justify Bertha Mason’s confinement in the attic by highlighting the associations of her madness with demonic forces, criminal instincts, immorality and general corruption of character. Charlotte Brontë’s novel also demonstrates the racial and gender prejudices of her time. Jane Eyre refers to the practice of unjust domestic confinement of erring and non-conformist wives by husbands that continued for several more decades to come.

The accounts of unfair confinement, How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors (1879) by Georgina Weldon, A Blighted Life: A True Story (1880) by Lady Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, The Bastilles of England; or, The Lunacy Laws at Work (1883) by Louisa Lowe expose the practice of husbands who use the asylum to control and silence their wives by locking them away. Being independent and outspoken made women vulnerable to false diagnosis of deviance and hysteria. The relationship between female autonomy and madness was established by medical discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England. The medical/ social superstition that some categories of madness were specifically maladies affecting women shows the influence of vicious patriarchal preconceptions on medicine and psychiatry that haunted the Victorian and modernist understanding of madness. It is alarming to see how medicine and psychiatry collaborated in the general social agenda to tame, discipline and force women to conformity through inhuman treatment procedures and prolonged captivity for hysteria, literally suggesting an ailment originating in the womb.

One can observe a shift from docility to resistance in the representations of madness in women in the coming decades. The resistance of madwomen assumes the dimensions of violent and indignant protest of rebellious angels turned devils, which results in their expulsion from the paradise of domesticity. But for these women, home was hardly a paradise. Two works based on postpartum psychosis illustrate how women finally decided to talk in their own terms about the ‘female malady’. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the madwoman is the embodiment of a female fantasy of liberation wherein the protagonist tries to reclaim her agency and authority in a society that kept women economically dependent and legally powerless. The proclamation of the protagonist, Lucy Graham, accused of murdering her husband, can be read as a defiant protest against the attitudes of society which perceived women as inane, infantile, and enslaved by carnal passions, “When you say that I murdered him treacherously and foully, you lie. I killed him because I AM MAD! because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and insanity” (364).

According to Lucy Graham, she became mad after giving birth to her child, the product of a loveless union. Her state worsened on being abandoned by her husband who left her in search of a better future. Her narrative is credible and acceptable to the psychiatrist Sir Alwyn Mosgrave, whose intervention saves her from being tried for her crimes. Lady Audley gets admitted to a ‘madhouse’ in Brussels. In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter observes that, “As every woman reader must have sensed, Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative” (167).

The semi-autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by the American author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives an account of postpartum depression. The story demonstrates symbolic and literal confinement of a woman under the pretext of mental disturbance. The tragedy of the narrator-protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is her inability to conform to the roles of wife and mother thrust upon her and the trauma arising from not being able to fulfil her artistic and creative urges by writing freely. It is madness that makes the author and her character sly and brave enough to challenge oppressive male authority.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) analyze the character of the deranged woman who lingers at the margins of the nineteenth century women’s writings. The madwoman in women’s writings is often the author’s mirrored persona, raging against brutal patriarchal tradition. In the madwoman, the protest of the woman writer who lives a life of conformity gets embodied. While Gilbert and Gubar see the undertones of insolence and protest in madness, Shoshana Felman thinks that madness is the opposite of rebellion as it is an impasse that a woman finds herself trapped in. On being restricted by patriarchal cultural conditioning, women descend into madness. It is a state that a woman is doomed to, after having stripped off her power to protest or express herself.[4]

The madness of Bertha Mason, Lucy Graham and the narrator-protagonist of the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” show moments demonstrating the angel/ monster paradigm discussed by Gilbert and Gubar. In male understanding of female insanity, the angelic persona expected from a wife and mother turns into monstrosity embodied in the madwoman. Gilbert and Gubar explain how this angel/ monster paradigm is internalized by several women authors as well. Madness in Victorian age had symbolic interiority, intensified by the practice of wrongful detention of madwomen at home. The nuances of resistance and subversion slowly blended into the hues of madness and the persona of monstrous madwomen.

Introspections on Madness and Trauma: The Character-Author Conjunction

The beginning of modernist disposition in the western world is replete with the crisis of uncertainty and loss of faith in cultural norms and ideals, invariably resulting in an experience of fragmentation and disintegration. This moment of chaos and disenchantment is captured in the literature and art produced during and after WWI. The prevailing despair, pessimism, loss of hope and meaning, inability to feel or establish connections with others, disillusionment and a sense of entrapment characterized this insane phase in European history.

In modernist literature, the acutely intimate and internalized aspects of madness coexisted with the collective insanity of the Post-War era. T. S. Eliot’s prose-poem, “Hysteria” (1917), captures the male anxiety, quite representative of his times, about the seduction of the all-consuming hysteric female. Her destructiveness lure has beast-like qualities pouncing at the male, combined with an aggressiveness comparable to war, as her teeth demonstrate a vindictive flair for squad-drill:

As she laughed, I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.[5]

Hysteria became an identity marker for a woman who has a will and voice of her own. Despite the well-advertised benevolent qualities of mental institutions such as healing and rehabilitation, the asylums were still places of patriarchal discipline and confinement for women. The ‘shell-shock’ or Post Traumatic Stress Disorders of soldiers returning from WWI became the male version of hysteria. The Return of the Soldier (1918) by Rebecca West is one of the first novels that discussed post war trauma and resulting mental disorder. Shell-shock was something to be proud of, like a medal or gallantry award signifying a hyper masculine feat. Traumatized by WWI, the protagonist in West’s novel, Chris Baldry slips into amnesia, a hysterical interim which gives him peace and purpose. Baldry is at home to recuperate; but it is no confinement for him, unlike what a woman in a similar condition may have had to put up with. Baldry’s confinement is liberating as he cannot remember what binds him: his responsibilities to his wife and family-estate or his occupation as a soldier slip into oblivion. The man, through his madness, escapes from his obligations as a landowner, householder, husband and military officer. But this paradise of forgetfulness is short-lived; as memory returns, Chris Baldry is forced to get enrolled back again in the oppressive roles of life that he is expected to play.

Post-traumatic stress disorder informs Virginia Woolf’s depiction of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Moreover, this character is a pretext for the author to reflect on her own madness. Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf were aware that Virginia goes through phases of extreme agitation and disturbance, which they fondly referred to as ‘madness’. Such phases were marked by amplified sensitivity and prolific literary outpourings. Virginia Woolf never got a proper diagnosis of her condition while she was alive. The ignorance and prejudices of the doctors she consulted contributed to her mis/ non-diagnosis. Her breakdowns, anxiety and failed and successful suicide attempts could all point to serious mental condition needing care and treatment.

Virginia Woolf’s novels offer deep psychological analysis of her characters in a much more nuanced way than Freud does. As a woman, Woolf believed that she has more experiential authority to interpret the psyche of women. As evident in Freud’s infamous analysis of Dora’s hysteria, the male, even while he thinks that there is a dialogical connection with the woman patient, whose condition is described as ‘hysteria’, predominantly hears the monologic din of his gender prejudices and empty ring of his arrogance.[6]

Two diary entries of Virginia Woolf show how her novel Mrs. Dalloway has a major thematic interest in madness and sanity: On 14 October 1922, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary: “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side - something like that.[7] She noted on 19 October 1922, “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense. . . . Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it.”[8]

In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who witnessed his friend Evans getting killed in WWI suffers from a pathological trauma that does not let him feel or express his grief. Septimus is unable to experience or convey any emotions, including affection for his wife Rezia. The doctors cannot understand the nature of his condition and fail him, leading to his suicide. The leap of faith for Septimus is literally leaping into his death. Clarissa and Septimus never meet; but they are indeed the two sides of the same coin. The dead soldier is Clarissa’s alter ego, they reflect one another and there is an uncanny similarity in their visions about self and society. In their perceptions, reality and imagination merge; they cannot differentiate between hallucination and introspection. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s firm demarcations between sanity and psychosis, Woolf keeps these categories fluid. The sane Clarissa Dalloway and her insane doppelganger Septimus Warren Smith are conflicted, alienated, choked by their inexpressible emotions and struggle to function in a judgmental society. Their connections are deeper and their experiential domains are suggested through shared archetypes of the sea, fire, trees and flowers. Both experience anxieties comparable to drowning as they try to immerse themselves in the world of the normal. Clarissa and Septimus go through phases of angst, isolation and insecurity in various intensities to the extent that their psychosis borders on mysticism. Both are troubled by a feeling of emptiness and imminent doom, an apprehension collectively shared by the inhabitants of a world that is trapped between the memory of one World War and the fear of another impending World War.

The void in the heart of life unsettles the sense of the self for Clarissa and Septimus, who are the victims of the pathology of history. Empathy does not come to them easily and hence they cannot connect to others. People like Septimus and Clarissa live in the shadow of the threat of annihilation. Being misfits, their sense of the self is always imperilled. The defensive mechanism for Clarissa is to fit in and for Septimus, opt out of life by killing himself, a choice made by Virginia Woolf later in life. Clarissa vicariously experiences the suicide of Septimus through a deep reflection of it. The novel, making use of the musings of Clarissa, critiques the psychiatric practices that could not heal Septimus and prevent his death. The doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, has an air of expertise and cold politeness; but he cannot see beyond the medical principles and prejudices about mental health and illness. Bradshaw fails to comprehend the male response to trauma, which appears weak and effeminate in his view. Septimus is a victim of the patriarchal expectations demanding men to remain unruffled by traumatic incidents in life.

Septimus is capable of loving the entire humanity unconditionally, despite the follies and foibles of human beings. It is individual connections that he fails to establish. He is deeply disturbed by the prevailing atmosphere of fear and hatred. Septimus is aware of the lack of kindness, brutal competitiveness and paranoia that have become the defining attitudes of his time. Mechanization and alienation have brought out the worst in humans. The feeling of being in the midst of everything and yet not being able to be participate is what Septimus goes through, which is very much a modern condition. The symbolic deadness of the inability to feel became suicidal for Septimus. As John F. Schumaker observes:

The cultural abandonment of emotion has paved the way for the deeper experiences of deadness and flatness that are frequently described as the most fundamental emotional realities of the modern person. Such a situation is certain to occur when emotional control has been removed from its historical social context, and when emotion itself lacks sustaining qualities beyond its immediate pragmatic usefulness. It is not surprising, as will be seen later, that psychic deadness and other related existential disorders have been increasing steadily as modernity has transformed our relationship to our emotions. (The Age of Insanity 26)

Clarissa has occasional glimpses of this predicament and is marginally aware of its lethalness. Both Septimus and Clarissa suffer from nervousness, comparable to sinking and being consumed by flames while they brood over the state of affairs with a passive mind. Septimus has in his persona the qualities of a martyr; a scapegoat and Jesus Christ rolled into one. He is the eternal sufferer who wants to redeem others. It is also his incompetence to liberate others from suffering that leads to utter dismay and sense of helplessness, culminating in self-annihilation. Virginia Woolf’s women integrate and transform the agony of their survival in tough times through their involvement in symbolic activities. The life-sustaining act for Woolf was weaving stories, with deep insights into characters. For her, weaving narratives kept death at bay although there had been a time when death claimed the ultimate triumph by making her walk into a stream with heavy stones in her pocket. In Modernism and Melancholia, Sanja Bahun makes the following analysis about the healing strategies of Woolf’s female characters:

Woolf ’s female characters typically “heal” ruptures in history and collective memory through “unifying” activities such as knitting, sewing, painting, or directing a play, while men split, smash, or break in search for an analyzable core. This polarization is Woolf ’s regular device, but one that, as it will become evident soon, is not devoid of sophistication, self-reflection, and ironic distancing. (170)

Women of Woolf’s era had begun to interpret the magical power of madness as a state of altered and sublime consciousness. By describing her mental illness (undiagnosed bipolar depression) as ‘madness’, Woolf discovered a new terminology and terms for self-representation. Though this altered mental state filled Woolf with insufferable pain and even incapacitated her at times, she attached both mythical and clinical connotations to her madness. She did not see herself or any of her characters as case studies exemplifying the textbook notions of madness. Like Septimus, Woolf was averse to doctors and conventional psychiatric care; but losing one’s mind was a scary prospect for her. Her interpretation of madness is more than a writer’s attempt to make sense of it by narrativizing it. Woolf’s is a powerful critique and observation of madness and its cultural and medical representations that were in vogue in the modernist era. Woolf wrote in her Diary in 1930:

I believe these illnesses are in my case partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid…. Then suddenly something springs… a tremendous sense of life beginning . . . and all the doors opening . . .. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is . . . before I can control my mind or pen.[9]

The classical experience brought together art and madness in a way that it was impossible to tell apart creative frenzy and madness. A work of art, in moments of inspiration, was believed to engage with the world through madness. When hallucination and artistic inspiration occupy the same plane, madness and art establish a symbiotic relationship. Where there is no madness, there possibly cannot be art was a view accepted by classical reasoning. Medicine and psychiatry push to the margins such creative and radical possibilities of madness by reducing it to illness. Unreason finds a voice in the modern world despite the structures erected for subsuming or covering it. Madness engenders art and disrupts it simultaneously. It is through art that madness gets to fight back or address difficult questions to the world.

In the postwar depression and emerging of a modern industrial society, the Marxian way of looking at collective and individual alienation as symptomatic of an insane society became relevant. Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 explored how alienation constitutes the key feature of an insane, industrial urban society. The madness of society contributed to the insanity and insecurity of the individual who was estranged from oneself and led a mechanical life as a result of industrial capitalism. The idea that difficult historical moments can be unsettling and maddening gained popularity. Writers were concerned about immersion and distancing from their times in their writing. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about how she plunges into and dodges the trauma of the WWI:

Now we are in the war: England is being attacked. I got this feeling for the first time completely yesterday. The feeling of pressure, danger, horror…. The feeling is that a battle is going on – a fierce battle. May last for weeks. Am I afraid? Intermittently. The worst of it one’s mind won’t work with a spring next morning. Of course, this may be the beginning of invasion. A sense of pressure. Endless local stories. No – it’s no good trying to capture the feeling of England being in a battle… I shall swim into quiet water.[10]

In American Literature, Ernest Hemingway’s early novels written between 1920 and 1930 have poignant depictions of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or shell-shock as it was described in the Post WWI era. Unlike his women characters, Hemingway’s madmen have an understated madness, be it Jake Barnes or Frederic Henry, both ingesting the trauma of the First World War. The post-war generation in the novels of Hemingway is marked with a collective madness, similar to the state of Septimus, characterized by aimlessness, lack of purpose and self-imposed isolation because of their inability to establish meaningful relations with others. Jake Barnes in Sun Also Rises (1926) is emasculated in the WWI, literally and symbolically, and suffers from the consequences of it. His derangement is subtle, yet tangible. Hemingway’s war-torn men, Nick Adams[11] in “A Way You’ll Never Be” and “Now I Lay Me” and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929), are haunted by recollections of the war, marked by a sense of disillusionment and experience troubled sleep and nightmares. These men are scarred by history and do not really understand what ails them. Their habits of drinking and smoking reach a self-destructive excess. They travel as if they are trying to flee from unknown horrors and from themselves. Jake Barnes comprehends the futility of his escapism: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There is nothing to that” (Sun Also Rises 10). Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Cantwell in his later novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950) has an urge to talk about the unsettling experiences of the World War II which is overpowered by his hypermasculine determination to maintain silence about the tragic moments endured by him. Colonel Cantwell who led the soldiers of his battalion to their doom is traumatized by his guilt, which distresses him. His brief outbursts are frightening, yet infrequent. His failure to protect his battalion is an insult to his masculinity and he reacts to any reference to war with an aggressive hypermasculine rage. People who are suffering from trauma seldom acknowledge it or seek help. Such denial hides their struggle from the world. Hemingway on having witnessed and participated in the WWI might have undergone what was then termed as ‘war neurosis’. Being rejected by the United States Army left a scar on Hemingway’s psyche and he looked at his vocation of a war-time ambulance driver as inferior and less satisfying in comparison to that of a soldier. Multiple injuries to the brain during his life-time, history of mental illness and suicide in the family, his traumatic experiences during the World Wars and alcoholism contributed to a condition that ended in suicide in Hemingway’s case.

Modernist literature, like the Victorian era, seldom looked at madness in women as an indicator of trauma. Madness in women was dramatized and considered to be vulgar. It was also a manifestation of women’s frustration about their powerlessness, turning them hysterical. Madness was looked at as innate to women, rooted as a flaw in their nature. Whereas the mental illness in men was a justifiable response to tragedy. Men were represented as masters of their madness while women were slaves of the malady.

It is quite intriguing to see how patriarchal prejudices associated similar values and connotations to madness in the Victorian and the modernist understanding and representations of madness. The new findings in medical science and psychiatry could not effectively erase the stamp of patriarchal bias on mental illness. In fact, methods of diagnosis and care, like psychoanalysis further reinforced the gender bigotry around madness. The view that women are more susceptible and vulnerable to madness prevailed as it was seen as an ailment of weak minds and women, the weaker sex.

The modernist perceptions on madness aligned with the Victorian views on several grounds; but the epistemic shift in the definition and care of madness was also too tangible to be ignored. The concept expanded its scope to include more conditions other than ‘hysteria’ as a female malady. The acknowledgement that men can also experience violent and dysfunctional forms of madness was a realization following the proliferation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder across Europe and America, well documented in early modernist British and American literature. Doctors and psychiatrists started talking about the care and healing for the mad, and confinement was not anymore an assurance for the sane that the mad will be kept outside the domain of the normal beings. The discussions and depictions of madness in literary works acknowledge the impact of changing times. The collective insanity of the post-war era, replete with hollowness, mechanical view of existence and alienation became a thematic interest for writers. Madness gathered connotations as mysticism, creative frenzy and resistance. In all these, what we often refuse to account for is the immediacy of the experience of the mad individual, who is seldom heard or seen. The mad men and women continued to inhabit the margins of society and were victims of stigma and discrimination. There indeed was the beginning of a new hope that literary interventions of writers and artists who have sensitively observed and suffered from madness will bring about an epistemic and attitudinal change. Even though we have not seen the fulfillment of that hope yet, in its transitions from the Victorian to the modernist era, madness demonstrated a nuanced and expansive approach in its interpretation and representation across epistemic and creative fields.

Notes

[1] The much romanticized creative frenzy of the poet or artist in moments of high inspiration or the passion of the mad scientist can be cited as examples for this notion of madness.

[2] The psychoanalytical method was not free from the gender prejudices and misogyny of Freud and his times. Although it gives a deceptive impression of enabling a dialogue, the interpretation was solely the prerogative of the analyst, which often silenced, misinterpreted or heard the patient partially.

[3] Freud challenged the conventional biological determinism through an approach that necessitated deep engagement with the patient’s mind, dreams and desires. His view overemphasized the influence of libido in the interpretation of hysteria as a female malady, which in a way, inserted biological determinism in an altered guise into psychiatry.

[4] See Writing and Madness, which dismisses the view about madness as a mode of resistance and subversion. Felman sees nothing liberatory in madness.

[5] The prose poem, “Hysteria” is part of T.S. Eliot’s collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (The Egoist LTD, 1917), p. 37.

[6] Dora was the pseudonym used by Freud to denote Ida Bauer, who was under his care for the treatment of hysteria. A unique aspect of her condition was the loss of voice, rendering her speechless.

[7] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, p. 207.

[8] Ibid, p.248.

[9] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, p. 287.

[10] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.2, p. 314.

[11] Nick Adams is the protagonist of a series of stories written by Hemingway between 1920-30. A man bearing the wounds from the First World War, the experiences of Adams is similar to what Hemingway had witnessed and suffered during WWI. Nick Adams stories were compiled in a posthumous collection published in 1972.


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