Women and madness in the early Romantic novel

Injured minds, ruined lives

Author:
Deborah Weiss
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Injured minds returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism by offering a close look at the novels of five early Romantic-period women authors. In an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness, Weiss maintains that Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Hays created novels that exposed how medical models for mental disease and the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid allowed men to hide their culpability for injuring women. Weiss demonstrates that in these novels, patriarchal structures of control, acts of abuse, and the educational and sentimental legacy of Rousseau, rather than inherent female weakness and the supposedly aberrant female body, are responsible for the protagonists’ dangerous hysteric and melancholic illnesses. Making careful distinctions among authors, Weiss shows how Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie shared their radical contemporaries’ critiques of misogynistic medical and sentimental models of female madness, but resisted blaming men and patriarchal social systems entirely for women’s mental afflictions. Instead, these more mainstream authors explored less strongly gendered and less victim-based models of causality, such as trauma, misplaced passions, erroneous associations, and remorse. Weiss shows that these novels presented ways of understanding madness that were more modern than those available through contemporary medical or sentimental texts. Taken as a whole, Injured minds suggests that this presentation of female madness furthered the development of the psychologically complex heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. In so doing, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women’s mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.

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