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This chapter reads the second season of US TV series Pose (2019) through the lens of dreams and the dreamlike in order to underline how the series deals with intersectional oppression; the experience of harm and marginalisation by colluding structures of subjugation such as racism and heterosexism. Following the lives of queer Black and Latinx characters, the series centres marginalised communities living at the precarious interstices of structural violence for whom intersectional oppression functions as a source of substantial trauma. This chapter argues that Pose makes use of dream sequences and dreamlike aesthetics to comment on this trauma as it foregrounds the complex ways in which marginalised communities strategically and creatively navigate hostile environments. The first part draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, proposing queer heterotopias as dreamlike spaces in and of themselves. The second part moves to consider the explicit use of dream sequences in the series and borrows from Achille Mbembe’s vocabulary of necropower to specifically examine the ways in which the sequences address the precarity and death which haunt queer communities of colour. Thinking through the ways in which Pose employs the use of dreams and the dreamlike, we thus see the oneiric employed in the series as both a celebratory aesthetic and a critical allegory which exposes the traumatic gap between the ballroom and the world beyond its walls.
The Nigerian-American performer and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili’s 2017 performance piece and documentary film Bronx Gothic employ dreams as a narrative structure and a way to tell her story throughout the piece. Okpokwasili, in character, describes a recurring dream that turns into a nightmare: ocean water turns to boiling blood that the girl must escape. This dream becomes the landscape of her story and the lens through which she describes her traumatic memories. Her character’s repetition of the phrase, ‘and I ask myself, am I awake?’, speaks to the dreamlike quality of remembering trauma, and a tool for the audience to enter into a dreamlike state with her. Bronx Gothic enlists the audience as unwitting witness into everyday violence and trauma as a form of radical praxis (Alexander and Mohanty, 2010). In her stage and screen performances, Okpokwasili uses endurance, repetition and the reciprocal gaze to make visible the impact of dreams through trance and trauma. What people tend to see as individual trauma is embedded in a transnational web of structural violence; Okpowasili’s performance work reveals the central role of art and culture in challenging the structural nature of violence. Using Bronx Gothic as a case study to extend Collins’ notion of interaction ritual chains (2004), we argue that theatre captures key elements of trance and trauma in a way that impacts social dynamics off-stage. We employ microsociology to explore the concepts of witness and affective solidarity as ways of understanding trauma and trance: a call to move beyond empathy into action. Far from fiction or separate from the embodied politics of the social world, acts of imagination and staged performance are both real in their consequences (qua the Thomas theorem, 1928) and help us better understand the profoundly social nature of dreams and nightmares.
The chapter revisits Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit hotly contested novel, The Kindly Ones (2006), which retells the events of the Holocaust from the perpetrator’s perspective. The chapter focuses specifically on the nightmares and diurnal hallucinations experienced by Maximilien Aue during his service in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and during the post-war period. While it has been suggested that Littell’s descriptions of Aue’s dreams may be designed to enhance readerly identification with his novel’s abhorrent protagonist, the author’s mobilisation of images of Jewish suffering in communicating Aue’s progressive traumatisation has raised strong objections. To mitigate such criticism of The Kindly Ones, the chapter reframes Aue’s dreams with Cathy Caruth’s recasting of history as an entanglement of the perpetrators’ and victims’ traumas as part of her influential trauma theory. In this light, Littell’s representation of the perpetrator’s mental wounding can be seen as an effort to give a new and powerful voice to the pain of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims who, like Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, analysed by Caruth, speak to us with a renewed and powerful voice through their killer’s trauma. In other words, the chapter argues that Littell’s potentially morally problematic representation of the perpetrator’s psychological injury has the potential to counter ‘Holocaust fatigue’ engendered by an oversaturation of victim-focused cultural and media representations of genocidal violence, including those of the Shoah.
Between 1933 and 1939, Berlin-based Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt undertook a clandestine project to collect the nightmares of the German nation, which were eventually published in 1966 under the title The Third Reich of Dreams. Demonstrating the deep psychological reach of the Third Reich, which penetrated even the unconscious minds of its subjects during sleep, this extensive archive boasts over three-hundred dreams of German citizens, both Jews and gentiles, yet has received little critical attention since its publication over fifty years ago. This chapter critically examines the political potency and collective nature of dreams of Nazi fascism in Beradt’s archive alongside an analysis of Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass (1994), in which a Jewish woman living in 1938 New York is inexplicably paralysed by reports of antisemitic violence in the Third Reich. By uniting these real and fictional episodes of the collective interwar unconscious, this chapter demonstrates the ability of dreams and other psychic modes to not only reflect but respond to the otherwise latent fears of the collective interwar imaginary as a reaction against the ways in which totalitarianism seeks to colonise the psyche. Bringing Michel Foucault’s early work on the dream as constitutive of the imagination into dialogue with Cathy Caruth’s notion of the ‘life drive’ central to traumatic dreams, I build on Sharon Sliwinski’s convincing notion of dreaming as an expressly political act to elucidate the decolonising logic harnessed by dreams.
This final chapter explores why madness could evoke so much social anxiety. Fears of perceived rising lunacy rates were used as proof of over-civilization and decline. As the nineteenth century progressed, cure rates seemed to plummet, and degeneration literature flourished. Fear that madness was hereditary led to gloomy predictions about the decline of the British race paralleling conversations about urban decay and criminal classes. This chapter places medical conversations into broader cultural contexts.
Particular masculine anxieties were linked to fears of overwork and the emasculated neurasthenic, the criminalized degenerate, and the alcoholic madman. A final focus on the diagnosis of General Paralysis of the Insane demonstrates the social construction of medical thinking. GPI was one of the few mental diseases that could be seen in the brain after death, and it had a relatively clear and consistent set of symptoms. Despite this, GPI was often diagnosed through lifestyle as much as symptomology. The fact that GPI seemed to affect men more than women and led to almost inevitable death made it the embodiment of degenerationist fantasies that only increased as the century progressed. Insanity was a central point of argument in theories of decline.
The final section of the book points to the significance of Edwardian thinking going into the twentieth century. The doctors deployed to treat soldiers in the First World War were largely trained in an Edwardian and Victorian medical world, and thus their understanding of men’s madness is the missing link to most studies of shell shock. This epilogue highlights the continuity of concerns over men and mental illness into the twentieth century.
This introduction outlines the scope of the book, its methodology and approach, and gives a brief discussion of historiography. The text sketches in broad strokes what examining the experience and representation of madness tells us about Victorian masculinity. This includes a study of sufferers, families, and the culture at large. It argues that the social, medical, and personal explanations of men’s insanity point to increasing anxieties about manhood and civilization in general over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century.
This chapter continues with the voice of the patient, but rather than focusing on those who were ashamed of their fate, here the patients fought back. Individuals and advocacy groups challenged diagnoses both inside and outside the asylum. This chapter explores how men fought back against certification and incarceration and attempted to restore their public reputations or regain their freedom. The chapter outlines the boundaries of madness, and the debate over the line between eccentricity and madness.
Here Chancery lunacy cases take centre stage, widely publicized in the press as men of wealth and position battled to prove their sanity. Such situations were the worst-case scenarios for families of status and influence and demonstrate a complete breakdown in family coherence. The chapter ends with a series of case studies which played out in the public eye, exploring how and why different men challenged their diagnoses. Men’s chief justification for telling their stories can be grouped into three main motivations: an attempt to reassert their patriarchal control, an attempt to regain their freedom, and a desire to restore their reputation.
This chapter places media representations of madness as its central focus. Stories of madmen as perpetrators of violence made for sensational copy, and thus they are overrepresented in media coverage. These narratives reveal larger anxieties of the modern age, and the fragility of established rules and norms of society. The fear that madness could strike at any moment, and that a man could suddenly fall victim to an irrational and violent breakdown, was particularly gendered as male. Madwomen were often portrayed as victims whereas madmen were often portrayed as perpetrators of violence, both within the home and within the asylum. These media panics are perhaps the most public expressions of underlying anxieties about the threat that madness posed to everyday people and highlight the deep stigmas of men’s mental illness.
In assessing media trends, clear gender- and class-based panics emerge. In particular, the figure of the working-class madman who murders his family highlights fears of domestic instability. And stories of sudden madness emphasized deeper fears about the state of British manhood and the dangers of modern technology.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of a national network of asylums across Britain. Asylums were sites of both enormous hope and dashed expectations. This chapter explores why some people embraced institutionalization, and why others did not. It gives readers a brief overview of the structures of asylums, rules of admission for different classes, and types of conditions, and builds on the strong institutional histories of asylums. It provides information about the diversity of asylum experiences, from the elite institutions for the wealthy, to the mass pauper asylums, to the criminal asylum.
The Victorian asylum was born out of optimism, flourished in an era of no better alternatives, and quickly became a symbol of failed expectations. I focus on the male experience of incarceration, and how this experience was particularly destabilizing for those used to being in control of themselves and their families. Men also proved particularly difficult patients to control if they were prone to violence. This chapter introduces the typical experience of madness in the Victorian era that saw the asylum as at least a part of most men’s curative treatment.