Literature and Theatre
The Coda argues that like the first three Romantic-period novels covered in Injured Minds, Wide Sargasso Sea reimagines the love-mad maid to expose the forms of patriarchal control and abuse that inflict psychological damage on women. Failed male guardianship, unjust marriage laws, and libertine male behaviour all work together in Wide Sargasso Sea to drive a sympathetic young heroine to madness while the male perpetrator hides behind a flimsy screen of medical science. While on the surface the heroine, Antoinette, may look like a love-mad maid, she does not lose her mind because she loses her man. Rather, she is driven mad by her husband’s purposeful actions and by his determination that she is mad, which compounds the psychological damage she has already suffered from a traumatic past that includes her mother’s own male-inflicted injuries. Like the feminist authors of the early Romantic period, Rhys gives the mad woman both a backstory and a subjectivity to which the reader has access. This backstory, which combines the inner monologues of both Antoinette’s husband (an unnamed Mr Rochester) and the woman he calls ‘Bertha,’ inculpates not only the husband himself, but also the very avenues of patriarchal control identified and exposed by Rhys’s predecessors over a century and a half before. Abusive male power replaces lost love as the cause of ‘Bertha’s’ mental affliction in this classic revision of the classic literary incarnation of female madness.
Chapter three focuses on an admirable heroine who, like Fenwick’s Sibella, is psychologically destroyed by guardianship, libertinage, and Rousseauvian educational ideas. In Hays’ hands, the guardian is enlightened and well-meaning, not retrograde and tyrannical; nonetheless, he injures the heroine, Mary Raymond, by following Rousseauvian ideas about isolating children to preserve them from social contamination. The chapter examines Mary’s battles with melancholia as she struggles to recover from her privileged lover’s abandonment and her sexual assault by a powerful man and attempts to avoid her mother’s fate as a fallen woman. Through Mary’s story, Hays makes the point that women’s mental disease comes directly from their disadvantaged position in relation to men, and most particularly from libertinage in its most destructive form—as a social practice that controls women through sexual assault. In contrast to both Wrongs of Woman and Secresy, Victim of Prejudice never considers the role of sentimental literature or the romantic imagination in women’s plight, which makes the line of causality from men’s actions to women’s victimization more direct and the novel more didactic. Although it focuses much more than the other two novels on just one avenue of male control, Victim concludes, like Secresy, with the tragic death of its heroine from mental illness and with the failure of female friendship to provide shelter from male abuse. And like Secresy, Victim ends by suggesting that the only salvation for women is to write tragic novels that might prompt men to reform their ways.
This short coda reflects on Richard Field’s current condition and on the trial of new drugs which promise to slow the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Discussing the role that art plays in the portrayal of this disease, the Epilogue discusses a cluster of novels, including Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves (2014) and Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting (2008). The Epilogue ponders whether novels can in fact tell us what the sufferers of dementia are experiencing.
Chapter 1 explores Baldwin’s accounts of his stepfather, David Baldwin, a disciplinarian preacher who in the last few years of his life suffered from paranoia and possibly dementia. The chapter weaves recollections of Douglas Field’s father’s illness, which the author uses as a springboard to consider Baldwin’s poignant writing on David Baldwin’s decline, as well as that writer’s transparently autobiographical accounts of this stepfather in early works, among them his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and his first published short story, ‘The Death of the Prophet’ (1950). The chapter explores how David Baldwin haunts Baldwin’s early work, reflecting on parallels with writing on haunting and hauntology. It examines how Baldwin’s early writing confronted his painful relationship with his stepfather and how much of his fiction from the 1950s explores his burgeoning queer desire against the backdrop of his evangelical upbringing. Reflecting on Baldwin’s complicated relationship to Christianity, the chapter recounts that author’s quest to locate Eugene Worth, a close friend, who committed suicide in the 1940s, and who serves as the basis for the protagonist of his best-selling third novel, Another Country (1962). The chapter concludes by exploring the importance of the painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin referred to as his ‘spiritual father’.
This chapter argues that Amelia Opie rejects physiological models for women’s madness and revises the victimization plots written by Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays to establish the impossibility of love-madness. Opie does so through turning the story of the love-mad maid into a tale about a love-mad man—about a father who loses his mind when his daughter, Agnes, runs away with an officer. The daughter, too, experiences bouts of madness, but these are caused entirely by her own actions—by her remorse over the mental injury she has inflicted on her father. Although the novel seems to reinforce structures of male control by blaming the daughter for her own and her father’s illnesses, Opie demonstrates a considerably more diverse set of ideas about mental disease and male avenues of power than one might assume. In reversing the narrative of the love-mad maid, Opie shifts gendered power dynamics to make the daughter the guardian of the father after he goes mad. Through the love-mad father and various other ineffectual older men, the novel criticizes patriarchal structures not for abusiveness, but rather for weakness. Opie also downgrades the importance of romantic love for women and gives her female characters considerable self-determination. Although the novel ends with Agnes’s death, Opie, like Edgeworth, resists seeing women as psychologically damaged victims of male control. Instead, women in her novel demonstrate considerable moral and mental strength in that they are capable of great acts of courage and sacrifice in the service of those they love.
The introduction situates novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie within two inter-related eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century contexts: the medical understanding of madness and the sentimental literary convention of the love-mad maid. With sections explaining mania, melancholia, hypochondriasis, and hysteria, the introduction shows how medical models for understanding madness in the period were shifting from a somatic to a psychogenic model except where women's mental afflictions were concerned. The introduction offers a related reading of the convention of the love-mad maid (the woman who loses her mind when she loses her lover) as a figure that permitted society to divert its attention away from the systemic injustices that allowed women to be mentally and emotionally injured by men. The introduction argues that both medical models for female madness and the convention of the love-mad maid provided rationales for male domination that explained women’s madness through inherent physical and mental weakness. The radical authors Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays, as well as the more moderate Edgeworth and Opie, all recognized that both medical and sentimental renditions of female madness made it possible for male guardians, libertines, and husbands to hide their culpability for inflicting psychological damage on women. The introduction makes the claim that these five authors, through creating psychologically afflicted female characters, critiqued and revised the gender-based power dynamics rooted in medical and sentimental discourses that facilitated male power by circulating models of inherent female frailty.
The chapter argues that Wollstonecraft reworks the inter-connected medical and sentimental models for women’s madness in order to expose the systems of male power that defined both health and disorder for women and that produced the states they pathologized. Although Wollstonecraft subscribed to the commonly held eighteenth-century belief that women of refinement were more susceptible than men and other women to mental afflictions, her novel demonstrates that husbands, with their legal rights and social privileges, inflict on women the injuries that cause melancholia and other nervous disorders. Wollstonecraft also identifies sentimental literature—particularly novels by Rousseau—as a potent avenue of male power that, by offering itself as an antidote to the repressions of marriage, entraps women in destructive romantic fantasies. Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria Venables, is ensnared by her romantic imagination while imprisoned in a madhouse by her husband, which suggests that sentimental literature is as harmful to women as is the power the law gives to husbands. Wollstonecraft includes in her critique a restaging of the vignette of the love-mad maid that exposes how sentimental literature, in addition to producing distracting, destructive fantasies for women, also allows men to benefit morally from the harm they inflict. Wollstonecraft offers women some strategies for resistance in the form of life-writing and female friendship, but the novel’s lack of a conclusion makes it impossible to determine if Wollstonecraft believed women could escape from the linked, psychologically destructive forces of marriage, sentimental literature, and the romantic imagination.
The first part of this chapter argues that in the novel’s Lady Delacour section, Edgeworth draws on the ideas of David Hartley and Alexander Crichton to replace female frailty and male avenues of power with a new, gender-neutral psychological model for madness that draws on false associations, misplaced passions, and remorse. By incorporating the new treatment techniques of moral management, Edgeworth positions Belinda as a mental-health practitioner who guides Lady Delacour back to rational control and emotional balance. Edgeworth’s focus on recovery and on ungendered models of madness where Lady Delacour is concerned severs the association Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays made between women’s mental afflictions and male abuse. In this way, Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour plot functions as a repudiation of her contemporaries’ conviction that women were trapped by structures of male control. The chapter’s second section, however, argues that Edgeworth uses the Virginia plot to cast Rousseau’s Émile as a text that conveys an educational ideology founded on a male sexual fantasy that is harmful to women. Edgeworth offers considerable insight into how a Rousseauvian education damages women’s minds by attempting to make them into passive, childlike sexual objects. The gendered Rousseauvian education that harms women through breeding passivity and fostering the romantic imagination is the only avenue of male control Edgeworth is willing to entertain. But Edgeworth shows this form of control to be an improbable work of the imagination. In this way, she dispatches both the threat of gendered educational models and her contemporaries’ narratives of psychological victimization.
In the last decade, James Baldwin’s cultural capital has risen high. Since his death in 1987, he has been resurrected across social media, where he is the most tweeted literary figure on X (Twitter) relating to the Black Lives Matter movement. This chapter considers the renewed interest in Baldwin’s life and work but also explores the ways in which Baldwin, who acknowledged that his work left him open to ‘a vast amount of misunderstanding’, is a far more complex figure than he is often depicted as. An exploration of Baldwin’s developing views on Jewish culture, masculinity and sexuality reveals the ways that social media has cherry-picked two-dimensional versions of the writer, whose contradictions and flaws make him a more rounded and fascinating figure. The chapter examines Baldwin’s multifaceted character in relation to the recent culture wars and considers the ways that memoir has a tendency to resist writing about the more troubling aspects of family portraits.
This chapter argues that through writing a novel featuring two mad characters—a man and a woman—Fenwick revises the narrative of love-madness to identify the nexus of male guardianship, libertinism, and gendered Rousseauvian educational ideas, rather than women’s inherent weakness, as the cause of female mental affliction. In a clear rejection of medical models of female frailty, Fenwick casts Sibella Valmont as inherently both mentally and physically strong as she battles her guardian’s attempt to inflict Rousseauvian ideas about women’s natural passivity and docility upon her through an isolated education. She succumbs, however, to a romantic imagination, the product of social isolation and limited intellectual opportunities that make her idealize her libertine lover. Fenwick contrasts Sibella’s madness with that of the young Arthur Murden, who falls more quickly and more easily into love-madness than does Sibella, which further undermines sentimental and medical models of inherent female frailty. Fenwick’s novel is more pessimistic than Wollstonecraft’s in that there is no ambiguity about her character’s fate: she dies from melancholia and the physical effects of hysteria. Moreover, Fenwick actively destroys female friendship as a way for women to maintain their mental health, showing that women’s relationships are battered by the web of male power. In the place of female friendship, Fenwick presents an option that Wollstonecraft never considered in Wrongs of Woman—that men might be persuaded through moral instruction and tragic fiction to change their libertine ways.