Literature and Medicine I

21Although the subtitle of the novella is Love in a Madhouse, Haywood very carefully does not use that inflammatory term in her initial description of the private asylum to which Annila was to be sent. Annila was to be removed “to one of those Houses which are prepared on purpose for the Reception of Persons disorder’d in their Senses” (49). While it may have been the publisher who tacked on the subtitle to make it more sensational, it is still worth noting that Haywood made a very specific choice in describing the madhouse in a roundabout manner. The reader would have understood that by mention of the “houses” Haywood intended to evoke the idea of a private rather than a public madhouse, which though unregulated until 1774 with the Act for Regulating Madhouses, still had some semblance of restrictions upon family members falsely committing the reasonable. Another manner in which the reader was cued to share in Annila’s concern about being committed to a private madhouse was the statement not that she was to be committed to a house prepared for those who were mad, but for those people “disorder’d in their Senses”; a much more subjective status. While madness at its most base form required unreason, it was the inability to communicate and animality which signified its presence, whereas being simply “disorder’d” was a much more insidious accusation, entirely subjective on the committer’s point of view, easily-proved and incredibly difficult to disprove on the part of the patient. It is not until Annila is confined within her chambers in the place of confinement that Haywood finally uses the term madhouse (50). By avoiding the direct term Haywood helps increase the horror of unlawful confinement for her readers so that they can more fully identify with Annila’s distress when the term is finally uttered only after she is physically confined. Although her description of the madhouse is necessarily sensationalist because of her genre of amatory fiction, Haywood’s writing reflected popular notions of the peril to confined women. 

22In addition to popular fiction, women writers evidenced concern about madness in their epistolary communications. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of the Turkish Embassy Letters fame, made frequent mention of maladies associated with mood. In a 1712 letter to her absent husband, the newly married and pregnant Lady Mary speaks of her efforts to prevent further incitement of the Spleen and Melancholy; she speaks of how her “constitution will sometimes get the better of [her] Reason,” suggesting that the melancholia she experienced was bodily based rather than a creation of her circumstances. She notes that

[t]he idle Mind will sometimes fall into Contemplations that serve for nothing but to ruine the Health, destroy good Humour, hasten old Age and wrinkles, and bring on Habitual Melancholy. […] I lose all taste of this World, and I suffer my selfe to be bewitch’d by the Charms of the Spleen, tho’ I know and forsee all the irremediable mischeifs ariseing from it. (Halsband, ed., Complete Letters 173)

In this passage, Lady Mary reflects Robert Burton’s idea in the Anatomy of Melancholy of a certain disposition falling more-easily victim to melancholy (143). This conception of a melancholic personality was common to the developing medical literature of the time, especially with regard to women. Lady Mary is documented as having the relatively unique (unique in its documentation) duty of caring for the mental well-being of her mad sister Lady Frances Mar through frequent letters of encouragement and the climatic 1728 kidnapping in which Lady Mary took bodily custody of her sister from Lady Mar’s married family in order to have her confined within a private madhouse (Halsband, Life 134). In order for her to retain custody of her sister’s body, Lady Mary engaged lawyers and had her sister pronounced legally a lunatic, staking her claim for the temporary “ownership” of her sister (Grundy 275). Lady Mar was treated by Dr. Richard Hale of Bethlem Hospital, an early moral therapist who avoided the more mechanical and restrictive treatments in favor of sedation (Halsband, Life 135). According to Halsband, Lady Mar was treated in her home, but others maintain that she was placed in Dr. Hale’s private madhouse in Hampstead (Grundy 282).

23Suggestions for physical and mental stimulus are a frequent theme in Lady Mary’s letters to her sister. In a July 1727 letter, Lady Mary directs Lady Mar “as soon as you wake in the morning, lift up your eyes and consider seriously what will best divert you that day. Your imagination being then refreshed by sleep, will certainly put in your mind some part of pleasure, which, if you execute with prudence, will disperse those melancholy vapours which are the foundation of all distempers” (Wharncliffe 508). Here Lady Mary explicitly states that pleasurable actions will assist in relieving Lady Mar of the vapours which situates Lady Mary within the ideological shift that occurred mid-century in the field of medicine. These vapours, also known as the Spleen, illustrate that Lady Mary was cognizant of the newly popular concept of the “machina carnis, a machine of the flesh” replacing the previous notion of the humoural body (Porter, Flesh 51). By viewing the body as a machine, the basis of mental disturbance or lunacy became a physical ailment which indicated an awareness of physician-thinkers such as George Cheney.

24One symptom of Lady Mar’s illness was her difficulty with speech and human interaction. However hyperbolic it may seem, Lady Mar describes effectively isolating herself from the community at large in the previously mentioned letter to Lady Mary: “I fear a time will come when I shall neither write nor see anybody […] my solitude comes from causes that you are too happy to have experienced, and gives me no other inclination but to doze upon a couch, or exclaim against my fortune, and wish […] forgetfulness could steal upon me, to soften and assuage the pain of thinking” (Halsband, Life 127). This contradiction of both a fear and an embrace of isolation illustrates Lady Mar’s melancholy, as according to Foucault, “[l]anguage is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all cycles in which madness articulates its nature” (Discipline and Punish 100). Thus, it was Lady Mar’s own language, and its evidence of unreason, that defined her melancholy within her letters to her sister which indirectly prompted Lady Mary to eventually pursue custody and responsibility for her mental well-being; however, it was Lady Mar’s political position as a woman which led her constitution to be more inherently susceptible to madness. 

25Frances Burney had many interactions with madhouse culture which are documented in her journals and fiction. In addition to commenting on the confinement of her friend Christopher Smart, Burney was also a frequent witness to King George III’s bouts of lunacy through her position as Keeper of the Robes (Wiltshire 75). Burney directly positions female madness in elite society in her novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782). The protagonist Cecilia is an heiress bound by her uncle’s requirement that her husband retain her last name in marriage. After her uncle’s death, Cecilia is led through a barrage of equally unsuitable guardians who proceed to steal her money and status. It is toward the end of the novel that Cecilia finally exhibits a psychotic episode when she is driven mad from ill-fated love. Cecilia runs through London without money or identification, even forgetting who she is and her circumstances, until she collapses, mute, in a shop (Burney 897). Interestingly, her rescuers, the shopkeepers, assume that Cecilia has escaped from “Bedlam” or a “private madhouse” because of her elite bearing and clothing (897) indicating the late 18th-century association of private madhouses with moneyed individuals. This is reflected in their next course of action; to lock her within their domicile until she is claimed by her proper keepers. They eventually post a newspaper advertisement titled “Madness” which described “a crazy young woman” is being retained by them for her own safety and “[w]hoever she belongs to is desired to send after her immediately” (901). Burney subtly mentions the growing trade of the madhouse industry when she has the new keeper post the notice about Cecilia only after she begins to worry on the “uncertainty of pay for her trouble” (901).