Literature and Medicine I

26It is Cecilia’s language transition which is of most interest. In the beginning of the novel, Cecilia is presented as the most level-headed and discreet of all the characters in her astute identification of her poorly-suited guardians and the effect they have upon her reasonable state. However, toward the end of the novel, Cecilia not only loses all sense of decorum in her dash through the streets, but she loses her speech at the height of her madness. Burney writes against the trope of woman silenced by her family by endowing Cecilia with the agency to silence herself. It is not until Cecilia is confined by the shopkeepers that she regains her voice, not in a reasonable manner, but launches immediately into a tirade where she “raved incessantly” and “called out twenty times in a breath” (Burney 900). In making Cecilia rave, Burney reiterates the idea of woman as basely emotional and nearer to madness; Cecilia becomes mad only from her ill-fated affair because it is tied to the sexualized emotion of “love” rather than because her guardians ruined her finances and reputation.

Conclusions

27For some anti-psychiatrist critics like David Cooper, madness is a liberatory experience and a politically-conscious act. For Cooper, mad-writing is the only truly authentic form of expression untainted by Enlightenment (and Capitalist) oppression; “mad discourse skirts around, reaches above all this to regions where it finds nothing – but an important and specific nothing that is creative precisely in the measures that it is not destroyed by the normalizing techniques of the society” (21). He goes on to speak of madness as a transformative act moving away from the Enlightenment trend of familialization in treatment (23), which has special applicability to feminist critiques of the patriarchal normalizing of the psychiatric institutionalization trend in the late 18^th through mid-19^th century. Cooper briefly mentions his own experiences with madness, notably never defining it, merely describing the liberatory sensations of freeing oneself from the constraints of fulfilling social expectations. This highlights the problematic aspect of writing of mad-discourse; it is difficult to adequately speak of madness without pathologizing or diagnosing the illness because of the pervasive quality of diagnostic medical discourse developed in the 18^th century. If one hopes to avoid diagnosing after the fact because of inherent associated judgement and with the language of control utilized in such diagnoses, one may find it easier to leave madness undefined and simply examine the cultural variations it presents within itself. For Cooper, as for feminist writers on the subject, madness becomes another political position of the subjected body. This, however, was not evidenced in the women writers selected. In Frances Burney’s and Eliza Haywood’s fiction and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s epistolary discourse on the subject of madness, women writers of the 18^th century viewed madness not as liberatory, but as a physical affliction. Their writing showed an acknowledgement of the changing conceptions of women’s bodies in Enlightenment discourse, but their writing of madness does not show the intensive progression in misogyny that one would expect to precede the huge growth of gendered confinement that characterizes 19^th-century fiction. 

28One suggestion unrelated to the shift in gendered bodies in the 18^th century is the idea of “mood sweeps” overwhelming social groups. Mentioned by Caudill with reference to the trend of a mood or emotion sweeping through the multiple social groups within the psychiatric hospital, this phenomenon is particularly based upon both the cues received which interpret both emotional and cognitive information. In this type of mood sweep, emotional information becomes more easily understood than cognitive information, which in turn spreads more quickly among both patients and staff (9). One could overlay this idea upon women’s interpretation of the horrors inflicted upon their gender within the madhouse; although statistics note that most women were never confined, most women either knew of someone who was, or developed their concepts of confinement through popular culture. Because confinement was such an emotionally charged event, and women were thought to be ruled by their emotions, however much they may have internalized this trope, the idea of a mood sweep affecting the population is possible. 

29There is little evidence for the type of gendered confinement that many scholars have suggested at the end of the 18^th century. Admissions records show that there was a rise in female admissions which mildly out-paced the rise in male admissions during the period, a trend that continued through to the mid 20^th century (Caudill 21). Necessarily these records are from the larger, urban, public asylums such as Bethlem Hospital and the York asylum because they were the earliest to be regulated, along with some of the earliest asylums to move away from physical treatment. Additionally, it is nearly impossible to account for the myriad of private madhouses which existed until the regulations of the mid-19^th century; their admissions records are often non-existent as many served a small, informal population of the mad. It is possible that women’s confinement proportion was demonstrably higher in private madhouses which could have helped propel the 19^th-century trope of the unjustly confined (deviant) woman; however, this is an unsupportable conjecture and will remain just that until further archives are revealed, if they ever existed.  

30While women’s proportion of admission did rise modestly above that of men, I believe that it was the nature of confinement that so effected women’s writing enough to perpetuate the concept of the unruly woman unjustly confined which, in turn, helped advance this idea in popular culture and eventually into medical discourse, in a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. It was this cycle which led to the trope becoming reality in the 19^th century as women internalized this threat because of its unique dangers to what was believed to be their inherent female qualities. As evidenced by the women writers selected in this essay, the shift in the one- to two-sexed body became more pervasive in Enlightenment discourse. The body as other became more firmly entrenched as the female became defined only by her body. Women were doubly othered in their subjectivity viewed as seated solely within their politicized body while also believed to be victims of the newly antiquated and dismissed notion of female subjectivity as naturally ruled by emotions and irrationality.