“We are an Injured Body”: Finding Inspiration in a Class on Jane Austen
My new book, Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives (Manchester University Press), originated in an undergraduate class I taught in spring 2020 at the University of Alabama called “Jane Austen and the Injured Body.” I designed this as a new course, with the aim of using disability theory to situate Austen within the context of other early Romantic-period women novelists. I was inspired by Austen’s comment in her famous defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey, in which she said, “we are an injured body.” She was referring to that fact that she and the women novelists she admired were disrespected and that the genre she loved was disesteemed. When I started thinking about late eighteenth-century women novelists as an “injured body,” the metaphor seemed particularly rich in meaning. What I noticed in preparing for this class was that other women writers—most notably Mary Wollstonecraft—also saw themselves as part of an “injured body,” but for reasons far more political than Austen’s. The following summer, I dedicated myself to this new project, and it began to take shape. My key epiphany was that the injuries I was seeing in novels by Austen’s predecessors were psychological—hence, the subtitle of my book, “Injured Minds.” That epiphany led me to extensive research into the history of madness in the eighteenth century and to the further realization that this book would be grounded in historicism rather than disability theory, and that I would focus on the novelists that preceded Jane Austen.
Insights from Historicism: Discovering How Women Novelists Challenged Ideas about Mental Illness
I think that the central contribution of Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel is to return women’s mental health to the important role it played in literary criticism in the wake of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), but to do so through a deeply historicized perspective. My chapters reveal that women writers of the early Romantic period self-consciously incorporated forms of madness and what we would call mental health crises into their novels for various, related reasons. The political radicals Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Eliza Fenwick used madness to show how different avenues of male domination—namely guardianship, libertinism, marriage, and gendered Rousseauvian educational ideas—inflicted sufficient damage on women to result in psychological harm and even madness. The more moderate Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie shared some of their radical contemporaries’ perspectives, but offered different explanatory models that cast less blame on patriarchal power. All, however, challenged the period’s medical models that, despite the increasing psychologizing of mental disease in the last third of the eighteenth century, still blamed women’s madness (primarily in the form of hysteria) on the supposedly aberrant female body. And all the authors I examine, regardless of political outlook, wrote novels that revised the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid—the stock character of the beautiful young woman who loses her mind when she loses her man. My book ends with a chapter on Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which I interpret as a striking mirroring of the radical Romantic women writers’ understanding of how specific avenues of male abuse cause female madness
Pre-Victorian Accounts of Women’s Madness: Establishing the Need for More Work in the History of Women’s Mental Health
When I began this project, I was surprised at the scarcity of monographs on female madness in the eighteenth century or Romantic period. The primary exceptions were Helen’s Small’s invaluable Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (1998) and Philip Martin’s Mad Women in Romantic Writing (1987). I did find a variety of excellent book chapters and articles on the topic, but the absence of any more recent, full-length accounts of female madness in British literature before the Victorian period was striking. There’s growing academic attention now to women’s health among humanists, and I’m hoping we’ll see more studies of women’s mental afflictions, be they historical or literary in approach. The topic, I think, is of considerable interest to undergraduate and graduate students today, as well as to the general public, as what we now call “mental health” is everywhere being discussed more openly than ever before.
Dr Deborah Weiss is Professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Top image credit: Cover artwork for Women and madness in the early Romantic novel, designed by Abiodun Akambi.
