Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media [1st ed.] 9783030465810, 9783030465827

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind (Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier)....Pages 1-25
“I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre (Kate Faber Oestreich)....Pages 27-48
“We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse (Rachel M. Friars, Brenda Ayres)....Pages 49-72
The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish’s Strange Music (Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw)....Pages 73-95
“A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club Novels (Brenda Ayres)....Pages 97-120
Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I (Eckart Voigts)....Pages 121-144
“Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (Marshall Needleman Armintor)....Pages 145-165
The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and Ripper Street (Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier)....Pages 167-202
Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Its Adaptation (Barbara Braid)....Pages 203-227
Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful (Tim Posada)....Pages 229-251
The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock (John C. Murray)....Pages 253-279
Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives (Sarah E. Maier)....Pages 281-302
Back Matter ....Pages 303-308

Citation preview

Neo-Victorian Madness Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media Edited by Sarah E. Maier Brenda Ayres

Neo-Victorian Madness

Sarah E. Maier · Brenda Ayres Editors

Neo-Victorian Madness Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media

Editors Sarah E. Maier University of New Brunswick Saint John, NB, Canada

Brenda Ayres Liberty University Lynchburg, VA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-46581-0 ISBN 978-3-030-46582-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: “Ophelia Surfacing” copyright Robert J. Moore This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert J. Moore who granted us permission to use his painting Ophelia Surfacing on our cover. We are so grateful for the pioneering work in neo-Victorianism, starting with David Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff in 2000 who published a collection of essays, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Peter Widdowson in 2006 called it “re-visionary fiction,” Sally Shuttleworth in 2006 labelled it “the retro-Victorian novel,” Cora Kaplan in 2007 called it “Victoriana” and preferred the term “NeoVictorian” and Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn in 2010, liked “NeoVictorianism.” Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss published an invaluable collection in 2014 titled Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. In that volume, Marie-Luise Kohlke referred to “neo-Victorian’s shape-shifting” (2) and asserted that we were currently busy tapping into the “cultural gold rush vein of neo-Victorian literature” (21). There have been others, too, who have asked why we are rewriting the Victorian past, but no one has analysed what specifically neo-Victorian is doing to correct the Victorians’ perceptions about mental illness. This is what Neo-Victorian Madness has attempted to do. We want to express our great appreciation for the contributors of this volume: Marshall Needleman Armintor, Barbara Braid, Rachel M. Friars, John Murray, Kate Faber Oestreich, Tim Posada, Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw and Eckart Voigts.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ayres wants to thank the generosity of Penn State’s library that loaned her hundreds of books and articles in order to do this project. Aside from always being grateful for the support of Violet & Gido, Maier would like to acknowledge her indebtedness to several people for her interest in neo-Victorian madness and the history of hysteria, including Juliet McMaster, Elaine Showalter and Naomi Schor; and to Christine Coleman for teaching her the difference between savoir and connaître.

Contents

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2

3

4

Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Bibliography “I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre Kate Faber Oestreich Bibliography “We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres Bibliography The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish’s Strange Music Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw To Be Guilty Is to Be Mad—Elizabeth Like Mother Like Daughter—Kaydia Not Your Negro—Sheba Bibliography

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27 46 49 69

73 78 84 89 93

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CONTENTS

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“A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club Novels Brenda Ayres Book 1: The Proposal (2012) Books 2 and 3: The Suitor (2013b) and The Arrangement (2013a) Books 4 and 5: Escape (2014a) and Only Enchanting (2014b) Book 6: Only a Promise (2015a) Book 7: Only a Kiss (2015b) Book 8: Only Beloved (2016) Bibliography

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Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I Eckart Voigts Bibliography “Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White Marshall Needleman Armintor Houses in Order and “Playing with Dolls”: The Non-maturation of Agnes Rackham Dear Holy Sister: Divine Eroticism and Shared Identities Retracing the Narratives of Madness: The Journals of Agnes Rackham The Woman in White and the Singularity of Vision Bibliography The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and Ripper Street Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Puberty and Menarche Sexual Desire and Nymphomania Childbirth, Puerperal and Lactational Insanity Menopause and Old Maids Mad Women

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148 152 155 158 163

167 172 174 177 178 179

CONTENTS

Neo-Victorian Revisions of Female Sexuality Sexual Desire, Nymphomania and Slumming Questionable Pregnancy and Deathly Childbirth Puberty and/as Trauma for Girlchildren Lost/Found Children and Postpartum Despair Threats, Menopause, Grief and Old Maids Woman’s Unmentionable Madness(es) Bibliography 9

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Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Its Adaptation Barbara Braid Queerness as Non-normativity and the Madwoman Grace Marks: A Victorian Hysteric A Madwoman’s Queer Identity and Narrative Conclusion: Being Queered by the Madwoman Bibliography Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful Tim Posada An Old Monster Diagnosing Hysteria Fragile Male Superegos A New Hysterical Woman An Old Curse Bibliography The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock John C. Murray Bibliography Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives Sarah E. Maier Bibliography

Index

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179 183 184 189 190 191 194 197

203 207 212 216 223 225

229 229 231 237 241 246 248 253 276

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Notes on Contributors

Marshall Needleman Armintor is Principal Lecturer in English at the University of North Texas. His research interests are primarily in twentieth-century British literature and critical theory, especially psychoanalysis; his book Lacan and the Ghosts of Modernity: Masculinity, Tradition, and the Anxiety of Influence (Peter Lang) was published in 2004. He has taught a wide range of courses at UNT since 2003, with topics ranging from graphic novels, to James Joyce, to Victorian literature and to videogame narrative. He maintains a blog on theory, neo-Marxism, and art in the age of late capital at posthegel.com. Brenda Ayres is the coeditor of this volume and has coedited several past collections of essays with Sarah E. Maier, the most recent being Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (2019). She edited Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (2019) and Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (2017). Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017) is her latest monograph. Barbara Braid earned her Ph.D. degree at Opole University, Poland, and currently holds a position of Assistant Professor and Deputy Head at the Institute of Literature and New Media in Szczecin University. Her most recent publications include: “The Frankenstein Meme: Penny

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Dreadful and The Frankenstein Chronicles as Adaptations” in Open Cultural Studies 1 (2017) and “A Psychiatrist as a Detective: Laszlo Kreizler, Stratham Younger, and Max Liebermann” in: Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture: Beyond Sherlock Holmes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. She is currently working a monograph on female insanity motifs in Victorian and neo-Victorian novels. Rachel M. Friars is a Ph.D. student at Queen’s University. Her dissertation centres on neo-Victorian lesbian narratives and nineteenth-century lesbianism, with a particular focus on the ways in which female authors construct a revised sexual history of the Victorian age. Her research areas include Victorianism, neo-Victorianism, Charlotte Brontë, queer theory, gender theory and lesbian and trauma studies. Sarah E. Maier is the coeditor of this volume and Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick. With Brenda Ayres she has coedited Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (2019). Most recently, she has published extensively on the Brontës; edited special issues on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Neo-Victorian Considerations; Charlotte Brontë at the Bicentennial; and published articles on biofiction and neoVictorian narratives. Her current interests include neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives and redheads. John C. Murray is a professor of English and has served as Co-chair of the Humanities Division and Coordinator of the Department of English at Curry College. He teaches courses in British literature and film and novel. He published Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period (Cambria, 2010), as well as numerous chapters, articles and reviews for Lexington Books, the Journal of Literature and Science, the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Nineteenth Century Studies and The British Society for Literature and Science Book Reviews. He was recently appointed to serve as assistant book reviews editor for The British Society for Literature and Science website. Kate Faber Oestreich is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. She and Jennifer Camden have coauthored a book titled Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digital’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (2018). She has published four articles: “Deviant Celibacy: Renouncing Dinah’s Little Fetish

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in Adam Bede” in Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of Heterosexual Desire in Literature, edited by Richard Fantina (McFarland, 2006), “Gothic Remediation: The Castle of Otranto and The Monk” in The College English Association Critic (2011); “Sue’s Desires: Sexuality and Reform Fashion in Jude the Obscure” in Victorians Institute Journal (2013) and “‘Orlando About the Year 1840’: Woolf’s Rebellion Against Victorian Sexual Repression Through Image and Text” in NineteenthCentury Gender Studies (2016). Tim Posada is Chair of Journalism and New Media at Saddleback College. His writings have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture; Palgrave Communications and in volumes on film theory, digital media, comics studies, race and gender in speculative fiction and on the hysteria trope. He contributed a chapter on male hysteria in horror cinema for Leuven University Press’ forthcoming Performing Hysteria. He is currently working on a book for Lexington Books/Fortress Academic on depictions of the body, soul and spirit across popular culture. Posada holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Claremont Graduate University, where he wrote his dissertation on the emerging language of superhero media. He also serves as film columnist for the Beverly Press. Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Zurich, where she is working on her dissertation on the intersection of race and sexuality in a British-Caribbean context in both Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives. She holds an M.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in English Linguistics and Literature from the University of Zurich. Her other research interests include feminism, gender and fan fiction. Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature and Culture at TU Braunschweig, Germany and former President of CDE (2010–2016). He is the coeditor of Companion to Adaptation (Routledge 2018), Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse (WVT, 2015), and a special issue of Adaptation on Transmedia Storytelling (OUP, 2013). From 2016 to 2019 he was co-PI of a research project on “British-Jewish Theatre,” and from 2019 to 2022 he will be co-PI of the research project “Automated creativity in literature and music” (both funded by Volkswagen Foundation). The author of several research papers on neo-Victorianism, he also coedited Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate, 2014) and Transforming Cities. Discourses of Urban Change (Winter, 2018).

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

At the end of episode one, Agnes appears as an apparition to Sugar from her bedroom window Near the conclusion of episode three, Agnes urges her traumatised body to escape

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

In any given university in 1990, clusters of graduate students were discussing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) alongside The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and pondering the parallels between Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha and Jane as drawn by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and their composite daguerreotype of oppressed women everywhere (356–62). In Gilbert and Gubar’s words: “Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at Lowood), madness (at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End)” (339). Gilbert and Gubar pitched Bertha as Jane’s evil or, to use their term, the “monitory image” of Jane (361). Perhaps Brontë was simply being “Victorian” in depicting a Creole as the uncivilised, demonic, sensual woman who must be suppressed and harnessed, a dangerous creature who must be locked up in the attic of any proper woman’s being, but for those doctoral candidates who were hot on the trail of postcolonial atrocities, this treatment would not do.

B. Ayres (B) Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, USA S. E. Maier University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_1

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The scholarship of the nineties was on a feminist cusp of rewriting great wrongs to women and championing writers like Jean Rhys who adjusted the cosmos by giving voice to the female, Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea.1 Rhys’ was a more “authentic” story that had once been silenced by Brontë, that unwittingly imperialistic coloniser from the moors even if she herself had been an oppressed woman. Rhys gave voice to one of the most famous sulbaltern of all literature, Bertha. In Rhys’ account, the Creole woman’s confinement in the attic was not to be construed as the unfortunate trial for the impotent and to-be-pitied Edward Fairfax Rochester and the hapless impediment to the happiness of one long-suffering white, British governess, Jane Eyre. Rhys described the purloin of Antoinette’s name and identity as the beginning of a woman’s forced descent into darkness, a usurping of persona that led to her insanity, imprisonment and death. Bertha/Antoinette was the casualty from a collision between cultures in which the man had the power of the coloniser, and the woman had no power, not only because of her gender but also because of her race. Never did this attic inmate get to say with Jane’s hope, happiness and promise of a happy-ever-ending, “Reader, I married him”; rather, for Antoinette Mason, he married her and stole her future. If she ever did say it, think it or hope it, savvy modern readers would only shake their heads and murmur, “Poor subaltern.” Little did those graduate students think that one day, someone like Sarah Shoemaker would rewrite the stories of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Mason Rochester from a sympathetic point of view of the quintessential patriarcha l bully, Mr. Rochester, which ends (before the epilogue) with “Reader, she married me,” spoken humbly, gratefully and sincerely (2017). Those graduate students in the nineties would not have read anything yet that clearly articulated postfeminism as a consideration of gaps, contradictions and what Amelia Jones would argue to be a “monolithic entity” (1994, 57) of second-wave feminism. Doubtlessly they would not have thought about privileged patriarchy as a system that could and did disfranchise, marginalise and silence a white, British gentleman of property and wealth such as Edward Rochester. Neither would they realise that a new genre of literature was being hatched that would be designated “neo-Victorian.” They would have still been wrestling with a definition of Victorianism.2 Inclined to reject any scholarship by men from earlier decades, nevertheless, those students would have appreciated that Jerome Hamilton Buckley still carried vital currency when he made a statement in 1951

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that it was impossible to define “Victorian.” He suggested that Victorian explorers work with a term that was even more slippery but could serve as an approximation, and that is “Victorianism,” foregrounding the unknowability and variation in post-Victorian understandings of the past era. The students might have deferred to that Victorian of Victorians, Charles Dickens, who attempted to describe his time in what would become one of the most well-known introductions of any novel: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (1868 [1859], 1; emphasis added)

A Tale of Two Cities opens in 1775 with this metafictional introduction in its looking back to another era that can speak to the same problems that irritated the Victorians. Clearly, paradoxes detected by Dickens in his own age are captured in Buckley’s definition of Victorians who were torn by doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They were crass materialists, wholly absorbed in the present, quite unconcerned “with abstract verities and eternal values”; but they were also excessively religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past, and ready to forego present delights for the vision of a world beyond. Despite their slavish “conformity,” their purblind respect for convention, they were, we learn, “rugged individualists,” given to “doing as one likes,” heedless of culture, careless of a great tradition; they were iconoclasts who worshiped the idols of authority. They were, besides, at once sentimental humanitarians and hard-boiled proponents of free enterprise. Politically, they were governed by narrow insular prejudice, but swayed by dark imperialistic designs. Intellectually and emotionally, they believed in progress, denied original sin, and affirmed the death of the Devil; yet by temperament they were patently Manichaeans to whom living was a desperate struggle between the force of good and the power of darkness. (2–3)3

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Another male scholar with currency in the nineties was Gordon Haight. Since graduate students in America usually teach lower-level classes, they might have read to their classes from Portable Victorian Reader (1972) Haight’s own struggle with defining “Victorian”: “The time is long past when Victorian meant everything prudish, sentimental, and conventional. Now that we know more about them, we can see that the surface of respectability the Victorians presented was often only a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our own” (xi). Haight knew that the Victorians, in general, were not what they seemed. To study them invites the utilisation of tools of theory that operate like those under a magnifying glass: the scalpel, the tweezers, the file, or maybe more like the pick shovel or, more drastically, the sledgehammer or even a jackhammer. To exhume the Victorians then and now requires digging. Dickens certainly warned us that when it came to the Victorians, “All that glitters is not gold,” as Shakespeare whispered from his grave.4 In Our Mutual Friend, readers are thrice removed from seeing people as they really are; they are told to view “the company” in “The great looking-glass above the sideboard” that “reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy—a kind of sufficiently well-looking veiled prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs. Veneering; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory, conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself. Reflects Podsnap” (1884 [1864], 11). Significantly, in the world of the Veneerings, “All things were in a state of high varnish and polish” (6). With the reflection in the looking-glass and the veneer that covers a multitude of sins, compounded with the story told through a narrator who is doing the looking, and with the story being read by a sesquicentennial or so later, it is no wonder that in this novel no one knows who anyone truly is. The looking-glass and rear-view mirrors5 necessarily both reflect the readers even though they seek clarity of the human condition from another time or place. Identities and their portent of outcomes were even more mystifying in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a novel that Linda Hutcheon described as “historiographic metafiction,” identifying it as “intensely self-reflexive yet paradoxically also lay[ing] claim to historical events and personages” (1988, 5). William Stephenson, in the 2007 introduction to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, explains the novel’s literary strategies as “refusing to maintain a veneer of realist illusion or to

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end in a decorous Victorian manner, it challenged the narratives handed down to it that explained how things ought to be (and how stories ought to end). At the same time, though, it retained many of the characteristic features of great nineteenth-century novels” (2007, 13). He points out the similarities between the problems that the Victorians faced and those that plagued the 1960s (13–14). The very present narrator of the novel tells the reader that Sarah was “given the veneer of a woman” and that she judged people as if they were “fictional characters” in a novel by Sir Walter Scott or Jane Austen (48). The reader can then expect multiple distortions coming through multiple reflections that lead to multiple, complex, postmodern possible endings through the narrator, through the character, through the character’s perceptions of fictional characters, through Victorian sensibilities as understood by a man writing in the 1960s and through the author’s sensitivities about issues in the 1960s, all combined to question our own perceptions of reality and our Victorian precursors. According to Christian Gutleben, neo-Victorian narrative “echoes the ethos of postmodernism” in its reconstitution of the Victorian “historical period: the different, and sometimes contradictory, visions and versions of the facts signal and essentially contingent and possibly unattainable conception of historical knowledge” (1994, 140). That is, perhaps, why we find it so compelling—the multiplicity of possible knowledge outcomes and alleys of investigation for issues of neo-Victorian representations of madness. Thirteen years ago, Peter Widdowson wrote, “It is surely a truism by now to remark that large swathes of British ‘contemporary fiction’ by a diverse range of authors … are in fact ‘historical’ novels of one kind or another” (2006, 491). Historical novels make up the bestselling genre for contemporary readers, and of those, the Victorian historical novels sell the most (Heilmann and Llewellyn 27). Widdowson’s term for them is “re-visionary fiction” (491) with writers not interested in “destroying myths and illusions about the past,” but rather in “using fiction as history to explore how the scars of the past persist into the present, how the past’s presence in the present determines the nature of that present” and if not that they may be “in fact making displaced and oblique comment on their own present by ironically counterpointing it with the past” (492). He theorised that we scholars believe that “canonic texts from the past” are “central to the construction of ‘our’ consciousness” (491). The year of 1990, when graduate students began their interest in neo-Victorianism, whether they realised it or not, was also significant for

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the appearance of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Her novel spawned a “veritable deluge of Victorian-centred novels currently being published in the British Isles,” which Sally Shuttleworth termed “the retro-Victorian novel” (1997, 259). Although crediting Possession as the inaugural novel for this genre, Shuttleworth focused on a “literary subset,” the natural history novel such as Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1993) and Graham Swift’s Ever After (1998), while listing their progenitors as Wide Sargasso Sea and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The popularity, Shuttleworth claimed, corresponded with “the current upsurge of interest in the Darwinian revolution [as] a displacement of current fears concerning the indivisibility of man and machine onto the no longer threatening relationship between human and animal life” (259). Our “modern obsession with things Victorian” continued into the next century (Kaplan 2007, 1). “Victoriana,” Cora Kaplan asserted, is “a British postwar vogue that shows no signs of exhaustion” (2); further, she defined it as the “self-conscious rewriting of historical narratives to highlight the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire, as well as challenges to the conventional understandings of the historical itself” (3), noting the genre “has become so capacious and lucrative that it contains many mini-genres, including pastiche, Victorian crime fiction and mass-market romance” (88). Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn have provided the seminal definition of this genre of narratives. In their Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, the two scholars perceive neoVictorian literature to be more than historical fiction in encompassing texts (“literary, filmic, audio/visual”) that “self-consciously engage with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians ” (2010, 4). Part of their neo-Victorian project is to address the question of how Victorian novels are relevant to the twenty-first century (3). They assure us that “re-reading and re-writing” the “Victorian experience” is what neo-Victorian writers do and “is something that defines our culture as much as it did theirs” (4). They warn against generalising “Victorian” as a “homogenized identity” (2). Indeed, several subgenres have now been identified as further means to particularise a scholar’s inquiries. Their treatise identifies “the ontological and epistemological roots of the now through a historical awareness of then” (4), addressing questions “relating to the aesthetic, ethical, metafictional, and metacritical parameters of their own acts of (readerly/writerly) appropriation” (4). Many

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neo-Victorian works offer an “alternative view of the nineteenth century for the modern audience” (7). Some of them “correct aspects of the Victorian age, or the Victorians’ attitudes” (8). Heilmann and Llewellyn ask if neo-Victorian works are “mimicry or pastiche” (27) and, significantly, whether or not these texts succumb to nostalgia. In one way they are exactly this when one considers that we moderns deal with some of the same challenges and issues that the novels attempted to address, and therefore, we “seek a textual salvation in mimicking them as a salve to our (post)modern conditions” (27). Nevertheless, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous statement still holds true, that “Each age, it is found, must write its own books.”6 Neo-Victorian works may be set in the nineteenth century, but their creators and readers seek remedy for present woes, and to use a wonderfully Dickensian word, perspicacity.7 The term “neo-Victorian” first appeared in Enoch Arnold Bennett’s novel, The Twain, the third in a series titled The Clayhanger Family, published between 1910 and 1918. The Twain begins with the setting, 1892 in “Bleakridge, residential suburb of Bursley” (1916, 1),8 and immediately establishes a motif that will weave through the series: rapid change that contrasted old Victorian culture with “neo-Victorian” preferences. In 1892 the town was “still most plainly divided into old and new,— that is to say, into the dull red or dull yellow with stone facings, and the bright red with terra cotta gimcrackery” (1). Significantly, metaphorically, Bennett writes, “like incompatible liquids congealed in a pot, the two components had run into each other and mingled, but never mixed” (1). Much later, Auntie Hamps, who is very much the “old Victorian” who is dismayed “that the world would never stand still” (108), visits her niece’s house where the drawing room is very modern: “It quite ignored all the old Victorian ideals of furniture; and in ignoring the past, it also ignored the future. Victorian furniture had always sought after immortality. …But this new suite thought not of the morrow; it did not even pretend to think of the morrow. … Whereas the old Victorians lived in the future (in so far as they truly lived at all), the neo-Victorians lived careless in the present” (108; emphasis added). Bennett is using “neo-Victorians” to represent the fin-de-siècle Victorians. However, his sense of “Victorianism” holds true for contemporary books, film and media set the nineteenth century, with continued awareness of a “world that is too much for us,” as William Wordsworth lamented in 1802, along with nostalgia for a “simpler” past, along with an optimistic zeal for the future with faith in modern ingenuity and technology to solve the problems of the present. Therein lies

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“the affective dynamics” of writers’, readers’ and viewers’ “compulsive recycling of Victorian material” (Kaplan 15), on one hand—such as the stone architecture in Bennett’s Bursley and the “immortal” furniture of Auntie Hemps’ ideal Victorian drawing room, in contrast to the “terra cotta gimcrackery” and the rinky-dink fabrication of the neo-Victorian (Bennett 108)—and on the other hand, a “transformation of the Victorian past” that is “permanently restless and unsettled” (Kaplan 3) that characterises a rewrite of the Victorian, or simply put: Victorianism versus neo-Victorianism. To borrow another metaphor from Bennett, the authors of the essays in Neo-Victorian Madness separate the “incompatible liquids,” of Victorianism and the neo-Victorianism, in their diagnoses of mental illnesses in the nineteenth century. It may be worthy to note that the term “mental illness” was not concocted by any alienist (from the French, meaning one who heals the “insane”) or psychologist or psychiatrist (from the Greek, meaning one who gives medical treatment of the soul) or any other physician. Emily Brontë invented it in Wuthering Heights, when Nelly argues with Heathcliff about his insistence upon seeing Catherine Linton, lest it “create a favorable crisis in Catherine’s mental illness” (1858 [1847], 135). Besides documenting the historical past and its cultural idiosyncrasies, as is the case here with Brontë’s insight, literature often engenders history. None of this discussion explains why we are so fascinated with the Victorians, that we keep reading the works published in the 1800s, rewrite them, imitate them, write sequels in the twenty-first century and watch movie after movie about those Victorians. Just how many remakes of Jane Eyre do we need and for what reason? “Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people,” so says psychologists interviewed by Ian Sample in The Guardian (2009). He deduces that Victorian novels not only iterate “values of Victorian society, they also shaped them,” adding, “Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individual’s hunger for power and dominance” (quoted in Heilmann and Llewellyn 1). Sample seems to assume that all Victorians held the same values and virtues, and if that is so, a postmodern readership might simply discard them but still hope to find answers and appropriation for overriding concerns of the postmodern era: questions of identity; of the environment and genetic conditioning; repressed and oppressed modes of sexuality; criminality and violence; the urban phenomenon; the operations

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of law and authority; science and religion; the postcolonial legacies of the empire. In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenth-century fiction, often substituting for him/her the unreliable narrator we have recognized as common to appropriative fiction, postmodern authors find a useful metafictional method for reflecting on their own creative authorial impulses. (Sanders 2016, 129)

Victorian angst and mental illness—caused by rapidly changing technologies, uprootedness, moral relativism, situation ethics, unstable social ethos, expanding global awareness—have persisted into our current age. The Victorians did not understand the mental effects of such instability. Much of what they did suspect or were coming to learn about mental illness, they felt was improper to discuss. They believed that acceptable social behaviour was what separated humans from animals. Those individuals who did not act rationally or conform to social norms did not know how to control the animal within and therefore, deserved to be treated no better than most animals, and that is to be beaten, restrained, locked away and kept out of sight lest their moral decline pull down others or their degeneration be contagious. Those persons with a “pathology of the mind,” as the British psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley, diagnosed it,9 would include the mentally ill, the insane, the autistic, the “sexual deviant,” the depressed, the melancholy, the people with Down syndrome, the rebellious wife and a host of others perceived to be socially marginalised—they were simply silenced and locked away. This lack of knowledge, awareness and recognition of mental conditions is one of the reasons that neo-Victorian novelists and filmmakers have been revisiting the nineteenth century—to correct that lapse. Following their lead, the authors of Neo-Victorian Madness have purposed to increase literary scholarship by scrutinising neo-Victorian perspectives in literature, television and film on mental illness. Why is it important for a contemporary reader or viewer to compare attitudes towards mental illness written in the nineteenth century to those portrayed in the nineteenth century by twenty-first-century writers? Earlier literature teaches us how not to treat those who diverge from the conventional norm as well as how to help those men, women and children who are in pain. By studying Victorian and Neo-Victorian narratives, we are investigating and untangling the web of depression, addictions, insecurities, anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and other troubling behaviour and torment that has ensnared many a modern.

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This is a project of urgency. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), “there are 192 drug overdose deaths every day” in America (“Drug Overdose Deaths” 2019). The problem seems to be the worst in the United States but not exclusively so when the World Health Organization reported that in 2015, 450,000 people died from drug use worldwide (“Management of Substance Abuse” 2018). In 2017, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, there were 1,400,000 suicide attempts, making suicide the “10th leading cause of death in the US.” The site lists a staggering 47,173 suicides in 2017 (“Suicide Statistics” 2019). “Close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year,” the World Health Organization reports, adding that there is a death by suicide “every 40s.” WHO estimates that for every death, there are 20 others who attempt suicide (“Mental Health: Suicide Data” 2009). These are just some of the extreme results of mental illness. Studies reveal that in the United States, nearly half of all adults will suffer from a mental illness during their lifetime and that 5% of the American adult population suffer from mental illness each year, to a figure of 43.8 million people, but only about 41 percent receive “professional health care or other services” (Kapil 2019). One out of every five people experiences mental illness in the world or about 970 million with women outdistancing men (Ritchie and Roser 2018). As of September 2, 2019, there were 37,866 gun-related incidents in the United States that resulted in 9987 deaths with over 285 mass shootings (“Gun Violence Archive” 2019), with 22 school shootings (Lou and Walker 2019). The median age of school shooters between 1982 and 2018 is 21 (Brown and Goodin 2018, 1385). Youth depression in America has increased 8.2% in the last five years (“The State of Mental Health in America” 2018, 4). America is not the only mentally disturbed place in the world; the news constantly reports on genocides and all manner of horrible killings perpetuated by the mentally ill. Although not the only source for mental struggles, stress and trauma are common triggers in the modern world beginning with the Industrial Revolution. The American sociologist Kai Erikson defines “trauma” as “a violent event that injures in one sharp stab, while ‘stress’ refers to a series of events or even to a chronic condition that erodes the spirit more gradually” (1994, 230). He adds this about “trauma” as distinguished from “stress”: “trauma can issue from a sustained exposure to battle as well as from a moment of numbing shock, for a continuing pattern of abuse as well as from a single searing assault, from a period of severe

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attenuation and erosion as well as from a sudden flash of fear” (230). Christian Gutleben and Julian Wolfreys are more specific in their definition where “trauma has to be redefined” because it must include “the effects of the loss of a unified self mirror those of the more conventional sense of trauma, which likewise produce a radical disjuncture in selfhood, between the self before and after, with intrusive flashbacks, nightmares and involuntary body memories resisting any subsequent regained sense of wholeness and integration” (2010, 42). In a recent survey of America, 60% of all men and 50% of all women between the ages of 15 and 54 have suffered some form and degree of trauma (Vickroy 2015, 7). “Examining fictionalized trauma scenarios,” Laurie Vickroy suggests in her Reading Trauma Narratives (2015), “allows the development of insights into subjective endurance, crisis, and conflict and shows that the defensive responses of trauma link many types and degrees of wounding, informing a common humanity” (2). In this collection, we are mindful that supposedly “whereas the disturbed nineteenth-century psyche constituted the exception … the traumatized subject now assumes the position of the contemporary norm” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, 3). The writers of the chapters in this volume are ethically cognisant and respectful of the representation of marginalised, traumatised disruptions into and through some of the most popular neo-Victorian novels and films with the intention that such a study will increase awareness about mental illness and promote well-being. Useful to such a study are recent considerations of Victorian psychology. Following the early, important work on the construction of female hysteria done in The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter (1985), Jane Ussher, for one, has written three excellent books: Misogyny or Mental Illness ? (1991), Managing the Monstrous Feminine (2006) and The Madness of Women (2011). Very helpful are Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2007) and the essays from Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby’s Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (2004). Neo-Victorian Madness will look not only at female (mis)treatments but also male, as well as insane asylums and medical men in general. Two sources relevant to the first are Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore’s essays in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (2004) and Valerie Pedlar’s The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (2006). The latter topic is contextualised by Kathryn Burtinshaw and John R. F. Burt’s Lunatics , Imbeciles

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and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2017). Catharine Coleborne’s medical knowledge is invaluable in her analysis of literary work that conveys the trauma of colonisation and immigration (2007 and 2015). The critical significance of this collection is that it interrogates neoVictorian representations of perceived receptions of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches and non-normative imaginings. It also addresses important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility and methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. Chapter 2, “‘I Am Not an Angel’: Madness and Addiction in NeoVictorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre” is Kate Faber Oestreich’s analysis of the neo-Victorian transmedia series Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013–2014), Margot Livesey’s The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012) and April Lindner’s Jane (2010). She underscores how female characters who suffer from substance use disorders are understood to be mad, revealing anxieties specifically centred on women, sexuality and motherhood. These women are scapegoats, releasing the community from responsibility to protect them due to the perception that addiction is a form of insanity. This stigma runs deep enough to justify first neglecting and then murdering female characters who are addicts, whose deaths enable the romantic consummation of the heteronormative couple. While the neo-Victorian madwoman has been extensively criticised, many scholars tend to analyse her presence in fiction alongside the isolation and silence in which she typically exists. Instead Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres concentrate on both the neo-Victorian madwoman and her nurse as physical emblems of “the fundamental alliance between ‘woman’ and ‘madness’” (Showalter 3). Assaying Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) and Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester (2017), Chapter 3 concludes that the female/female bonds and power dynamics established between the neo-Victorian madwoman and her nurse(s) illustrate the position of the madwoman as a “failed but heroic rebel” (Showalter 4) through her refusal to conform to social and patriarchal gender norms and place the nurse in a conformist, carceral space. The fourth chapter, “The Daughters of Bertha Mason” by Olivia TjonA-Meeuw, reminds us that the madwoman is a recurring motif in the writings of Caribbean women, starting in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, but Rhys is by no means the last to do so. As Kathleen J. Renk points out in Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts (1999), Bertha Mason reappears

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in various texts (1999, 88). According to Renk, “this focus on female and colonial madness challenges the nineteenth-century discourse that positioned the madwoman and the colonies as loci of uncontrollable sexuality equated with a madness that must be controlled by paternal surveillance and governance” (89). In her neo-Victorian text Strange Music, Laura Fish combines the two approaches. In a story that includes two AfroCaribbean women, the text disputes the nineteenth-century notion that madness is somehow inherent to black women in the tropics (Renk 93). Instead, the text supports Renk’s claim that Caribbean madwomen are “grounded in the earthy pain of racial and sexual exploitation” (93). The trauma of white paternal power, exerted in a way that it only could have been on the bodies of black women, is the cause of madness rather than the cure. By altering “the past to suit current purposes” neo-Victorian novels act as “cultural doppelgängers of the Victorian Age” that both “mimic and challenge the discourses of the nineteenth century” (BoehmSchnitker and Gruss 2014, 2). In their Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (2014), Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss insist that the term, “neo-Victorian” must include contemporary popular works that might not satisfy any academic status as “high brow,” and should include those books that are set in the Regency period, as were Austen’s books.10 In fact, instead of the term “neo-Victorian,” Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss prefer the term “neo-Victorianism” (3). Marie-Luise Kohlke agrees with their theory of what and how contemporary Victorian tales deserve theoretical exploration; she deems it an “academic pitfall to deal with canonisation with debate of high and low culture exclusivity and inclusivity” (2014, 3). The Neo-Victorian needs to be “suitably elastic,” she says to represent the “shape-shifting” and “protean” reconstruction of the Victorian past in contemporary fiction (27). The canon is only one issue in selecting works to consider; there is a “problem with time and geography,” she says (27). Is “Victorian” restricted to just the British, especially given the fact that at the height of the British empire, its territory consisted of 13,700,000 square miles (Bowman 1922, 14) and 412 million people, ten times the population of Britain itself (Angus 2001, 97)? The United States, no longer a British colony, still uses the term “Victorian” to describe a style of its architecture and other arts. Aligning herself with Herbert J. Gans who calls

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for a “cultural democracy and cultural pluralism” (1999, xi), Kohlke suggests that the “neo-Victorian” encompasses “texts that highlight the nineteenth century as the advent of modern-day globalization, migration, and networks of cultural exchange, via increasingly interdependent economies and markets—literary, mercantile, criminal—subverting the very possibility of categorical cut-offs for the Neo-Victorian novel at arbitrary national borders, which even in imperial Britain’s case, were already permeable and often in flux” (28). Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss add to this argument that the Victorians themselves had a mirror perspective of themselves, as Dickens illustrated in A Tale of Two Cities, of looking to the recent (and sometimes distant) past to compare themselves with then and now (5–6). Neo-Victorianism should include popular works, neo-Austen and multimedia (3). Likewise, then, it is appropriate to include at least one chapter in NeoVictorian Madness on neo-Regency works. Mary Balogh may be considered “too popular” to be on the academic radar, but she has published more than 60 novels and 30 novellas and has appeared more than 35 times on The New York Times Best Sellers list. She was first inspired by the novels of Jane Austen and then by Georgette Heyer. With her first publication of The Black Moth in 1921, Heyer has been credited as the inventor of the historical romance and one of its subgenres, the Regency Romance (Regis 2003, 125–26). A. S. Byatt was so impressed with Heyer’s work that she wrote one article asking why she is so good (1992, 239) and extolling her works as “An Honourable Escape” (1992). She also wrote an article titled “Georgette Heyer is a Better Novelist Than You Think” (2001). Similarly, Brenda Ayres values the work of Mary Balogh, in Chapter 5, “A Necessary Madness,” in particular, Balogh’s literary therapy of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the Victorians typically romanticised war, Balogh’s bestselling novels, which are set mostly in the early nineteenth century, did not. Beginning in 2013, Balogh produced eight books that comprise the Survivors’ Club series and probe nearly every aspect imaginable of war-related PTSD. Without sentimentality, Balogh divulges the topsy-turviness and untidiness of war’s aftermath on commissioned officers from the Napoleonic War. Furthermore, her plots offer resolution, healing and hope, not only for her characters but also for her readers who may be suffering from PTSD or who knows someone afflicted by PTSD. Even though Balogh foregrounds PTSD caused by the Peninsular Wars, she concurrently draws parallels between it and

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other forms of PTSD caused by behaviour and events that were also forbidden subjects to be discussed during the nineteenth century, such as spousal abuse, abandonment of a child by an alcoholic parent, Down syndrome, bankruptcy through gambling, psychological damage from social and familial rejection, rape, spousal infidelity, miscarriages, death of a spouse, death of a child, homosexuality and the inability of women to follow their dreams and hearts or to have a means to provide financially for themselves and children. Although such themes do appear in Victorian novels, they are not treated with the psychological insight and the possibility of recovery apparent in Balogh’s novels. Eckart Voigts bridges madness as it was depicted in the nineteenth century with a contemporary understanding of mental illness. Chapter 6, “Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, ‘Unwomen,’ and Femmes Fatales : Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I,” opens with a reminder that as Gothic horror stories proliferated in the Victorian era, mad and unreliable narration became a standard device—from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Robert Browning’s “mad” dramatic monologues in “My Last Duchess” or “Porphyria’s Lover” (Rohwer-Happe 2011) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Somewhat over-represented, madness has also been a staple of neo-Victorian narratives, whose “refashioning of the Victorian madness topos” (Kirchknopf 2008, 71) regularly features hysterical women and mad scientists. Even Wide Sargasso Sea seeks to redress the literary fate of the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre by reassigning narrative agency. While a frequently gendered revision of lunacy is thus a core concern in neo-Victorian narratives, Chapter 6 discusses questions of its reliability. Starting from the assumption that the unreliable narrator fulfils essential functions in Gothic and neo-Victorian tales of repression, memory and identity (Smith 2013, 188), Voigts argues that assignations of “madness” frequently seek to clarify the contemporary attitude vis-à-vis the Victorian Gothic scenarios. This chapter addresses questions of unreliability and insanity in texts such as Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk (2012) and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I (2011). In Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), mental extremity takes on multiple forms in such figures as the extended cast of neo-Victorian types railing against grinding urban poverty. Chapter 7, “‘Dear Holy Sister’: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White” by Marshall Armintor, examines the layers of anxiety and insanity in both Faber’s

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novel and Munden and Coxon’s adaptation, tied to the procreative and sexed body and the struggles of the female subjects in the Rackham orbit to seize and stabilise the narrative over those bodies. Faber’s mental extremity takes on multiple forms in such figures as the extended cast of neo-Victorian types railing against grinding urban poverty. The many intertextual references woven into the book and also films (The Exorcist, Clarissa and The Woman in White) underline the struggle to make sense of the mania of life in the London of the 1870s. Even though each of the women in this novel are destined for some kind of narrative oblivion (whether through desertion, watery graves, or the threat of the asylum), each overcomes their confinement and trauma through madness. Tensions between the Victorian and neo-Victorian emerge in the space between the sensationalism of ideologies in the nineteenth century and the modern understanding of people and concepts in the twenty-first century. At no point is this tension better realised than between the salacious incarnation of the “mad person” and the hard reality of mental illness. Elaine Showalter posits that the fictional nineteenth-century madwoman is representative of the “author’s double” or “the incarceration of her own anxiety and rage” (1994, 4), and is, in fact, an “unconscious form of feminist protest” (5); however, in the context of the neo-Victorian novel, when not only madwomen but all women have “taken up residence in the front room” (52) of social, political and ideological discourses around sexuality and gender, one might ask how unconscious does this “feminist protest” remain, and what does the neo-Victorian madwoman and her relationships represent in a temporal period where rage is no longer unconscious? In the nineteenth century, the most common diagnosis of women’s “maladies” was called “female hysteria.” As for functions of the woman’s reproductive system, it simply was not proper to discuss such things. In general the many euphemisms boil down to “the unmentionables.”11 In Chapter 8, “The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman,” Brenda Ayres tracks the attitudes of the Victorians during the nineteenth century to menstruation, puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum depression, sexual desire and menopause. Sarah E. Maier then analyses how Ripper Street , the BBC UK/Amazon series that ran for five seasons from and 37 episodes from December 30, 2012, to October 12, 2016, infuses contemporary awareness and sensitivities in contrast to Victorian ignorance of women’s bodies and their minds. More significantly, Chapter 8 emphasises that Victorian perceptions of women and their sexual apparati and

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functions might have been defined by the best medical minds of the day, but in truth they were driven by patriarchal political ideologies meant to keep men in power in both the private and public spheres. Neo-Victorian narratives expose that agenda, rebel against it and give voice to what really was behind all that insanity experienced by our Victorian mothers and sisters. The Victorian madwoman (and especially a hysterical woman) has been a feminist icon in feminist criticism, but as noted by Marta CamineroSantangelo in The Madwoman Cannot Speak (1998), female madness constitutes an inherent paradox: The subversiveness of a madwoman is paired with her inability to express herself, her lack of language and retreat into the world of fantasy. This paradoxical failure of the madwoman as a rebellious ideal maybe, with the use of queer theory in line with Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), transformed into a sign of refusal to conform. This “embodiment of failure,” the madwoman’s lack of (coherent) language may instead represent the rejection of the logocentrism and coherence of the heterosexual matrix, as Barbara Braid argues in Chapter 9, “Queering the Madwoman.” Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997) is a neo-Victorian biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess. Grace’s “inability to speak”—fragmentation, instability and incompleteness of her narrative—is what makes it queer; its queerness is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp. Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also discusses the television adaptation of the to examine alternative techniques used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoherence of the self, and to examine if Grace Marks of the television show is also, indeed, a (queer) madwoman. Like Judith Butler’s drag queen/king, who destabilises the assumptions of “true,” coherent gender identity via imitation, parody and excess (2004, 52), a madwoman performs a similar role, undercutting the possibility of a self in general and a gender self in particular, working to “displace all certainty and especially to displace norms of identity” (Beasley 2005, 102). Finding a kindred spirit in a closeted gay by the name of Dorian Gray, Vanessa Ives fractures the Freud ian depiction of Victorian women as frivolous, unintelligent and in need of more masculine traits. In the Showtime television series Penny Dreadful, Tim Posada in Chapter 10 perceives a woman who is not powerful because she acts more like a man—a common convention in action films that merely make women just as violent

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and crass as male protagonists—but because she is a self-actualised woman aware of, but not guided by, Victorian-era London’s social classes. The central argument here is that Vanessa functions as a victim-hero who transcends both horror norms and the Victorian affinity for deeming unique women hysterical. Chapter 10, “‘Old Monsters, Old Curses’: The New Hysterical Woman in Penny Dreadful ” draws upon nineteenth-century nascent research on hysteria including the historical role of Jean-Martin Charcot’s exhibitions of female hysterics during the Victorian era and the eventual connection to horror cinema noted by Angela M. Smith (2011). Women are not the only mentally ill individuals in either the nineteenth or the twentieth-first century. In Chapter 11, “The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock,” John Murray inspects the character of Jim Moriarty and his influence on the BBC’s series Sherlock (2010– 2017). Moriarty creates subversive mythology to resist hierarchical structure and synchronise knowledge, power and agency. In so doing, he traverses thresholds of the spatial and ideological. The series transforms linear and sequential plotting by allowing the character to disconnect from the storyline and reconnect at any nodal point, without offering viewers many clues to his representation and portrayal. Moriarty becomes a multipurpose tool for challenging television’s ontological standards and for directing viewers’ exploration through a participatory model of television. Even in defeat, the character of Moriarty survives, evolves and is transformed by the fears and anxieties of viewers. In the 1835 A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind, James Cowles Prichard defines “moral insanity” as “madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucination” (1837 [1835], 16). Problematically, Prichard makes many assumptions regarding gender, convention(s), morality and nature, and typically, the Victorians silenced those who supposedly suffered from moral insanity. Sarah E. Maier’s Chapter 12, “Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives,” finds challenges to such attitudes in such neo-Victorian narratives as Wendy Wallace’s The Painted Bridge (2012) and Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (1996). These neo-Victorian narratives seek to deny any nostalgic or veiled representation of madness; instead, they demonstrate how individual difference—or inclination, habit, nature and/or imagination—is often turned

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into a weapon to traumatise and silence persons who do not adhere to social expectations but see life “otherwise.” Maier’s chapter argues that neo-Victorian narratives of madness critiques the Victorian context in which one may demonstrate intellect, rational behaviour and no outward signs of illness but still be deemed socially unfit. Particularly, the neurotic lunatic is victimised if appearing to hold ideas that violate decorum, whether it be in resistance to treatments, spectral visions, unconventional belief systems or exposure of mob mentalities. The misdiagnoses in these narratives expose how imagination is derogated as madness. They offer a corrective: creativity and/or what might be termed excessive intellectualism or misguided self-authority over one’s own person are not madness but rather a refusal to submit to loss of emotional and psychological agency. Thus, the chapters in this collection study Neo-Victorian fascinations with Victorian madness in light of past and present ideas of the figuration of the “mad.” They highlight the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad including how we may/may not replicate them in present-day representations, all the while assuring modern readers that the way Victorians regarded and treated “maladies of the mind” tells us more about their political agenda, gender biases, hegemonic control, social normalisation and cultural history—all of which, really, are forms of another sort of Victorian madness.

Notes 1. The 1990s have become known as the third wave of feminism. See Davies (2018). The fourth wave would begin with the second decade of the twenty-first century and has sometimes been labelled postfeminism(s). See Rivers (2017). 2. Brenda Ayres knew this to be true because she was a doctoral candidate in 1990. 3. Buckley cites all these claims from a variety of scholarly works published between 1918 and 1945. They must have been the sources that informed his own understanding of Victoriana. See his notes 2 through 10 on 249– 50. 4. Dickens makes this point with this quote in his article titled “Steppers” (1884, 31). 5. See Simon Joyce (2007).

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6. Emerson said this in a speech, “The American Scholar,” made on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. 7. In truth, we were unable to find that Dickens used either “perspicacity” or “perspicacious” in any of his novels. However, a web search finds over a hundred critics who lauded Dickens for his “perspicacity” and in particular the perspicacity exhibited by his characters, such as Liam Clarke’s attribution to Mrs. Gump: “A woman of perspicacity, she spread herself wide in the service of others and was thus needful of some comfort [gin] to do so” (2008, 77). In Death by Dickens, a collection of neo-Dickens short stories, Bill Crider writes, “Mr. Pickwick had no doubts about the perspicacity of his servant [(Sam)]” (2004, 46). Even those who wrote about Dickens were considered perspicacious; a reviewer for The Quarterly Review said so about biographer John Forster (1872, 147). 8. A fictional town, but no doubt representing Burslem, it is a part of the city of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. Burslem is listed in the Domesday book as a small farming hamlet, but in the 1890s, was an industrial district known for its potteries, mines and working canal barges. It was the home of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood in the eighteenth century. 9. See his The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867). 10. Ayres’ Chapter 5 discusses the ongoing debate about high versus low culture in classifying literature. 11. The Victorians were not alone in their reticence to discuss such things. One website claims that there are over 5000 slang terms for “menstruation.” See O’Connor (2016).

Bibliography Alias Grace. Directed by Mary Harron. Canada: CBC Television. 2017. Andrews, Jonathan, and Anne Digby, eds. Sex and Seclusion: Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Angus, Maddison. Development Centre Studies the World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001. Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. New York: Norton, 2007. Aref, Nessa, and Alysson Hall. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, 2013–2014. youtube id=”GK8HqCXybok. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. Beasley, Chris. Gender and Sexuality: Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers. London: Sage, 2005.

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Bennett, Enoch Arnold. These Twain. London: Methuen, 1916. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. Introduction: “Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions.” In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, edited by Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss, 1–20. New York: Routledge, 2014. Bowman, Isaiah. The New World: Problems in Political Geography. Yonkers-onHudson, New York: World Book Company, 1922. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. New York: Carleton, 1864. https://books. google.com/books?id=lSMGAAAAQAAJ. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1858. https://books.google.com/books?id=KhMYAAAAYAAJ. Brown, Joshua D., and Amie J. Goodin. “Mass Casualty Shooting Venues, Types of Firearms, and Age of Perpetrators in the United States, 1982–2018.” AJPH Open-Themed Research 108, no. 10 (October 2018): 1386–87. https://ajph. aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304584. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. New York: Vintage, 1964. Burtinshaw, Kathryn, and John R. F. Burt. Lunatics, Imbeciles and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword, 2017. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects: Two Novellas. New York: Vintage Press, 1993. ———. “Georgette Heyer Is a Better Novelist Than You Think.” In Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, 270–77. Saraland, AL: Prinnyworld Press, 2001. ———. “An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer.” In Passions of the Mind, Selected Writings, by A. S. Byatt, 233–40. New York: Random House, 1992. ———. Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Cannot Speak, Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Random, 2010. ———. The Angel of Darkness: A Novel. New York: Ballentine, 1997. Clarke, Liam. Reading Mental Health Nursing: Education, Research, Ethnicity and Power. Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone Elsevier, 2008. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Coleborne, Catharine. Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. ———. Reading “Madness”: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1880s. Perth, WA: Network Books, 2007.

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Community Management of Opioid Overdose. World Health Organization, 2015. Crider, Bill. “Mr. Pickwick vs. the Body Snatchers.” In Death by Dickens, edited by Anne Perry, 29–48. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2004. Davies, Edward. Third Wave Feminism and Transgender: Strength Through Diversity. Oxon: Routledge, 2018. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 1864. New York: Pollard and Moss, 1884. https://books.google.com/books?id=AFcYAAAAYAAJ. ———. “Steppers.” All the Year Round 35 (October 18, 1884): 29–35. https:// books.google.com/books?id=KjUFAAAAQAAJ. ———. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Ed. Andrew Lang. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868. https://books.google.com/books?id=YqfPAAAAMAAJ. “Drug Overdose Deaths.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” June 27, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Nature; Addresses, and Lectures. Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, 1849. https:// books.google.com/books?id=kIghAAAAMAAJ. Erikson, Kai. A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters. New York: Norton, 1994. Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002. Fish, Laura. Strange Music. London: Vintage, 2009. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Signet, 1969. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Gilbert, Susan, and Sandra Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Gun Violence Archive 2019. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/. Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. New York: Rodopi, 1994. ———, and Wolfreys, Julian. “Postmodernism Revisited: The Ethical Drive of Postmodern Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction.” In Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 37–72. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Haight, Gordon S., ed. The Portable Reader. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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Jones, Amelia. “Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art.” In New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, edited by Joana Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven, 16–41. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Kapil, Rubina. “5 Surprising Mental Health Statistics.” USA Mental Health First Aid. National Council for Behavioral Health. 2019. https://www. mentalhealthfirstaid.org/2019/02/5-surprising-mental-health-statistics/. Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana—Histories, Fictions, Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Kirchknopf, Andrea. “(Re)Workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions: Terminology, Contexts.” Neo-Victorians Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 53–80. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal.” In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revistations, edited by Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss, 21–37. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———, and Christian Gutleben. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. New York: Rodopi, 2010. ———, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. ———, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Lou, Michelle, and Christina Walker. “There Have Been 22 Schools Shootings in the US So Far This Year.” CNN. July 26, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/ 2019/05/08/us/school-shootings-us-2019-trnd/index.html. “Management of Substance Abuse.” World Health Organization. 2018. https:// www.who.int/substance_abuse/information-sheet/en/. Maunder, Andrew, and Grace Moore, eds. Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2004. McGinnis, Mindy. A Madness So Discreet. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. “Mental Health: Suicide Data.” American Health Organization. 2009. https:// www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/. O’Connor, Roisin. “Menstruation Study Finds over 5,000 Slang Terms for ‘Period’: Euphemisms Were Found in 10 Different Languages.” Independent. March 1, 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/healthand-families/menstruation-study-finds-over-5000-slang-terms-for-perioda6905021.html. Pedlar, Valerie. The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006.

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Penny Dreadful. Directed by Damon Thomas et al. Showtime Television Series, 2014–2016. Perry, Sarah. Essex Serpent. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Prichard, James Cowles. Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. 1835. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1837. https://books. google.com/books?id=0PIRAAAAYAAJ. The Quarterly Review. Article VI: Unsigned review of The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 1, 1812–1842, by John Forster. 132, no. 263 (January 1872): 125–47. http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://searchproquest-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/2479213?accountid=12085. Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Renk, Kathleen J. Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1966. Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. “Mental Health.” Our World Data. April 2018. https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health. Rivers, Nicola. Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rohwer-Happe, Gislind. Unreliable Narration im Dramatischen Monolog des Viktorianismus: Konzepte und Funktionen. Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2011. Rushforth, Peter. Pinkerton’s Sister. 1996. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2005. Sample, Ian. “Victorian Novels Helped Us Evolve into Better People, Say Psychologists.” The Guardian (January 14, 2009). https://www.theguardian. com/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch. BBC: Masterpiece Theatre. 2010–2017. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. ———. Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Shoemaker, Sarah. Mr. Rochester. New York: Grand Central, 2017. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel.” In The Third Culture: Literature and Science, edited by Elinor S. Shaffer, 253–68. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997. Simonov, Konstantin. The Living and the Dead. Tokyo: Pickle Partners, 2016. Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature. 2007. 2nd Ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

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“The State of Mental Health in America 2018.” Mental Health America. 2018. https://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/sites/default/files/2018% 20The%20State%20of%20MH%20in%20America%20-%20FINAL.pdf. Stephenson, William. Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. London: Continuum, 2007. “Suicide Statistics.” American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. 2019. https:// afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/. Swift, Graham. Ever After. New York: Vintage, 1998. Ussher, Jane. The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience. London: Routledge, 2011. ———. Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. Misogyny or Mental Illness? Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Vickroy, Laurie. Reading Trauma Narratives: The Contemporary Novel and the Psychology of Oppression. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Wallace, Wendy. The Painted Bridge: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. New York: Riverhead, 2002. Widdowson, Peter. “‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction.” Textual Practice 20, no. 3 (2006): 491–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09502360600828984.

CHAPTER 2

“I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre Kate Faber Oestreich

Scores of authors, directors and digital producers have adapted, revised and modernised Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). As Antonija Primorac notes, neo-Victorianism is “a powerful trend in contemporary Anglophone media” pointing to the “continuous production of adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture” (2017, 452). These ubiquitous transformations of Jane Eyre reveal transtexual1 parallels between nineteenth- and twentyfirst-century life, including the ways in which women with substance use disorders are understood to be mad—so mad, in fact, that the community’s future happiness depends on the addicted female character’s death.2 In Sean and Sinead Persaud’s web series Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, the character “Charlotte Brontë” colludes in a scheme to murder a slew of authors in order to cover up that her sister killed Jane Austen for threatening to expose their brother Branwell’s misdeeds. At first glance, this version of Brontë seems absurdly inaccurate for the sake of comedy. She is too sardonic, too vindictive and

K. F. Oestreich (B) Department of English, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_2

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too violent. Yet this Brontë—who proudly and gleefully murders Fyodor Dostoevsky with an axe to the skull, poisons two police officers and plunges a butcher knife into Lenore’s abdomen—is in some ways a plausible parody (2016, ch. 11). The Persauds overemphasise aspects of Brontë’s personality—resentment, anger, desire for vengeance—that she downplayed, repressed and tried to annihilate. In the real Brontë’s correspondence, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Ellen Nussey’s “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë” (1871), she appears to be an admixture of nineteenth-century English feminine and unfeminine traits: devout yet irreverent, vivacious yet introverted; kind yet moody; trustworthy yet questioning; dutiful daughter, sister and friend yet not particularly fond of her pupils.3 Brontë transposes many of these characteristics onto Jane Eyre’s titular character, as well as her own plain features, short stature, occupations and affection for a married man. Jane Eyre additionally reveals Brontë’s self-serving side: when, for instance, Jane fails to feel compassion for Bertha’s plight, barely containing her pleasure when she hears that Bertha is “dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered” (2016 [1847], 381). Jane candidly recounts Rochester’s description of Bertha as a “madwoman and a drunkard! … a bad, mad, and embruted partner!” (262). Like Thomas Leitch’s “triangular notion of intertextuality” (2012, 95), the hypertexts examined within this chapter incorporate not only their hypotext’s but also other hypertexts’ narratives, such as Jean Rhys’s prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in which Antoinette cum Bertha, like her mother, is driven to insanity: “They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. … no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. … In the end—mad” (1966, 94). Antoinette seeks refuge from her husband’s emotional abuse by drinking cup after cup of rum, a snare that grants temporary relief but traps her in a cyclic prison of desiring repeated doses.4 After Rochester sees Antoinette “dead drunk on bad rum,” he declares, “she’s a wreck. I scarcely recognized her” (93), implying that Antoinette’s drunkenness makes her subhuman. Christophine immediately recognises Rochester’s plan to “pretend she is mad. … The doctors say what you tell them to say” (1966, 96), providing a patina of medical care so that Bertha’s community is relinquished from superintending her well-being. Bertha is a scapegoat, not only for Brontë but also for modern authors that perceive the insanity of substance abuse disorders sufficient justification to murder the addict in order to salvage the romantic, heteronormative couple.

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Despite the many liberties Rhys’s prequel and subsequent Jane Eyre hypertexts take with their hypotext’s narrative, the Bertha figure persistently haunts these tales, illustrating that Jane needs Bertha, needs a mad addict, to legitimise Jane’s claim to superiority. Margot Livesey’s The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012b, hereafter FGH ), April Lindner’s Jane (2010) and Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013–2014, hereafter AJE) appropriate portions of their hypotext Jane Eyre in order to reinterpret and re-vision concepts of selfhood and addiction by highlighting the madness associated with a range of addicting substances, from champagne to whisky, pills to heroin. These hypertexts reveal that popular ideology surrounding substance use disorders has constants: worries about intoxication, especially among women; confusion over willpower versus addiction and the perception that addiction is, ipso facto, insanity. Despite their greater openness than the original text about substance use disorders, modern appropriations of Jane Eyre do not view the “Bertha” character any more sympathetically than did Brontë. Furthermore, the female characters whose addictions lead to diagnoses of insanity reveal modern cultural anxieties about women, sexuality, marriage and motherhood. Brontë’s brother Branwell’s addictions and nineteenth-century beliefs on la addiction as madness provide context in which to examine the above intra- and intermedial transformations. Brontë’s family history illustrates that living with an addict is emotionally, physically and psychologically exhausting. By 1845 Branwell’s addictions had progressed to the point that he suffered from seizures and delirium tremens, stole from the family, “required extrication from a burning bed he himself set alight” and feared for his own sanity (Marchbanks 2010, 58–59). Brontë confided to her friend Ellen Nussey that “no sufferings are so awful as those brought on by dissipation—alas! I see the truth of this observation daily proved” (Smith 2010, 441–42). Although the Brontë family felt it their duty to care for Branwell at home, Brontë seethed under her perception that Branwell was weak-willed, choosing to continue consuming addictive substances. The week after Branwell’s death due to “chronic bronchitis and marasmus,” most surely exacerbated by his addiction to alcohol and opiates, Brontë wrote to W. S. Williams5 that “I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—… I had aspirations and ambitions for him once— long ago—they have perished mournfully—nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings” (Smith 120). Living with Branwell’s

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alcohol and opium addictions left Brontë bereft of compassion for her brother, instead clinging to her resentments and mourning her dreams for him that he had failed to fulfil. Brontë’s chagrin over Branwell’s dependence mirrors Victorian Era frustrations with England’s long history of excessive drinking. Leaders in the medical field knew even in the late sixteenth century that alcohol addiction is “a progressive disease characterised by a loss of control over drinking, the cure for which is total abstinence” (Nicholls 2009, 65), yet alcohol was widely consumed and wickedly profitable, so it remained legally available and regulated in only a slipshod manner. After King William III introduced to England a Dutch spirit, “Geneva,” which was eventually shortened to gin, the foreign beverage was quickly vilified as the cause of English subjects’ inability to consume responsibly.6 The 1736 Gin Act—which attempted to rid England of the “disease of drunkenness” by effectively prohibiting the production and distribution of gin—paradoxically created the “Gin Craze” of the early 1740 s, during which gin became associated with poverty, crime and insanity (36–37, 44–45). The press leveraged gin’s popularity to stoke fears that lowerclass women’s drunkenness prevented them from fulfilling their true calling to reproduce and nurture, thereby ruining both England’s moral fibre and future (41).7 Long after the Gin Craze passed, the prevailing notion remained that beer was a healthy, English drink (Skelly 2011, 56; Nicholls 34–48).8 But the 1830 Beer Act created an “explosion” in public drinking establishments (Nicholls 91–92), fostering the perception that both gin and beer were poisonous to health and home. This act, therefore, cemented the growing divide between capitalists that appreciated alcohol’s economic market value and temperance advocates that deplored the commercialisation of useless, addictive substances. In 1843 dipsomania entered the lexicon as “A morbid and insatiable craving for alcohol, often of a paroxysmal character … persistent drunkenness” (OED), helping to cement linguistically that alcohol addiction is a physiological disease that manifests as insane behaviour.9 It was during this time, between August 25, 1846, and August 24, 1847, that Brontë was writing Jane Eyre. Jane first mentions beer soon after she arrives at Thornfield, when she discloses having seen Grace “come out of her room … and shortly return, generally (oh, romantic reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth!) bearing a pot of porter” (Brontë 101). “Generally” suggests that Grace frequently partakes of porter. Although Jane gossips her disapproval, she neither investigates

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why Grace has the beverage nor attempts to dissuade her from imbibing. The day after Jane believes Grace has set Mr. Rochester’s bed on fire, Jane is “absolutely dumfounded” at Grace’s “miraculous self–possession and most inscrutable hypocrisy” when Grace asks calmly for “my pint of porter” (141). Although beer was widely consumed, porter had come to be associated with the working classes; with fears of adulteration by “dangerous drugs” or “toxic additives,” including opium; and with Ireland, in part since Guinness had industrialised production in the early nineteenth century (Sumner 2008, 300). Grace’s porter, therefore, would have struck Jane as a low-class, foreign beverage that was insanely too potent for a woman to be consuming. Jane imputes that Grace is an alcoholic by freely spreading others’ unsubstantiated reports that she consumes gin to excess. After Rochester is forced to reveal he employs Grace to guard Bertha, he confides, “Grace has, on the whole, proved a good keeper; though, owing partly to a fault of her own, of which it appears nothing can cure her and which is incident to her harassing profession, her vigilance has been more than once lulled and baffled” (Brontë 277), perhaps relying on the stereotype of ginaddicted nurses popularised by Charles Dickens’s Sairey Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). Similarly, the host at the Rochester Arms Inn confides to Jane that Grace is “an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault … she kept a private bottle of gin by her” (380; emphasis in original). The host, who most surely never entered Thornfield hall’s third floor, recites details that closely mimic Rochester’s account, revealing he is recirculating Rochester’s tale which Jane then unquestioningly repeats as fact. The host criticises Grace for taking “now and then … a drop over–much” and falling “fast asleep after the gin and water” (380), insinuating that without the gin, there would not have been an opportunity for “the mad lady, who was as cunning as a witch, would take the keys out of her [Grace’s] pocket … and go roaming about the house, doing any wild mischief that came into her head” (380). As Bertha’s sole caretaker, Grace spent all but “one hour in the twenty-four” (149) guarding her; therefore, Bertha would have had six to nine hours every day during which to wreak havoc while Grace slept. Since Bertha’s episodes were not repeated nightly, a more likely conclusion would be that Grace’s cups of porter and store of gin were intended for Bertha and that occasionally Grace accidentally provided Bertha with a “drop over-much” (380), igniting Bertha’s rage, which Bertha acted upon after Grace had fallen asleep.

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Prejudice towards older, unmarried female workers taints Jane’s perceptions of Grace, helping Jane to conclude that Grace is criminal, bizarre, even alcoholic—which the Rochester Arms Inn host asserts is “a fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons” (380)—all without firsthand confirmation and despite visual evidence to the contrary. For example, Jane continues to believe Grace is an alcoholic who had lighted Rochester’s bed even though Jane sees Grace the next morning “thread[] her needle with a steady hand” (140). By contrast, Bertha’s eyes are the very picture of an alcoholic’s—bloodshot “red balls” (263)—and she exhibits a hedonistic behaviour of an addict. Julia Skelly argues that there was “the long–held belief that women’s drunkenness was morally more reprehensible than men’s” and “secretive” (57, 59). Due to these prejudices, women were reticent to drink in public and surreptitious about their drinking in private, but they did drink. Jane Eyre reveals that alcohol addiction is not just an external threat found in men’s dram houses but internal, hiding in the women’s domestic sphere. Strikingly, descriptions of public taverns in the mid-nineteenth century bring to mind Bertha’s room on the third floor of Thornfield in their desire for “concealment” with doors that closed automatically and dark windows so that outsiders cannot see the occupants inside (51). Without visual confirmation, the rumours surrounding Grace’s alcohol use are just that, rumours that adhere to the dominant lay ideology that working women’s—and especially nurses’—weak wills leave them prone to making choices that threaten public safety. Ominously, though, the steady stream of alcohol provided by the kitchen and delivered by Grace hints that Rochester condones Bertha’s consumption. As Bertha’s sole caretaker and guard, it would not have been unusual for Grace to administer porter and gin as either beverage or medicine; Victorian doctors often prescribed alcohol, even though it was known to contribute to addiction, especially in women (Porter 1985, 387). In The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (2009), James Nicholls posits that eighteenth-century doctors like George Cheyne began to believe there was a “physiological reason why intoxicating drinks might be detrimental to mental health” because they “collapsed the division between body and mind” and that “intoxicating drinks were ‘sensible causes’ of ‘madness and lunacy’” (61); therefore, intoxication was seen as a “voluntary madness.” Brontë’s rage over her family’s (and England’s) inability to effectively treat alcoholism manifests by the end of Jane Eyre in the methodical

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execution of all alcoholics whose deaths ensure their finances are better utilised by temperate citizens. First, John Reed’s death, whose “life has been very wild” and who “ruined his health” before “kill[ing] himself” (Brontë 199–200), capitalises on the association between alcoholism and suicide that had been established since the 1790s (Goldney and Schioldann 2000, 182). Jane’s speechless acceptance that her archenemy will be denied a Christian burial and his property forfeited to the crown (Laragy 2013, 733) may signal her belief in divine retribution. Second, as Alexandra Valint persuasively argues in “Madeira and Jane Eyre’s Colonial Inheritance,” John Eyre dies from the “disease” of “decline” or alcoholism (2017, 329). Jane represses that her uncle’s fortune results from Madeira wine’s addictive qualities, celebrating her inheritance, which signals her financial and emotional salvation and enables her to marry Rochester on more equitable financial ground. The third and final alcohol-related death is Bertha’s, at her own hand. In the nineteenth century, Bertha’s suicide would have verified Rochester’s claim that she was insane (Laragy 735), indeed, she represents the cyclical reasoning behind Victorian’s understanding of insanity: addiction to alcohol is a sign of insanity; persons who abuse alcohol are more prone to commit suicide; and suicide proves one is insane. Brontë’s “murderous” rage against alcoholics is the key to the denouement of Jane’s romantic quest: John Eyre’s, John Reed’s and Bertha’s deaths bequeath to Jane family ties, financial security, love, respect and revenge. In honour of Bertha, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar entitled their groundbreaking feminist examination of Victorian literature, The Madwoman in the Attic. In it, they argue that Brontë describes “female realities” of the nineteenth-century: “confinement … rage even to madness” (2000 [1979], 336) and note that the larger structure of Jane Eyre relies repeatedly on enclosure and then “attempts to escape through … madness” (341). The character’s responses to Bertha’s madness in Jane Eyre makes manifest Brontë’s attempt to transcend her own impotent fear, rage and resentment over a life tainted by the irrationality of her brother Branwell’s addictions. This lack of empathy or sense of responsibility for persons suffering from substance use disorders permeates modernised appropriations of Jane Eyre. FGH, Jane and AJE were all written in the 2010s and have a feminist literary perspective; highlight a Bertha-figure with a substance use disorder and are set in current/former British colony. Many other modernisations of Jane Eyre also meet several of these criteria but not all, such as Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001), Lorrie Moore’s

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A Gate at the Stairs (2010), Eve Maria Mont’s A Breath of Eyre (2012), Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2016) and Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester: A Novel (2017). The three modernisations analysed below clearly illustrate that Bertha, the mad addict, remains a necessary scapegoat. In FGH, Margot Livesey moved Jane Eyre from England to her native Scotland, setting the novel in the late 1950s and 1960s “before the tide of feminism broke over the U.S. and Europe, bringing with it the Pill, equal rights, and a far greater range of jobs for women” (Livesey 2012a, 9). Lacking the means to pursue a college degree, Gemma accepts Hugh Sinclair’s position as au pair for his niece, Nell. Although Bertha the wife is erased from FGH, she still haunts the story. Gemma confesses, “As a married woman, I told myself, I would have certain freedoms. … But at night I dreamed of barred windows and small, dark rooms” (Livesey 2012b, 393). The sense of confinement that permeates the narrative is not just for women. Instead, part of Bertha’s narrative is transcribed to the Rochesterfigure, Hugh Sinclair, who is mentally scarred after being trapped for hours in an underground tomb by his friend Seamus. Hugh’s resulting anguish explains both why and how Hugh manipulates Seamus into taking over Hugh’s cramped, subterranean work as a Bevin Boy in World War II. The next weapon Hugh wields is money: He pays Seamus three thousand pounds. The final and most egregious temptation Hugh exploits is his sister, Alison; Hugh promises Seamus “his heart’s desire” by pledging to “do everything I could to persuade Alison to marry him, and to ensure that our father gave permission” (274). Although Seamus’ suffocating combat duty as a Bevin Boy attempts to illustrate how men are as confounded as women by gender roles, the men conspire to exchange Alison as a form of payment, plotting to transfer legal ownership of her sexualised body from father to prospective groom. Their scheme is, ultimately, unsuccessful and the disappointed men spend the next years exhibiting extremely anti-social behaviour and problematic relationships with alcohol, yet neither are labelled insane nor as addicts, nor do they die. Instead, Bertha’s legacy of madness, addiction and death is transposed onto Alison, their prey. Hugh laments that Alison was “trapped” “in a single passion” and that “Sometimes Alison didn’t care what she did, or was too drunk to mind who touched her” (Livesey 2012b, 193), clearly conflating Alison’s intoxication with loose morals at best, prostitution at worst. Hugh explains, “[Alison] became addicted to painkillers, then to other things as well. A pretty girl with money, she could get whatever

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she wanted” (219). Hugh implies that money is not enough; that Alison needs a greater currency, her body, to pay men for the substances she needs to sate her addiction. Hugh’s judgmental stance prevents him from providing Alison, his own sister, with emotional support, even posthumously. Hugh remarks that “Nell was alone with her when she died” (219), implying that Alison was so depraved that she overdosed while caring for her daughter. Later, differences in gendered expectations are highlighted when Seamus recalls that on the night Alison dies, “We were passing a pub and I stopped for a quick dram. I hoped the whisky would help me mind my tongue” (270), ascribing alcohol supernatural powers to replace his own lack of control. By the time Seamus finishes his whisky, Alison “was already rolling down her sleeve” (270). Hugh expostulates that “We don’t really know what happened” but that Seamus “couldn’t forgive himself for not taking Alison to the hospital that night. … Poor Seamus” (219, 275). Although both Seamus and Alison consume intoxicating and addictive substances the night Alison overdoses, Hugh reserves his pity for Seamus, the person who was ostensibly more sober than Alison yet left her to die alone with her child. In the Victorian era, women’s sanity was understood to follow the Hippocratic model, in which women needed their husbands to provide them with regular conjugal intercourse resulting in pregnancy (King 1993, 17– 24, 53); therefore, Bertha’s childlessness and her insanity would have been understood as at least partly Rochester’s fault since he failed to impregnate and, thus, cure Bertha. In the twentieth century, it is the presence of Alison’s—albeit illegitimate—child that overshadows Alison’s dependence on drugs; ironically, both Hugh and Seamus view Alison as the sole adult responsible for Nell’s as well as her own well-being. As Fiona S. Martin and Shaughney Aston argue in “A ‘Special Population’ with ‘Unique Treatment Needs’: Dominant Representations of ‘Women’s Substance Abuse’ and their Effects,” research illustrates how “attention was directed at the effects of women’s substance abuse on their children” and “that more support should be made available to substance-abusing mothers on the grounds that they often struggle to care adequately for their children” (2014, 346–47). Martin and Aston point out that published research “reinforces women’s socially prescribed role as the primary caregivers of children and intensifies the already disproportionate burden of responsibility for child … health that they bear” (351). In other words, women with substance use disorders are caught in a lose-lose situation; society expects them to be the primary caregiver, emphasises that

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the mother should get better for the child’s sake and yet, by privileging the child’s needs over the mother’s, failing to help the mother overcome dependence, and blaming the addicted mother for not saving herself for her child. Hugh’s retelling of Alison’s death reveals the sexist stereotype that women (and especially mothers) suffering from a substance use disorder are more degenerate than addicted men. Following Alison’s overdose, the adults in charge of the now orphaned Nell’s welfare continue to ingest alcohol, and when they do so, drinking is presented as a solution to escaping social, emotional and psychological constraints. This dynamic works to divorce the “casual, sane” use of addictive substances from the “obsessive, insanity” of people suffering from substance use disorders. After Hugh pours himself a cocktail, he “raised his glass and swirled the liquid, as if it were something to admire rather than to drink” (Livesey 2012b, 180). The prestige of pretentious yet disciplined drinking culture is further emphasised when Gemma recounts, “From the trolley of bottles and decanters in the library he poured me a modest glass of wine, and for himself what he called a wee goldie, and we raised our glasses” (265). Here, alcohol symbolises wealth and ease, a display to be taken pride in as long as restraint in “modest” or “wee” consumption is exercised. When Sinclair catches Gemma’s grimace, he “teased me about preferring Ribena” (265), a cloyingly fruity soft drink popular throughout Great Britain, especially among children. Later, although “Any kind of wine still tasted bitter to me,” Gemma continues to drink because “I could tell, after only one sip, that it would make everything easier” (389). When she becomes alarmed that “my legs wobbled, as if I had just stepped from a boat to dry land” (Livesey 2012b, 391) and blurts out “I’ve had too much to drink,” her peers encourage her to continue imbibing, as Hannah replies, “Good for you …. No harm in getting a little tipsy” and Pauline advises, “a glass of water and two aspirin before bed” (391). The ubiquity of alcohol abuse within the culture is underscored by how many people encourage each other to drink alcohol more than they should, even repeating codified advice on how to mitigate—rather than avoid—the consequences of overconsumption. Alcohol’s attraction stems in large part from is its power to reduce another person’s ability to think rationally, making them more amenable to dubious plans. Hugh uses wine as truth serum on Gemma: “First a drink, he said. Then I must tell him what was wrong. … I drank it as if it were a medicine and blurted out [that he must return to work]” (247).

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Although Hugh and Gemma are in a committed relationship, she is incapable of speaking soberly with him about his professional responsibilities, which Hugh has been avoiding by staying home due to sexual shame: He cannot be seen in public with a woman to whom he is not married. After Gemma has drunk sufficiently to overcome her inhibitions, Hugh proposes marriage and she accepts. This scene parallels Rochester offering Jane alcohol after she has learned about that he has a living wife, Bertha. Jane imbibes only this one time within the novel when Rochester, “put wine to my lips; I tasted it and revived,” and later Rochester commands, “Taste the wine again, Jane” and “I obeyed him” (Brontë 268). The contrast between the two scenes illustrates how in the nineteenth-century even characters representing the temperance movement would use alcohol medicinally for fortitude—Jane turns down Rochester’s request that she become his mistress—yet in the twentieth century, modern men and women use alcohol to repress rational objections and justify making life decisions they know to be morally questionable. At the close of the novel, Gemma overrides Hugh’s objection that it is “ten in the morning” and orders two glasses of champagne from a flight attendant (440–41). Her first time ordering alcohol is meant to commemorate her recognition that all humans make mistakes, all humans change. Ironically, she celebrates this newfound maturity by taking another step towards becoming accustomed to habitually consuming alcohol, upping the ante by drinking in the morning. Hugh, an older man, introduces and familiarises Gemma to the regular consumption of an addictive substance that reduces her ability to think and act rationally, which they both know had disastrous consequences for Alyson, who progressed from alcohol, to pills, to intravenous drug use. The penultimate and last sentences of the novel are “I raised my glass and drank again. Then I leaned forward and kissed him” (443), linking alcohol abuse and romance, participating in the normalisation of the hard drinking dram culture of the modern era. Lindner’s Jane as well as Aref and Hall’s The Autobiography of Jane Eyre also grapple with the prevalence of problematic drinking in the twentyfirst century, again highlighting how women are first coaxed by and then punished more harshly than men for becoming hooked on an addictive substance. The World Health Organization’s 2016 report on “Alcohol Consumption: Levels and Patterns” reveals that in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom men report consuming three to four times as much alcohol as women, are at least two to three times more likely to engage in binge drinking and are diagnosed three times as frequently

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as women with an alcohol use disorder or dependence (2019a). Perhaps since female addicts are a proportionally smaller group (and perhaps due to misogyny), “women are customarily ignored in drug research and policy debates, except those concerned with the potential impact of drug use on … children” (Martin and Aston 336). In England females “represent 40% of those in treatment, although only 23% of females in the population have problematic alcohol use” (2019b). It is unclear whether these numbers reveal a greater desire among women to escape addiction or a lower social tolerance of women’s problematic drinking. It is possible that more men in the United States and Canada drink problematically because they earn more than women (OECD) and research shows that the more one earns, the more likely they are to drink alcohol (2019c). Regardless, these narratives highlight how the more financial power a person commands, the more willing others are to overlook their bad behaviour, and the male characters are in general more financially well off than the females. Jane and The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, set in the United States and Canada, respectively, reflect these statistics in that their hard-partying Bertha-figures are treated far more harshly than their similarly hedonistic but high-earning male counterparts despite the women’s repeated attempts to recover from addiction. In the novel Jane, once American college-student Jane learns she has been hired as a nanny for musical legend Nico Rathburn’s daughter, Maddy, she “vaguely recall[s] something about his … on-again, off-again marriage to a model …. Hadn’t they both been junkies?” (8). Turning to the Internet, Jane discovers tabloid reports of Nico’s and his wife, Bibi Olivera’s, drug-fuelled escapades. She pours over pictures in which Bibi mutates from a healthy fashion model with “sun-kissed skin,” “big, engaging smile,” and “leaf-green eyes” to a person with a substance use disorder, who is “skinny as a famine victim, black hair matted, … her wide green eyes broadcasting panic” (14). Aghast, Jane wonders, “In what kind of universe did people wander through their neighborhoods in lacy black panties, too stoned to care what other people thought of them…? No universe I cared to live in” (14); yet, live there Jane must, as she needs a paycheck. It is striking that Jane fails to mention Nico’s physical changes nor his actions, focusing instead on Bibi’s wasted beauty and inappropriate public display of underwear. Jane notices that following “a stint in celebrity rehab” (13), Bibi disappears from the tabloids. Armed with the knowledge that her new job will most likely bring her into close proximity with persons who may or may not still suffer from substance use

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disorders, Jane promises herself, “My time in the alternate universe of coke-snorting rock stars and their strung-out wives … would be brief” (16). Jane’s disdainful attitude reflects how quickly she dehumanises persons who have suffered from addiction, cynically overlooking their time in rehab; her goal is individualistic, self-preservation. Lindner updates Brontë’s Byronic hero for the twentieth century by making Nico a recovering drug addict. Julie of Discriminating Nannies counsels Jane that her new employer has “been sober for a while now. … That bad-boy stuff is old news. Besides … the pay is excellent. … You’re a lucky, lucky girl” (9). Nico romanticises his former dependence on drugs, bragging to Jane about his excesses, abusing cocaine, alcohol and women (79, 80). He then confesses that he corrupted Bibi, whom he describes as “an innocent when I met her” because “She’d never tried coke or anything else.” But “she wanted to keep up with me … to share my interests. … she worshipped me. She’d try anything I’d try” (80). Nico appears contrite when he asks the rhetorical question, “What kind of man does that to a wife?” (80). It seems that Jane, Julie, band mates and general public have all forgiven Nico for his former addiction. When Jane asks what became of Bibi, Nico replies, “She’s far away. … Out of my reach” (81). The distance separating them is mental, not physical because Bibi is locked up in Nico’s house, imprisoned in the turret, a fairy tale gone bad. After Bibi attacks her brother Mason with a steak knife and her own teeth, Mason says, “All I could think of was her, up here—how lonely she must be” to which Nico protests, “She’s not lonely! … I take good care of her” (172). Mason does not believe Nico’s claims that Bibi is contented as “She tried to suck my blood. She said she was going to dig out my heart and eat it,” begging Nico to promise to take good care of her (172). Nico protests, “I’ve always taken good care of her” (172), but his words are directly contradicted by both Bibi’s actions and her physical presence. Like a carnie, Nico offers up Bibi’s middle-aged body as an aberration, shouting, “Come on … you’re in for a treat, an inside look at the freak show I call my life. Be sure to bring your camera phones. I’ll give you something you can sell to the tabloids for half a million dollars. An exclusive!” (247–48). Nico’s big reveal shows that Bibi has in fact suffered gross negligence. She is literally in the dark, alone, unbathed, clad in dirty clothes with uncombed, matted hair, no shoes, and has been practising self-harm. Lindner describes Bibi in the same animalistic way that Brontë describes Bertha, except instead of having exotic black hair, Bibi

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has “wild white hair” (237). This version of Bertha as Other is not so much xenophobic as ageist. Nico claims that Bibi has schizophrenia, rationalising that “Cocaine can do that—trigger schizophrenia if it’s in someone’s genetic makeup. And then there were all the other things we tried—acid, mushrooms, ecstasy, Jack Daniels—in all sorts of combinations” (256). David Nutt, Leslie A. King and Lawrence D, Phillips report in “Drug Harms in the U.K.” that the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs scored drugs according to sixteen harm criteria to users and others, finding “the most harmful drugs to users were heroin (part score 34), crack cocaine (37), and metamfetamine (32), whereas the most harmful to others were alcohol (46), crack cocaine (17), and heroin (21). When the two part-scores were combined, alcohol [72] was the most harmful drug followed by heroin [55] and crack cocaine [54]” (2010, 1560–61). Compare alcohol’s combined score with the other items on Nico’s list: LSD [7], mushrooms [6], ecstasy [9]. Additionally, Nico’s correlation between Bibi’s substance use and her schizophrenia is more complicated in that there is “the wellestablished, very high comorbidity between schizophrenia and cigarette smoking, alcohol misuse, cannabis abuse and dependence and the use of psychostimulants such as cocaine” (Compton et al. 2009, 151). In other words, mental illness is hard to diagnose, to find the root cause of, but it is easy to see that Nico is not treating his wife humanely. Jane is praised by Nico for her calmness and rationality, especially her silent acceptance of his abusive treatment towards Bibi (252). The message is clear: Young women who stoically accept unfair treatment are attractive, but older women who angrily demand fair treatment are insane and expendable— worse than expendable: They must be locked up, abandoned. Meanwhile, the party continues on with a new crop of younger women. Jane illustrates that rich men can consume addictive substances with few repercussions and still maintain their freedom. Despite his past addiction and current abusive behaviour, Nico has held onto his position in the culture, admitting he lured Bibi into drug addiction and then physically imprisoned her. The same culture that praises Nico for recovering from dependence on substances also stigmatises Bibi for manifesting consequences of their earlier addictions. Nico capitulates to this cultural shame, going so far as to thwart Bibi receiving the best mental health care possible, confessing “If I’d sent her away, the press would have gotten wind of it. ‘Rock Star Hides Wife in Mental Institution.’ I’d be the villain. Instead I coasted for years on ‘Rock Star Pulls Life Back Together’” (Lindner

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256–57). Nico cannot give up his personal redemption narrative by being exposed as a person who has not respected standard Christian wedding vows: “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.” Yet in the era of no-fault divorce and mental awareness campaigns, there is no reason to remain married, to neglect one’s wife physically, emotionally, spiritually. Nico cowers before the potential negative publicity because of the social ramifications for him. Yet he is willing to risk these potential headlines: “Famous Musician Locks Wife in Attic” and “Bigamist Lies to Child Bride” (257), portraying the depths of his selfishness: He cannot face negative publicity in order to get the best medical care and support network for his suffering, ageing wife but will risk negative publicity in order to gain sexual access to Jane, a younger woman who is (at the moment) sane. Aref and Hall’s appropriation of Jane Eyre is the transmedia series, AJE, in which excessive drinking is underscored in the web series’s generous reliance on alcohol to both the plot and as a visual prop. Bertha is modernised into Beth M who dates E.D. Rochester for three years in college at which time E.D. describes Beth as “so amazing. She was smart. And passionate. Wild. She made me feel like everything mattered. … There were a lot of parties. Lot of drinking. … We were really in love. I mean really in love” (ep. 56). Everything changes after Beth (whom most of the characters call “M,” because E.D. withholds her first name), becomes pregnant, and suddenly the smart, hardworking, hard-partying millennial is expected by her parents and new husband to become a stayat-home mom. Isolated with her daughter, Adele, she does not stop taking addictive substances, yet neither does E.D., the husband and father. In the episode “Kidnapped!,” Jane asks, “Are you sure you should be the one driving?” (ep. 43), suggesting that E.D. is not sober, and they laugh. E.D.’s reliance on alcohol as an escape is highlighted when he confesses, “I find it’s easier to drink than regret,” to which Jane replies, “Maybe you just find it easier to drink” (ep. 12). Earlier, as E.D. and his friends play charades, a multitude of specific alcohol containers are scattered around the room: glasses for red wine, martinis, high balls and brandy, as well as open bottles of distilled spirits and red and white wine, the latter nestled in a silver chiller. In E.D. and Jane’s off-camera conversation, he asks, “What are you afraid of? Afraid you might have too much fun and never be the same again?” to which Jane replies, “Something like that.” As E.D. chides, “The ever serious Jane Eyre” the crowd behind

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her shouts out “Grey Goose!” a popular brand of vodka. The audio pairs a cacophonous endorsement of alcohol consumption with E.D.’s coercive behaviour. Jane’s penchant towards teetotaling is highlighted when E.D. offers to fill her glass with red wine and she places her hand over the goblet. E.D., stunned, exclaims, “You don’t drink. What do you do?” (ep. 12), emphasising how he views intoxication as analogous to living, underscoring how E.D. combines power and alcohol to dominate young women. Marion Shaw argues that Jane Eyre focuses on how men must be “train[ed] into becoming suitable companions to the new, spiritually independent and morally superior heroines” (2013, 333). Shaw also purports that “the secularism of Charlotte Brontë has appealed to the secular twentieth century” (338), and perhaps Shaw is correct in that Brontë’s secularism exposes human flaws that still exist in the twenty-first century, most clearly the undeserved privileges of patriarchy coupled by the continual idealised expectations for and concomitant damnation of less than perfect wives and mothers. Both E.D. and Jane admit he is a terrible father to Adele. He ignores Adele, is never around and, by his own admission, drinks too much. When Jane presses E.D. about Blanche, he confesses, “She believed the stories. That M ran off. She met another man. That Adele isn’t even mine. She never asked. You never asked.” Jane replies, “It seemed IMPOLITE. You barely lied to me. You barely hurt me” (ep. 56). Jane, like an abused woman, minimises E.D.’s gross dishonesty to her and serious abuse to his wife. Earlier, during a party game, Blanche half–heartedly agrees to E.D.’s “invitation to marry” and be “joined by children” by demurring, “Well I suppose…” After which E.D. exclaims, “—AND I need another drink!” (ep. 22). Unlike the original Rochester, who “was not a man given to wine” (Brontë 381), E.D. escapes to whisky. During most of this exchange, E.D. is in full shot while Blanche’s back is to the camera. The cinematography forces the viewer to recognise the extent to which she is primarily a body to E.D., not an intelligent and autonomous human, hinting that E.D. will start the cycle again, with Blanche, with Jane, with perhaps any attractive woman willing to believe his lies. It is plausible that M felt misled by the essentialist myth that women naturally enjoy pregnancy and parenting, chafing at being biologically chained to her child while E.D. escapes the tedium through professional engagements and bacchanalian delights. E.D. is willing to go any length to get M to single-handedly shoulder the responsibility of parenting,

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abandoning M emotionally and physically by arranging for doctors to prescribe her “Painkillers for headaches. Sleeping pills because she couldn’t sleep properly” (56). E.D.’s plan backfires when M is not simply pacified and instead “started mixing new drugs. Lying in bed all day. Drinking when the drugs weren’t enough. She spiralled. We’d fight. She’d throw things. She’d cry and cry and cry” (56). E.D. does not offer M sympathy or attempt to get her into recovery; he clashes with her until she becomes distraught. E.D. recounts coming homing from work and finding M “standing over Adele’s crib. Just standing there. Staring at her. It was terrifying. … I mean, she didn’t do anything but” (Aref and Hall ep. 56). After M is seduced by the false escape of intoxication, E.D. not only reneges on his vow to be there “in sickness and in health” but also, more damningly, castigates M for engaging in a normal activity: gazing down at her sleeping daughter. M, unlike E.D., is not allowed to remain an autonomous, independent person once parenting comes their reality. E.D. enjoys cultural permission not to grow up, while the M is punished repeatedly, even for doing nothing. AJE illustrates that addicted mothers are disproportionately vulnerable to punishment, perhaps even more so if she is a woman of colour. Juliet McLaughlin, who plays Adele, M’s daughter, identifies as a “half African-American and Caucasian girl” (“Juliet McLaughlin”); since the actor who plays E.D. appears Caucasian, the implication is that the never seen M is of African descent. Erick G. Guerrero argues in “Examination of Treatment Episodes Among Women and Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Addiction Treatment” that “African Americans and women faced the most significant risks of dropping out of treatment, particularly during their first experience in treatment” and “Tailored practices might be necessary to serve African American … women, who are likely to face significant psychosocial stressors … related to stigma, child care, and poor access” (2013, 236–38). In “Motivational Enhancement Therapy for African American Substance Users: A Randomized Clinical Trial” the authors found that if women completed a 12-week treatment plan they exhibited 55% better retention rates, especially if they had a support system “expressing empathy, … avoiding argumentation, rolling with resistance, and supporting self-efficacy” (Burlew et al. 2011, 357 and 362). M, thusly, is Bertha’s horrifying doppelganger—an educated twenty-firstcentury Canadian businesswoman of colour whose husband, family and colleagues fail to follow best practices by not communicating empathy

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for her attempts at recovery, instead engaging in arguments, not accepting her resistance as normal, and incarcerating her within her own house. E.D. confesses how time and again he ignored M’s pleas, treating her not like an adult patient who could participate in her own recovery but instead like a petulant child that can be ignored, locked up, denied succour (Aref and Hall ep. 56). AJE’s narrative, therefore, highlights how we can no longer ignore the connections and repetitions between the past and the present, compelling one to ask: Why is the mother forced to quit her job, abandoned by her support system, vilified for using substances and then locked up as punishment for less dissipated behaviour than her husband? In modernising the narrative, AJE highlights how all women continue to be exploited by patriarchal expectations to be superhuman: forever young, unaffected by maternity, willing to abandon professional goals, and exempt from suffering from addiction. Canonical nineteenth-century novels provide a compelling opportunity for neo-Victorian appropriation because they are part of public domain and can be adapted across various media, affording fans the pleasure of remaining in and expanding the story world of a familiar novel. Brontë, in particular, provides a built-in audience of fans and her enduring appeal is evident in that we can imagine ourselves in her world even as we are insurmountably distant from it. Although Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman, neither it nor its appropriations evince moral, compassionate treatment of addicts under the disease model. Brontë, Livesey, Lindner and Aref and Hall all reflect the ideology that one comes of age by learning to drink alcohol, an addictive substance. In every (re)telling of the story, a woman becomes addicted to alcohol and her community fails to feel a moral or psychological responsibility for her care and recovery, instead bewailing the addict’s weak will, her insanity, turning a blind eye to the abuse to which she is subjected. Chillingly, none of the young female protagonists identify with the older female addict, who once was as young, innocent and beloved by the Rochester-figure. The narratives stress over and over that individual, heteronormative, romantic consummation is paramount over communal responsibility to support and protect a woman suffering from the madness of addiction. These modernisations of Jane Eyre reveal that feminism, birth control, the right to vote and access to higher education have not erased the double standard, especially in the stories we tell about women with substance use disorders. In the original novel, Jane was tested: Could she

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withstand various trials and tribulations, and yet ultimately make the correct, sane choice? Whereas Jane overtly and defiantly refuses to become Rochester’s next mistress, she also fails to recognise his “bad, mad, and embruted partner!” Bertha as human, exposing how a personal refusal to become Rochester’s next victim does not signify an incipient feminist rebellion against patriarchal abuses (Brontë 262). When Jane hears of Bertha’s death, she joyously marries the very man who imprisoned her. Jane objects less to Rochester’s abuse of patriarchal power than to his attempt to demean her by making her his mistress. Mad Bertha’s treatment exposes weakness in Jane Eyre’s feminist mythology. Jane awakes to her own worth by disassociating herself from Bertha’s degraded subject position; thereby, Jane maintains rather than challenges established patriarchal hierarchies. These neo-Victorian hypertexts are not as radically feminist as one would hope, troublingly the ideal of historical progress, as the younger women also fail to identify with the older female characters who, bewitched by the ubiquitous consumption of alcohol, have not make the sanest choices, ultimately becoming entangled in the madness of addiction. In each of the retellings, the women, the mothers, the mad Berthas are more severely punished for their addictions than the male characters. Tara MacDonald and Joyce Goggin ask whether the neo-Victorian “impulse to re-write the story of the fallen woman or madwoman … redress the ignored histories” or “reinforce unproductive stereotypes” (2013, 5). Ultimately, these neo-Victorian texts underscore that Jane Eyre is not a feminist, utopian fantasy in which one individual’s salvation negates patriarchal evils evident within the larger culture. Bertha is, instead, the scapegoat that allows the female protagonists to pretend they do not still have second-class position in society. To say otherwise would be insane.

Notes 1. In Palimpsests, G´erard Genette outlines his influential definition of the five modes of transtextuality, or “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (1), as: intertextuality (relationships with other texts, such as quotation, plagiarism, allusion), paratextuality (such as the preface, chapter titles, illustrations, etc.), metatextuality (commentary and allusion), hypertextuality (“uniting a text B [hypertext] … to an earlier text A” [hypotext]), and architextuality (generic taxonomy, classification) (1997, 1–7).

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2. I avoid using terms like “abuse” or “problematic substance use,” which refer to patterns of behaviour, in favour of terms such as “dependence,” “addiction” and “substance use disorder,” to highlight that Branwell as well as Bertha and her modern counterparts suffer under physiological dependence on alcohol/drugs, rather than weak morality or willpower. 3. See in particular Brontë’s letters to Ellen Nussey (Smith). 4. See Rhys (1966: 43, 70, 78, 80, 87–89, 93, 98). 5. W. S. Williams was co-owner of Smith, Elder and Company, which published Jane Eyre. 6. Laissez-faire market conditions coupled with a ban on imported French alcohol further increased gin’s popularity, as gin could be produced locally and non-professionally (Nicholls 35–36). 7. Gin was uniquely associated with women, as indicated by its nicknames, “Mother Gin” and “Madam Geneva.” 8. Following an 1825 Act, legal production of gin doubled and the number of retail spirits licenses rose precipitously, leading citizens to conclude a second gin craze was upon them and, in turn, encourage the consumption of wholesome beer (Nicholls 2009, 89). 9. For more on the development of understanding compulsive drinking as addiction—or a physical and mental disease—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Nicholls (59–72).

Bibliography “Alcohol Statistics.” Alcohol Change UK. https://alcoholchange.org.uk/ alcohol-facts/fact-sheets/alcohol-statistics. Aref, Nessa, and Alysson Hall. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre. 2013–2014. Vancouver. YouTube. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. 1847. 4th ed. Edited by Deborah Lutz. New York: Norton, 2016. Burlew, Ann Kathleen, et al. “Motivational Enhancement Therapy for African American Substance Users: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 17, no. 4 (2011): 357–65. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/a0025437. Compton, Michael T., Victoria H. Chien, and Annie M. Bollini. “Associations Between Past Alcohol, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use and Current Schizotypy Among First-Degree Relatives of Patients with Schizophrenia and NonPsychiatric Controls.” Psychiatric Quarterly 80 (2009):143–54. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11126-009–9102-x. “dipsomania, n.” OED Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/view/Entry/53257.

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Gaskell, Elizabeth C. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Vol. 1. London: Electric Book Company, 2001. Genette, Gérard. “Five Types of Transtextuality, Among Which Hypertextuality,” In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, 1–7. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene/Yale University Press, 2000. Goldney, Robert D., and Johan A. Schioldann. “Pre-Durkheim Suicidology.” Crisis 21, no. 4 (2000): 181–86. https://doi.org/10.1027//0227-5910.21. 4.181. Guerrero, Erick G. “Examination of Treatment Episodes Among Women and Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Addiction Treatment.” Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions 13 (2013): 227–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1533256x.2013.812011. “Juliet McLaughlin.” Star Now. https://www.starnow.com/julietmclaughlin. King, Helen. “Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates.” In Hysteria Beyond Freud, by Sander Lawrence Gilman, Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, 3–90. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Laragy, Georgina. “‘A Peculiar Species of Felony’: Suicide, Medicine, and the Law in Victorian Britain and Ireland.” Journal of Social History 46, no. 3 (2013): 732–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shsl23. Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does It Matter?” In A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, edited by Deborah Cartmell, 87–104. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Lindner, April. Jane. New York: Hachette, 2010. Livesey, Margot. Appendix: About the Book: Two Journeys’ to The Flight of Gemma Hardy. 6–10. New York: HarperCollins, 2012a. ———. The Flight of Gemma Hardy. New York: HarperCollins, 2012b. MacDonald, Tara, and Joyce Goggin. Introduction: “Neo-Victorianism and Feminism.” Neo-Victorian Studies 6, no. 2 (2013): 1–14. Marchbanks, Paul. “A Costly Morality: Dependency Care and Mental Difference in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 1 (2010): 55–72. Martin, Fiona S., and Shaughney Aston. “A ‘Special Population’ with ‘Unique Treatment Needs’: Dominant Representations of ‘Women’s Substance Abuse’ and their Effects.” Contemporary Drug Problems 41 (2014): 335–60. Nicholls, James. The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England. New York: Manchester University Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Nussey, Ellen. “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë.” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no 1 (1871). ProQuest. Nutt, David J., Leslie A. King, and Lawrence D. Phillips. “Drug Harms in the UK: A Multicriteria Decision Analysis.” The Lancet 376 (2010): 1558–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6. OECD. “Gender Wage Gap (Indicator).” 2019. https://doi.org/10.1787/ 7cee77aa-en. Persaud, Sean, and Sinead Persaud. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party. Directed by William J. Stribling. Shipwrecked Comedy, 2016. YouTube. Porter, Roy. “The Drinking Man’s Disease: The ‘Pre–History’ of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain.” British Journal of Addiction 80 (1985): 385–96. Primorac, Antonija. “Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45 (2017): 451–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1060150316000711. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Edited by Judith L. Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999. Rochester, E. D. Twitter Post. December 14, 2013, 11:10 AM. https://twitter. com/Pilotsthoughts/status/411890978254249984. Shaw, Marion. “Anne Brontë: A Quiet Feminist.” Brontë Studies 38, no. 4 (2013): 330–38. Skelly, Julia. “Addictive Architecture: The Crystal Palace, Gin Palaces and Women’s Desire.” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 25 (2011): 49–65. Smith, Margaret, ed. Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sumner, James. “Status, Scale and Secret Ingredients: The Retrospective Invention of London Porter.” History and Technology 24, no. 3 (2008): 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510801900409. Valint, Alexandra. “Madeira and Jane Eyre’s Colonial Inheritance.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45 (2017): 321–39. https://doi.org/10-1017/ S1060150316000632. World Health Organization. “Management of Substance Abuse: Country Profiles 2019: Canada.” 2019a. https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/ publications/global_alcohol_report/profiles/can.pdf?ua=1. ———. “Management of Substance Abuse: Country Profiles 2019: United Kingdom.” 2019b. https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_ alcohol_report/profiles/gbr.pdf?ua=1. ———. “Management of Substance Abuse: Country Profiles 2019: United States of America.” 2019c. https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/ global_alcohol_report/profiles/usa.pdf?ua=1.

CHAPTER 3

“We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman 1 opens like a Gothic novel: “Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind” (2012 [1798], 161). Truly it is a Gothic story, but instead of a castle or haunted house or cemetery, the setting is in a “mansion of despair” (161), that is, an insane asylum. It is no less haunted though according to Wollstonecraft’s description: “Horror still reigned in the darkened cells, suspicion lurked in the passages, and whispered along the wall” (189). The asylum is “a tomb of living death.” If one—like Maria—is not insane (or in today’s vernacular, mentally ill) before being committed, it will take no time at all before one turns into a raving lunatic. Wollstonecraft is the first to conceptualise the asylum as a metaphor for the confinement of women in a world run by patriarchs that drives women

R. M. Friars (B) Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada B. Ayres Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_3

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literally insane. Her trope will be repeated in novels throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and prefigures two neo-Victorian novels that will be discussed in-depth in this chapter, namely Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) and Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester (2017), in which female confinement and patriarchal control becomes central to relationships between women in the novels. In the carceral space, she is not alone. Although the madwoman has become an iconographic figure, especially after her induction as Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), whether confined to the dungeon, attic, asylum or sick room, she usually shares that space of horror with a female attendant, keeper or nurse. The pairing of the female keeper and the kept woman appears first in Wollstonecraft’s novel with Jemima and Maria, respectively. Wollstonecraft’s Maria makes clear that even in her day all men perceived women only as sex objects and prostitutes, regardless of class, marital status or degree of sanity; and as a result, all women lived in some form of an insane asylum. Maria declares, “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (167). She speaks on behalf of all women, but she is thinking of herself and her keeper. Jemima has had a hard life. Born illegitimate, she has lived in the shadows of a social outcast. While still an infant, her mother died, and then she was placed into her father’s house to be a servant. Because of the new wife’s jealousy, she was apprenticed to a master who beat, starved and raped her when she was quite young. From one abusive situation to the next, interspersed with being forced into prostitution and into aborting her unwanted child (195–96), she finally ended up being an attendant for four years at the asylum that would detain Maria (189–206). Although of higher rank, Maria has had trouble aplenty in her own life beginning with being undervalued by her parents in preference to her brother, who turned into a despot. When her mother dies, her father marries the housekeeper who treats Maria very ill. Maria escapes that situation by marrying George Venables who turns out to be a libertine. After she refuses to comply with his arrangement to have intercourse with a man who, once services were rendered, would forgive her husband’s debts, he takes away her child and has Maria locked up in the asylum. It was not unusual for a husband to have a disobedient wife confined to an asylum, for in his eyes and in the eyes of a patriarch-privileged culture, a woman who did not submit to her husband had to have been a lunatic and have

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been in need of control, not just for the sake of the men in her life but also for the sake of civilised society. Wollstonecraft, of course, predates the Victorian’s austere didacticism that pervaded many of its novels inculcating female compliance to ideologies and morality. Wollstonecraft was unable to finish Maria before she died of septicaemia after having given birth to Mary Godwin, but she left behind her notes, from which Godwin wrote the ending. Sympathetic to the plight of women who were prostituted by men in one form or another—even as she became pregnant out of wedlock to Gilbert Imlay who would not marry her—Wollstonecraft held out hope for women like Jemima and Maria, who were ruined by men. Although they suffer because of men, Wollstonecraft gives her women a happy ending: Jemima, Maria and her child, form a family unit with no men in their lives and freedom from the insane asylum, literally and metaphorically. Their outcome is very similar to the two major women in the neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) by Michel Faber, forming similarly an all-female family, with Sugar—made into a prostitute at the age of 13 by her own mother who was a madame—Agnes, the wronged wife who was driven insane by her husband—and her child, Sophie. Laura Mandell reads Wollstonecraft’s plot ending as the production of a “queer family” (2008, 63). By “wed[ding] together people by transgressing class and gender lines” and designating Jemima as a second mother to Maria’s child, Wollstonecraft not only advocates for an unconventional, non-heterosexual family model, but she also suggests that only such a model can ensure that the family members will get to live happily ever after. Mandell’s reasoning is that the female characters are committed to promoting each other’s happiness and well-being, which is a factor often grossly lacking in eighteenth-century heterosexual relationships (63–64). Historically in Britain, women, supposedly with their innate patience, compassion and maternal instincts, were expected to take care of the sick within their domestic sphere of influence. This assumption must have taken a hiatus in the middling and upper classes during Wollstonecraft’s life as she bemoaned women’s dereliction of such duties (1796 [1792], ch. 5: 200–202). The solution was to grant equal educational and vocational opportunities for women to join professions like physicians and nurses. She asked, “But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools and chronicle small beer! No. Women might certainly

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study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them, though I am afraid the word midwife, in our dictionaries, will soon give place to accoucheur, and one proof of the former delicacy of the sex be effaced from the language” (ch. 9: 337). By the time Wollstonecraft was writing her own autobiofictional horror story via Maria and Jemima, it seemed as though the wealthy in England preferred male physicians and male attendants over female midwives who had been previously favoured (Sommers 2011, 89). Elizabeth Nihell, who titled herself a “Professed Midwife,” complained that it was mere fashion to request a man to help with childbirth because men advertised their services by playing on women’s fears (1760, ii), convincing them that they—as men—could ensure a better, safer and quicker delivery. Women’s hands were “tender, soft, duly supple, dextrous, and trusting to its own feelings for what it is about” (36). Women were perceived to be too sympathetic with each other; whereas, a man-midwife supposedly had objectivity (Sommers 90), but from a woman’s point of view, sympathy during pain was exactly what was wanted (93). The anonymous writer of the 1772 The Danger and Immodesty of the Present Too General Custom of Unnecessarily Employing Men-Midwives reasoned that women wanted the “tenderness for their own sex in labour, which it is impossible men can ever equal” (29). This was her answer to the trust that others were placing in men who were armed with the forceps that promised a safer and quicker delivery. And that is one of the reasons men came under attack, for they were considered “unsympathetic, in a hurry, out to dazzle, wildly over-interventionist and trigger happy with the dangerous and unnecessary instruments, the forceps” (Porter 1987, 216). Nihell called forceps “murderous instruments” (xii), and listed a number of highly respected physicians of the day who rejected their use, such as Heinrich von Deventer (a leading expert on the anatomy of the pelvis), Cosme Viardel (the most famous obstetrician of the late seventeenth century) and André Levret (known for breech manoeuvres and caesarean sections) (41). Many of the accoucheurs (male-midwives) worked in the lying-in hospitals, where many women, mostly of the lower classes, went to have their babies. Egregious to their reputations, the epidemics caused by lack of sanitary conditions added to the public perception that men had no business messing with childbirth and that their interference was deadly. Between 1746 and 1795, under the attendance of men-midwives, women suffered thirty-five different epidemics throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain (Murphy-Lawless 1998, 108).

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By the mid-Victorian Age, men who practised midwifery were almost extinct, destroyed by allegations of sexual immodesty and impropriety (Sommers 90). For one, John Stevens, M.D. addressed the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1849 denouncing men-midwifery. His lecture was published as Man-Midwifery Exposed, or the Danger and Immorality of Employing men in Midwifery Proved; and the Remedy for the Evil Found. It began with a few quotes by notables such as Sir Antony Carlisle who said, “The practice of man-midwifery compromises the character and morality of our country. It is demoralizing to society, and insult to virtuous women, and a foolscap to men.” If not abolished, the result would be the end of “female modesty, and a respect for the decorums of society” (quoted in Stevens 1; emphasis in original). Stevens also quoted Count Buffon who was known for his work on Natural History. He called the practice of man-midwifery as “every indecency” and “a violent attack against chastity” (quoted in 1). Another obstetrician, Dr. Curtis, warned, “Wild beasts are caged,” but the men-midwives are “loose upon society” (quoted in 1). Stevens described a scenario that surely must have made the average Victorian, male or female, gasp: “A young creature is but a few months married, and feels a little unwell, before a strange man is sent for: asking a few questions in a soft, simpering, insinuating manner, he then, with the utmost politeness of professional assurance, and as a matter of course, slides his hand *** Nor does the innocent creature, thus assailed and outraged, rebuke the indecent act. What might be the only response of any civilised gentleman? Stevens said it: ‘Oh fie! Fie! Thy sins are not accidental, but a trade’” (13). If that wasn’t enough, he added: “Monstrous! Apart from Hymenial rights, and in violation of those sacred limits where modesty should ever stand sentinel, those outposts where sensitiveness should be every ready to touch the chords of alarm, which puts the heart and the mind upon guard, and induces circumspection, have been approached—nay, passed, betrayed—into the hand of the enemy by the pass-word ‘man-midwifery’” (13). Concurrently, the female nurse evolved out of the Victorian notion of domesticity. In the home, it was understood that the women took care of the medical needs of their families except when a physician needed to be called. It was their duty (Reverby 2001, 11). The experience prepared them for nursing professions outside of the home, at first, with the upper and middling classes of women serving, but only as payless charity, but as the economy expanded for some of the classes, people began to pay for a

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nurse—who most likely was a spinster or a widow—and nurses began to depend upon the income for their livelihood (12). In the age of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) and amid dialogues urging nursing reform, the Victorians successfully linked “nursing and femininity [as] interchangeable concepts” (Vrettos 1995, 31). Occupying the ambiguous space between caregiver and transgressor of domestic space due to her employment outside of her own home, “the Victorian medical woman, … was always and already fragmented” (Swenson 2005, 202–3). Pre- and post-Nightingale, “representations of medical women (and many of the women themselves) influenced public debates surrounding women’s education and employment, the Contagious Diseases Act and the ‘health’ of the empire. At the same time, the presence of these educated and independent women who receive payment for performing tasks traditionally assigned to the domestic woman or the servant inevitably alters the meaning of ‘womanhood’ and the positions of other women in Victorian culture” (2). By moving outside of the home, nurses altered the meaning of Victorian womanhood by repositioning her as an active figure in a “scientific culture” (2), as opposed to a passive, pious individual. Nursing disrupted the ideologies surrounding gendered roles in the nineteenth century, reconfiguring the bounds of women’s roles. By 1850, there was an estimate of 30,000 prostitutes in London alone, with the figure climbing to 140,000 by the end of the century (Finnegan 2001, 6). Although these statistics are arguable, one physician wrote: “The sum is a terrible one, pregnant of vast results in debauchery, disease, and death to individuals—of degradation and danger to the community at large. Let anyone walk certain streets of London, Glasgow, or Edinburgh, of a night, and, without troubling his head with statistics, his eyes and ears will tell him at once what a multitudinous amazonian army the devil keeps in constant field service for advancing his own ends. The stones seem alive with lust, and the very atmosphere is tainted” (Logan 1871, 221). Although this physician urges men to keep themselves sexually pure before marriage (229–31), he seems to put the blame on “that amazonian army” for such moral contamination, ignoring the fact that there would not be prostitutes if there were not willing, paying customers. He even blames the “better ranks” of women because they are no longer shocked and indignant about either the prostitute or the woman who has been seduced and impregnated outside of wedlock. He blames the theatre for losing its moral tone towards fallen women (231–32). In fairness to women, however, he does point out that a woman need make only

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one mistake to lose her reputation, but a man, even a libertine, can “fall” many times but society does not hold him accountable (232). The original Contagious Diseases Acts (known as the CD Acts) were passed in 1864, in an effort to curb the spread of not only venereal disease, but also moral contagion due to the prostitution trade. The police were to identify women working as streetwalkers, require them to undergo medical examination by a military doctor and then force them into hospital confinement for up to nine months. When released, the women were to submit to regular medical examinations. It was difficult for a woman to have her name removed from the register (Walker 2008, 476). Further, “the acts contributed to a process that placed prostitutes in an identified professional class of social outcasts” (476). Since these new patients needed attending by females, the opportunities for employment as nurses greatly increased. However, by earning a public wage for tasks she presumably would have done in private for free, engaging in tangible terms with the human body and moving within taboo spaces, “the Victorian medical woman could not escape from the shadow of her cultural ‘other,’ the fallen woman” (Swenson 3). The culture and its literature of the time associated moral contagion and bodily contamination with the Victorian sex worker. The first Magdalen Asylum (the Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes) was founded in Whitechapel in 1758. In asking for financial support for these asylums, the good Dodd pleaded the necessity of the asylums and the moral obligation of the Christian to support them in a way to show Christ’s compassion and redemption, but also to separate the prostitutes from good people—especially innocent children—from their “dire contagion of tis promiscuous defilement” (1776, 98). Nurses not only move out of private spheres and into the workplace as earners (like prostitutes), but they do so in spaces that are synonymous with disease and the body (Judd 1998, 93). In Victorian novels that feature prostitutes and other fallen women, they are punished, so that their stories can be cautionary tales and iterate morality. They must be sent to the workhouse and then die of either childbirth, like Agnes in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–1839) or some undeterminable affliction of the mind and heart like Jessie in Frances Trollope’s Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (1844). Or they might do something desperate like kill their babies and be hanged, for it, or in the case of Hetty in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), have her sentence commuted to transportation. Or they might be banished to

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Australia like Little Em’ly in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849– 1850) or brutally killed by a man of the streets (Bill Sykes) like Nancy in Oliver Twist . If any of these stories pair the fallen woman with a nurse (as does occur in Oliver Twist ), the nurses do not suffer a similar fate, but neither are they depicted as happy, healthy and virtuous women. In Victorian fiction the complexity of the nurse’s role is repeatedly examined from multiple perspectives. When Charles Dickens serialised The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit beginning in 1842, although it would not be one of his most popular novels, it gave the world Mrs. Gamp. She, Sairey Gamp, was a midwife and monthly nurse (a nurse hired to tend to a mother and a newborn during the postnatal period) and was extremely fond of her gin especially when it was purchased as medicine for her patients. She apparently embraced the idea of conflation of nurse with patient and felt that she was in greater need of medicinal spirits than were her patients. She became a popular figure to the Victorian public— popular because she was not just a stereotype but because apparently there were many Mrs. Gamps that were employed. Throughout the novel, she is often referred to simply as “the umbrella,” for she is never without it, given that it was such a handy tool for expressing “violent animosity” (1844, 467). Ever since meeting Mrs. Gamp, the Victorian public would use “gamp” to refer to a nurse, and it also became popular slang for “umbrella” (Bowen 2013, 39). Sairey Gamp is based on a real nurse that Dickens came to know through his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts (who was also a friend to Florence Nightingale), who had hired a nurse like her to tend to one of her friends (Healey 1978, 69). This detail is significant to our study because, as well known, Dickens and Burdett-Coutts, “the richest heiress in England” (Anderson 1912, 259), co-founded Urania Cottage, a home for the rehabilitation of prostitutes. Martin Chuzzlewit was dedicated to Burdett-Coutts. An article in The Australasian Nurses’ Journal said, “The ‘contemporary’ image of the nurse was of ‘a trim, educated, highly skilled self-reliant woman,’ a woman who was ‘primed with quite a vast store of medical and surgical knowledge.’ By comparison, the mental image of the nurse of the past’s unsightly and unwieldy form could be described in two words, ‘Sairey Gamp.’”2 Susan Reverby described Mrs. Gamp as “a merely besotted representative of lumpen-proletarian womanhood, who asserted her autonomy by daring to question medical diagnoses, to venture her

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own opinions (usually outrageous and wrong) at every turn, and to spread disease and superstition in the name of self-knowledge” (13). Dickens intentionally created Gamp to provoke medical reform. He condemned hospitals in London, arguing that Gamp was “a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness” (quoted in Tooley 1906, 46). He also claimed that Mrs. Betsey Prig, another nurse in that novel, “was a fair specimen of a hospital nurse,” but, twenty-four years after the publication of Martin Chuzzelwit, Dickens thought that the nursing situation was “greatly improved through the agency of good women” (quoted in 46). Regardless, Sarah Tooley observed that despite his efforts, Dickens had not succeeded in convincing hospital management to do better (56). In 1847 King’s College Hospital (56–57) began asking for philanthropists to fund the creation of a training institute for nurses (57). It was not until 1860 that Florence Nightingale succeeded in getting St. Thomas Hospital Nightingale School of Nursing built for the purpose of training women for the nursing profession. Prior to that time, without much medical knowledge, women were hired to be “keepers” like Sairey Gamp and before her, Jemima, many of them employed in asylums. For the Victorians, madness was a social problem as well as an economic enterprise. The “English malady” ran rampant in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with 80,000 known asylum inmates living in England by the fin de siècle, and the average asylum housing up to 1000 inmates, most of whom were women (Busfield 1996, 126).3 Neo-Victorian authors often wrote about the Victorian asylum both because of its mythical conditions and, as Showalter notes, because “we do not hear the voices of female lunatic patients” (1985, 60–61). The madwoman, already disadvantaged by rhetoric that disparaged her as being irrational, was denied her own voice in Victorian fiction or history. This silence, coupled with iconographic images of Victorian madwomen that establish a portrait of the female lunatic or the “imagistic” hysteric, led neo-Victorian texts to interrogate popular images of the madwoman to access narratives of the marginalised, forgotten or misidentified madwoman (Showalter 150).4 In this neo-Victorian narrativisation of the madwoman and the asylum, the neo-Victorian nurse is under-examined as an ambiguous figure who is both powerful and powerless in the neo-Victorian madwoman narrative. The nineteenth-century asylum has been interpreted as an isolated environment distant from Victorian social conventions as well as an institution that perpetuates and reaffirms the ideologies of the period,

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particularly in relation to women.5 Renewed interest in the Victorian period and its conventions and inconsistencies has inspired neo-Victorianmadhouse novels that attempt to explore ideological disparities by representing marginalised voices through those confined in the Victorian asylum based on societal prejudices. Neo-Victorian-madhouse fictions therefore endeavour to access a truth that lies between the sensationalism of the fabled Victorian madhouse, produced by popular media in both periods, and the silence of the patients confined therein.6 The asylum nurse enters the text out of the margins of Victorian narratives as the figure who illustrates that the conditions of confinement in the asylum extend beyond physical imprisonment and look to the female body as imprisoned by ideology. Neo-Victorian-madwoman texts fixate on the nurse in the Victorian asylum in addition to the fabled healthy Victorian woman imprisoned at the convenience and collusion of her husband or father (Showalter 52). This fixation is evidently an effort to move the madwoman, as Victorian novels do, to the front room of neo-Victorian fiction. In Jane Eyre the nurse/attendant/keeper operates on the outskirts of Brontë’s fiction, appearing in the periphery of the novel while at the same time being implicated in much of its action through the “conflation of the madwoman and madwoman’s keeper” (Lawson 1992, 46). Residing “in a room without a window” are Bertha Rochester, “the beast or human being” that “grovelled, seemingly, on all fours”; as well as the essential but nondescript caretaker, Grace Poole (1999 [1847], 380). Victorian nurses that tended to the sick, birthings and madwomen, worked and often lived in similar rooms like those in Thornfield Hall, those of “deep shade” (380) or isolated asylum environments that mirror the madwoman’s mental state. Brontë portrays the nurse as being as mad as her patient and denies Grace her own identity and voice, just as she does with Bertha. Brontë collapses Grace and Bertha as two female characters who are bound by ostracisation, vice and ultimately, silence. Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, famous for their analysis of Jane Eyre, identify Grace as “the madwoman’s public representative” (1980, 350) and quote Jane’s observations that Grace was “companionless as a prisoner in a dungeon” (quoted in 350 from Brontë 241). A revision of the relationship between Grace and Bertha—now referred to by her Creole name—appears in one of the first novels to be considered neo-Victorian, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It is a “counterdiscursive” (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 196), a postcolonial revision of Jane Eyre

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through retelling the story from Antoinette Mason’s point of view. She is a multiplex victim because she is a Victorian woman who has no say in who she marries, she is a Creole Victorian woman, she is a Creole Victorian woman living in Jamaica who is forced to marry a British citizen and relocate to Britain where she will endure horrific cultural shock and she is a Creole Victorian woman who has inherited a genetic disease that leads to insanity and suicide; symptoms that Elizabeth Coon and Anhar Hassan diagnose as Huntington Disease (2015). Regardless, Rhys retells the story as if being forced to marry Rochester and to resettle in England are the cause of her insanity. Because Grace Poole cannot control her, Grace often takes the brunt of her patient’s lunacy. “I was blamed for letting you attack him,” she says to Bertha (Rhys 187). Their lives are conflated in another ways: Just as she forces Antoinette to drink laudanum, Grace drinks gin (179). Rhys is not repeating the stereotype of the gin-addicted nurse (like Sairey Gamp); both women escape from their misery through chemical fluids. In addition, Grace is often violent and abusive to her charge. Her power over the madwoman stems both from her hatred of her and the fear of becoming like her. Brontë relegates Bertha/Antoinetta/Antoinette “to the margins” and Grace along with her as they “haunt” the woman we readers are supposed to admire: Jane Eyre (Rosen 2016, 51). “Rhys underscores the values, politics, novelistic conventions and narrative priorities that underline” Brontë’s negation of the “intransigent, disobedient—indeed barely human—Creole Bertha” (51). Although Rhys also underscores the significance of Antoinette’s name, she does not give the name of Grace Poole until the last few pages of the novel, and she vilifies Edward Rochester. In Shoemaker’s retelling, Rochester realises that he uses Grace as his scapegoat (356). Grace Poole has received attention over the last five years as the object of neo-Victorian adaptation.7 Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester attempts to explore the links between Grace Poole and her madwoman patient and provides a neo-Victorian backstory for Brontë’s neglected nurse. Like Jemima in Wollstonecraft’s novel, Grace’s mother dies. Grace is abused by her father and marries a man to escape him, only to learn that her husband is even more brutal. She takes her baby boy and flees from him (277). She is hired in one of the few professions open to women: as a keeper or attendant in an asylum. She works at Grimsby Retreat, a place run by Quakers to take care of the mentally ill, but only if they are curable,

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which Antoinetta is not. When the director refuses to take Antoinetta, he recommends Grace to be her nurse at Thornfield Hall (276–80). Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester engages with the nurse’s role on multiple levels. The asylum is not the arena in which this relationship is worked through. Instead, two women are confined together in private care. Brontë’s account obscures “the perimeters of the imprisoning ‘asylum’ and the desirable sanctuary of domestic space” (Judd 58). This assertion holds true for Shoemaker’s text as well, as the novel examines the dialogues between female companionship and female guardianship through Grace Poole’s backstory. Grace’s neo-Victorian history and her relationship with Bertha Mason poses an interesting shift in the relationship between the madwoman and the nurse’s identities, as Bertha remains unknown to herself and Grace’s identity is couched in her identification with the madwoman. Therefore, although Grace is sympathetic towards Bertha, it is ultimately because she is aware of the imprisonment that plagues them both, and that they are or have been subject to male control. Despite Catherine Judd’s understanding that Bertha and Grace inhabit a “female carceral” (10), in this neo-Victorian text, Rochester is just as much if not more so a victim than are the women. Shoemaker is sympathetic to Rochester, blaming Antoinetta for being so lascivious towards him before she turns into a kleptomaniac and for not telling him that she had been married to Rochester’s older brother first and had borne him a child. Neither Rochester’s nor Antoinetta father reveals this information to him. They neglect to tell him about the genetic disease that has turned Antoinetta’s mother and one brother into lunatics. Mr. Mason wants Antoinetta off his hands because he knows that she is turning into her deranged mother. Antoinetta is to inherit the Mason property, and Rochester’s father wants and needs that money. Time and time again, Rochester is portrayed as the victim throughout Shoemaker’s novel (mistreated and unloved by his father, forced into becoming the ward of Adèle after his Céline’s manipulation and betrayal, compelled to surrender Thornfield Hall to his brother and Antoinetta’s son, thwarted by the law in having to take care of Antoinetta and not being able to divorce her) in a near backlash to the influx of criticism on Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea that regard him a perfect example of patriarchal tyranny. Rochester, although male, in this neo-Victorian account, has very little power to determine the path of his own life and securement of happiness, like the women.

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In Mr. Rochester Grace and Antoinetta are still eerily linked through their presence in the house. Rochester rescues Grace from the third storey, and she becomes a surrogate Bertha, who can no longer be rescued. Grace, “perhaps already dulled with drink, had almost succumbed [to the flames], but Bertha was not in her room, and I had no time to think. I nearly dragged Grace downstairs with me, both of us leaning on each other, gasping for air, catching her when she stumbled. Half carrying Grace, I somehow shepherded her out of the inferno” (436). This passage is unique both for its confusion and for its tenderness. Rochester enters the third storey looking for Antoinetta; when he finds Grace instead, he says he had “no time to think,” perhaps meaning that, had he had time to think, he would have left Grace behind, or that, in his mind, Grace instinctually replaces Antoinetta as he leads her out of the fire, catching her and shepherding her out of Thornfield. Furthermore, Grace and Antoinetta become indelibly linked through the uncanny disappearance of Grace, who is simply missing when Rochester regains consciousness (439). Grace’s departure clarifies that, as the madwoman is ejected from the plot, so too is the nurse, her fellow prisoner. As the patriarchal influences of the novel have mistreated them both, so too does the novel abandon them, and with Bertha’s death, Grace’s identification with the madwoman extends into her own death—Antoinetta’s real suicide, and Grace’s death in the plot. Indeed, Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester does give voice to the neoVictorian nurse and her mad patient as one of mutual imprisonment and power relations within the isolated world of their confinement. Claire Chatterton argues that, in the Victorian asylum, “female nurses’ lives were closely controlled” and that “in some quarters mental illness was thought to be contagious and the stigma “rubbed off” on those who worked in this field” (2000, 15). Assigned to guard the madwoman, a nurse is in constant danger of being labelled as mad herself; therefore, the femininity that links the neo-Victorian nurse with her patient renders the nurse’s authority over her own mind and the body of the madwoman tenuous. Chatterton’s assertion is highlighted in neo-Victorian novels that feature confined characters; “the physical carceral space” confines both the madwoman and her nurse as they become indistinguishable from one another under the masculine and patriarchal influences of the text (Judd 10). In Fingersmith Sarah Waters similarly forges links between gender, imprisonment, disease and the body (Arias 2009, 27) through an exploration of the conditions in which both nurses and their female patients

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existed within the confines of a male-controlled medical environment. Like Wollstonecraft, Waters “suggests that all its women are in prison, either physically or psychologically” and that “every woman in Waters’ texts is trapped” (Edwards 2016, 133). Certainly, physical and psychological imprisonment are crucial narrative elements, articulated through the novel’s portrayal of the asylum. Waters positions the nurse and madwoman as linked through their imprisonment and simultaneously questions the boundaries of that linkage. Rather than being united through their feminine bodies, the female lunatic and nurse are connected through confinement and silence. This mutual confinement does not imply that female nurses and female patients are equal—the marginalisation of madwomen remains paramount in both the nineteenth century and the neoVictorian novel. Rather, the systems that remain in place to oppress women in these novels serve to confine both the nurse and patient in different and mutually damaging ways. In fiction by nineteenth-century writers, “women’s intuitive relationship to body language took two forms: interpreting the physical symptoms of emotion and producing them. These twin gestures correspond, in turn, to the figures of nurse and patient in Victorian fiction … the pathologisation of female emotional excess is perhaps most clearly enacted in Victorian fictions that highlight the interpretive (and in some cases narrative) skills of the nurse who makes the patient’s body legible to the reader through a prodigal access to unspoken feelings” (Vrettos 29). This emotional legibility is reversed in Waters’ novel; the madwoman instead makes the nurse’s emotional and bodily conditions of confinement legible to her. The nurses obscure Sue’s identity as a form of control; however, the nurses then obscure their own identities as they perform the act of concealment. In other words, Waters’ neo-Victorian nurse, in suppressing the identity of the madwoman, cannot then identify herself as separate from the custodial and patriarchally determined role she occupies. Nurses are “subject to the surveillance system of a punitive heteropatriarchal regime reliant on both male and female jailers, themselves confined as closely as those whom they watch” (Edwards 134). Nevertheless, the women in Fingersmith endure a far more rigorous system of surveillance, despite being guards themselves. This surveillance, evidenced through the nurse’s close confinement with the madwoman, precedes her realisation that she is imprisoned with her patient. The madwoman, in her transgression of domesticity, silence and bodily restraint through violence and sexuality, makes legible the nurse’s links to the madwoman as well as her desire

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for her. This avenue of legibility is not an indication that madwomen are redefined as feminist revolutionaries in Fingersmith. To clarify: “madness and confinement were both an expression of female powerlessness and an unsuccessful attempt to reject and overcome this state” of impotence (Chesler 1972, 15–16). Waters’ text nods to this powerlessness through its representation of the male-controlled asylum. However, in escaping confinement and leaving the nurse behind, Waters’ neo-Victorian madwoman disembodies the imprisoned, helpless madwoman without identity and embodies the escapee whose imprisonment, unlike the nurse’s, has been temporary. The terms of engagement in Dr. Christie’s asylum establish boundaries between the female patients, nurses and male influences (in the form of doctors, fathers or husbands). While there are no male inmates, there are male orderlies and, more importantly, male doctors. The text characterises a group of women with an array of symptoms that cross multiple categories of madness, including those who are developmentally delayed, depressed, delusion al or in Sue’s case, are lesbians. Waters illustrates the dangers of the multiple meanings that the designation of mad can have for the identities of the women imprisoned literally in the asylum and figuratively by such a label. It is in this context that Sue’s imprisonment establishes the hierarchies of the female carceral and illustrates the conditions of imprisonment of both the patients and the madwomen. With names like Nurse Spiller, Nurse Bacon, and Nurse Flew, the nurses establish themselves as agents working on behalf of the doctors in order to make Sue’s identity illegible. As she is forced into the asylum, Nurse Spiller has “a grip on her like a man’s,” figuratively establishing her as having the grip of a male doctor as she drags her into an isolated, carceral space (Waters 396). Inside the asylum, Nurse Spiller’s word is also “as good as a man’s … while the doctors are away” (447). The nurses can figuratively and temporarily embody the command of a doctor in service to a male authority, but they are unable to permanently possess power. As they carry her deeper into the asylum, the space itself begins to represent an unrecognisable world, and, as Edwards argues, “Fingersmith’s madhouse is … intentionally spatially disorientating” (136). Sue “tried to study the way” but “could make out only so many drab-coloured ceilings and walls … they had got [her] deep into the house” (Waters 397). By pulling her further away from familiarity, Sue is isolated from the class distinctions that may have protected her, as the doctors assume, she is Maud. In this new hierarchy, Sue continues to struggle against Nurse Spiller and

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the doctor. When Dr. Christie believes “she’s becoming demented,” Sue thinks he means Nurse Spiller and not herself, further indicating her distance from the hierarchies of the asylum (396). The passage that follows serves to establish the layered relationship between the doctors, nurses and inmates. Nurse Spiller carefully hits Sue “hard, with the points of her fingers,” and “she did it in such a way, the doctors did not see” (396). Nurse Spiller then reports to the doctor that Sue is having “fits,” making Sue’s body illegible to the doctors and silencing Sue, first by knocking the air from her and then by placing the spoon into her mouth (396). Throughout Sue’s time in the asylum, the nurses and madwomen have a markedly different level of interaction in comparison to the addition of the doctors. The patients are physically, verbally and emotionally abused by the nurses, who hate them because they fear them, while the doctors take on a polite and distant approach to the madwomen. Sue violently injures Nurse Spiller by giving her “a crack with her head” (398), and after she is plunged due to the nurses’ abuses, they are “cooler” to Sue, but she is continually “shaken and bullied and slapped” (445). The mother/daughter paradigm that Chesler highlights is established as the nurse/mothers punish and resent their patient/daughter, and Sue is embroiled in an environment of hatred. When Nurse Spiller moves to undress Sue, she says “let’s have this gown off .… Why, what small little hooks! And my hand’s hard, is it? Used to better, are you? I should say you are, from what I’ve heard .… Well, we don’t keep ladies’ maids, here” (398). Nurse Spiller’s disgust at both Sue’s station and her dress, and her evident delight at removing them, elucidates Spiller’s hatred and resentment which she then sadistically enacts upon Sue as a mode of controlling her and physically removing her identity. As Sue loses all sense of familiarity in the asylum, so too does she lose her identity. Imprisoned because she is believed to be Maud and under the delusion that she is Sue, the removal of her clothing further destabilises her identity when it is replaced by the nurses with the attire of a madwoman. They dress her in “madhouse things,” with a corset that has “hooks instead of laces,” short stockings and India-rubber shoes (407). The nurses become the agents of Sue’s loss of identity, which degenerates over the course of her time in the asylum as she assumes her role in the nurse/patient dynamic. In the soft room, after the removal of her clothes and hair, Sue’s body becomes othered; she cannot identify herself with the role she now occupies. She does not believe that “those were [her] cold feet on the oil-cloth floor; that it was [her] sore face, [her] arms, that

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the green light struck” (400). Even her voice sounds “strange” to her ears (400). Her only remaining token of identity arrives in the form of Maud’s kidskin glove—ironically part of Maud’s prisoner attire at Briar— which the nurses allow Sue to keep. Sue’s efforts to reclaim her identity are either disbelieved or thwarted. When she writes her name “fifty times” on a piece of paper, “Nurse Bacon hit [her]. Nurse Spiller hit [her], too” (430). Dr. Christie made the nurses restrain her while he “poured” “drinks of creosote” into her mouth (430).8 Sue, quite literally, cannot make her own identity legible. Finally, when she sees herself in the glass window of the drawing room, she realises that she looks “like a lunatic” and her face “frightened” her (432–33). Sue no longer looks like herself, but rather like the role she is imprisoned in. Distant from her own identity and similar in her appearance to the other madwomen, Sue becomes fully subsumed into the culture of the asylum and linked with its nurses. The asylum itself represents the threat of the transition from “sane” to “mad” that haunt s the women in the novel. Sue observes the slow encroachment that madness has upon the house: I thought, “They have got me in the place where the doctors and nurses live. Now they’ll take me to the mad bit.”—I think I supposed it would be something like a dungeon or a gaol. … finally it broke upon me that this was the madhouse after all; that it had once been an ordinary gentleman’s house; that that walls had used to have pictures and looking-glasses on them, and the floors has used to have rugs; but that now, it had all been made over to madwomen—that it was, in its way, like a smart and handsome person gone mad itself. (407–8)

Sue’s description actively links the liminality of the asylum to the madwoman’s loss of identity. The dungeon or the gaol she anticipates is replaced with a structure “made over to madwomen.” As Sue becomes physically, socially and mentally stripped of her selfhood, the house has also had all its identifying features removed. Edwards also argues that, although the asylum’s links to a gaol are apt, “the asylum is the worst option. Prison offers the illusion of a justice system behind it, and the promise of theoretical release. To consign a woman to the madhouse forever requires only the signatures of two medical men. The madhouse, then, is not so much a life sentence, as a death sentence” (135–36). Edwards’ point distances the laws that govern the gaol from the apparent lawlessness of the asylum. The markers of society have disappeared

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in an effort to enclose and distance the asylum from recognisable modes of living. Sue makes no distinction between the nurse’s and the madwomen’s quarters. Sue’s room contains “four beds in it, along with a cot where a nurse slept” (408). The isolation of the asylum and its featureless landscape therefore only effects the women while the men move freely. By sharing a living space, the nurses live like madwomen themselves; although the “drunken madhouse nurses have more seeming-freedom to exercise their authority as they wish,” “yet they too are stuck [in the asylum]” (Edwards 137). The doctors, in comparison, simply arrive and then disappear beyond the boundaries of the asylum, and, like the madwomen, the nurses are reliant on the doctor’s arrival. As Sue says, “the doctors were like kings to [the nurses],” and they do in fact seem to live like kings: separate from their charges and employees alike—separate from the women (Waters 410). As the madwomen in the asylum are characterised as being predisposed to madness via their femaleness, the nurses are similarly bound by their roles as physically undesirable women. Although “they called them” nurses, “they were no more nurses than [Sue] was, they only got that work through being stout and having great big hands like mangles” (403). The nurses dream of escape to a better asylum but “they all knew no other madhouse would have them” not only due to their actions, but because they, like the madwomen, are outcasts (434). The text poses that the nurses are prevented from any other mode of employment because their profession links them with elements of the monstrous because they are overweight, gruff, violent and masculine. Although they are linked with male strength and physical power in the text, this masculinisation is ultimately reductive because the physicality that allows the nurses to control the madwomen also prevents them from fulfilling traditional markers of attractiveness, cutting them off from heteronormative marriage roles. The tension between the madwomen’s incarceration and the nurses’ arrives through perhaps one of the most key interactions in the nurse/patient dynamic. In this instance, as Edwards observes, “It seems that asylum nurses … can be even more unstable than their charges” (137). On the night of “Nurse Bacon’s birthday,” “she had some other nurses come secretly to our room, to give them a party,” and the nurses decide to hold a contest to determine who weighs more by the extent to which they can crush Sue (437). Nurse Bacon’s turn to crush Sue illustrates the strange kinship that exists between the madwoman and the nurse in regard to silence and carceral spaces:

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Then she came upon me. She came faster than the others, and the shock and the weight of her was awful. I cried out, and the nurses clapped. “Ten points!” they said. Nurse Bacon laughed. I felt the shudder of it, like rolling-pins; and that made me screw up my eyes and cry out louder. Then she shuddered again, on purpose. The nurses cheered. Then she did this. She pushed herself up on her hands, so that her face was above me but her bosom and stomach and legs still hard on my own; and she moved her hips. She moved them in a certain way. My eyes flew open. She gave me a leer. ‘Like it, do you?’ she said, still moving. “No? We heard you did.” (442)

This passage is perhaps one of the most unnerving of the text. Sue’s sexual assault alone moves this passage and everything that has happened to Sue thus far beyond the mode of physical violence and into the realm of sexual violence; the passage indicates an intense shift in the dynamic between the nurses and patient as not only one between mother and child, but a relationship between women that seems to work itself out in an arena of shame and torment disguised as sporting abuse. Claire O’Callaghan argues that, in Fingersmith, violence “committed by members of both sexes challenge the misandry of feminist perspectives that focus on patriarchy as the source of all oppression” (2017, 81). Indeed, this passage depicts violence between women in isolation through a violent assertion of sexual dominance; however, the violence enacted between women in this passage illustrates the contorted symptoms of shame and repression in the novel’s women. This passage is crucial not in what it implies about Sue, who remains, whether she is a lesbian or not, a victim of sexual violence that precedes a debilitating mental episode. Rather, the value lies in what the act of assaulting Sue implies about Nurse Bacon and the neoVictorian relationship she has to incarceration and silence as part of the female condition in the asylum and the world beyond it. Nurse Bacon’s position in this passage categorises her not only as an abuser, but as someone who is attempting to work through what has been repressed in both her role as a woman and as a nurse. By performing categorically deviant acts (simulating sex) with a woman (Sue) who has been labelled as deviant for reportedly performing the same acts, Nurse Bacon blurs the lines between the nurse and the madwoman in terms of the actions performed by both. Edwards argues that “Waters deliberately demonizes her warders, and thereby the system they represent” (140). While Waters may be pointing to a system of oppression that silences and

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covertly represses a lesbian sexual impulse in all women who might otherwise be lesbians, this system and the ways in which women work through it cannot be separated from the dynamics already in place between the nurse and the madwoman. Nurse Bacon’s hatred of the madwoman as a result of her fear of becoming like her emerges through the nurse’s actual embodiment of the madwoman in this passage. Her hatred of the madwoman becomes self-hatred because she cannot separate what she believes Sue “like[s]” with what she hates herself for liking (442). It is impossible to distinguish between Nurse Bacon’s hatred of the madwoman and her desire for her in this instance, as she acts out her desire through violence, but Sue clarifies this desire in the nurse where it has previously been obscured by the conditions of incarceration for the nurse and patient. Fingersmith presents a complex portrait of both the nurse and madwoman both in that the madwomen are not necessarily mad, and the nurses are subject to similar categories of deviance. The nurse is a nuanced character in neo-Victorian fiction. Set in a period that fixated its anxiety on the nurse’s identification with disease and sexuality, the nurse becomes a liminal figure; she is both a curer and a contaminator. In the context of the madwoman, the nurse’s relationship is even more complex. Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester recapitulates Grace Poole’s narrative to further link her with Bertha Mason and the conditions of abuse and confinement that both women endure, highlighting the nurse’s complex relationship to the madwoman’s own experience. In Fingersmith, there are two versions of the nurse/inmate dynamic represented. Sue’s imprisonment presents a brutal environment in which the nurses, trapped as the madwomen are, exercise their authority over their patients. The nurses’ imprisonment reveals repressed or unacknowledged desires that work themselves out through violence but nevertheless indicate the nurse’s attraction to the madwoman and the transgression she represents, as the line between the madwoman and the nurse is so readily blurred, and as they hate and desire one another in equal measure.

Notes 1. The title is sometimes reversed as is the Broadview edition. It was published posthumously by Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, who wrote the ending based on her notes. 2. Quoted in Summers (1997, 15) from “Nurses, Ancient and Modern.”

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3. The term “English Malady” arises from George Cheyne’s 1733 book of the same name, in which he cites that madness “was the by-product of English sensitivity, ambition, and intelligence” (quoted in Showalter 7). Showalter also points out that “by the 1850’s women were the majority of the inmate population” (17). 4. Such images can be found in fiction, art and medical texts in the nineteenth century. Such examples include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851–1852), and Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographs of the hysterical women at the Salpêtrière (circa 1870s and 1880s). 5. For further examples of the neo-Victorian asylum/madwoman novel, see Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Megan Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife (2005), Stephanie Carroll’s A White Room (2013), and Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn (2009). 6. See Charles Dickens’ “A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree” (1852) or Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse (1887). 7. For an alternate neo-Victorian adaptation of Grace Poole, see “Grace Poole Her Testimony” (2016) by Helen Dunmore. 8. A Dictionary of Chemistry describes creosote as “an almost colourless liquid mixture of phenols obtained by distilling tar obtained by the destructive distillation of wood. It is used medically as an antiseptic and expectorant” (2008).

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Lawson, Kate. “Madness and Grace: Grace Poole’s Name and her Role in Jane Eyre.” English Language Notes 30, no. 1 (1992): 46–49. Logan, William. The Great Social Evil; Its Causes, Extent, Results and Remedies. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1871. https://books.google.com/books? id=87BYVLt75CgC. Mandell, Laura. “Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The ‘Philosophical Romance.’” In Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–1830, edited by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, 49–77. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Murphy-Lawless, Jo. Reading Birth and Death: A History of Obstetric Thinking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Nihell, Elizabeth. A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery. London: A. Morley, 1760. https://books.google.com/books?id=OslEAAAAcAAJ. “Nurses, Ancient and Modern.” The Australasian Nurses’ Journal (October 16, 1905): 113–14. O’Callaghan, Claire. Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Porter, Roy. “A Touch of Danger: The Man-Midwife as Sexual Predator.” In Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, edited by George Sebastian Rousseau and Roy Porter, 206–34. Manchester University Press, 1987. ———. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: Norton, 1997. Reverby, Susan. “A Caring Dilemma: Womanhood and Nursing in Historical Perspective.” In Nursing Issues in the 21st Century: Perspectives from the Literature, edited by Eleanor C. Hein, 10–25. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 2001. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1966. Rosen, Jeremy. Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Shoemaker, Sarah. Mr. Rochester: A Novel. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Sommers, Sheena. “Transcending the Sexed Body: Reason, Sympathy, and ‘Thinking Machines’ in the Debates over Male Midwifery.” In The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, edited by Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge, 89–106. Liverpool University Press, 2011. Stevens, John. Man-Midwifery Exposed, or the Danger and Immorality of Employing Men in Midwifery Proved; and the Remedy for the Evil Found. London: William Horsell, 1849. https://books.google.com/books? id=LlwXAQAAMAAJ. Summers, Anne. Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854– 1914. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988.

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Summers, Annette. “Sairey Gamp: Generating Fact from Fiction.” Nursing Inquiry 4 (1997): 14–18. https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.liberty. edu/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1440-1800.1997.tb00132.x. Swenson, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. London: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Tooley, Sarah A. Southall. The History of Nursing in the British Empire. London: S. H. Bousfield and Company, 1906. https://books.google.com/books?id= g5BEAAAAIAAJ. Vrettos, Athena. Somantic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Walker, Pamela J. “Contagious Diseases Acts.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonie G. Smith, 476–77. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008. https://www-oxfordreference-com. proxy.queensu.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780195148909.001.0001/acref9780195148909-e-203. Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. London: Virago, 2002. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. London: Johnson, 1796. https://books.google.com/books?id=qhcFAAAAQAAJ. ———. The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. 1798. In “Mary, a Fiction” and “The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria,” edited by Michelle Faubert, 149–288. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2012.

CHAPTER 4

The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish’s Strange Music Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw

Bertha Mason is an iconic figure of nineteenth-century literature. The madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) casts a large shadow in both literature and literary criticism. Already during the nineteenth century, Brontë’s madwoman became famous, influencing even medical discourse: “Bertha’s violence, dangerousness, and rage, her regression to an inhuman condition and her sequestration became such a powerful model for Victorian readers, including psychiatrists, that it influenced even medical accounts of female insanity” (Showalter 1985, 68). She has been read as Jane’s “truest and darkest double” by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gunbar (2000 [1979], 360), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has read her as the white colonial Other (1985). Clare Savage, the protagonist of Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), chooses Bertha as her heroine, a model for her own revolutionary self. One of the most influential readings of this character remains Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the novelist reimagines Brontë’s “clothed hyena” (Brontë 2000 [1847], 293) as Antoinette Cosway, a young Creole woman, shattered by the changes that abolition has wrought on

O. Tjon-A-Meeuw (B) English Department, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_4

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Jamaica. Instead of a voiceless, animalistic Other of the white woman Jane, Antoinette becomes the narrator of her own story. This move from the margins to the centre of the text is typical of women’s writing in the 1960s, Monika Kaup explains. The madwoman is no longer the double but the protagonist (1993, 93). This shift is evident in the neo-Victorian novel under discussion here; Strange Music by Laura Fish (2009 [2008]), inspired by the life and poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, follows the path laid out by Wide Sargasso Sea by featuring three narrators who experience madness. Rhys’ novel is an early example of both neo-Victorian and postcolonial rewriting. As a neo-Victorian text, it is engaged in a conversation with a seminal Victorian text. Rhys challenges the marginalisation of Empire in Victorian texts, instead choosing to demonstrate how the Victorian novel had a vested interest in the project of Empire, anticipating Edward Said’s theoretical discussion of this fact, when he writes that “imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible … to read one without in some way dealing with the Other” (1994, 71). As a postcolonial Caribbean text, Wide Sargasso Sea prefigures much of later Caribbean women’s writing. As numerous critics have pointed out, there is an obsession with the madwoman in Caribbean writing; the figure of Bertha Mason in particular is rewritten again and again. Such rewritings, Ankhi Mukherjee argues, signal the constructedness of literary texts, identity categories and cultural formations: “the work of rewriting then is to look awry at virtual pasts, interrupt collective identities and the habitual coherence of cultural experience” (2007, 54). Strange Music engages in such disruption by showing how the madness of both black and white women is not intrinsic to women and blackness but, instead, is the result of the violence of slavery. By analysing the narratives of the three women, white and black, from the metropolis and the colonies, and their versions of madness, it will become clear how the novel posits their insanity as the only reasonable answer to the systemic violence of the colonial enterprise, engaging in a neo-Victorian and postcolonial challenge to the Victorian predecessors. Madness is more than insanity; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “madness” also refers to “imprudence, delusion,” “wild excitement or enthusiasm” or “uncontrollable anger, rage, fury.” Whenever someone is described as mad, all these meanings are also activated. John Thieme expands on the specific Caribbean context of madness from a Foucauldian framework, arguing that madness “is culturally constructed, a discursive

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formation, in which a group, usually a dominant group, designates deviations from its supposed norms as ‘mad’” (2013, 95). In the West Indian context, these deviations from the norm are often based on race as well as gender. Frequently, it is the rebellious Other who is designated as mad. Depending on who is speaking, Kelly Baker Josephs (3) explains, “mad” thus has different connotations; “it can be both derogatory and desirable, both criticism and commendation” in the Caribbean context (2013, 3). During the nineteenth century, the black woman was widely believed to have a so-called excessive, primitive sexual appetite, which was said to even drive her to copulate with apes (Gilman 1985a, 212). Kathleen J. Renk explains that in addition, the tropical climate was seen as conducive to madness, making the Caribbean the place where madness and sexual excess came together (1999, 89). She argues that the preoccupation with the madwoman in anglophone Caribbean writing is a direct challenge to these Victorian stereotypes of “the primitives,” which continue to shape the image of the West Indies: “This focus on female and colonial madness challenges the nineteenth-century discourse that positioned the madwoman and the colonies as loci of uncontrollable sexuality equated with a madness that must be controlled by paternal surveillance and governance” (89). Rather than controlling and suppressing madness, the patriarchal surveillance and governance actually produces it in the first place. Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Jane Eyre’s portrayal of madness as a congenital disease. When Rochester tells Jane the story of his marriage to Bertha, he discusses the Mason family, laying out a pattern of madness: Her mother “was mad; and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too; a complete dumb idiot. The elder one … will probably be in the same state one day” (Brontë 305). In contrast to this, Rhys reads Antoinette’s madness not as something intrinsic to Creole women, but as a result of the destabilisation of Jamaican society in the wake of the abolition of slavery. As a white Creole, she falls between the black freedmen and the new white arrivals from the metropolis; she is a “white nigger” (10). Her husband, who is one of the new arrivals from England, is obsessed with finding out what he calls the truth about her heritage: “Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (40). As this otherness in her unsettles him, the husband ultimately drives her to madness. He exerts his power over Antoinette in two ways; first, he constantly questions her about her family, surveilling her, which undermines her

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sense of identity as a white Creole subject. Second, he uses sex as a tool of power. Antoinette and her husband initially seem to engage in sexual activities every night during their honeymoon. The husband refers to orgasm as dying, so Antoinette symbolically dies every night as a result of sex (57). But literal death is also threatened, as the husband confesses that Antoinette came close to actually dying during their sexual encounters: “I … wonder if she ever guessed how near she came to dying. In her way, not mine. … Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness” (58). Christophine, the observant servant, analyses his behaviour succinctly: “And then … you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without. It’s she can’t see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up” (98). The husband does not inflict sexual violence on his wife, but instead he uses abstinence to purposefully destroy her. At the same time, he casts her as a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite: “She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She’ll not care who she’s loving). She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would—or could. Or could” (106). He reads Antoinette as mad because she is sexual; he speaks within a Victorian discourse that, as Renk explains, equates madness with sexual behaviour (91). The novel as a whole challenges this notion but finds no escape from the madness of the creole. In her postcolonial neo-Victorian novel Strange Music, Laura Fish follows in Rhys’footsteps by challenging the notion that madness is an intrinsic part of the tropical colonies, race or women, instead revealing the madness of the metropolis and the colonies to be the result of the trauma of slavery. The novel takes as its starting point the life of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and in particular, her poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848). In that poem an American slave tells of why she chose to murder her own child: “I could not bear / To look in his face, it was so white” (1850 [1848], 18:120–21). The child was the result of a sexual assault by the white master. She cannot live with the constant reminder of the rape in the form the child’s light skin colour, so she kills the baby. The poem, however, does not cast her as a madwoman. Defiantly, she exclaims to the white men who have caught her and strung her up to the flogging-place: “I am not mad,—I am black!” (32:217); thus, the poem points to the fact that her behaviour is intimately tied up with her position as black slave woman in a pre-emancipated United

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States. Her so-called mad behaviour is the direct result of her existence as an enslaved woman. Fish picks up on this understanding of madness by telling a broader story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her family. In her correspondence with her friend, the historical Barrett Browning explained that the poem was inspired by a story her cousin Richard told her. Richard was an illegitimate cousin of her father and lived in Jamaica. The Barrett family had extensive holdings on the island; Barrett Browning’s paternal grandfather owned more than 10,000 acres distributed over four estates. Similarly, her maternal grandparents’ fortune was in part based on Jamaican sugar plantations. Barrett Browning felt uncomfortable about the origin of her family’s fortune and was active in abolitionist circles; her poem is part of the abolitionist effort (Stone 2008). In her novel, Fish imagines Elizabeth’s life between 1838 and 1840, when she was sick and sequestered in Torquay, on the coast of Devon. She mixes first-person narration with excerpts from the historical Barrett Browning’s correspondence to weave an image of the poet’s mental state. This mixture of archival material and imaginings points to the porous boundary between fiction and history (Brindle 2014, 9). Using “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” as her point of departure, Fish interweaves Elizabeth’s metropolitan story with that of two colonial women in Jamaica, during and after the apprenticeship system, which followed the abolition of slavery. One is Sheba, a former slave, who works in the cane fields. She is raped by the white masters, among them Elizabeth’s cousin Richard. When she falls pregnant—like the nameless speaker in the poem—she kills the child once it is born. The second woman is Kaydia, who works in the great house on the Cinnamon plantation, where Elizabeth’s brother Sam is installed. When she realises Sam is abusing her nine-year-old daughter Mary Ann, Kaydia desperately tries to divert his attention from her by seducing him. By interweaving three different first-person narrators and jumping in time and place, the novel gives room to the voice of the subaltern, just as Rhys does by putting Antoinette at the centre of the narrative: “The voices of resistance are represented linguistically through hybrid and experimental languages, and generically through patterns of fusion and disruption: the epistolary, diary, and first-person novel is broken up by omniscient narration …; the realist novel is injected with the uncanny and transformed into magic realism” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 69). Sheba and Kaydia’s narration is hybrid, as they speak in Jamaican patois,

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which is the result of English and African languages colliding. In Victorian texts such language would have been used as a marker of inferiority; in Strange Music it is a way of representing the specific identity of these women. It is not a monolithic identity because Kaydia’s variety is closer to standard English than that of Sheba. The magic realism which Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn allude to is strong in Elizabeth’s sections where she has visions of a woman in the mirror. All three women have brushes with madness, which are, however, specific to their respective locations in the metropolis and the colony and the consequences of this situating; as Elizabeth thinks at one point, “places are ideas that can madden or kill” (Fish 66).1

To Be Guilty Is to Be Mad---Elizabeth Elizabeth’s madness bears traces of that typical nineteenth-century ailment of women: hysteria that shows itself in both physical and mental symptoms. For instance, Elizabeth has lost her appetite (Fish 5). Anorexia, Elaine Showalter explains, was seen as one of the symptoms of hysteria (129). Darwinian psychiatrists such as T. Clifford Allbutt saw this behaviour as the most extreme version of the feminine role: a performance of self-sacrifice by turning oneself into a little woman. Showalter, in contrast, reads it as a means of protest, in a time when their bodies were paramount for women (128–29). This reading is relevant for Strange Music. Right after explaining how much weight she lost, Elizabeth adds, “But I am bloated with guilt” (Fish 5). This guilt is the result of her family’s involvement, first in slavery, and then in the exploitation of the freedmen, as she explains at a later point. It is a guilt she tries to assuage with fasting after her father is furious about her signing a petition to abolish the apprenticeship system early: “But that night Arabel and I did not eat—we shared in the apprentices’ suffering” (14). Elizabeth is not turning herself into an ideal Angel in the House, but aligning herself even more radically with the racial Other. As punishment for this rebellion, the sisters are whipped by their father, paralleling the plight of the apprentices. Clearly, the anorexia, while the result of physical ailments, is a way of rebellion; yet, the text does not champion hysteria as a way of resistance, but ultimately as a sign of impotence. Elizabeth exclaims: “I conversely belong to that pitiful order of weak women who cannot command their bodies with their souls at every moment, and who sink down in hysterical disorder when they ought to act and resist” (132).

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Elizabeth’s hysteria is triggered by both extreme emotional states and a lack of sexuality. Over the centuries, the causes scholars saw at the root of what they called “hysteria” have shifted, but they have generally been rooted in a lack or excess of sexuality. This emphasis on sexuality is not surprising, considering the root of the word, which goes back to the Greek word for “uterus.” In ancient Greece and Rome, it was thought that hysteria was caused by a loose uterus moving around in the body (Beizer 1994, 5). The uterus was always present in the various theories on hysteria throughout the centuries, at the very least metaphorically, making hysteria an essentially female disease, until the etiology of the disease shifted from physiology to psychology towards the end of the nineteenth century (Bergo 2007, 8). And yet, the association with femininity remained. Some of Elizabeth’s hysterical attacks are brought on by rejections by men. She remembers her friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar of Greek. Elizabeth is attracted to him, but he shows no interest, “so I would boil over for hours in near hysterics after my long visits amounted, at most, to my reading Greek aloud to him” (Fish 69). It is a lack of sex that brings on these hysterical attacks. Interestingly, Elizabeth describes Boyd as “almost bleached of colour” (69), while her own skin colour is something of a source of anxiety. Boyd is not the only man to deny Elizabeth her sexuality; by her father’s decree, all the Barrett siblings are barred from marrying, because there are already too many Barretts in Jamaica and their racial origins are questionable. Instead of controlling the madwoman, the paternal governance is what brings her forth in the first place. Other hysterical fits are brought on by extreme emotional states; whenever a family member departs, Elizabeth is “prone to fainting and uncontrollable tears” (8). These leave-takings increase Elizabeth’s isolation which has been prescribed by her doctor. This isolation is a form of the rest-cure, which has become infamous through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), wherein a nameless narrator is ordered to stay in a former nursery in order to recuperate after the birth of her child; she is considered to have a “slight hysterical tendency” by her husband (1). She is specifically forbidden from writing by her doctor, who also happens to be her husband. She does it anyway—the short story is in the form of her diary—but more importantly, she begins reading the yellow wallpaper in her room; slowly, she comes to see a woman behind the pattern and finally identifies with her entirely, as she frees her double and herself from

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behind the walls, as she slowly turns insane: “I don’t like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” (17; emphasis in original). Strange Music picks up on this seminal text by enriching the metropolitan feminist themes with a more intersectional approach. Like the nameless narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Elizabeth is a writer who is forbidden from writing by her physician Dr. Barry, in order to further her convalescence. The neo-Victorian Strange Music makes explicit what is only implicit in the short story, namely that it is only the injunction of writing which allows the text to be produced. Gilman’s story is the very product of the prohibition: a text about secretly writing. At one point the narrator exclaims, “There comes [the husband and physician] John and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word” (4). Elizabeth herself explains that she can only write when she is forbidden from doing so: “I never can write when ordered to, but when refused, that is when I can” (Fish 6; emphasis in original). The patriarchal veto makes these women productive, bearing out Michel Foucault’s theories on the productivity of power in History of Sexuality (1998). Indeed, when Dr. Barry dies and with him his prohibition, Elizabeth longs to write, but she cannot: “now Dr. Barry is gone, I must write. I must write. What grand thoughts these are—I cannot ” (Fish 174; emphasis in original). Texts are not the only a result of the interdiction; so is madness. Gilman’s narrator turns mad as a result of her forced inactivity: “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (5). Elizabeth fears her fate would be the same: “And I fear that if much more goes wrong I shall go mad!—Such thoughts are, to Papa, but phantoms of the mind. Yet from a play of thoughts and words what is not becomes reality. No, I am not mad. I am cut off from the world. Maddeningly” (17). It is the treatment which produces the illness. Additionally, Elizabeth connects madness to the role of imagination; to think of one as mad endangers one’s sanity. Crucially, she also rejects the designation of madness but cannot quite escape it after all. While Strange Music treats Elizabeth’s suffering seriously, hysterics were often accused of faking their symptoms. Thus, modern criticism of hysteria has frequently focused on the performance element of the condition, in particular in relation to Jean-Martin Charcot and his treatment of hysterics at his clinic La Salpêtrière in Paris during the final decades of

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the nineteenth-century. Even at the time, there was the suspicion that the hysterical attacks which Charcot’s patients displayed in the lecture theatre were the result of, if not fraud, then suggestion (Showalter 150) because the patients wanted to please their doctors. Strange Music moves away from these suspicions. Elizabeth’s symptoms are not on display when her other doctor Mr. Weale is around: “When we were next alone Mr. Weale said it was ‘a nervous cough.’ He then made me talk of poetry, and gave me Coleridge’s works—though I was nervous, I did not cough” (Fish 64; emphasis in original). The diagnosis of nervous cough is treated with a certain irony, but what is central here is that Mr. Weale responds to Elizabeth’s interests and, instead of forbidding her to even think about poetry, he encourages her, thus making her symptoms disappear—at least for the moment. Poetry is what keeps her sane. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is invoked even more directly, when Elizabeth writes to her friend Miss Mitford, asking her if she knows “what it is to be shut up in a room by oneself, to multiply one’s thoughts by one’s thoughts—how hard it is to know what ‘one’s thought is like’— how it grows and grows, and spreads and spreads, and ends in taking some supernatural colour—just like mustard and cress on a (wet) flannel in a dark closet?” (Fish 63). Her thoughts take on a yellow colour and, like the nameless narrator, she finds her thoughts growing, but they do not become visible on a wall; Elizabeth does not find her double in the wallpaper but in her mirror, at least at first. During her opium high, she keeps seeing a woman in the mirror, whom Heilmann and Llewellyn interpret as versions of the other female characters in the text (84), but who is more fruitfully read as Elizabeth’s dark double—just like Bertha was read as Jane’s dark double by Gilbert and Gubar (84). Furthermore, as made clear by Wide Sargasso Sea, this dark double needs to be thought in terms of race. The choice of the mirror for the appearance of the double is a fitting one, since it functions as a middle ground between utopia and heterotopia, as Foucault argues in “Of Other Spaces” (1986).2 The utopian aspect of the mirror is due to the fact that it is a place without a place which opens up a virtual space. Seeing oneself in the mirror reveals a sort of shadow that makes the self visible. The heterotopian aspect of the mirror is due to its existence as a physical object: “Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and reconstitute myself there were

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I am” (Foucault 1986, 24). The gaze into the mirror forces the subject to see herself and in the wake of that gaze to refashion herself, incorporating what she has seen of herself. In addition, heterotopias are spaces in which all other spaces in a culture are represented, inverted and contested.3 In Strange Music, the mirror connects Elizabeth to a virtual space, namely a reality where she has an African heritage as the result of her family’s association with slavery. It contests her identity as a white subject and forces her to reckon with the other that made her.4 The novel picks up on debates between Barrett Browning’s biographers such as Julia Markus, who, according to Marjorie Stone, speculated that the poet did, indeed, have African blood. Yet, while other branches of the Barrett family were racially mixed, there is no evidence to support the speculation that the same was true for the poet’s lineage (quoted in Stone). Fish nevertheless uses this starting point to connect Elizabeth to her family’s legacy, both on a personal and poetical level. At one point Elizabeth speaks of a “grotesque vision,” when the woman is nursing a child with brown skin colour. “A Negro baby, here, in my room? Surely it isn’t kin of mine. I do not fear the future. It is the past that scares me. It is impossible to reconcile the past” (173). The double reveals the hidden fear of a dark secret, to be exposed through a child, whose African heritage could not be ignored. This revelation would be the result of past misdeeds of her family, which Elizabeth cannot undo. Elizabeth is both fascinated and repulsed by the woman in the mirror; she says: “I am small and black. (Black, I imagine, as Sappho.) A thin partition divides us; why do I regard the woman who watches me with distaste? … The mouth is large, obstinate, projecting—she is fulllipped—and has dark eyes, deep and calm, and long thick ringlets, again, dark brown, almost black” (10). She sees in the reflection both herself, but also someone else. This moment is found, too, in Wide Sargasso Sea, when Antoinette finally sees the woman that has been haunting the house in England: “It was then that I saw her—the ghost. The woman with the streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her” (Rhys 123). She misrecognises herself. This misrecognition is the basis of hysterical identity, according to Mukherjee: “Hysterical identity is predicated on and presupposed by moments of non-identity, not eradicated by them” (2007, 2–3). Elizabeth, too, experiences moments of non-identity when she looks into the mirror. Elizabeth calls herself black, a description which becomes racialised by the observation that the woman is full-lipped, a physical feature that is

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often associated with an African heritage. Through the invocation of the poet Sappho, blackness is connected to poetry; yet, the invocation of the ancient writer also puts Elizabeth firmly in the Western literary tradition.5 She cannot or does not want to connect to an African narrative tradition. The double does, however, connect her to the Western literary tradition about those of suspected African heritage, specifically both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. At one point, the vision woman appears wearing a magenta dress, similar to Antoinette’s red dress (15). The woman also burns down a house, at least within the virtual space of a dream: “She is burning a house of memories” (12), which is reminiscent of the conflagration of the master’s house in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. This destruction of houses is repeated in the visions. The house of memories might stand for the house of the slave master but also for the legacy of a certain system of knowledge that needs to be destroyed; this conflagration of the symbol of oppression at the hands of the black subaltern is the utopian side of the vision. Elizabeth’s madness is steeped in literary history. This intense intertextual awareness is limiting Elizabeth, she feels. To break out of this Western tradition, she needs to rid herself of her textual ancestors. She cannot talk to the black woman in the vision, yet, she is convinced that her imagination will allow her “to experience … an otherness,” for as she says, “I have a vision of a poet. A poet’s vision” (Fish 129, 118; emphasis in original). The madness both limits her and shows her a way forward. After all, it is these visions that give Elizabeth the impetus to write, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” inspired by a story her cousin tells her. “Imagination is like the act of remembering, without memory being in the consciousness—I have heard this before. I have been here before. I have lived this already. I am black, I am black!” (183). Picking up on this claim, Heilmann and Llewellyn explain that “in Elizabeth’s project of empathic remembering Fish extends Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory: The collective re-membering of communal trauma is complemented by an individual act of bearing witness to trauma shared imaginatively through identification” (88). While this impulse is utopian, the novel also shows the limits of such imaginative solidarity and identification. Elizabeth, in spite of her fears of blackness in the family, remains a resolutely white metropolitan woman. Thus, it is only her double, who burns down the house in the virtual space. Unlike Bertha/Antoinette, she does not have to eradicate herself in a conflagration, because, in spite of the doubts, she is not a Creole; her racial identity is not in question.

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Additionally, the text also shows how the imagination of the metropolitan woman cannot capture the lives of those living in the colonies. Elizabeth bases her story on that of a slave named Quasheba. One of the other women narrators in Strange Music is called Sheba, and like her name, her story is very similar to that of the speaker in the poem. Yet, there are important differences, for instance her rejection of any deity, as well as the fact that the poem is set in the United States, while Sheba lives in Jamaica. By having a figure who is different from the one in Elizabeth’s imagination, the novel shows that understanding based solely on imagination can only go so far. The others need to tell their own stories. Elizabeth’s madness might be the result of colonial injustices, which the black women share in, but it is nonetheless specifically metropolitan, because she is more perpetrator than victim.

Like Mother Like Daughter---Kaydia In having two colonial women narrate their own stories, this postcolonial neo-Victorian novel allows for resistance towards Victorian discourse in which they were portrayed as sexually deviant madwomen. The colonial context, was seen as marked by excessive sexuality, which, in contrast to Britain, was not tempered by reason and therefore needed stricter control. Unrestrained sexuality was feared as a threat to civilisation and Empire, as it undermined notions of British rationality, crossed racial lines and sometimes even produced offspring (Levine 2004, 134–35). While Elizabeth’s hysteria is the result of a lack of sex, Sheba and Kaydia’s brushes with madness are the result of too much. In contrast to the nineteenthcentury thinking on black women, this excessive sexuality is not intrinsic to them, but something that is forced upon them by the white male masters. In fact, it is the white master’s sexuality that is excessive: “E like black woman’s pum-pum too much” (33), Sheba’s lover Isaac explains of Sam Barrett, Elizabeth’s brother. In Victorian thinking excessive sexuality was often connected to madness, as it is in Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester explains Bertha’s descent into madness, partially with her family history—a Creole history—and partially with her own excessive sexual appetites: “What a pigmy intellect she had—and what giant propensities! … Bertha Mason,—the true daughter of an infamous mother,—dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste. … And I could not rid myself of [her] by any legal proceedings; for the doctors now

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discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity” (Brontë 306, emphasis in original). This understanding of madness as the result of compounding of congenital factors with habits is typical of what Showalter calls Darwinist psychology—although somewhat avant-la-lettre in this case (104). In Jane Eyre, by specifically naming Bertha’s mother a Creole, Rochester calls upon race as a factor in her insanity. In fact, during the nineteenth-century, the black body, like the female body, was thought to be prone to hysterics. “The ‘hysterization of women’s bodies’ is paralleled on the racial-sexual border by the hysterisation of the black body, which is also represented as saturated with sexuality,” Abdul R. JanMohamed explains and goes on to argue that the hystericised male black body was used to police the border between black and white (1995, 104). Yet, the supposedly hysterical black female body was not treated in the same manner; instead, white male sexuality was acted out on it. In Cambridge (1991) Caryl Phillips draws the portrait of madwoman named Christiania, whose madness is not intrinsic, but instead the result of her violation first by a slave husband and later the white master Mr. Brown. Her second husband Cambridge recognises this: “The woman steadfastly refused to adopt the Christian religion …, but to my horror she now reverted to dirt-eating and other abominations. I traced this filthy behaviour to a sickness brought on by Mr Brown’s hunger, although this by no means justified such paganism” (1993 [1991], 163). While Cambridge understands the causes, he still judges his wife for her mad behaviour. She is not given a voice of her own, but, like Bertha Mason, remains mute. In Strange Music, it is the so-called madwomen who tell their own stories. This allows for a more intimate understanding of their actions and shows that they are termed mad not by themselves, but by others. What others call madness is to them the only possible reaction to the violence they experience. Kaydia’s story spans three days in February of 1840. She is taking care of Sam Barrett who seems to be dying of fever. She is distraught because she does not know whether he has provided for her in his will. She believes he should because she is pregnant with his child. Their sexual relationship started because she wanted to distract his attentions from her now 12-year old daughter, Mary Ann. He has been abusing her since she was nine and the sexual relationship is the only way for Kaydia to protect the child. The abuse has driven Mary Ann insane: “From then on Mary Ann had monsters in she head” (Fish 44). There are also physical

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signs of the abuse, as Mary Ann grew lumps in her mouth and throat. The child’s behaviour is reminiscent of other literary madwomen: “Kicking, fighting, snarling, wildly matted mane muddled round she honeybrown neck, screaming like she felt to tackle hell’s fire when Mister Sam forced she into that blue dress” (45–46). Compare this description to that of Bertha Mason: “It grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hit its head and face” (Brontë 293). As far back as the Middle Ages, the mad woman has been described as both hairy and black (Gilman 1985b, 142). Her unkempt hair is a sign of a mind in disarray. Bertha then goes on to attack Rochester, the man who is her master. Mary Ann does the same when Sam wants to dress her up in a new dress from Europe. Both Bertha and Mary Ann fight back the only way they can, yet their behaviour is understood as madness by those around them. Neither woman can articulate herself. Bertha never speaks, Mary Ann only in a few instances, and never to explain her behaviour. It is left to her mother to read the signs on her body. Due to this silence, Heilmann and Llewellyn consider Mary Ann to be the ultimate subaltern: “Muted, traumatised, and maddened, she represents a young Bertha Mason who can articulate only her rage” (87). This silence also means that Mary Ann is marginalised; it is not her story, but that of her mother. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben argue that neo-Victorian fiction posits itself as the rescuer of children and the righter of historic wrongs against them by the ubiquitous presentation of children as abused, molested and murdered (2011, 24). Interestingly, Heilmann and Llewellyn explain that in the nineteenth century, there had been rumours about the historical Sam Barrett making presents to Mary Ann, the daughter of a plantation worker; her exact age or the precise nature of their relationship was apparently unclear (256n32). Yet, Fish decided to make Mary Ann a child, which illustrates Kohlke and Gutleben’s point and is, in fact, a sign of what Kohlke elsewhere calls a desire for imagined perversity in the reading of neo-Victorian fiction (Kohlke 2011, 143–44). The perverse desire of the abuser is predicated on the desire of the reader. During the nineteenth-century, Foucault explains, it was the children who were thought to be naturally perverse (1998, 42). Charles, Mary Ann’s father, does indeed blame his daughter for what happened to her. He calls her crazy and says she “let Satan have im way wid she” (Fish 44).

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His impression of his daughter’s culpability is furthered by the presents of jewellery that Sam makes Mary Ann. Like Sam himself, Charles seems to think that by accepting these trinkets, nine-year-old Mary Ann is welcoming the abuse. Yet, the neo-Victorian text does not posit the child as the source of the problem, but as a victim by calling attention to Sam’s excessive sexuality; he is described as a zombie, someone who does not feel his own body and rampages through the freedmen village in search for further victims: “E a-zombie, Mister Sam! … True, Mister Sam walkin dead man … No feelin in him body, no memory in him head” (Fish 33). It seems to give credence to the Victorian fear that the hot colonies were places that led to sexual excesses by white men, which were all the more dangerous for being lived out on the body of a black woman (Mohanram 2007, 74). The neo-Victorian text furthermore refutes the notion that the mother is to be blamed for her daughter’s madness. Victorian psychiatry believed mental disorders to be passed down along the maternal line (Showalter 123). In Jane Eyre, Rochester clearly blames Bertha’s mother for passing on her vices and her madness to her daughter when he calls Bertha “the true daughter of an infamous mother” (Brontë 306). Indeed, even in neo-Victorian texts, it is often mother and daughter both who are mad. In Wide Sargasso Sea, both Antoinette and her mother Annette Cosway go mad; however, just like her daughter’s madness, Annette’s madness is the result of outside powers pressing down on her, rather than something intrinsic. Christophine explains of her former mistress: “They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her” (Rhys 101). They accused Annette of being mad, questioning her constantly. This constant surveillance combined with her husband’s abandonment drove her insane. Charles blames Kaydia for what is happening to Mary, claiming she cannot watch over their daughter. At the same time, he also holds Mary Ann responsible for what he perceives to be Kaydia’s madness, while comparing that madness to that of Kaydia’s own mother. All three women are put in a maternal lineage of madness. Kaydia herself draws a comparison between her daughter and her mother, saying, “[Mary Ann’s] eye’s glazed and crazed like [my mother] Rebecca Laslie’s” (Fish 49). Kaydia remembers how her mother once ate dirt; she interprets the behaviour as a way of burying loneliness and the feeling of being wronged (158). As Kaydia finds out, her mother had a relationship with old Mr. Sam, an uncle of Elizabeth and the current Mr. Sam; Kaydia is their child. Rebecca was

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hoping to be considered in Old Mr. Sam’s will, but young Sam is worried what it will signal if a black woman is bequeathed an inheritance by her white master, so she receives nothing; she is wronged. It was this relationship with old Mr. Sam that drove Rebecca mad. This madness comes to the fore, again, when she attacks Kaydia after the latter accuses her of never helping her and her own daughter. Rebecca flies into an act of rage, similar to those of Bertha and Mary Ann, strangling Kaydia, while disavowing her. She is wearing a red dress, like Antoinette (162). Before this disavowal, Kaydia was longing for her mother, because she needs her to make sense of her own suffering; the mother needs to teach the daughter about madness. It is for this relationship with the master that Rebecca is considered a lunatic by other black workers on the plantation; to have what appears to be a mutually consensual, sexual relationship with a white man is considered insane (152). Kaydia and her mother do so because it is the only way of gaining a modicum of power. The Obeah woman, Leah, advises Kaydia to do so in order to protect her child.6 Now Kaydia is also considered mad by the other black people on the estate. This madness is only ascribed to her from outside. To her, all of her actions make perfect sense and are, in fact, the only logical solution to her problem. The only instance when Kaydia truly loses her reason for a moment, is when she thinks about what has been done to Mary Ann: “Reason and order vanished in a haze of beating wings flying like my own rage” (87). She experiences the uncontrollable rage, which is one of the aspects of madness. It is not insanity but anger at the situation. Yet, there are also moments, when her own condition threatens to tear her apart: “Before I lay with Mister Sam inside I was crumbling, now I’ve lost too much of myself to hold on to days” (102). The madness is grounded not only in sexual exploitation but also intimately connected to race. First, these abuses can only take place because the abuser is white and the abused is black. Second, what is termed mad behaviour by the black population is also often considered to be white behaviour. Kaydia is frequently accused of being too white, which is a reference both to her skin colour—she is mixed-race—as well as her behaviour. This also picks up on “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” where the speaker considers her child to be too white. Conversely, Kaydia’s mother also claims that her white blood actually serves as a barrier against madness: “Yu not backward as Congo nigger, not tainted wid deir lunacy. Me high cheekbones come fram white Ingland’s criminals made

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to work in dis ere colony” (160). There was racial mixture in the family line before; yet a few moments later Rebecca accuses Kaydia of being too white. Thus, it seems in the eyes of the Afro-Caribbean people, for the most part, madness is something which comes from white people. Ultimately, Kaydia sees only one way out of her situation; as Charles takes Mary Ann away from Cinnamon Hill, she realises she cannot stop him. So she turns away, instead choosing to save her unborn child, who is even whiter than her. By removing herself from not only white, but also black patriarchal surveillance, she flees madness, making the only rational choice open to her.

Not Your Negro---Sheba Sheba is the figure in Strange Music who is most directly inspired by “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Yet, by making certain changes, Fish comments on questions of responsibility and agency. As previously mentioned, she sets Sheba’s story in Jamaica on the Barrett family plantation, rather than in the United States. This lessens the distance between Elizabeth and Sheba and implicates the former in Sheba’s fate. Since Sheba’s narration covers a period from 1838 to 1839, she is no longer slave, unlike the speaker in the poem. Yet, her fate clearly shows that the abolition of slavery did not lead to a sudden change in power relations; black women were still at the mercy of white masters. A further central point is the final fate of the two women; the speaker in the poem is hunted by the slavers, caught and flogged until she dies. Sheba commits suicide by walking into the ocean. The outcome might be the same, yet, in her neo-Victorian rewriting, Fish gives the black woman agency to decide her own fate. Both women find release in death but that release looks very different. The poem’s speaker is finally united with her white child, “who is waiting for [her]” (1850 [1848], 36:250). In death, the black mother and the (too) white child can be reunited. In contrast, Sheba dreams of a reunion with her lover Isaac. There is no reconciliation with the child born of rape. Sheba is the only narrator in the novel who enjoys sex. In fact, this is how she is introduced to the reader: “Happily me body moves under Isaac’s, moving on love” (Fish 25). Comparing this to the way in which the other narrators engage with sex, it becomes clear that sexuality is highly racialised, in a manner reminiscent of Victorian logic, in spite of

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the neo-Victorian ethos. Sheba, who is the darkest of the three narrators—she was probably born in Africa—has a lot of sex. Kaydia, who is mixed-race, has some sex; quite apart from the abusive relationship with Sam, she has a child with Charles. Elizabeth, the white woman, finally, is the one who has no sex. However, Elizabeth is driven mad by this lack of sex; clearly, she has sexual desires. This might once again point to a reading of her as a black-ish woman. Thus, the text reproduces the discourse about black women as highly sexualised and white women as the opposite (Weeks 1989, 41–42). Yet, this sexuality is not problematised in Sheba’s case, but instead celebrated and even a source of rebellion; the lovers hide from the overseers, trying to evade their surveillance. The problem only arises when white men force themselves on her. After Isaac challenges Sam to a cane-cutting race and wins, he is brutally beaten and eventually killed. Perhaps as revenge for this, or for some entirely different reason, Sheba is later hunted down and raped by a group of white men. Afterwards, both Sheba and her fellow workers think her sick: “Sickness’s a blister spreading out from me belly, out from between me legs” (Fish 78). The illness is the direct result of the rape. It also burrows into her mind, making it hard to think: “Again. Tiny pieces come too sharp to see clearly. Slippery red between me legs. Memory splinters embedded in me head, cling to me throat back” (138). She is traumatised. Yet, while this could well have been a cause for madness, Sheba only calls herself a lunatic, when she has not run away after the baby is born (188). The failure to rebel is madness. Thus, her decision to run away and kill the baby must be read as the opposite of madness. Her infanticide is not insanity, but resistance. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the escaped slave Sethe takes a similar path and kills her daughter rather than have her fall into the hands of the slave master. What Londa Schiebinger calls “reproductive resistance” historically was a part of the fight against the white masters (1993, 181). Thus, Sheba is not mad: She is black. The woman who sets both Kaydia and Sheba on their path of resistance is the Obeah practitioner, Leah. The women turn to her when they do not know what else to do and she advises them on how to resist; in Kaydia’s case, she advocates using her sexuality to save her child, in Sheba’s case she recommends abortion or infanticide. Leah has traces of the madwoman about her: “Untidy. Overgrown, Leah’s hair’s sprinkled with burrs; grass heads heavy with seeds are woven into curls. Standing naked and tall in hut’s dark light” (Fish 144). Like Bertha and Mary Ann, her hair is wild

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and she is dirty. Later she performs an Obeah ritual to help Sheba placate the child’s spirit. The way she moves is reminiscent of a hysterical fit: “Hunched up, shouting, Leah dances faster than John Canoe dancer; mouth gaping, yes bulging dangerously. … Leah’s soul fights, shaking terribly, as Loa comes from we God. Long flat feet stamp. She falls. She have left she body, Loa makes it move now, she all shake-shivering legs, arms stretched across sandy ground” (147). Hysterical attacks are signified by fits, fainting, vomiting, checking, sobbing, laughing and paralysis. The seizures that were observed at La Salpêtrière included loss of consciousness, eccentric physical movements as well as the miming of emotions (Showalter 129, 150). Renk explains that spirit possession, which is part of some African religions, is seen by Western cultures as madness, because to them it is associated with “a sexually ecstatic, transformative state” (102). Leah does not perform at the behest of a male doctor; her behaviour is not a sign of illness. Rather, she is the one with the authority to cure, and in fact, the quasi-hysterical behaviour itself is part of the cure. When Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Daria Tunca ask whether, “what passes for madness [could] actually be something other, such as resistance to the truly demented logic of race, class and gender prejudice enshrined in the popular consciousness of Caribbean societies,” the answer, in this case, has to be yes (2018, 6). By bringing together three narratives from women in the colonies and the metropolis, Strange Music allows for an understanding of the common root of their madness: the violence of a system predicated on racial difference and subjugation. As the three narratives weave in and out of each other, they jump from location to location and between different times, occasionally making it difficult to follow the plot. This disjointed narrative also reflects their madness and the moments when their identities are similarly disjointed and fragile. “Leaning over the side of the boat, my face is broken into thousand pieces; and … the reflections floating on the gloomy surface diverge and diffuse into fragments that stare up at me,” Elizabeth ruminates at one point (Fish 67). Yet, while their stories make a whole, the three women are always next to each other, textually speaking, but they never actually interact. Sheba and Kaydia are in the same location, yet they meet only once, and do not even speak. As they are both visiting the market—Sheba about to run away, Kaydia worried about her pregnancy—they have the urge to reach out to the other, but they do not. Even though their situations are very similar, they cannot connect. Elizabeth, meanwhile, is an ocean

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away. The only moment of connection is when Kaydia sees a painting of Elizabeth at the plantation. White and black women do not interact in this text, apart from a mixed-race relation of Elizabeth who lives in England. White women only figure in the thinking of the Jamaican women with regard to their inability to keep their husbands (152). As pointed out above, solidarity through imagination is limited. The same can be said for the solidarity that the reader of the neo-Victorian text experiences for the subaltern subjects that have been given a voice in Strange Music. By picking up on a dense intertextual tradition of madwomen in Caribbean writing, Fish deconstructs Victorian notions of women, madness and race. Yet, it also becomes clear that some women are more steeped in this literary tradition; Elizabeth complains about how she is trapped in it. Indeed, even her madness is configured in these traditions. She is a woman who belongs to the metropolis, but also struggles with her ties to the colonies, just like Bertha and her daughters. Thanks to a neo-Victorian feat of revisioning, Sheba, Kaydia and Mary Ann, however, move outside this literary tradition. Their position is clearly that of colonial subjects, and their madness does not make them like Jane’s dark double, but instead helps them to free themselves from the heritage of Bertha Mason.

Notes 1. The novel devotes most of its pages to Elizabeth. This imbalance is therefore also evident in the space devoted to the analysis of the three narrators. 2. Simon Joyce uses the metaphor of the rearview mirror to describe how we, and indeed neo-Victorian texts, engage with the Victorians. We never engage with the Victorians directly, but rather with a mediated image: “The image usefully condenses the paradoxical sense of looking forward to see what’s behind us” (4). This is what happens when Elizabeth looks into the past in order to figure her possible future as the mother of a child with African heritage. 3. Elizabeth’s room or more extended, her house at Torquay can be itself read as a heterotopia. Through the visits by her family and the correspondence with her family, she is connected to the outside world, both London and Jamaica. At the same time, the location at the Atlantic coast connects her to the island and the women on it. 4. This is also to be understood in terms of finances, since the inheritance that makes Elizabeth’s lifestyle possible is built on the proceeds of slavery. 5. Additionally, it also invokes a queer heritage which, however, is not further pursued in the text.

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6. Alan Richardson explains that “like Voodoo, Obeah is a ‘hybrid’ or ‘Creolized’ Caribbean religion with indigenous West Afrian roots, which includes such practices as ritual incantation and the use of fetishes or charms” (1997, 173).

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Josephs, Kelly Baker. Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Kaup, Monika. Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Neo-Victorian Childhoods: Re-Imagining the Worst of Times.” In Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 119–47. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. ———, and Christian Gutleben. “Introducing Neo-Victorian Family Matters: Cultural Capital and Reproduction.” In Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 1–42. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Ledent, Bénédicte, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca. “‘Madness is Rampant on This Island’: Writing Altered States in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.” In Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge, edited by Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca, 1–17. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Levine, Philippa. “Sexuality, Gender, and Empire.” In Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine, 134–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. “madness, n.” OED Online. June 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www. oed.com/view/Entry/112066?redirectedFrom=madness. Mohanram, Radhika. Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. London: Vintage, 2007. Mukherjee, Ankhi. Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2007. Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. 1991. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Renk, Kathleen J. Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Richardson, Alan. “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–1807.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 171–94. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Edited by Angela Smith. London: Penguin, 2000. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

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Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–61. Stone, Marjorie. “Browning [née Moulton Barrett], Elizabeth Barrett (1806– 1861), Poet and Writer.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10. 1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3711. Thieme, John. “Becoming a Madman, Becoming a Madwoman: Ex-Centricity in Caribbean Writing.” In Ex-Centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction, edited by Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes, 95–118. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1989.

CHAPTER 5

“A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club Novels Brenda Ayres

With all the handsome redcoats that entice the ladies throughout the novels of Jane Austen (and throughout other nineteenth-century fiction), you would think that there would be one or two suffering from PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), but if there are, the authors do not let the reader see it. Of course, the diagnosis of PTSD was unknown before the twentieth century; the term emerged for the first time in 1980 in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM–111). Before then, there was very little understanding of the effect, especially the long-term effect, that trauma could have on people. Those of the British upper and rising middle classes were ostensibly all about self-control, order and the stiff upper lip. To display emotional pain was just not the thing. Anyone considered “mad” failed to get help or sympathy and was ignored, denied, banished from polite society, hidden away and erased from family logs. This happened to one of Jane Austen’s brothers, Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre (1847), Anne and Laura

B. Ayres (B) Department of English, Liberty University, Red Lion, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_5

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in Woman in White (1859) and characters in many of the neo-Regency novels written by Mary Balogh, but she pulled them into the light of day. Many scholars, with the most recent being Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, have observed that contemporary texts often attempt to correct the past by producing nineteenth-century stories revised by contemporary knowledge, perspectives and agendas (2019, 45). This is what Balogh and other novelists are doing in their neo-Regency/Victorian novels in their depiction of PTSD.1 In my opinion, Balogh’s are the best written of this subgenre, especially in her portrayal of PTSD. As for the value of popular novels in helping readers gain healing of their own PTSD or helping others who are coping with trauma, one has only to remember these novels’ wide readership and how often they appear on bestselling lists; they speak to millions of people. Categorised as popular fiction or “paraliterature,” Balogh’s novels may be too quickly dismissed as not deserving of academic study, but as Fredric Jameson has observed, postmodernists have embraced an “aesthetic populism,” rejecting the categorisation of literature as “high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture” (1981, 2–3). Refusing to accept that only academe or “cultural expert(s)” should have the authority to pronounce what is quality literature and what should form “the canon,” Herbert Gans invites more “cultural democracy” and “cultural pluralism” (1999, vii). I also agree with Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss who warn of “academic pitfalls” in reengaging in the longrunning debate about high and low culture (2014, 3).2 Including popular novels and novels set in Austen’s time, as well as considering multimedia, for Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss, should come under scholarly study even if it would be more tenable to call the genre and its scholarship “neo-Victorianism” (3). The “appropriat[ion]” of “high art” by pop culture and its far-reaching effects must be taken seriously (Voigts 2018, 394), just as Balogh raises some very serious questions about nineteenthcentury experiences with trauma that she intends to rediagnose for a twenty-first-century audience. The perspective of nineteenth-century society maintained that those who served in combat, simply did their duty to the Crown and should not feel, much less talk about their pain. It was rather objectionable to recount one’s war experiences, particularly in the presence of delicate ladies, even in private to one’s wife, mother or sister. Besides that socially induced repression, the unspoken question that deepened PTSD was, how did a man, who was brought up to abide by a code of honour, nobility, noblesse oblige and gentlemanly behaviour, who

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found himself in dishonourable situations that often occur during a war, reconcile conflicts of honour after the cannons fell silent? How did a gentleman deal with the fear that naturally assaulted him during battle and the nightmares that would torment him for the rest of his life when he was supposed to be fearless? Furthermore, at a time when beauty and fastidiousness to outward appearance were cardinal, how did men cope with scars and missing limbs once they were returned to the ballroom and parlour? In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans fought wars by ordering men into tight line and column formations and marching them within a few yards of the enemy before firing. This disciplined the troops and controlled them with mere vocal commands. Because muskets were not very accurate, soldiers shot and were shot at close range. Tolerating this proximity to danger is just not natural; it demands suppression of fight-or-flight instincts. If stoically facing rifles aimed at only feet away was humanly unnatural enough, then how were the British, Scottish and Irish to cope when decorum was dashed in favour of guerrilla warfare first practiced by the Spanish in the Peninsular War?3 After combat, the soldier who suppresses his emotions only exacerbates the devastating effects of trauma. Balogh describes such combat trauma for men, and she parallels it with trauma caused by the equally unnatural act of women lining up at balls in a marriage market to be picked off as spouses with no say about their futures. As early as 1792 when she penned her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft complained that nuptial negotiations and marriages had become a form of legal prostitution. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell satirised the same in their novels but concurrently often romantised the entire business, just as war was romantised. Prior to World War I literature, engaging in battle was extolled as a noble sacrifice as exemplified in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and those famous lines: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die” (1923 [1854], 14–15). Continuing to be popular and widely quoted by the Victorians was Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, especially these lines: “Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please” (1840 [1590], 1.40.8– 9). Granted, life is relatively easier when one is not in the midst of war, but postwar life is anything but easy.

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This is the point in Balogh’s eight books that make up her Survivors’ Club series, with the first published in 2012. They deal with nearly every aspect of PTSD that resulted from the Peninsular War. Adroitly, she not only divulges the topsyturviness and untidiness of war’s aftermath on commissioned officers, her plots also offer resolution for her characters and in turn, for her readers who may be suffering from PTSD or who may have a relationship with someone who suffers from PTSD. Even though she foregrounds war-related PTSD, Balogh concurrently pitches it with other forms of PTSD caused by behaviour and events that were also forbidden subjects to be discussed during the nineteenth century, such as spousal abuse, infidelity, rape, abandonment of a child by an alcoholic parent, alcoholism, Down syndrome, epilepsy, prostitution, homosexuality, gaming addictions, invisibility of the woman, miscarriages, unacceptable length and inappropriate display of mourning for a spouse or child, and women who were not allowed to follow their dreams and hearts or to have a means to provide financially for themselves and children.4 Jayashree Kamble begins his essay, “Patriotism, Passion, and PTSD: The Critique of War in Popular Romance Fiction” (2012), with an epigraph from Fredric Jameson’s seminal The Political Unconscious. The excerpt is as follows: “In order to be consequent, the will to read literary or cultural texts as symbolic acts much necessarily grasp them as resolutions of determinate contradictions”5 Most readers and writers expect books—especially novels of romance—to have conflict and a plot that will resolve the conflict. Jameson also says, though, that while history is being made, its “ideological subtext ” is not “always understood” or “present” but “must itself always be reconstructed after the fact.”6 Nineteenthcentury novels like Austen’s did have conflicts that would be resolved by the end of the story, and certainly George Wickham (in Pride and Prejudice, 1813) caused major conflicts in the lives of most people who knew him. Still, Austen did not present Wickham with PTSD (had he served in combat), just as she did not with Fanny’s father in Mansfield Park (1814), and Captain Frederick Wentworth, Admiral Croft, Captain Harville or Captain James Benwick in Persuasion (1818), although some of their attitudes and behaviour could be attributed to PTSD (such as Frederick’s and Harville’s melancholy). Just as Jameson predicted, situations that are mentioned in early novels can be better understood years later with the benefit of advanced insight and hindsight. This is one of the advantages of neo-Victorianism with its informed knowledge in the social

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sciences including psychology. In particular relevance to this chapter is our current understanding of PTSD. From the original Greek, “trauma” translates as “wound.” Marian MacCurdy defines it as “any assault to the body or psyche that is so overwhelming that it cannot be integrated into consciousness”; it “breaches the unspoken contract we think we have with life, that if we do what we are supposed to do we will survive” (2007, 16). When impacted by trauma, “we often cannot absorb its meaning and at the same time still hold onto all of our core beliefs” (16) and thus experience debilitating terror, nightmarish horrors, helplessness and hopelessness (16 and APA 1994, 424). “Trauma is an ancient human phenomenon,” Laurie Vickroy relates, but “trauma literature—that is, literature written with a conscious awareness of the concept—has become a contemporary genre” (2015, 3), and it certainly is the case with Balogh’s novels. Such fiction provides a safe place for readers to face their own crisis and conflicts (2), and most of them (including Balogh’s) give hope through the characters who survive trauma and adapt (2). Therapeutically for the reader, such books “incorporate the gaps, uncertainties, dissociations, and visceral details of living through traumatic experiences” (3). Although most postmodern literatures fails to give closure (unlike Balogh’s) and “trauma fiction” may only ameliorate the pain, it also facilitates the reader’s living vicariously through characters and consequently, becoming stronger and more selfaware of tensions and possibilities of negotiating those tensions with varying degrees of success (4). Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman suggest that “trauma has become a major signifier for our age. It is our normal means of relating present suffering to past violence.” It has become “one signifier for a plurality of ills signified” (2009, xi). A plethora of books have been published on the subject, such as: The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018) by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning; Victims: Trauma, Testimony and Justice by Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate (2015) and Victors and Victims: Are You Being Held Back by a Victim Mentality? (2014) by K. R. Harrison. Ironically, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) eliminated the phrase PTSD in 1994 (4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-IV ]) because trauma had become a norm. This is borne out in the following statement by Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery: “Rape, battery, and other forms of sexual and domestic violence are so common a part of women’s lives that they can hardly be

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described as outside the range of ordinary experience. And in view of the number of people killed in war over the past century, military trauma, too, must be considered a common part of human experience; only the fortunate find it unusual” (1992, 33). Yet, it certainly does not feel commonplace when one is traumatised. “Traumatic life events involve reactions at life’s extremes,” Ronnie Janoff-Bulman theorises in his Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. “By understanding trauma,” he adds, “we learn about ourselves, victim and nonvictim alike, and begin to become aware of our greatest weaknesses and our surest strengths” (2016, 4). Cultivating awareness about PTSD, even within the context of such novels as Balogh’s, helps us come to grips with modern trauma that no one can avoid anymore. Balogh’s Duke of Stanbrook, George Crabbe, loses his son early in the war. His wife is so distraught, she commits suicide by throwing herself off one of the high cliffs on their property. Such a desperate act is all too frequent for traumatised victims who want only to end the pain, but suicide in turn traumatises others. George, already traumatised by his own early experiences as a soldier and traumatised further by the death of his son in battle, now suffers even more because of his wife’s suicide. He is haunted by persistent nightmares (2012, 76). Trauma evinces episodes in which the event not only recurs as if for the first time, they are “irruptive” (Leys 2000, 10) and inflict the wound again and again. Joanne Davis describes posttrauma nightmares as having “pernicious impact” and effecting symptoms of a “broader trauma response … and pathology themselves” (2009, 47). Due to inconclusive research, psychologists today are not agreed as to whether nightmares similar to what George and other Balogh’s characters suffer are literally redundant or if they are as Freud suggested, efforts of the mind to master the trauma (Lansky 24–26). Regardless, nightmares only perpetuate and deepen the pain in Balogh’s novels. The novels likewise reflect the research that suggests that people who struggle with trauma connect to others who are struggling, which not only helps traumatised victims not to feel alone, but also empowers them in efforts to help other overcome and heal (Calhoun and Tedeschi 2013, 143). Acutely aware of the suffering caused by the war, the Duke takes in men (and one woman) to help them recover from their physical and mental injuries. After they are on their feet and can resume their civilian positions the best they can, there are seven of them who reunite each year at Penderris Hall in Cornwall for three weeks to renew their friendship and

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encourage each other in their progress of recovery. They call themselves the Survivors’ Club. In most contemporary neo-Regency/neo-Victorian novels, the reader usually knows by the end of the first chapter or so who’s going to marry whom, which, after all, is the point of a romance. What keeps a reader reading are the conflict, the barriers and the foils that block the way to the altar and most importantly, the growth that both characters must undergo before they are right for each other, before they discover that they are in love and before they deserve each other and a happy-afterever ending. Balogh’s Survivors’ Club novels are unique in their conflicts, for the characters endure psychological journeys of coping with PTSD for veterans of the Peninsular War as well as veterans of other types of wars.

Book 1: The Proposal (2012) Gwendoline Grayson (Lady Muir) resides at the dower’s house at Newbury Abbey, the home of her brother, Neville, Earl of Kilbourne, happily married to Lily. Gwen’s sister Lauren is also happily married, to Kit, a survivor of the Napoleonic Wars. The stories of Aidan/Eve, Neville/Lily, Kit/Lauren, each involving men who were traumatised by the Peninsular War, are told in Slightly Married (2003, the first of the Bedwyn Family series), and One Night for Love and A Summer to Remember (2007 and 2002, respectively, and are prequels to the Bedwyn novels). At the opening of The Proposal, Gwen is visiting Vera Parkinson to comfort her after the death of Vera’s beloved husband. Feeling lonely herself and anxious to escape her garrulous host, Gwen walks along the beach until she realizes that the tide is coming in, thereby preventing backtrack. Instead she takes a rugged path up the cliffs intending to get back to Vera’s cottage through the village. Upon doing so, she falls and severely sprains her ankle. Reluctantly but fortuitously, Hugo Emes, Lord Trentham, comes to the rescue (only for her to rescue him in turn—from his isolation and depression). They both suffer from PTSD but due to different causes. It is because of their own experience of chronic, traumatic pain that they can help each other heal. With Gwen, she must overcome her guilt for not winning the war with her husband’s severe depression and for miscarrying their child. Hugo’s guilt arises from two sources. He broke his father’s heart by going to war (83). However, as we learn later in the novel, he was only 18 when his stepmother seduced him and physically aroused his manhood.

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In order to prevent a sexual relationship with her, he urged his father to buy a commission, and then Hugo fought as a soldier for ten years. He has had to contend with remorse in what part, if any, he played in his stepmother’s infidelity and in the sorrow that he caused his father while he was alive in abandoning the family’s business. He was good at soldiering and was promoted numerous times, returning a hero having been awarded one of the highest battle honours for the “Forlorn Hope” (60). This is a term for a very dangerous military operation sure to be suicidal. He was under orders to lead the charge, but when defeat was sure, he would not allow his men to retreat but continued to advance against an insurmountable foe. Four years later when he is relaying all of this to Gwen, he claims that he killed nearly 300 men or got them killed when he led them “up an almost sheer slope into the guns.” There were only 18 survivors, he was the only one unhurt, and some of these survivors died later (85–86). Because he received no battle wounds, he complains to Gwen, “You would guess that I was the sort of officer to who cowered in a tent and gave orders without ever coming out to risk intercepting an errant bullet” (82). Balogh likens him to the hero of the Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington, who “had often ridden recklessly within range of enemy guns despite all the efforts of his aides to keep him out of harm’s way” (84). Hugo is a man with wounds; they just are not “visible ones” (84). Arriving home from war in a straitjacket, his relatives wanted to send him to Bedlam, the hospital for the insane, but were too embarrassed to do that since he was a nationally claimed war hero. Learning that the Duke of Stanbrook had turned his estate into a hospital with nurses and doctors to help soldiers recover, his relatives dispatched him to Penderris Hall. Hugo shares this with Gwen: I went out of my head, but that was not an accurate description of my particular form of madness, for if I had been out of my head, all would have been well. The fact that I was still in it was the problem. I could not get out. I wanted to kill everyone around me, especially those who were most kind to me. I hated everyone, most of all myself. I wanted to kill myself. I believe I started to talk in nothing lower than a bellow, and every second or third word was foul even by the standards of a soldier’s vocabulary. It infuriated me that I soon ran out of words strong enough to get the hate out of me. (84–85)

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The guilt and pain “offered him some absolution for having spent his years as an officer killing men and allowing his own men to be killed” (109). Many PTSD soldiers suffer from “survivor guilt” as does Hugo. There is an added dimension to Hugo’s suffering. Nineteenth-century writers tended to reward good people who do good things. In the twentyfirst century, traumatised people learned that being good does not always guarantee good outcomes. As a result, like Hugo, they cannot see themselves as “decent and good” (Janoff-Bulman 74–75). Such survivors “live within fragmented or repressed memory, a tainted and diminished sense of self, and a feeling of alienation from others” (Herman 42–47). This is a precise description of Hugo. Right after the battle considered to be a “Forlorn Hope,” before his PTSD shuts him down, he visits the survivors of that battle in a hospital, and one spits at him (86). This sinks him into greater guilt and depression. After he is able to function, Hugo runs into this soldier in London, and he spits at Hugo again (223). The soldier’s own PTSD healing begins only after he makes a public declaration at a ball that Hugo was right to lead the attack, and the soldier admits: “We were a Forlorn Hope, dash it all. We volunteered for death. We were the cannon fodder that would allow the real attach to break through behind us. Captain Emes led from the front, and he earned all the accolades he has received since” (238; emphasis in original). What happened to change this soldier’s perspective, which consequently helped change Hugo’s perspective? When it comes to PTSD, Dr. M. L. Nichols disputes the old saying that time heals all wounds (2004, iii). “What time does allow,” he suggests, “is to give a person’s own internal strategies time enough to loop through enough repetitions to reprogram his or her own internal thinking or ‘strategy’ using that person’s own thought patterns (words)” (iii). If Dr. Nichols had read Balogh’s novel, he would have said that the two soldiers went through five stages, reaching and crossing thresholds in each: “denial, anger, bargaining, blaming, and resolution” (71; emphasis in original). Gwen’s process of recovery helps Hugo with his recovery. He was surprised to learn that after she had her horse accident that killed her baby and made her limp for the rest of her life, that she still loved to ride. She tells him, “I hate not doing something simply because I do not have the courage” (108). This is the language of a soldier. “Eventually I forced myself back into the saddle, and more recently I have even forced myself to encourage my mount to a pace faster than a crawl. One of these days

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I shall actually allow it to gallop,” she says, adding with language that speaks to Hugo’s heart, “Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beast if it is allowed the mastery” (108–9; emphasis in original). As she speaks, he thinks about his practice of growing his own garden and tending to lambs, even though he is wealthy to hire others to perform this labour at his prosperous estate of Crosslands Park (9). He had become a recluse and wants to return to being one after this reunion at Penderris, with the intentions of never seeing Gwen again, but his fellow Survivors’ Club members warn him that “it was not his natural state and he was in danger of exploding somehow one day, like a firecracker waiting for a spark to ignite it” (135). Like Hugo, Gwen takes on the blame of others’ deaths, including her husband, Vernon (180 and 207–8). Jason Grayson was Vernon’s cousin and heir. He also fought in the wars, knew Hugo during the war and is now a general (187). During the war, because Hugo was not an aristocrat, Jason blocked two of Hugo’s promotions (185) and now mocks “the hero of Badajoz” (185) and insists that Gwen not have anything more to do with Hugo. Seven years earlier, he demanded to commit Vernon (her husband) to Bedlam. Having overheard Gwen’s arguing with Jason about this, Vernon threw himself over the bannister. As Gwen recounts what happened, she reminds Hugo: “You of all people would know how guilt where there is no real blame can be almost worse than guilt where there is. There is no atonement to be made” (210). Hugo helps her by telling her something that Stanbrook had told him: “suicide is the worst kind of selfishness, as it is often a plea to specific people who are left stranded in the land of the living, unable for all eternity to answer the plea” (210). He says with great wisdom, “Your case is similar in many ways to his [(Stanbrook, whose wife had committed suicide)]. For one moment you were unable to cope with the constant and gargantuan task of caring for your husband’s needs, and for that momentary lapse he punished you for all time” (210). Tending to his lambs and garden has taught Hugo a realistic lesson about life that will help him and Gwen reach an understanding about death. Before he went to war, this giant of a man, “could never bear to kill even the smallest, ugliest creature” (221). He would carry out spiders and earwigs from the house, release mice from traps, and bring home wounded birds and stray dogs and cats. This same man would be expected to kill men (221). Later, through his relationship with Gwen, he comes to terms with his keeping sheep for their wool, cows for their milk and

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cheese, and chickens for their eggs; it is acceptable to be a meat-eater. He realises that all animals prey on each other for food and that life is “a continual balance of opposites. There are hatred and violence, for example, and there are kindness and gentleness. And sometimes violence is necessary.” If the British—including himself—had not defeated Napoleon, he would have overtaken British “towns and countryside. Pillaging for food and other pleasures. Attacking my family and yours. Attacking you” (268– 69). Coming to terms with the reality that violence is often necessary to subdue an invader or tyrant to protect others can help those with war PTSD.

Books 2 and 3: The Suitor (2013b) and The Arrangement (2013a) The second book in the Survivors Club series is The Suitor and consists of only four chapters. Billed as a preview to The Arrangement (the third novel in the series), it is about Philippa Dean whose family wants her to marry Vincent Hunt, the Viscount Darleigh, who is blind and is one of the Survivors. Instead, she means to have her beloved Julian Crabb, the nephew and heir to the Duke of Stanbrook (who, if you are losing track of names, opened his home to care for war survivors). To avoid marriage, Vincent and his best friend and his spunky valet (who is his surrogate eyes) escape to the Lake District. Philippa gets to marry Julian after all. The major point that one can make about The Suitor relevant to PTSD is that a man like Vincent, although handicapped because of a war wound, does not have to settle in life by marrying a woman he does not love, just so he can have a caregiver. Likewise, a woman should not have to settle in life by marrying a man she does not love, just so she can have a provider. The next novel, The Arrangement, is much more developed and focuses on Vincent, with his large, blue, “lady-killer eyes” (2013a, 7) even though those eyes cannot see because of a cannon explosion “close enough to have propelled him all the way back to England in a million pieces. By some miracle he has escaped both dismemberment and death” (Proposal 105). Only seventeen at the time of his war wounds, he arrives at Penderris half deaf as well. Cradled in George’s arms through hundreds of nightmares, he does recover his hearing but will never regain his sight and never stop having nightmares (Proposal 2012, 95). Please allow me to insert a personal note here. My dad was only sixteen when he served in the U.S. Navy in the Asian-Pacific Theatre. On the last

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day of his life at the age of 92-1/2, he was still having nightmares about his experiences on the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, his hands busily loading up the big guns on his carrier ship. He never wanted to talk about his war experience. According to Mental Health America, the memories of a PTSD suffering will never disappear and will recur throughout one’s life. Like the men in Balogh’s novels, the more they try to repress their memories, the greater the frequency and intensity of “delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 2016, 11–12). Edward Tick reasons that prolonged violence in the past that repeats itself in memories and nightmares is “a normative response to extraordinary conditions” (2012, 105). By simply being able to talk to people about these events and by being able to resume normative behaviour, the frequency and intensity should decrease (Pynoos et al. 2007, 340). Treating Vincent or anyone with PTSD as if he is an invalid repeatedly reminds him of the traumatic events, which is the worst thing one can do for someone suffering from it (340). Vincent was nineteen when his uncle and son died suddenly and violently, leaving him heir of Middlebury Park in Gloucestershire, but now, six years later, no one lets him be master of anything. Everyone coddles him, except that “it behooved him, therefore to fill his nursery with an heir and a number of spares as soon as was humanly possible” (Arrangement 2013a, 2), a task that even a blind man can perform, especially when every woman of his acquaintance was determined to get him wedded. So suffocating and intolerable are their efforts, that Vincent, with his trusty valet and best friend Martin, bolt to the Lake District from where he writes to say that he needs to be alone and that he will find his own wife in his own time and in his own way. Once tired of drifting, he decides to take up residence at his estate, Covington House in Baron Coombs in Cornwall, the home of his happy childhood. There he can be free of his mother, sisters or other females who are suffocating him with their attentions and intentions. Unfortunately, the next-door neighbours are Sir Clarence and Lady March who have a very eligible daughter of nineteen, Henrietta. The Marches are drawn to Vincent’s wealth and title, even if Henrietta does not want to marry a blind man who has a disfigured face. When she meets him and realizes how handsome he is, despite the facial scar, she relents somewhat but still has major issues about his blindness. Miss Sophia Fry, nicknamed the mouse (lowercase), lives with the Marches. Her mother left her father when Sophie was only five and then

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died. Mr. Fry was a handsome rogue who was an alcoholic and gambler and was always in an impoverished state never far from debtors’ prison. Her father “did not put a permanent roof over their heads or a regular supply of food in their stomachs” (28). In addition, he was an avid womaniser who was constantly trying to avoid angry husbands, until the one time that he failed and was killed in a duel (209). At the age of 15, Sophie is sent to live with an aunt who despises her for the disgrace of her family. After the aunt has “raked her from head to toe with one contemptuous look upon her arrival,” she pronounces Sophie “impossible” (29). That is when Sophie becomes invisible and is content to be ignored (28–29), until she falls in love with Sebastian Madlock, her uncle’s stepson. When she professes love for him, he forces her to stand in front of a mirror and accuses her of insulting him: How could she ever presume that he could ever care for such a “scrawny, ugly thing” (295)? This is the traumatic event that will haunt her for years to come. Three years later when her aunt dies, she is to stay with another aunt, Lady March, who treats her worse than a servant (29). Mostly, the family chooses to ignore her as they do servants. Others see only a girl—even though she is nineteen—who has a boy’s body and boy’s haircut. She is not beautiful, she is not womanly and she has little to no self-esteem. Blind Vincent can see what other people cannot see though. To him she is a beautiful, kind, humble, gentle and selfless woman, and Sophie sees in Vincent a beautiful man who refuses to be defined by his disabilities. He asks her if she feels like a victim, assuring her that “most of us do at some time or other in our lives,” and that there is no shame in that, but “if we are fortunate or diligent, we can rise above self-pity” (106)— a message that Balogh wants to convey to her PTSD-oriented readers. When Vincent implores her to describe herself, Sophie replies that she is “five foot nothing” and “small in every way” with a nose that her father said was a button but with a mouth that is too wide for her face. She has hair that is too curly to control, so she cuts it short. The hair cutting, she admits, has “led to the destroying of her soul” (80). Later, Sophie foils a plan that the Marches have contrived to trap blind Vincent into having to marry Henrietta. Sophie’s intervention so angers the Marches that they oust her. Subsequently, Vincent proposes an arrangement of a marriage, so that Sophie can be cared for and no one will force Vincent into a marriage not of his choosing. After a year of married life, then Vincent will provide a cottage for Sophie to live by

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herself. If during that year when they have been fully married and if she gives birth to an heir, then they will amend the arrangement. They agree, and of course, they fall in love with each other. He learns that she is as severely damaged by her own personal wars, as he is from physical battle (172). She is the perfect PTSD woman for him in knowing how to empower him. Guide dogs were in service as early as the midsixteenth century but were not in vogue until World War I. Still, Sophie has heard about them, finds a dog for Vincent and hires someone to train him. Before long, Shep becomes Vincent’s eyes, thereby giving him greater mobility and independence. Next, Vincent and Sophie fall in love with their nieces and nephews and make up stories to tell them. Sophie writes down the stories and illustrates them, and their work is published, with requests for more. Both have discovered a purpose for their lives, another essential ingredient for healing from PTSD. Additionally, Sophie has a path made for him outside, lined with a rope on poles that lead Vincent to some of his favourite places on his property, without being dependent on anyone to help him. She also has five miles of property cleared of obstacles so that he can ride again, alone. Thus, Sophie grants him greater independence and victory over his war wounds, a prize crucial for all PTSD sufferers. Vincent cherishes her, so she too, heals. When Sebastian Maycock visits, Vincent takes him to the cellar, the site of his gym. They agree to fight for Sophie’s honour, and when the lights are out, they are equals. Vincent pummels Maycock, thereby asserting his own manhood and ensuring satisfaction for a slight and injury that had once devastated his wife. Through their marriage, Vincent and Sophie mend each other and live a full and rich life, as can Balogh’s readers.

Books 4 and 5: Escape (2014a) and Only Enchanting (2014b) These next two books can help women cope with men who suffer from PTSD. In Escape Samantha Kay is a recent widow who spent every day of her married life tending a husband who was totally debilitated with battle wounds and was extremely self-centered, vain and demanding. Samantha was manacled to him. His sister bullied her too. So did her father-in-law. When her husband dies, the father-in-law evicts her from the house and demands that she live with him in Southern England where he can control her. She escapes to Wales, there to live in the house that was owned

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by her mother (who is now deceased). She and Survivor Sir Benedict Harper—who had been wounded as a cavalry officer and now walks with two canes—fall in love. Ben achieves his grandest ambition in dancing the waltz with Samantha, his ultimate conquest over incapacitation. In Only Enchanting (2014b), Agnes Keeping had married a very elderly man. They were excellent companions and adored each other, but she was still a virgin when she becomes a widow and when Survivor Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, finds her painting daffodils. Agnes is a good friend of Sophie’s and becomes familiar with the Survivors through her. Flavian had trauma to his head, has blackouts, and stutters; but by the end of the novel, he and Agnes enjoy a passionate marriage.

Book 6: Only a Promise (2015a) Balogh brilliantly creates such a variety of scenarios that deal with warrelated PTSD as well as other forms of PTSD without overlap. The PTSD that Ralph Stockwood, Earl of Berwick, suffers in Only a Promise is still very different from any of the Survivors’. He too spent three years at Penderris and left, as several of them did, emotionally dead. “Trauma is an individual’s response to events that is of such intensity that it impairs emotional or cognitive function,” Vickroy observes and explains that trauma “can bring lasting psychological disruption” (6), which surely is the prognosis for Ralph, until Chloe penetrates his armour. Unlike the others, Ralph does not suffer guilt just because he returns home when others cannot; he harbours guilt for having convinced three of his best friends to go to war with him, and then all three are killed. Of all the Survivors, Ralph does not just want to die; he attempts suicide by taking an overdose of his medicine. If nineteenth-century Brits were reluctant to discuss emotional trauma, they were even more reticent about suicides. Although the religious and social stigma and legal repercussions had lessened by the early nineteenth century, suicides were still considered Felo de se, or “felon of himself,” an illegal act (Jalland 1996, 70). Before 1823, a suicide was denied a Christian burial. Labelled a “profane burial,” suicides were buried on the north side of the church “alongside executed felons, excommunicates and unbaptized infants” (Williams 2001, 15). If the suicide owned property, it was confiscated by the Crown. After 1823, though, suicides could be buried only at night, and clergy were forbidden to perform rites (16). In 1840 a surgeon of the Royal College, Forbes Winslow, wrote The

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Anatomy of Suicide. He conceded that one might kill himself if he were unsuccessful in winning a war (1840, 4), but apparently it was inconceivable to him that someone so noble as to have fought in a war for England would ever suffer non compos mentis (temporary insanity) and that anything related to battle trauma could ever motivate suicide (278). Reverend James Gurnhill, as did most Victorians, called suicide “sin, first against God, and then himself” (71). Gurnhill quoted others who listed motivation behind suicides as “agricultural distress and misery, and of financial crises.”7 Gurnhill added “dearness of food (in Protectionist countries), want of work, commercial stagnation, bankruptcy, strikes, and lock-outs … by causing privation, poverty, and distress” (1900, 85). Regardless of cause, Gurnhill insisted that such mental distress was the same as “moral deterioration” (215). Not once did he mention that anyone might try to end pain from war trauma through suicide. Instead, he referenced Enrico Agostino Morselli, who wrote Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics: “Again, the high premium on paper money appears to coincide with a remarkable increase in suicides, such as took place in Austria soon after the Italian war of 1859” (1882 [1881], 153). Then Morselli discussed the number of suicides that followed the Crimean War due to “the worst turn in economical affairs” (153). It seems as if the Victorians could not comprehend any reason for committing such an immoral sin as suicide other than economic distress. “Writers placed greater emphasis on socio-economic factors in suicide” rather than “genuine mental disorders” (Jalland 71). Yet, today, according to Leilani Anastasia, there are 22 Veterans who kill themselves every day in America. They belong to the “Club 22” (2017, preface). Although the perceptions about serving as a soldier were somewhat different in Morselli’s and Gurnhill’s time, combat PTSD has always been a dangerous residual. Suffering from her own form of PTSD, 27-year-old Chloe Muirhead is treated as a social pariah because of family scandals not of her making (Balogh 2015a). She writes to the Duchess of Worthingham, her mother’s godmother and her late grandmother’s best friend, asking if she may come to Manville Court and be the Duchess’ companion. Once resituated, she berates herself for feeling ungrateful and self-pity. Chloe admonishes herself that she should be content with her life and fairly succeeds at this until Ralph, the grandson, arrives. Of course, he is handsome except for a hideous scar that runs down the right side of his face. With his grandfather’s failing health, his grandmother insists that he marry and assume his duties as heir.

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Ralph is “incapable of love—of feeling it or giving it or wanting it” (13). Still, he must secure a wife and heirs. Needing a home, needing to be a wife, needing to have children, Chloe proposes that they marry. With no emotions involved or promised, they marry. During the night of their wedding, Ralph’s grandfather dies, and overnight Chloe becomes a duchess. This is no blessing to her, for it will throw her back into high society which she deplores. “Courage” is a word that appears often in this book. When Graham— Chloe’s brother—refuses to go to war with his four best friends, Ralph calls him a coward. When Ralph makes it clear that he is incapable of loving Chloe, they challenge each other as to whether they possess the courage to marry under such conditions (76). When Ralph insists that they make their debut in London, he reassures Chloe that she will be able to brave the beau monde again after having fled from it twice before (248). She remembers a sermon preached by her brother about facing one’s worst fears instead of running away from them (249). Chloe is courageous enough to deal with the family secrets and scandals. She dares Ralph to be courageous enough to visit the parents of his fallen comrades. When he finally does, he discovers that none of them ever blamed him for persuading their sons to go to war, that each son made his own decision to go. The parents rejoice that he has survived. This brings healing. Both confrontations—both Chloe’s and Ralph’s—are done with the support of each other. Neither one would have been able to confront his and her worst fears alone; they made their stands together. Only after Ralph’s visit is he able to grieve for the loss of his friends. The weeping is cleansing. Although the friends died seven years before, as Chloe notes, for Ralph, “they have just died” (358). Even though he used to relive and relive the deaths of his friends, it is only when “cognition associated with the trauma” and through “access to language” occur, as it has for Ralph, that recovery is possible (Van der Kolk and Ducey 1989, 271). As his mother says, her son is finally, “really back” (Balogh 2015a, 361); he has returned to the land of the living. In nearly all her novels, Balogh mentions fate, and here Ralph makes a statement about the “cruel joke” played on him: “Instead of killing me and assignment me to hell, where I no doubt belonged, it saved me and gave me hell on earth instead” (160). Yet, fate—or God—showed mercy and brought two people together, and together they overcame the crippling effects of PTSD.

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Book 7: Only a Kiss (2015b) This is the story of the only woman in the Survivor’s Club who suffers from war-inflicted PTSD. Imogen Hayes, Lady Barclay, is the widow of a surveillance officer who had been captured and tortured in front of her eyes. We do not learn until the end of the novel the truth that really haunts her and has twisted her soul, the reason why she ended up at Penderris Hall in need of sanctuary just as much as did the men. Imogen had dearly loved her husband, Dicky. She persuaded him to let her go with him on his mission of spying, and then they were betrayed and captured. The French tortured Dicky for days, maybe weeks. They tortured him in front of her eyes, but he would not reveal any British intelligence. Finally, six officers told Dicky that they were going to take turns raping his wife before his eyes if he didn’t relent. One assailant carelessly set his gun on the table, and Imogen grabbed it. She was in a dilemma though because if she were to shoot one man, there would be five left who would rape her. Dicky smiled at her. They had loved each other so well, that they could read each other’s thoughts, and his were “Shoot me, Imogen. Do not waste your bullet on of one of the French officers.” She shot her husband between the eyes. The officers punished her, not by raping her or killing her, but by escorting her back to her own people; “They left me to a living hell” she would say later (368–71; emphasis in the original). When she returns home, she goes to her father’s house where she will “not speak or sleep or leave” her room. Her mother is a cousin of the Duke of Stanbrook, and upon learning that he is taking in severely wounded officers, she asks him for his help. He transports Imogen to Penderris Hall where she stays for three years (53–54). Only those in the Survivors’ Club come to know what really happened to her. Of the eight novels, this one spends less time on developing the psychological state and journey of the two people meant to marry (Imogen and Percy—Percival William Henry Hayes, Earl of Hardford) and more time unfolding a mystery—smuggling of illegal brandy and storing it in a tunnel that connected to the dower’s house when Imogen lived. Nevertheless, similar to the other novels, through romantic love and help from fellow Survivor Vincent, she rebounds. He tells her, “We all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together” (367–68).

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Patrick Foley’s research has discovered that veterans often create metaphors to describe their experiences of PTSD. In interviewing Kuwaitis after the Iraqi occupation, Deidre Barrett reports that PTSD dreams often follow a pattern that begins with nightmares of literal reenactments that then morph into metaphoric nightmares (1996, 3–6). Balogh uses the metaphor of a garden to convey Imogen’s and Percy’s recovery. Imogen is diligently working on the garden, rooting out weeds, and anticipating the first harbinger of spring to break forth, a snowdrop (2015, 127). And then finally “the frail shoot” appears (138). Percy sees her kneeling as if she is praying. When she expresses her joy and hope because of the snowdrop, he asks her if she believes in springtime and “New life, new beginnings, new hope” and “Off the with the old, on with the new, and all that rally-the-old-and-tired-spirits stuff?” Her answer is quite significant; she replies with “I want only an end to the cold” (139). The other Survivors have not “carried her particular burden,” and she fears: “What if she could not see the first snowdrop, not this year or ever?” (143). She is making some progress though, signified by “The farthest she went, except for that one visit to the hall, was the garden, where she found the first snowdrop had bloomed” (180).

Book 8: Only Beloved (2016) The final book in the Survivors’ Club series is Only Beloved, and treats the Duke of Stanbrook, George Crabbe, the man who opened his home to returning soldiers from the war. He himself had been a commissioned officer at the age of 17 but was forced to return home when he learned that his father was dying. But he did have enough exposure to combat to imagine the horrors that men faced in war. He also lost his son to war and his wife who committed suicide. Now that all six recovered sufficiently to marry, have babies, and live their “happily-ever-afters” (2016, 6), George is the PTSD caretaker who suddenly has no one to take care of. This last book is about dealing with reconciliation. Dora reconciles with her mother, although she and her sister Agnes will probably never totally recover from their pain. Their father—whom they continued to treat with respect—was much to blame. He was abus ive to his wife especially when he was drunk, and he was often drunk. Dora was seventeen when at her coming-out ball, her inebriated father made the public announcement that his wife was unfaithful, which so shamed his wife, she ran away, but as Balogh emphasises, there was nowhere for her to

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go and no way for her to take her daughters and support them because jobs simply were not available for women with children. Agnes was only a child at the time and grew up believing that her mother left because she was unlovable (174). Dora lost all opportunity to attract a husband because of the humiliation and because from that point onward, she had to raise Agnes. Only after Agnes is happily married to Survivor Flavian,8 and Dora is 39 and a music teacher, does the 48-year-old George feel ready to attempt marriage again, and this time with Dora. On their wedding day, a man who had loved George’s first wife, publicly accuses George of having murdered his wife. Unable to provide proof, the announcement is dismissed, and the bishop continues and pronounces Dora and George husband and wife. Months later, pretending to offer the olive branch, this man nearly succeeds in forcing Dora and the unborn child she is carrying over the same cliff, and in the effort, falls to his own death. There is resolution but not reconciliation. The next day, Dora indulges in “a necessary madness” when she leads George back to the cliff and shows him how safe and how beautiful the cliffs can be (342). This brings healing to George. “When we don’t become invested in finding a literal truth,” Peter Levine and Ann Frederick counsel in Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, “We remain free to experience the full and compassionate healing afforded by the rhythmic exchange between trauma and healing vortices that occur in renegotiation. … We give ourselves permission to heal” (1997, 213). Dora and George go down to the beach and realise that they are “Alive, yes, and mad too” as they allow the waves to make “cold and wet and lacking all dignity,” as their youth is restored to them (349). Three years later, 31 happy people—seven warriors, their spouses, and children—reunite, but not to commiserate about the war. Instead, they “celebrate friendship and love” (371–80). Ralph adds “life” to that assessment, and George adds “memories,” for they should never “forget the people and events and emotions [that] have made” them the good and happy people they are today. Thus, Balogh ends her series with hope, that people with PTSD and others who have battle scars from the war of life, can heal and truly get to live happily ever after.

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Notes 1. To name a few: Sarah Granger, Christina Dodd, Sophie Barnes, Sarah E. Ladd, Sophie Jordan, Elizabeth Boyle, Christine Merrill, Anne Gracie, Laura Kinsale, Grace Burrowes and Jane Feather. Their heroes are “manly” but tormented, wounded and broken because of the Napoleonic Wars. 2. Very relevant to the discussions in this volume of neo-Victorianism is Eckart Voigts’ chapter, “Memes, GIFS, and Remis Culture” in The Routledge Companion to Adaptations. For early debates on low and high culture, see Leslie Fiedler’s What Was Literature? (1982) and his seminal essay, “Cross the Border—Close the Gap” (1971a). Also his and Ihab Hassan’s “The Death of Avant Garde Literature” (1971b) and English: Opening Up the Canon (1981). Then read commentary on Fiedler and the subject of culture by Prem Kumari Srivastava (2014) and Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin’s Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999). See also Grabes, For additional study, see Swirski’s From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005), Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (2009) and Meisel’s The Myth of Popular Culture (2009). 3. The Peninsular War (1807–1814) was a European military conflict with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Portugal versus Napoleon and Bourbon Spain for control of the Iberian Peninsula. The War began in 1807 when French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal and ended in 1814 when Napoleon was defeated. 4. These situations appear throughout Balogh’s novels but do also through most neo-Regency novels. Unique though is Jon Huxtable, the earl of Merton and heir to Warren Hall, Jon, has Down Syndrome in Balogh’s First Comes Marriage (2009) and A Secret Affair (2011). The effect of his life and death on his family and community is one more exploration in PTSD. 5. Quoted in 2012, 153 from Jameson (1981, 80–81). 6. Ibid. 7. Gurnhill quoted Enrico “Henry” Agostino Morselli in 84 from Morselli’s Suicide (1881, 152). Morselli also wrote A Guide to the Semiotics of Mental Illness (1895). 8. The story is in Book 5, Only Enchanting.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: The American Psychiatric Association, 1994. Anastasia, Leilani. Warrior Lost: Veteran Suicide and the Combat PTSD Monster. New York: Pronoun, 2017.

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Balogh, Mary. The Arrangement. New York: Dell, 2013a. ———. The Escape. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2014a. ———. One Night of Love. New York: Dell, 2007. ———. Only Beloved. New York: New American Library, 2016. ———. Only Enchanting. New York: Signet/Penguin, 2014b. ———. Only a Kiss. New York: Signet, 2015b. ———. Only a Promise. New York: Signet, 2015a. ———. The Proposal. New York: Delacorte Press, 2012. ———. Slightly Married. New York: Dell, 2003. ———. The Suitor. New York: Dell, 2013b. ———. A Summer to Remember: New York: Delacorte Press, 2002. Barrett, Deirdre. “Introduction.” In Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett, 1–6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Boehm–Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. “Introduction: ‘Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions.’” In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, edited by Nadine Boehm–Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 1–20. New York: Routledge, 2014. Calhoun, Lawrence G., and Richard G. Tedeschi. Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Davis, Joanne L. Treating Post-Trauma Nightmares: A Cognitive Behavioral Approach. New York: Springer, 2009. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2009. Fiedler, Leslie A. “Cross the Border—Close the Gap.” In Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, 2: 461–85. New York: Stein and Day, 1971a. ———. “The Death of Avant Garde Literature.” In Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, 2: 454–61. New York: Stein and Day, 1971b. ———. English Literature: Opening Up the Canon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. ———. What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Foley, Patrick S. “The Metaphors They Carry: Exploring How Veterans Use Metaphor to Describe Experiences of PTSD.” Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, Research, and Education 28, no. 2 (2015): 129–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2015.1011375. Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Grabes, Herbert. Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern “Third Aesthetic.” Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.

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Gurnhill, James. The Morals of Suicide. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1900. https://books.google.com/books?id=0KYuAAAAYAAJ. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming. Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Jalland, Patricia. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: The Free Press, 2016. Kamble, Jayashree. “Patriotism, Passion, and PTSD: The Critique of War in Popular Romance Fiction.” In New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger, 153–63. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Lansky, Melvin R. “The Legacy of The Interpretation of Dreams.” In Essential Papers on Dreams, edited by Melvin R. Lansky, 3–31. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Levine, Peter A., and Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. MacCurdy, Marian M. The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing About Trauma. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Meisel, Perry. The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Morselli, Enrico Agostino. Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics. 1881. New York: Appleton, 1882. https://books.google.com/books?id= s4jaAAAAMAAJ. Nichols, Dr. M. L. When Times Doesn’t Heal: How to Overcome Loss, Grief, Trauma and PTSD in 30 Minutes or Less. Bloomington, IN: Health and Fitness, 2004. Pynoos, Robert S., Alan M. Steinberg, and Armen Goenjian. “Traumatic Stress in Childhood and Adolescence: Recent Developments and Current Controversies.” In Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Soul, edited by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. Mcfarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, 331–58. New York: The Guilford Press, 2007. Spenser, Edmund. Faerie Queene. 1590. London: Routledge, 1840. https:// books.google.com/books?id=nQCEhgSj0U0C.

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Srivastava, Prem Kumari. Leslie Fiedler: Critic, Provocateur, Pop Culture Guru. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Swirski, Peter. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1854. In Poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson, vol. 1, edited by Ernest Rhys, 267–68. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1923. https://books.google.com/books?id= 4bAdXZXzv2MC. Tick, Edward. War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2012. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and C. R. Ducey. “The Psychological Processing of Traumatic Experience: Rorschach Patterns in PTSD.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2 (1989): 259–74. Vickroy, Laurie. Reading Trauma Narratives: The Contemporary Novel & the Psychology of Oppression. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 2015. Voigts, Eckart. “Memes, GIFs, and Remix Culture: Compact Appropriate in Everyday Digital Life.” In The Routledge Companion to Adaptations, edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, 390–402. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018. Williams, Mark G. Suicide and Attempted Suicide: Understanding the Cry of Pain. New York: Penguin, 2001. Winslow, Forbes. The Anatomy of Suicide. London: Henry Renshaw, 1840. https://books.google.com/books?id=a3dCAAAAIAAJ.

CHAPTER 6

Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I Eckart Voigts

As Gothic horror stories proliferated in the Victorian era, mad narrators became a standard device from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) via Robert Browning’s “mad” dramatic monologues in “My Last Duchess” (1842) or “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836) (Rohwer-Happe 2011) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Madness is clearly over represented in neo-Victorian narratives, whose “refashioning of the Victorian madness topos” (Kirchknopf 2013, 71) tends to draw heavily on the Victorian sensation novel or the Victorian Gothic and regularly features hysterical women and mad scientists. Feminist critics have jumped on the opportunity to relate mid-nineteenth-century “lunacy panic” narratives about the fear of wrongful confinement (McCandless 1978, 366) to the patriarchal gendering of insanity in texts such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s

E. Voigts (B) Professor of English Literature and Culture, TU Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_6

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Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Elaine Showalter’s classic study sketches how Victorian patriarchy designates madness as The Female Malady (1985), while for Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic sees it as emblematic of how Victorian patriarchy treated women. Even Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966), arguably the first neo-Victorian novel, seeks to redress the literary fate of this “Madwoman in the Attic” in Jane Eyre by reassigning narrative agency. Mary Poovey investigated mid-Victorian obstetricians and influentially argued that women, because of their uteri, were supposedly emotionally unstable, disorderly or devious (1988, 24–50). The link between sexuality and the pathologised “monstrous” feminine (Creed 1993, 1) has been discussed at great length in neo-Victorian criticism (Muller 2009; Heiberg-Madsen 2017). On the basis of the frequently discussed lectures by Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpêtrière since 1862, Poovey and Showalter (via Michel Foucault) demonstrated the discursive invention of hysteria. The emerging “hysteriographic metafiction” (Muller 99) re-enacts Victorianism not as a repressed patriarchal trauma but provides the vestiges of a supposedly damaged but liberatory excess Victorianism. This kind of neo-Victorian narrative uses prudishness, patriarchal brutality and bland bourgeois lifestyle connoted as “old” as a shorthand straw man that may cover up unresolved contemporary conflicts in gendered constructions of insanity. After all, as Christian Gutleben holds, neo-Victorian texts’ “emphasis on the ill-treatment of women, homosexuals or the lower classes is not at all shocking or seditious today; on the contrary, it is precisely what the general public wants to read” (2001, 11; emphasis in original). While a frequently gendered revision of insanity is thus a core concern in neo-Victorian narratives,1 the issue of how the stipulation of madness pertains to unresolved issues of unreliable narration is frequently touched upon but rarely foregrounded, both in cognitive and rhetorical perspectives.2 This chapter, therefore, seeks to extend the discussions and problems that have come with Wayne Booth’s concept of unreliable narration to questions of madness in the neo-Victorian novel. It seeks to answer two key questions: (1) Why is unreliable narration so popular in neo-Victorian fiction, and (2) how can we adequately describe what kinds of unreliable narration prevail in recent neo-Victorian novels? In order to answer these questions, this chapter discusses theories of unreliability in fiction first before it will address unreliability in recent fiction, with an emphasis on two unreliable female narrators in contemporary neo-Victorian novels

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Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk (2012) and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I (2011). Booth famously defined his unreliable narrator as follows: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (1983 [1961], 158–59). There are various problems with this definition: the “implied author” is merely a theoretical construct and therefore vague and difficult to identify. The norms Booth invokes seem to be tinged with moral judgements and hardly objective, and the concept of “unreliability” might encompass a great variety of motivations on the part of the narrator. These motivations might include the kind of moral, mental or psychological deficiency which we tend to equate with a state of “madness”—we might find deliberate strategies of deception by a completely sane narrator who might be merely greedy or biased, or unreliability that results from a state of innocence, gullibility, or lack of information, education and perspective. As Gaby Allrath argues, the “attribution of unreliability to a narrator-persona is often based on the understanding that he or she is ‘abnormal,’ ‘insane’ or ‘mad’” (2005, 126) and a “psychological disposition of the narrator can be, and in fact often is, a signal for unreliable narration” (128). We might, with Ansgar Nünning, Greta Olson and others, differentiate between a narrator’s intentional, deliberate untrustworthiness, and his or her unintentional unawareness (“unreliability” in the narrower sense). This differentiation also informs James Phelan’s distinction between three kinds of intentional, deliberately false “mis-narrations” and three kinds of unintentional, inadequate and deficient “under-narrations”: (1) misreporting, misinterpreting (misreading) and misevaluating (misregarding); (2) underreporting, underinterpreting (underreading) and underevaluating (underregarding) (2005, 34–37; 49–53). In addition, we might, with Monika Fludernik, separate different causes of unreliability: from “deliberate lying” in the narrative or “the narrator’s insufficient access to the complete data,” to exhibiting “symptoms of a pathological scenario” (1999, 76–77). At the most fundamental level, however, we ought to follow Nünning’s and Olson’s advice and distinguish the textual signals of unreliability as a semantic, text-immanent feature of texts, from the overall appearance of unreliability as a result of the interaction of textual signals with recipients of texts: Unreliability invariably and always emerges from the encounter of readers who come away from the experience of reading a text with

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Table 6.1 Textual signals of unreliability Discrepancies between

Narrator’s statements (explicit contradictions)

Accumulations of

Perspectives (contrasting versions) Narrator’s statements/actions Self-reflexive statements (high degree of subjectivity) Self-characterisation/external Addresses to the characterisation narratee (reader) Narrator’s Stylistic statements/unintentional signals/emotionally self-exposure involved (exclamations, ellipses, repetitions) Narrated events/narrator’s Affirmations of comments trustworthiness Story/discourse (linear Perspectives events in time sequence (contrasting events as narrated) versions)

Admissions of

Correctional elements

Untrustworthiness Other characters’ statements Lack of memory Body language

Paratextual signals Title, subtitle, Preface, etc.

Cognitive limits Bias of opinion

Adapted from Olson 97–98 and Nünning (1998 [1997], 27–28)

the impression of unreliability, most often by perceiving a gap or discrepancy between what they read as the narrator’s knowledge and intentions and their own ideas, knowledge and norms. As Olson concluded, we can always distinguish three factors in the communication process: (1) the reader who registers unreliability, (2) the narrator who appears unreliable to the reader and (3) the text’s intentionality which is perceived as different from the narrator’s by the reader (2003, 93). With Olson (97) we have to keep in mind that while we perceive textual signals as stable, the reader reaction is historically contingent and notoriously unstable. Whether we find a narrator unreliable depends on reader norms and values that are subject to constant change, whereas we can stipulate (in spite of textual variants and metamorphoses) that a text is relatively stable. Indeed, ascriptions of “madness” to existing persons are equally unstable, depending on isolating particular moments in people’s biography and the existence of a particular diagnosis (whether medical or amateur). The textual signals identified by Nünning, which are collected in the Table 6.1, have proved useful in the analysis of texts and will guide us through an assessment of unreliability signals in our two novels:

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Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk is set in the year 1831 and invokes many of the conventional features of neo-Victorian fiction, as listed by MarieLuise Kohlke, in the “recycl[ing of] many recognisable, by now standard neo-Victorian tropes—the oppressed woman, sensationalised sexuality, threats of madness, Gothic villains, slavery” (2008, 201), but it is careful to avoid the charge of sensationalisation in both the laconic treatment of sexuality and the avoidance of demonised villainy. The homodiegetic narrator Mary turns out to have committed a gruesome manslaughter; the critics, however, do not primarily comment on Mary as a country maid driven towards killing her abuser, but on the “haunting, distinctive voices” (Independent), a voice “inspiring and likeable” (Marian Keyes) a “convincing voice” (Penelope Lively, Evening Standard), of “one of the most compelling narrators I’ve ever encountered” (Stylist ).3 If there is criticism, then it focuses on the difficulties of reading Mary’s newly found written means of expression. One reviewer notes an interesting discrepancy between the narrator’s voice and the hidden intentions of an “implied author,” according to Booth, that emerges from the many instances of direct second-person address: “The fact that she often speaks personally to us as ‘you,’ reminding us that these are the words of an unlettered farm girl, paradoxically reinforces the knowledge that we are actually in the hands of a skilled novelist. The book is richly stylised, the groundwork carefully laid, the novelistic detail well chosen, the dialogue perfectly paced” (Birch 2012). The reader implicitly knows that the lack of subordinate clauses and restricted lexicon in Mary’s narrative are the consequence of deliberate efforts on the part of the novelist and may therefore appear to be an almost metafictional stylistic effect. After all, we learn that Mary’s subsequent abuser and victim, the vicar, has, over the course of only a year or so, taught her how to read. Distinguishing features of Mary’s narration are the non-capitalised “I”s; a paratactic style; polysyndeton “and”s; sparse punctuation; limited lexicon; elliptic, monosyllabic exchanges and frequent grammatical oddities (“give me one of they looks what says”; 15). Mary tells her story with an insistent, repetitive urgency. With literacy, however, comes knowingness and Mary comes to realise that the vicar raped her and exploited her sexually. Mary’s narration is clearly a case of underinterpreting, and underevaluating in Phelan’s terminology, all owing to her lack of education as well as lack of experience. In her case, we find both frequent self-reflexivity and unintentional self-exposure. The focus is very much on her own experiential world as

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she does not seem to be capable of inhabiting the emotional world of any other of her characters. Through Mary’s laconic, underinterpreting and underevaluating voice, the reader is led to understand why Mary kills, coming from a household “where happiness never did no one any good” (Leyshon 22) as her mother points out. This underinterpreting leaves the reader with questions of moral judgement: Was it a premeditated murder? Why was the cheese wire in Mary’s pocket? “I curled up the wire and put it in my pocket,” she had reported earlier, but fails to tell us why (156). When she kills her abuser immediately after an act of violation, she comments: “I felt in my apron pocket something. I put it in my hand and pulled out the cheese wire. I did not think. What happened next I did not think or plan. And that is the truth as god is my witness” (160). Some features of unreliable narration are exhibited here such as the self-reference and appeal to the reader with protestations of trustworthiness; the simplicity and idiosyncrasy suggesting limited cognitive or at least linguistic competence; and, most importantly, the perceived contradiction between the claim of unpremeditated action and the fact that Mary earlier put the weapon of choice in her pocket. The possession of the cheese wire seems to contradict Mary’s statement. The appeal to God as the highest Christian authority as witness demonstrates a degree of implausibility that calls for climactic substantiation: For what other reason might it have been in her pocket? Our sympathies, however, are entirely with Mary because the innocent simplicity of her voice makes her a victim rather than a perpetrator of a crime. We tend to see Mary’s attack on her tormentor as an act of self-defence or self-administered justice rather than as a capital offence, all of which is the result of her first-person narration. Indeed, Leyshon can rely on a heightened reader awareness nourished by increasingly popular, feminist-inflected, but frequently exploitative raperevenge scenarios. Readers will be familiar with these from movies such as Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and their often more nuanced and less exploitative and frequently female-authored literary counterparts.4 Mary’s narrative begins with a note of possession: “This is my book and i am writing it by my own hand. in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things. … i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk. my name is mary and i have learned how to spell

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it. M.a.r.y. that is how you letter it. i want to tell you what it is that happened” (Leyshon 3). From the beginning, the act of narration is cast by Mary as an exercise in female agency: Acquiring a narrative voice is the precondition for her subsequent act of revenge which can be seen as her only option to escape the role given to her in the patriarchal world, that of docile victim. The lower case “i” directs the reader’s attention to this highlighted authorship. Abuse and rape threats connect her to other “unreliable” female neo-Victorian narrators such as Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). Her voice is simple and repetitive and, hence, urgent. Often, she recounts dialogues, thus veering towards the “showing” mode of narratives, which might be owing to Leyshon’s background as a dramatist. Mary’s repetitions give the narrative a poetic quality where her elliptic simplicity recalls the earthy country idiom as well as the Bible that would have obviously shaped the experiential world of an otherwise illiterate simple country girl in the early nineteenth century. The effects of this narrative strategies become evident when we consider how Mary introduces the account of her first auto-erotic explorations, in a field, close to a cow whose “shit” (17) she smells: “There is summat you must know. i write this with my own hand in this year of the lord eighteen hundred and thirty one and i am proud that it is with my own hand i write it. You will see why. i told my self i would tell you everything that happened. i said i would say it all but i ain’t done that. i ain’t been true” (17–18). In the final pages, she admits to lying when she said she was writing her account by a window, which she exposes as wishful thinking (171). While Mary seems to subvert her own protestations of truthfulness, seemingly admitting untruthfulness, she nevertheless establishes a rapport with her twenty-first-century reader. Her laconic voice seems to contradict the elaborate stylistic ornamentation frequently found in nineteenthcentury narratives (both Victorian and neo-Victorian). The sexual frankness as well as the lack of appropriate terminology establishes a link. Her sexual organs are merely “my own skin” (17) and “that place” (18). In this way Leyshon and her narrator avoid the frequent medicalisation or denigration of this taboo area. When her father becomes abusive, Mary does not like to tell the reader, but, once again, self-reflexively reminds her of her intention of absolute truthfulness: “I don’t like to tell you all this. I don’t. But I remember that day and I know it was the day when things changed. And I told myself I would tell you everything. You know that. I said that” (29).

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The repetition and simplicity generate an intensity that, as stylistic signals, we may interpret as signs of either reliability or unreliability, depending on how readers interact with the textual signals. All in all, we hear in Mary the voice of a killer driven towards desperate measures in the context of a negative (i.e., failed) female bildungsroman. The narratorheroine tells a coming-of-age story and her narrative is the product of her education. She is taken away from her beloved grandfather, abusive father, sidelined mother and her three sisters (Hope, Violet and Beatrice) and becomes the maid and kept woman of the vicar, while the vicar’s son impregnates her sister Violet. She is a youth at the crossroads, in principle similar to Johann von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795– 1796) but with a decidedly limited range of options. Most of the elements as listed by Jerome H. Buckley’s assessment of the bildungsroman in Seasons of Youth are palpably present in The Colour of Milk: “childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love and the search for a vocation and a working philosophy” (Buckley 1974, 18). In fact, just as Charles Dickens and Margaret Atwood, Leyshon seems preoccupied with the idea of “the life as narrative,” as Ellen McWilliams (2009, 15) puts it. With reference to Mary, one may easily invoke David Copperfield, the defining first-person bildungsroman/künstlerroman narrative of the nineteenth century, albeit in David’s superior language: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (Dickens 1994 [1849–1850], 13). Just as in the case of Dickens, the narrative voice in Leyshon’s female fictional autobiography seems deceptively trustworthy, but one decisive difference is the time implicitly elapsed between the act of remembering. Whereas David has to rely on long-term memory, Mary’s narrative occasion is urgent and immediate. By writing the story of her abuse and retribution by manslaughter “in her own hand” just before she is executed, Mary becomes the hero of her own life and an excellent example of the negative neo-Victorian bildungsroman. Eschewing the blatant metafictional devices familiar from John Fowles’ paradigmatic The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Leyshon’s text is self-referential without flaunting its own self-referentiality and might therefore be described as a post-postmodern neo-Victorian novel. The simplicity of her language is supposed to signpost honesty. In league with her insistent repetitions and the stubborn protestation of truthfulness to the narratee, Mary’s language is an attempt to wrest her

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nascent literacy from the Victorian educational norms of stylistic embroidery and mirrors the attempt to reclaim her body from the abusive patriarchal power. Mary’s innocent, newly acquired literacy, which comes at a gruesome cost, claims a position at odds with verbose slippery signification. Mary abstains from any moral judgement on her deeds, apart from the equation of the envisaged “rope about her neck” with “the wire about his” (172) that seems to accept the Judeo-Christian morality of an eye for an eye. The female villains and mad murderesses in neo-Victorianism negative bildungsroman scenarios are rarely proper villains or even “mad,” but driven to excess by patriarchal suppression. Mary is more sinned against than sinning. True, the vicar’s blood seeps through the floorboards just as the abusive Alec’s had done before in Thomas Hardy’s influential negative bildungsroman Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1988 [1891], 369)—but as Leyshon has written a neo-Victorian feminist book, she seeks to escape the femme fragile, the femme fatale and the “unwoman”—three variants frequently encountered in Victorian (and neo-Victorian) fiction discussed below. Leyshon wrote her text after waves of supposedly “feminist” neoVictorian narratives that are now increasingly seen as ambiguous because fashionable and consumerist versions of established narratives trivialise the supposedly “genuine” impetus of earlier neo-Victorian revisionism of, say, the novels of Jean Rhys or John Fowles. Sexuality is the battlefield between the supposedly radical Victorian subcultures (nymphomaniacs, crossdressers, pornographers, lesbians, etc.) and the normative anti-sexual discourses of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Thus, in ways similar to my own argument, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, following Gutleben, diagnosed “a nostalgic fetishization of the taboo, the secret and forbidden in a world of sexual over-exposure, a disingenuous belief in the radical nature of a society no longer under the shadow of what Michel Foucault conceptualised as the ‘repressive hypothesis’” (2010, 107). Kohlke condensed this attitude in her argument that neo-Victorianism is “the new Orientalism, a significant mode of imagining sexuality in our hedonistic, consumerist, sex-surfeited age” (67). The deliberate limitations of Mary’s narrative voice are Leyshon’s chief device in debunking an orientalist view on the Victorians. Mary restricts her reports very much on her sense perceptions and on accounts of what was said and done. Frequently she interrupts her narrative with foreshadowing. A significant passage is her deflowering at the

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hands of the vicar, which starts with an account of how the vicar slips next to her in her bed: “and he lay next to me and that is all. The two of us in the bed” (Leyshon 144). This is how the narrator Mary builds trust with the reader, refraining from embellishing this important step towards the ensuing violation and carefully avoiding the sexsation so frequent in neoVictorian narratives. In this context, the following protestation of truthfulness that can be frequently decoded as a signal of unreliability rather becomes an urgent appeal to assess Mary’s reason to provide her narrative in the first place: “I tell the truth. If I was not telling the truth why would I have told you any of it” (144). The answer is rather clear: her narrative is a justification of her killing the vicar. If The Colour of Milk is a female bildungsroman, then we might ask if it is a “bankrupt and jaded oxymoron” or “a cogent mode of expression for contemporary women writers”—alternatives given by McWilliams (12), who clearly prefers the latter assessment. Indeed, the female neoVictorian bildungsroman is the dominant model of neo-Victorian writing, and, as Kohlke and Elizabeth Ho have argued in their introduction to Frances Kelly’s A Tale of Minnie Dean in Neo-Victorian Studies, there is a subgenre of neo-Victorian biofiction that testifies to the “enduring fascination with re-visiting high profile Victorian murder cases” (2011, 44).5 Leyshon covers familiar territory demarcated by Kohlke and Ho: “familial traumas and environmental factors, particularly gender discrimination and social exclusion” (44). In spite of the signals of potentially unreliable narration, however, Leyshon joins a host of other female murder narratives in neo-Victorianism that make these narrators seem victims rather than villains, driven to extreme countermeasures by patriarchal suppression. Mary is a case in point and the real villains in the novel are male: the abusive father, the guilt-ridden rapist vicar and his unethical son Ralph. Ralph, who teases Mary about her frankness, impregnates Violet but disavows his child and simply leaves to study at Oxford, exposing the double standard; unlike Mary, he is free to become educated, while Mary’s education would have to be paid for. The vicar, much older and presumably more experienced, becomes Mary’s tutor, thus replicating the standard role of the male husband in Victorian notions of marriage (Pohle 2000, 88). The relationship between the vicar and Mary represents the structural violence of patriarchy that generates the individual, climactic outbreak of violence in Mary, whose laconic, matter-of-fact narrative voice rejects the male imagery of femininity that is uneasily couched between

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the femme fatale and the femme fragile. In fact, the relationship replicates some aspects one can detect, for instance, in the double first-person narrators Maud/Susan in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002). The space of sexuality is a dangerous male territory imbued with symbolic power. As Heta Pyrhönen (2010) suggests, this is the eponymous pattern of the Bluebeard Gothic she finds in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as well as in Fingersmith. We also find it in The Colour of Milk (reversed of course, as Bluebeard does not kill, but is killed). Mary does not even need her mother (as in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber [1979]). Mary commits the deed herself. In Leyshon’s narrative (just as in Fingersmith), literacy is a device to subjugate women, a Lacanian symbolic phallus (Voigts-Virchow 2009, 118). Thus, when Mary is invited to the vicar’s study, she becomes a victim and the vicar a villain: you have to come into my room, he said, other wise [sic] there will be no lesson and as a result you will not learn to read or write, and i know you want to. i know what you think. don’t go, you think. don’t go into [sic] that room. but i did. (141–42)

Again, the direct address of Mary’s narrative voice seeks to build an allegiance to the knowing twenty-first-century reader who comes to the text equipped with knowledge of predatory masculinity. Many other neo-Victorian novels have built on the first-person template of diaries or journals in order to provide outlets for marginalised voices (Brindle 2009–2010), such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid (1990), Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) or Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2008). The comparison with Starling’s and Atwood’s frequently discussed narrators makes evident how Leyshon’s strategy differs markedly. Starling’s neo-Victorian fictional biography provides a more sceptical introduction penned by the book-binding heroine who praises simplicity in books, but goes on to warn: This book is more likely to jump out of my hand, waggle its finger at me about the events I am trying to make sense of, and I shall have to stuff it into a bottom drawer amongst my stockings and smalls in an attempt to stifle its mocking. Or it may have a greater sense of responsibility, and less of a sense of humour, and reveal within it some approximation of the truth.

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For whatever one makes of its curious binding, it conceals the contents of my heart, as clearly as if I had cut it open with a scalpel for the anatomists to read. (2)

This epistemological framing is more ambivalent than the one supplied by Mary: the book is elusive, out of control, it conceals, but it cuts the heart open. Although a novice, Mary frequently suggest that she is very much in control of her writing. Atwood’s well-known Alias Grace may also serve by way of comparison. Grace Marks is a sixteen-year-old servant girl in Ontario, accused in 1843 of murdering her employer Thomas Kinnear and the housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and blamed her dead accomplice, Mary Whitney. The eponymous narrator in Atwood’s Alias Grace warns, “Perhaps I will tell you lies” (1996, 41). Mary never says this—on the contrary. Neither are there any conflicting multi-perspective narratives as in Atwood. Mary’s hand, her voice, is all we are left with. We might thus conclude with Brindle that unreliable narration in neo-Victorian narratives counters the very idea of panoptic narrative control: “I suggest that letters and diaries in neo-Victorian fiction imitate ideas of incomplete ‘truths’ in order to reinforce Linda Hutcheon’s familiar idea that we can only know the past through its textual traces, which are always partial” (67). In view of the necessarily incomplete truths in narratives, the real chimera, therefore, is the very notion of reliability. This conclusion can also be drawn from Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I. The novel otherwise features an unreliable female narrator who is interestingly different from the standard neo-Victorian character-narrator. What is probably most remarkable about this novel is that until the very end the text does not resolve its inconsistencies. Harris uses the device of underreporting differently from Leyshon’s underevaluating and underinterpreting. As Miriam Burstein (writing as “The Little Professor”) suggests, “much of the unreliable narration is of the ‘outright omission’ type as opposed to the more subtle ‘read between the lines’ type” (2014). While in The Colour of Milk the underevaluated narration is nevertheless transparent as to what happened so that the readers can deduct a real event from reading between the lines of the narrative, Gillespie and I balances the narrator’s version of events with a publicised (and, therefore, in Brindle’s sense “panoptic”) version of what happened. Increasingly, the reader comes to realise that he is the victim of Harriet’s misreporting,

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and while Harriet reports the court proceedings, we begin to see what she never reports—her obsessive and increasingly destructive intrusion of the Gillespie family. While Mary describes her killing of the vicar, Harriet never tells us that she kidnapped and killed Rose. What is also vastly different is the fact that the motivation for the possible crimes committed by the narrator remains shadowy, and while the youthful country girl Mary is described as a victim attractive to predatory men, Harriet remains isolated, spinsterly and even witch-like throughout the narrative (cf. Heiberg Madsen 2014, 270). She is the very opposite of the innocent unreliability of Mary, as her duplicity is probably the result of a childhood trauma quite similar to the one she inflicts on the nine-year-old Sibyl Gillespie. As both Burstein (2014) and Lea Heiberg-Madsen (2017, 95) point out, she inflicts the vision of a duplicitous, unruly, insane and murderous child on Sibyl when, in fact, she herself might be suffering from a psychotic personality disorder. She is even queered by possessing an extra nipple, which provokes a perceptive comment by Burstein on the contrasting traits of excessive and deficient femininity in a “much more troubling and socially inimical [character]—the threatening female Other whose body is both too female (the extra nipples) and not female at all (unattractive, apparently asexual)” (2017). Thus, Harriet is a threatening, queer “unwoman.” While in Leyshon we have the unreliable narrator as victim, Harris gives us the unreliable narrator as perpetrator and, while the victims are both female in both novels, in Harris’ novel the focus is on female insanity rather than male greed and lust. The memoir of the inexperienced, linguistically restricted Mary who seeks to narrate in order to explain and justify her crime before her execution turns into the linguistically elaborate exculpation of an old lady who even escaped trial for her crime. Harriet’s stated aim of writing the real story of the suicide of genius painter Gillespie quickly recedes behind her deceptive strategies at exoneration. The very refinement of the linguistically capable evocation of a Victorian lady contrasts sharply with the basic language of Mary. While Mary’s abuse is evident and central to Leyshon’s revenge narrative, Harriet displaces an aggression that can be inferred as a symptom of abuse and neglect at the hands of her father on her destructive machinations within the Gillespie family, which remind Burstein (2014) of an asexual variant of Fatal Attraction (1987) and Pale Fire (1962). Gillespie and I has two narrative levels: a London-based frame narrative beginning in April 1933 and the events ensconced in this frame that take place in Glasgow in 1888. This narration makes up most of the

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novel and is cast as a memoir by Harriet Baxter about how she insinuates herself into the life and family of the painter Gillespie and how she is subsequently tried for the kidnapping and murder of Rose, the Gillespie’s younger daughter, and finally acquitted for want of proof. Who has drawn obscene pictures and smeared excrements on the wall and planted sharp objects in Rose’s bed—the neurotic daughter Sibyl, as Harriet’s narration suggests, or Harriet herself? In the frame, the narrator Harriet, approaching her natural death (probably stomach cancer, as her tarry stool and bloody vomit suggests), feels haunted by her maid Sarah. Harriet suspects Sarah to be in fact Sibyl, the older daughter of the eponymous writer Gillespie, her whose other daughter Rose has probably fallen victim to Harriet’s obsession with him. Finally, the frame narrative—in parallel with the events in 1888—suggests that Sibyl has died in hospital in 1918 and Sarah Whittle is not the revengeful intruder Harriet made her out to be. While Harriet doubts this “official” information, the unreliability signal here comes in a final qualifier about her own proofs that Sibyl is Sarah—her scars: “Besides, I saw her scars. I am almost certain I saw them” (602). Sarah had already cast severe doubt on the truthfulness of the narration, attacking Harriet’s powers of manipulation: “You could make anyone do anything, just by talking to them” (467). As Harriet is getting weaker but fails to properly assess the real reasons for her illness, her lack of appetite as well as the neglect that results in bluebottles, flies and the dead bird in the cage (all of which she still blames on Sarah) are final indications of the overall manipulative and mendacious narrative to which the reader has been exposed. While we are aware of the external construction of Harriet as kidnapper and murderer from the trial, the first part of the book focuses solely on Harriet’s internal memoir of how Gillespie’s daughter Sibyl disrupts the family, exhibiting all the kinds of prepubescent sexual pressure and incestuous love for her father that we may subsequently construct for the narrator herself. As her father is absent and her stepfather Ramsay is abusive and repulsed by her, Harriet’s pursuit of Gillespie might be constructed as the quest for a father figure. Here, it is a case of overnarration that becomes a signal of unreliability. As Burstein argues, it needs an attentive reader to start questioning “just why Harriet provides so much detail about how Sibyl might have cleverly broken Rose’s fern pot.” Both Mary and Harriet have been discussed as female neo-Victorian types. Frequently, these types conform to the eponymous roles of either femme fragile or femme fatale, or both as these pathologised ideals can be

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seen as complementary. They represent a Romantic otherworldliness and transcendence either in proud, eroticised reticence (neurosis, virgin, epitomised by Eleonore Duse) or sexualised aggression (perversion, whore, epitomised by Sarah Bernhardt). While Mary (as designed by Leyshon) seeks to escape this dichotomy, Harriet is, uncomfortably, an “unwoman”—older, isolated, unproductive, sexually barren and procreatively useless. The femme fragile emerged in the Romantic era as a literary type, signifying a suppressed nervousness about sexuality, according to Ariane Thomalla (1972, 60). The type of the femme fragile has been investigated by a number of scholars, such as Thomalla or Barbara Korte. In the words of Korte, she is “a type of woman that is young and innocent, frail, thin, pale and almost disembodied” (1987, 366). She names Collins’ Woman in White (1859), Rose in Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–1939) and Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as representatives. Clearly, the fifteen-year-old Mary is young and innocent—arguably, after all, her apparent powerlessness and marginalisation explains the attraction the vicar develops for her. Equally clearly, however, the vicar’s perception of her is wrong: Mary’s narrative voice communicates from the very beginning that she is neither frail nor disembodied. As a farm girl, by definition she cannot boast the aristocratic trappings of the femme fragile. Interestingly, Leyshon highlights a bodily frailty that contrasts sharply with her increasing mental prowess. True, Mary is the youngest daughter and she describes herself as merely “some scrap of a thing” (12) when she was born, but she is outspoken (“speak how i like,” Leyshon 6). What is more, she bonds with her incapacitated grandfather and is herself handicapped, has a lame leg: My leg is my leg and i ain’t never known another leg. it’s the way i always been and the way i always walked. Mother says it was like that when i come out into the world. i was some scrap of a thing with hair like milk and i was born later than they thought and for that reason i was covered in some hair like i was an animal and my nails was long. And she says i took one look around me and i opened my mouth and i yelled and some say i ain’t never shut it since. (Leyshon 12)

The narrative highlights the hard-working farm life. As Korte points out, for working-class women fragility did not spell attractiveness, but disaster and “their illness did not lend itself to idealization” (377). Neither

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does Mary become a female monstrosity in Leyshon’s book, where Mary insists in a matter-of-fact way on the normalcy of her “deformation.” In her narrative world, there is little space for excessive metaphorisation or symbolism: Mary is not the Elephant Man. Early on, Mary warns her mother not to call her stupid or slow: “I ain’t none of them things” (7). Her hair colour, referenced in the title and explained as a feature by birth (12), suggests nourishment, but white is, of course, the colour of death and innocence. It is also the signature colour of the femme fragile. This explains the irony of killing with a cheese wire. Eugene Alabaster in A.S. Byatt’s Morphoe Eugenia (1992) may be the perfect example of the type in neo-Victorian fiction, her pale beauty and corrupt delicacy mirrored in the family name of the incestuous aristocrats. The femme fragile is associated with death via the absence of colour, but milk makes white the colour of nourishment. What is most noteworthy about her is a self-confident, assertive, almost rebellious voice that, in spite of her pale skin colour and white hair, makes her anything but a femme fragile. This proves attractive to Ralph, the vicar’s son, for whom Mary is “normally fun” (92). Mary resists him: “Don’t go touching me … I know what you’re like.” (92). Mary, in contrast to the docile femme fragile, has to work hard in spite of her handicap and makes up for her disadvantaged body by her raw, animal-like power and a “filthiness” of mouth she shares with her grandfather (cf. 10). Early in the novel, Mary confesses to masturbation, thus exploding any idea of eroticised reticence or angelic virginity.6 There are no flowers in her hair. Mary is a liberated woman avant la letter and a feminist type who shines through the early Victorian farm girl. Leyshon in fact makes a point of avoiding the types of both femme fatale and femme fragile. As Korte makes clear, Jane Austen sets an example of resistance here, not following the Romantic trend to associate a victimised frailty with feminine attraction: Austen heroines never come across as frail. Again, Tess comes to mind, described by Hardy’s narrator as “a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience” who “to almost everybody … was a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more” (Hardy 21). While she is not entirely a femme fragile, Tess still has to die. Hardy makes Tess a killer and then has her punished whereas Leyshon makes Mary a killer but gives Mary her own voice and, as the memoir breaks off before her execution, does not tell the story of her punishment. Mary is a farm worker turned servant. She frequently describes her work routines. Leyshon makes a point of not turning the “lame” Mary

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into an idle beauty who can become an “icon of her husband’s wealth” (Korte 375) by a fashion that suggests lowered vitality (corsets, etc.) and makes women unfit for work. Boredom, this much is patently evident, is not Mary’s problem. The manslaughter she commits may be a direct response to Ruskin, who, in his lecture “Of Queen’s Gardens” infamously styled man “the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation, and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest … But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,— and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision” (1887 [1865], 99). The empowered Mary can do battle, too, but within the confines of a patriarchal world and at the lower end of any Victorian social stratification, she has to do battle with a cheese wire. Interestingly, Korte describes how the Victorian ideal of femininity, as expounded by Ruskin and others, favoured a healthy and strong delicacy before some male fin-de-siècle decadents further incapacitated femininity. Clearly then, Mary belongs to the early or mid-nineteenth century rather than to Hardy’s fin de siècle that features prominently in neoVictorianism. Hardy’s narrator enthuses about “Tess’ ‘bouncing handsome womanliness’” (21), her “fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was” (45) and sees Alec tempted by “this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow yet” (77). Tess is, indeed, “doomed to be seen and coveted” (46). Mary is quite demonstrably not an Eve. Unlike other neo-Victorian femmes fragiles, Leyshon intentionally takes Mary out of the scope of the male gaze. If she feels hunger, her narration makes it real, not a symbolic annihilation or a metaphoric assault on her virginity as Alec’s forcefeeding of Tess with a strawberry. In fact, it would have been impossible for Mary to be a femme fragile in a contemporary novel. On the one hand, idealised thinness and anorexic devitalisation as well as the “symbolic annihilation” of other female body types through stereotyped representation modes (omission, trivialisation and condemnation; cf. Gaye Tuchman 1978) has increased awareness for this kind of stereotyping. On the other hand, as Korte (389) concludes, “the narrowly defined topos of the femme fragile, the stock figure cherished by the romantics and the aesthetes, is no longer a viable literary theme.” If she reappears in neoVictorian fiction, she must be dismissed as an aberration, as, for example, Agnes in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).

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The second feminine type that abounds in neo-Victorian fiction, the femme fatale is represented, for instance, by Sugar in Faber’s novel, introducing “the psyche of a frighteningly damaged female,” as Faber (2011) put it in an interview when it was filmed for BBC2. According to the definition by Carola Hilmes, the femme fatale is a young, sensuous woman who is instrumental in the ensuing corruption or death of a man who becomes attached to her (1990, 10). The femme fatale is thus—in conjunction with the new woman—the antithesis of motherly and angelic womanhood—a female type that expresses the fear of the patriarchal bourgeoisie of being overpowered in the late Victorian crisis of masculinity. She exerts power through her erotic attraction over a weak man who has abrogated his manliness and thus, Hilmes argues, her strength is ultimately derived from male masochism. As even Tess makes clear, the femme fatale not only destroys weakly men, but she is also self-destructive (Hilmes 65). As Mario Praz’s foundational text argues the type of the femme fatale predates Victorianism and flourished in Romanticism, from Eve via Cleopatra to Salome (1983 [1933]). The first half of the nineteenth century, Praz suggests, was dominated by the male Byronic hero, the second half by the female femme fatale that emerges with Matthew Lewis’ Matilda in The Monk and other Romantic belles dames sans merci. Bram Dijkstra’s study, Idols of Perversity (1986), made the link between the male imagination and constructions of fatal femininity explicit. Catani suggests that she is the most analysed construction of femininity in the field of literary studies (2005, 90), but both Hilmes and Stephanie Catani argue that she is in a problematic way open to all sorts of representations that make her appear much less defined than the femme fragile (2005, 93). Adriana Craciun distinguishes between the hyper-feminine femme fatale and the masculinised, unfemale violent woman we also encounter in neo-Victorian narratives (2003, 16). She also asks the question of why women writers seem to have embraced the supposedly male typology of femme fatale and femme fragile. Mary, on the contrary, is neither the brainchild of a male fantasy nor frighteningly damaged. She is, again deliberately, not a femme fatale nor an unfemale violent woman nor a femme fragile, but just happens to take revenge on her abuser. Thus, she is representative of the defiant feminine “unvillain” in neo-Victorian fiction. Waters frequently spares her young marginalised lesbian heroines who get to live out their queerness. This is true with Nan Astley and Florence

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in Tipping the Velvet (1998); Selina Dawes and Ruth in Affinity (1999); and Sue Trinder and Maud in Fingersmith (2002). Probably Sue Trinder kills Gentleman, but, true to the plot logic, Mrs. Sucksby who had engineered the identity change between Maud and Sue, takes the blame and is hanged. As Gamble (2013, 44) has shown, Fingersmith is an interesting case of two unreliable narrators restricted by knowledge, whose narratives seem contradictory, particularly on the basis of first readings, but finally turn out to be complementary, with a denouement contradicting the previous doubts cast on the ability of writing to convey truth (Gamble 2013, 54). Robert James Muscutt, a relative of Mary Ball, the last woman to be publicly hanged in Coventry, Warwickshire in 1849, wrote a 2011 novel, pleading the case for his great great grandmother. In a review of Muscutt’s novel The Defiance of Mary Ball, Sneha Kar Chaudhuri compares the murderess Ball to George Eliot, arguing that “Like Eliot, Ball too is a victim of patriarchal violence and subject to the abusive men in her life, restricting her autonomy and independence” (2012, 211). Clearly, under conditions prior to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, murdering an abusive husband is permissible. The historical figure of Lizzie Borden is another case of a manslaughter probably perpetrated by a young female that has attracted not just fiction writers like Angela Carter (“The Fall River Axe Murders” [1985], “Lizzie’s Tiger” [1993]) and Elizabeth Engstrom (Lizzie Borden [1991]) but also, more recently, the horror movie Lizzie (2012). Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892 but was acquitted. Thus, whenever women kill, either the femme fatale or the “unwoman” is a template invoked. Mary is too young and too justifiable in her action for this, while Harriet’s victimisation of Sibyl and her expressly asexual obsession with Ned and the happy Gillespie family qualify. Harriet ultimately destroys precisely what has been missing in her own life and what she sees in the heteronormative family: creativity, human interaction and communication, love and procreation. To that extent, Harris’ Gillespie and I might be seen as taking an anti-queer stance, failing to provide a more positive trajectory for the Othered unwoman Harriet. In a final move, however, Leyshon manages to engage the type of the unwoman, too. When Mary’s mother brings the cheese for the vicar, she alludes to the superstition that the first person to taste the new cheese would be with child (156) and, though Mary makes a point of not eating the cheese, she is pregnant, waiting for her hanging, when she tells the story—and she deliberately withholds this information as she is afraid her

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life will be spared but at the price of giving birth to a child that will be taken from her. By allowing herself and her unborn child to be executed, effectively she is permitting an abortion and by extension, becoming an “unwoman.” Clearly the eponymous colour of milk as nourishing is ironic as white is the colour of death for both mother and child. Again, however, it is her insistent and urgent narrative voice that still prevents her from becoming a mere neo-Victorian villain. Unreliability in narrations develops in the process of reception, depending on the reader’s assessment of unreliability signals. In neoVictorian narratives this reader construction is typically determined by their superior frames of reference: We decode Esther’s “madness” as a result of her problematic upbringing with an abusive stepfather; we decode Mary’s rape-revenge as the desperate strategy by a disempowered country girl at the mercy of a patriarchal system. While—in archetypal neo-Victorian fashion—the patriarchal system is the root of all Victorians evils, the focus shifts from a physical attack on an abusive man (Leyshon) to the duplicitous psyche of a damaged female (Harris) and while Harris presents an “unwoman,” Leyshon involves the reader emotionally with her character-narrator and carefully avoids catering to established female character typologies. While Harriet in Gillespie and I is untrustworthy and duplicitous, Mary is merely unreliable and restricted by lack of education. In fact, following this logic, a refined education might be seen as inducing untrustworthiness, so that Harriet’s strategy of deception seems to serve her exculpation, while we are asked to forgive Mary her premeditated murder as an almost subconscious revenge strategy. Whereas the unreliable, mad Harriet is Othered as a monstrous, mad unwoman, Mary is exculpated by her own narrative voice as victim who is driven to violent self-assertion by a biography thwarted by the Victorian patriarchal regime. Mary’s reliability is, therefore, in the terminology of Phelan, bonding as her value schemes seem in line with her contemporary audience, while we become more and more estranged from Harriet. The unreliable narrator fulfils essential functions in Gothic and neoVictorian tales of repression, memory and identity (Smith 188) and is indicative of the appropriative fiction of post-authentic neo-Victorianism (Heilmann and Llewellyn 24). Both Mary’s and Harriet’s narratives emerge are post-Victorian and therefore cannot be authentically Victorian. Both emerge from the author’s desire to rewrite and appropriate the Victorian age. Both first-person narrations emerge from the necessity to add their memories to the historical record and it seems ironic that the

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more untrustworthy narrator lives to old age while the seemingly more reliable narrator is executed. While Harriet partakes in the unreliability of Gothic insanity, clearly Mary seeks to escape from it, but can choose only death.

Notes 1. The number of examples is too vast to mention, but prominent narratives are Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Claire Dudman’s 98 Reasons For Being (2004) or Jane Harris’ The Observations (2006), Belinda Starling‘s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006), Emilie Autumn’s The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (2009), Jane England’s Wildthorn (2010), Wendy Wallace’s The Painted Bridge (2012), John Harding’s Florence and Giles (2010) and The Girl Who Couldn’t Read (2014) or John Harwood’s The Asylum (2013). Interestingly, both novels discussed here do not have an asylum setting. 2. cf. for example, Heiberg Madsen (2014, 270). 3. See the author homepage: https://www.nellleyshon.com/the-colour-ofmilk/. 4. See Pâquet (2018). 5. One may note that this fascination obviously predates Victorianism and neo-Victorianism. Randall Martin (2005) reports on the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer in ballads, pamphlets and trial reports. 6. As Creed following Dijkstra has argued, both lesbianism and masturbation were linked to female narcissism as from a patriarchal perception nonheterosexual desire could only be explained in that way (1995, 99).

Bibliography Allrath, Gaby. (En)Gendering Unreliable Narration. Trier: WVT, 2005. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Bierce, Ambrose. “Oil of Dog.” 1911. In The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, 800–803. New York: Citadel Press, 1946. Birch, Carol. “Review of The Colour of Milk, by Nell Leyshon.” The Guardian, June 15, 2012. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brindle, Kym. “Diary as Queer Malady: Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’ Affinity.” Neo-Victorian Studies 2, no. 2 (2009/2010): 65–85.

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Buckley, Jerome H. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Burstein, Miriam. Gillespie and I. The Little Professor. Blog. May 5, 2014. Catani, Stephanie. Das Fiktive Geschlecht. Weiblichkeit in anthropologischen Entwürfen und literarischen Texten zwischen 1885 und 1925. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005. Chaudhuri, Sneha Kar. “Scenes of Defiant Female Lives: Review of Robert Muscutt, Heathen and Outcast and The Defiance of Mary Ball.” Neo-Victorian Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 209–16. Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. ———. “Lesbian Bodies. Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts.” In Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, 86–103. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1849–1850. Penguin Popular Classics. London: Penguin, 1994. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986. Faber, Michel. “The Crimson Petal and the White: Watching My Novel Reborn on TV.” The Guardian. April 6, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2011/apr/06/crimson-petal-white-my-novel-faber. Fludernik, Monika. “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Unreliability.” In Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by W. Grünzweig and A. Solbach, 75–95. Tübingen: Narr, 1999. Gamble, Sarah. “‘I Know Everything. I Know Nothing’ (Re)Reading Fingersmith’ s Deceptive Doubles.” In Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Kaye Mitchell, 42–55. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Harris, Jane. Gillespie and I. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Heiberg-Madsen, Lea. Medicine and Female Gothic in the Neo-Victorian Novel. Renegotiating Monstrosities Now. PhD diss. Universidad de Málaga, 2014. https://riuma.uma.es/xmlui/handle/10630/8359.

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———. “Neo-Victorian Naughty Children: Double Narratives, Struwwelpeter and (Mis)Reading Misbehaviour.” Neo-Victorian Studies 10, no. 1 (2017): 83–109. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Hilmes, Carola: Die Femme fatale: ein Weiblichkeitstypus in der nachromantischen Literatur. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Kirchknopf, Andrea. Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the 19th Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2013. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction.” In Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza, 53– 77. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. ———, and Elizabeth Ho. “Editors’ Note to Francis Kelly’s ‘A Tale of Minnie Dean: The Wilton Baby-Farmer.’” Neo-Victorian Studies 4, no. 1 (2011): 44–54. Korte, Barbara. “‘The Femme Fragile’: Decline and Fall of a Literary Topos.” Anglia 105 (1987): 366–89. Leyshon, Nell. The Colour of Milk. 2012. London: Penguin, 2013. Martin, Randall. Women and Murder in Early Modern News Pamphlets and Broadside Ballads, 1573–1697. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. McCandless, Peter. “Liberty and Lunacy: The Victorians and Wrongful Confinement.” Journal of Social History 11, no. 3 (1978): 366–86. McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Menhard, Felicitas. Conflicting Reports. Multiperspektivität und unzuverlässiges Erzählen im englischen Roman seit 1800. Trier: WVT, 2009. Muller, Nadine. “Hystoriographic Metafiction: The Victorian Madwoman and Women’s Mental Health in 21st-Century British Fiction.” Gender Forum 25 (2009): 83–101. http://www.genderforum.org. Nünning, Ansgar. “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung. Grundzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens.” 1997. In Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischen Erzählliteratur, 3–39. Trier: WVT, 1998. Olson, Greta. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative 11 (2003): 93–109. Pâquet, Lili. “The Corporeal Female Body in Literary Rape–Revenge: Shame, Violence, and Scriptotherapy.” Australian Feminist Studies 33, no. 97 (2018): 384–99. Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

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Pohle, Bettina (2000). “Namenlose Furcht. Weiblichkeitsentwürfe zwischen Abscheu und Wollust.” In Frauen—Körper—Kunst: Literarische Inszenierungen weiblicher Sexualität, edited by Karin Tebben, 86–102. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1933]. Pyrhönen, Heta. Bluebeard Gothic. Jane Eyre and Its Progeny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Rohwer-Happe, Gislind. Unreliable Narration im dramatischen Monolog des Viktorianismus. Konzepte und Funktionen. Bonn: V&R Unipress, 2011. Ruskin, John. “Of Queen’s Garden.” In Sesame and Lilies, 81–131. 1865. New York: John Riley and Sons, 1887. https://books.google.com/books? id=dJQLAAAAIAAJ. Starling, Belinda. The Journal of Dora Damage. 2006. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Thomalla, Ariane. Die “Femme Fragile” Ein literarischer Frauentypus der Jahrhundertwende. Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1972. Tuchman, Gaye. “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media.” In Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, edited by Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels and James Benét, 3–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Voigts-Virchow, Eckart. “In-yer-Victorian-face: A Subcultural Hermeneutics of Neo-Victorianism.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 20, no. 1 (2009): 108–25.

CHAPTER 7

“Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White Marshall Needleman Armintor

One of the primary features of neo-Victorian literature is the implied and sometimes overt postmodern critique of Victorian life. Within Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), we find a number of standard Victorian types: the industrialist, the swell, the ominous medical practitioner, the deranged housewife, the cosseted child, the street urchin, the factory drudge, the chambermaid, the governess, the madam, the John, the parson, the social crusader and most emphatically, for Faber’s purposes, the prostitute. In the case of Faber’s novel, this last figure, known by the mononym “Sugar,” is placed at the centre of the narrative and stands in for the sensibilities of the reader outside of the economy of what Michel Foucault termed the “deployment of alliance”: the nuclear family anchored by procreation, the blessings of the Church and the politico-economic life of Victorian England (1978, 106). Sugar’s strategic liminal position is by default adversarial to domestic life and permits the reader an alien perspective resonant with the outsider’s postmodern view.1 M. N. Armintor (B) Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_7

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However, the conflicting aims of the neo-Victorian novel are to provide the content and narrative conceits of a Victorian novel, while at the same time providing a convincing historical review of Victorian times, paired with a clear-eyed critique of Victorian morals. The text of Faber’s novel achieves this complex set of goals through a chaotic approach to novelistic narrative. The explicitly fictive stance adopted by the neo-Victorian novel, to use the phrase of Peter Lamarque, implies exploring that world and its internal logic through grappling with the fragmentation of history, memory and nostalgia (1994, 149). The pathologisation of Agnes Rackham’s sexual miseducation, plus her haphazard schooling squarely aimed towards a felicitous marriage, is compromised by the novel’s unvarnished and metafictional approach to the historical observations offered by the omniscient narrator, without the necessary euphemisms of the period.2 Is too much information being offered to the reader in order to maintain the narrative illusion that Agnes Rackham is profoundly mad? In other words, is the neo-Victorian too meta to explore madness in an ingenuous way? In investigating of the question of madness in Faber’s novel, we necessarily come to understand in a more nuanced way the narrative strategies of the work which may point to the broader tendencies of the neoVictorian strain in contemporary writing. By engaging in many different narrative modes at once, some more or less ironic, playful or documentarian, this mode of historical fiction produces a similar sort of vertigo to the feeling Roger Caillois evokes when describing the mask as a means to enter into a state of ritualised play (2001 [1961], 95). The conceit that opens the work is itself reminiscent of the narrative frame of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749); Faber’s narrator explicitly greets the reader, “Watch your step…” as they begin to follow the various characters around the streets (and later, homes and brothels) of London. By contrast the 2011 BBC adaptation of the novel offers a visual counterpoint to the multiple neo-Victorian narrative layers of the book, specifically to provide a vivid illustration of Agnes Rackham’s fractured consciousness. The line between real and unreal experiences is one that Agnes appears to erase from the beginning: “Agnes doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a dream,” further noting she believes waking occurrences and dreamed events “happen” on the same level of reality (Faber 220). The many delusions offered by the dream-world, which Agnes views as real, are woven seamlessly into Faber’s text. The Convent of Health, Agnes’ cenobitic

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refuge from her domestic incarceration, takes on as much solidity as anything in the narrative reality of sensation fiction, to which the director’s (Marc Munden) visual aesthetic hews more closely.3 The vertiginous character of the narrator’s distance is established from the early sections of the book. The omniscient narrator starts from the outset treating each character as a pawn, an object for the reader to follow through the environment of late-1874 London. The reader is first bidden to follow Caroline (Sugar’s friend and brothel comrade), then Rackham, then Sugar as the primary bearers of narrative focus. Eventually, the reader spends time with Agnes in the Rackham manse. At the conclusion of chapter nine, the narrator describes the scene of the house at night as if it were a diorama: “If … you could lift off [the Rackham house’s] roof to peek inside, you would see William in shirt-sleeves at his desk…. In another compartment, at the far end of the landing, you would see a child’s body huddled in a cot slightly too small for it: Sophie Rackham, who isn’t yet of any consequence. In another compartment still, you would see Agnes swaddled in white bedding” (Faber 200–201). As things are firmly in the narrator’s control, these characters can only be made to interact intimately in the thoughts of the narrator we have before us the Victorian nuclear family, scattered, compartmentalised and impossible to fit back together. Shortly afterwards, another key signal of narrative distance applies the same logic to the body of Agnes Rackham. The reader is treated to a vaguely Proustian scene featuring Agnes lying in her bed, awake, and aware that Rackham (with whom she has not shared a bed in years) has not come home yet. Though she is nominally identified as the “Angel in the House,” the immobile Agnes maintains a status as a brute object within it: “She’s abnormally sensitive to the shutting of any door in the house, feeling the vibration, she fancies, through the floor or the legs of her bed” (Faber 218). The omniscient narrator then drops this piece of information into the narrative, laying bare a brutally material cause for Agnes’ delusions: In Agnes’s head, inside her skull, an inch or two behind her left eye, nestles a tumor the size of a quail’s egg. She has no inkling it’s there. It nestles innocently; her hospitable head makes room for it without demur, as if such a diminutive guest could not possibly cause any trouble. It sleeps, soft and perfectly oval. No one will ever find it. … Doctor Curlew, whatever parts of Agnes Rackham he may examine, is not about to go digging in her

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eye-socket with a scalpel. Only you and I know this tumour’s existence. It is our little secret. (218–19)

The narrator then goes on in a non sequitur to describe Agnes Rackham’s “real” illness, the one she feels affects her the most, as loneliness, something that Doctor Curlew cannot cure (219). This wild, overdetermined mix of Agnes’ maladies exemplifies the vulnerability to overdeterminism ever present with the neo-Victorian; by pulling out all the narrative stops, the reader is unsure about the place of the novel’s tension over this issue. In a sense, the omniscient narrator’s diagnosis here effaces all the novel’s other interpretations of Agnes’ illness. The explicitly postmodern reader, constantly reminded of her alienation from this historical setting, is set back on her heels, viewing the action of the book as a medical horror movie packed with dramatic irony. Knowing the true material cause of Agnes’ hallucinations, nausea and weight loss, we are left to contemplate her victimisation at the hands of masculinised medical discourse, the violation and decay of her body and therapeutic incarceration; however, it coordinates with the narremes of her upbringing and religious imagination. In an important sense, Agnes’ story holds the reader at one remove; she is a mere symptom of the overlapping regimes of Victorian social opprobrium and control.

Houses in Order and “Playing with Dolls”: The Non-maturation of Agnes Rackham The issue of social performance in The Crimson Petal and the White inaugurates the action of this narrative as Agnes’ madness first manifests itself in social situations. When the viewer first sees Agnes in episode one of the BBC adaptation, she has just attacked the headpiece of a guest at the Rackham manor, believing her guest’s hat decoration to be a live and hostile bird (Coxon 2011). This results in Agnes being confined to her bedroom, place of incarceration and regularised trauma without the possibility of further embarrassment to the Rackham household. However, the textual version of Agnes’ story depicts a largely successful season of 1875. She attends concerts with her husband, visits friends during proper “at-homes” and takes to her correspondence as any society wife would. Despite the gossip trailing her, she is able to mix with seemingly any crowd without fear of judgement; Agnes is even able to enact a number

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of unusual hospitality schemes, such as the “black and white party,” featuring a drastically charred pumpkin as dessert and plans to introduce her guests to such unusual items as blindfolds and cinnamon-scented candles (Faber 358). This is all part of her focus on being “modern,” with stuffed birds on her own hats, as well as provocatively “curved” dresses (359). In the late Victorian text Natural Causes and Supernatural Seeming s, Henry Maudsley pathologises the broad idea of rebelling against convention, claiming that only “unstable minds” were capable of originality (1886, 208–9). However successful and diverting Agnes’ innovations have been, her autonomy has not been honoured, to say the least, by patriarchal control over the household and familial reputation. Her stepfather, Lord Unwin, upbraids Rackham by informing him that stories of her antics have reached the social circles he travels within, even into France and Tunisia (Faber 607). Unwin’s ultimatum for Rackham has more to do with how Agnes’ behaviour reflects on his masculinity, specifically, that everyone would associate madness with his family line and name: “They think I father mad children, Bill! Now is it right that I, and my children, should be suspected of … bad blood, only because John Pigott’s feebleminded daughter is still at large?” (608; emphasis in original).4 Agnes’ au courant tastes signal madness but in the most unexpected of ways; garish though her lapses in manners may be, the Anglican stepfather she blames for her perdition also insists on conformity in social performance. Agnes’ illness touches on many of the different facets of Victorian pathological instantiation in familial and social roles. In the narrative, we see how the new medical thought with regards to female madness collides with appropriate social distance, in particular with the trauma of Doctor Curlew’s intervention. With his character, we have the intrusion of a new figure into the household in order to regulate its operation and the performance of Agnes in the name of domestic order. When the doctor comments disapprovingly on her paleness, she notes, “Ah, but that may be the face powder, mayn’t it?” (160). Agnes protests being examined, but this only stokes the familiar recriminations circling around in her head. Her resistance is more proof of her madness; in order to disprove this, she needs to acquiesce, while she is nevertheless thinking “he’s taking liberties no physician should?” (161). This is also shown diegetically by Munden in episode one, as Agnes grimaces in her bed during Curlew’s pelvic exam. The historical record ratifies the complicated function of a practitioner like Doctor Curlew. In general, as Helen Small points out,

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figures such as Maudsley were the proponents of “gentlemanly” psychiatric medicine and felt compromised by the new science of obstetrics and gynecology arising in the 1860s. The one thing common to both was the irreducible belief in the state of reproductive organs as a determinant of health; here, Curlew proves himself to be one of the new breed, with no consideration for the prevailing gendered codes of conduct (1996, 70). It is revealed at this inflection point in the narrative arc that Curlew’s role is not to cure Agnes but rather to sedate her so that “order” may be restored to the household, and this has a number of important and unexpected consequences (Faber 257–60). The drug has the required soporific effect, and it is also apparent that it routinely serves to facilitate Rackham’s sexual abuse of Agnes, the final instance of which takes place before she is to go to the asylum, by ensuring her pliability and relative silence (614– 15). Her sedation in turn serves as a gateway to her other contact point with madness, the eroticisation of her religious visions centred around the Convent of Health. When Curlew puts her under, he dispatches her to this well-trod place in her imagination, which Sugar later uses to lead her, mercifully, to her death at the end of Agnes’ narrative (261). There is a significant intertextual irony here, in that the line referenced in the novel’s title is drawn from Tennyson’s The Princess (1847); the sonnet “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White” is read by Princess Ida to her intended husband as she helps him recover from his wounds in the hospital she has built from the remains of her school for women. As Beverly Taylor notes, the girls’ school is dissolved by the erotic bonds the young women develop with their male patients, and the poem itself speaks of a genderless utopia in which men and women can coexist harmoniously (13–14). Rather than symbolising union, Agnes’ fantasy represents an escape from the trauma she suffers in a social economy ruled by gender.5 Given her status as a “childless” woman (as the birth of her child was too traumatic for her to grasp) who is still young, the pathologising of Agnes’ behaviour is also explicitly and repeatedly characterised by her lack of maturity. It would appear also that this pathologising characteristic applies equally to her daughter Sophie, growing apart from her in a different wing of Rackham household: frequent comparisons of both are made but no more pointedly when Beatrice, the outgoing governess, tells Sugar, “There’s times … when [Sophie] behaves like a baby …. At such times, she requires firm handling, if she’s not to become just like …

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a Bedlamite” (Faber 511). The severity of Agnes’ illness is not in question; the idea that Sophie has inherited her mother’s illness (along with her propensity for wetting the bed) is thoroughly implanted within the Rackham household. By the same token, Agnes’ immaturity is presented simultaneously as stumbling block to domestic felicity and a perversion for Rackham’s exploitation; upon visiting her in her room where she is recovering after one of her outbursts, Rackham’s amorous (to his mind) intentions are halted by her innocent question, “Am I still your little girl?” (301). In response to questions by Sugar, Rackham complains about the “inconsistency” of his wife’s madness which makes her case difficult to treat. The true nature of her malady revisits her supposed lack of maturity, put in the blunt terms he prefers: “She’ll come good with a bit of maturing. She was awfully young when I married her—too young perhaps. Playing with dolls still … and that’s what her outbursts tend to be: childish” (417).6 Rackham describes her poor diet as consisting of “lettuce and apricots,” noting that Doctor Curlew desires to “(fatten her) up with beef and buttermilk” in a sanatorium, as another of the outcomes of her bad diet is her “monthly issue has dried up,” hinting at Rackham’s tacit desire for a male heir to whom he can bequeath the family business (418).7 Sugar’s reaction to all of this is a reflection of her protectiveness over Agnes and her inability to see Agnes as a sexual being: “The thought of William—of any man—being so well-acquainted with Agnes’ body is an unexpected shock to her” (418; emphasis in original). Rackham’s anxiety over her health, combined with Curlew’s desire to reform her food intake, is an indication of compulsory breeding through management of women’s diets, a punishment visited on Agnes most memorably after the death of her mother (559). In addition to the numerous infantilising judgements assigned to Agnes, various male subjects agree that Agnes herself has no real agency, undergirded by Curlew’s medical opinion. He defends his medical intervention in Agnes’ case to his daughter Emmeline Fox, shortly before Agnes disappears for good. Emmeline has received a manic letter from Agnes describing her new theology of the renewed body as spelled out in The Illuminated Thoughts & Preternatural Reflections of Agnes Pigott and responds in a well-meaning (and orthodoxically Christian) attempt to cure Agnes of her delusions. Her father, by contrast, insists on the facticality of her mental illness, comparing it to a broken arm that cannot be cured through talking and forecasts her prognosis as poor: “If she’s been entertaining delusions since early girlhood, slim, I’d say” (631).8 Curlew

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further explains that the “intractably insane” “don’t wish to be rescued” and further criticises his own daughter’s own quixotic social crusade by putting Agnes in the same category as “your fallen women” (631).

Dear Holy Sister: Divine Eroticism and Shared Identities By the time the novel ends, it is apparent that there is no difference between Agnes and the other women in the book. The narrative twists of The Crimson Petal and the White continually circle around memory and mortality; the main narrative threads in the text, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798), are bound together by the similarities of the women’s stories depicted in it. As Alison Booth notes, common elements of life narratives can point to a “positive ethics” of shared identity (2015, 177). The tragedy of Agnes Rackham is not necessarily the unique quality of her plight but rather in its routine, systemic brutality. Throughout the book, death is never very far away; the opening scene of the BBC adaptation is drawn from a flashback where Sugar attends a dying prostitute named Elizabeth (Faber 334). This analepsis comes about as result of Sugar’s thinking about her own long-suffering novel writing process and her effort to memorialise in prose those she left behind in the rookery of Saint Giles. It is suggested that of all the sex workers in her circle, Sugar is the only one to regularly attend to the dying, thus taking on the mantle of a kind of angel of death, the role she will later play for Agnes. Elizabeth is concerned about the fate of her body after death and wails, “Tomorrow morning I’ll be cold meat. They’ll clean the room and toss me in the river. Eels’ll eat my eyes” (334). This is the precise fate that awaits Agnes at the end of her narrative, her body reduced to that very state having been fished out of the Thames (690–91). Agnes’ recurrent dream of the Convent of Health performs the function of a prophecy and promise for Agnes to be healed of her bodily trauma. It is a fantasy about the modern conveniences of train travel wrapped around the childlike wish to return to the coddled, infantile state she enjoyed before the horror of menstruation visited her. The very name signals her wish to return to the convent school of her childhood and she holds to the idea that her Holy Sister is the reader of the diary where this part of her life is immortalised. Stephanie Schatz asserts in “Lewis Carroll’s Dream-child and Victorian Child Psychopathology” that Victorian children’s fantasy-saturated waking lives were equated with the

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free-floating delusions of insane adults, thereby putting the question of childhood sanity beyond the reach of medical science (2015, 103). At the same time, her need to return to an unmarried state is also coordinate with her desire to be the virginal “Angel in the House,” one which conflicts directly with her horror of her own menstruating body, her denial of its procreative power and her desire to return to her Catholic childhood.9 Her feeling of being unmoored in this unfamiliar location spurs her desire to be attended by at least the spiritual presence of her Holy Sister: “For, each night, while Agnes sleeps, her Holy Sister reads her diary, by the light of Her own supernal aura, and leaves faint fingerprints on the pages” (Faber 442). Having closed her eyes, she crumples to the sand and is immediately visited by her spiritual guardian: “By the time her Holy Sister is close enough to be recognised beyond doubt, Folkestone Sands has disappeared entirely, and in its stead is the far more familiar landscape of her dreams: the tranquil environs of the Convent of Health” (444). The fantasy world envisioned by Agnes comes to her rescue, even though her incarceration continues. The imposition of the body and its constant assault on her sensibilities, factors into the problem of her being able to understand at once the hazards in store for her. Agnes’ relationship with her own physical body is problematic to say the least, from anxiety over her marriage to her fantasy of the convent; Pamela Gilbert reflects that the female body of the Victorian sensation novel betrays the transgressions its environment visits upon it (1997, 47). Amid all the talk of menstruation later on, Agnes’ reaction to this discussion of her “nethers” bespeaks a conscious anxiety about her own vulnerable female body: “All she knows is that this part of her is, by a deplorable fault of design, not properly closed, and therefore vulnerable to the forces and influences of Evil” (Faber 472). This is in tune with the Victorian concept of the female body as a “cell of sickness,” in Maudsley’s phrase, confined to the domestic sphere and, unfit for hard work, particularly the work Agnes spontaneously undertakes in burying her diaries (Wood 2001, 21). Occasioned by the perhaps miraculous menstrual flow (of which Clara notes that this is the sixth consecutive day), Agnes imagines that Curlew and Rackham are planning to send her away as Rackham had the previous day invited the doctor into the smoking-room for a full hour: “In nightmares, Agnes pictures herself fettered in the courtyard of a mad-house, molested by ugly crones and grunting idiots,” followed by a horrific vision of being mired in a bathtub full of her own menstrual blood (472). Wherever confronted with masculine surveillance, her

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Holy Sister is necessarily absent. At such times, the train dream becomes a nightmare when she realises the motionless train has instead become a literal “prison” (472). The Holy Sister, then, becomes a symbol of homosocial saviourhood, an emissary of the Holy Mother, a virginal premenstrual symbol of her prepubescent life. In beginning of her life as Agnes’ guardian angel, Sugar plays a part in feeding the intimacy Agnes craves with her Holy Sister, even though it takes a bluntly carnal form. Mark Eslick cites the Victorian Protestant anxiety over the deployment of the image of the Virgin Mary as “paganism” but one that authors such as Charles Dickens found necessary in order to convey emotion in invoking the spiritual (2012, 62–63). Her initial meeting with her Holy Sister takes place at a public concert after another childish fit towards a society matron (Faber 393). Agnes rushes out into the street trailed by Sugar, who has followed Agnes here as part of her surreptitious surveillance of the Rackham family. Sugar discovers Agnes collapsed into the muck of the alley and, once she begins to pull her body off of the dirty pavement, the touch of Agnes’ flesh brings her to the reality of the tenderness of her gesture, much as the touch of Sophie awakens her buried maternal instincts (394). Agnes explicitly narrates her expected response from Rackham, momentarily adopting his nervous stammer: “William s-says you are a f-fantasy, a trick of my im-mmagination” (397). She mistakes the poor cloak Sugar has procured for her as a “beautiful white robe,” completing the fairy tale; Sugar secures her silence about the exchange by saying, “Don’t tell [Rackham] anything. Let this be our secret.” Intimating that “Our Lady” would disapprove (397). Tellingly, the encounter plays with the eroticisation of the divine, as when Sugar place is the cloak on her, Agnes responds “with a sound remarkably like the erotic whimper Sugar performs when a man’s hard prick is nuzzling for entry” (396). The narrative of Sugar as Agnes’ Holy Sister ends with Agnes’ escape from the Rackham house one last time. Sugar finds her in the carriage house, where Agnes, has been puttering around in the search for her diaries, because, she maintains, they are “fattening me up for sacrifice” (642). Her last statement is “Please take me before they do,” signifying Agnes’ awareness of the fate that awaits her in the asylum (643).

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Retracing the Narratives of Madness: The Journals of Agnes Rackham The problem of tackling the madness of Agnes Rackham is that the etiology of her insanity was detailed all along in the comprehensive set of diaries she was instinctually correct to bury. The diaries themselves narrate and often fail to narrate the story of Agnes’ decline but also, in a more pedestrian way, it is the expected narrative of the trauma inflicted on Victorian subjects kept in the dark about their sexuality. Contrasting with Sugar’s fictional life’s work, The Fall and Rise of Sugar (which could aptly be the alternate title of Faber’s novel), Agnes’ diaries are also the narrative of one woman’s very Victorian coming of age. Likewise, Agnes is carrying the memories of everyone forward: their burial is symptomatic of her desire to erase her family, especially the stepfather she never sees. The book Sugar is writing participates in its own sort of madness, though brutally logical in that the plot of her book outlines the wholesale slaughtering of every man she runs across, with the heroine dying at the end, unredeemed. There is even an intertextual reference to that other famous novel featuring an incarcerated madwoman of the manor and a lucky ascendant governess, Jane Eyre (1847); Sugar mentally notes that the story would have to end her way, “otherwise this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks becoming one of those ‘Reader, I married him’ romances she so detests” (Faber 229). Sugar here invokes by name Wilkie Collins’ The New Magdalen (1872–1873). Though for Collins the triumphant Mercy Merrick wins elusive redemption at the end, Sugar rejects this as another narrative outcome to be studiously avoided (229). The story of Agnes-as-author enables the reader to rehearse the entire arc of her madness in the same narrative registers. In a deep way, the reader learns nothing really new from the performative chronological reading of the diary entries, all part of Sugar’s attempt to gain a better purchase on Rackham’s life and psyche. The mystery of Agnes’ madness has never really been in doubt, however; in this sense, the withholding of this information from the reader is more about Sugar’s edification. In this sense, Sugar recalls another Collins protagonist, Walter Hartright, who “filters” the information he receives to promote his own interests (Bachman 2010, 91). The ultimate result is that Sugar becomes Agnes’ guardian angel in earnest, delivering her from the fate of the asylum. At the outset of Sugar’s journey through Agnes’ account of her life, a diary

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volume falls open to an entry related to the birth of Sophie, with Doctor Curlew in attendance: “I may have said that after so many months of illness I wish for nothing but death but I didn’t mean it! His black bag frightens me—it has knives in it and leeches…. [Clara] prattles that everyone is very worried about ‘the baby’ —how very late it is, & that it must come soon. Whose baby can this be? I wish William would keep me better informed about whom he invites to this house” (Faber 526; emphasis in original). After a quizzical Sugar asks Rackham why Sophie claims she never sees her mother, Rackham informs her Sophie has been kept away from Agnes since the day of her birth (546). Perhaps not surprisingly, once Agnes has buried the past in the form of her diaries, her new work The Illuminated Thoughts & Preternatural Reflections of Agnes Pigott establishes a new theology of incorruptible bodies and is the text which causes her husband to place her into the asylum, given that the writings are to him the overt rantings of a madwoman. In her highly speculative work, one inspired by her secret cache of theosophic pamphlets, humans are modelled on the concept of the Trinity, complete with a second body or Sun Body reserved for the time of the Resurrection (551). It is Agnes’ quest to recover this “new” body by returning to her familial religious roots. The final conversation between Agnes and Rackham occurs over Cheeseman’s refusal to act on Agnes’ orders to drive her to the Catholic Church of her childhood, a prohibition ordered by Doctor Curlew (592). She understands that she needs a miracle to survive, and she inveighs against William, “‘my body is turning into … raw meat,’” crying in outrage and disbelief (594). William grasps her wrists, attempting to stop her from unwrapping the bandages on her feet (a pair of accidental stigmata acquired while burying her diaries), and she ends the conversation the way a little child might after a tussle in the sandbox, murmuring, “You are hurting me …. Go play with someone else” (594). The corruption of the body is very much on evidence in the diary as the precipitating factor of her insanity. Elaine and English Showalter’s classic “Victorian Women and Menstruation” details the commonplace Victorian belief that menstruation could occur spontaneously, almost at will, and was a sign of readiness for procreation, insanity, “mental weakness,” and a number of other sometimes contradictory factors (1970, 84–85). Though menstruation was considered to be traumatic in itself, it was also considered that menstruating women were “more susceptible to shocks,” a belief that had persisted into at least the 18th century (84). Agnes’ trauma at her onset of menstruation occurs simultaneously

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with the death of her mother and her subsequent burial in the Church of England cemetery: “Day by day, our house becomes more infested with Demons . They chuckle in the rafters. They wisper [sic] behind the skirtingboards. They wait to have their way with me. He waits to have his way with me” (Faber 558; emphasis in original). This account is attended by smearing of thick blood into the pages of the diary in the shape of a crucifix, with Agnes noting that whatever killed her mother will eventually kill her (558). Later, there is the wonderment and dread of the single line, “I woke in a bed of blood, and yet I live” (559; emphasis in original). The traumatic event of Sophie’s birth is narrated in the diary near the same point in the text that she is raped by her husband as she lies in bed, drugged and immobile.10 On the occasion of her wedding to Rackham at seventeen, she salutes her diary by triumphantly replacing her name: “I shall be, / no longer Agnes Unwin, / but Forever yours, / Agnes Rackham!!!” (Faber 617). The blank pages that follow are followed by an entry that conflates her food anxieties with her profoundly denied pregnancy: “I eat less than I ever did before I came to this wretched house, yet I grow fat.” This is followed by an extended fever dream of a demon sitting on her chest force-feeding her while she sleeps, then a fantasy of her being carried to the Convent of Health, where the Holy Sister is engaged to pull out the demon from her belly as a spectral midwife: “I feel it pushing and lungeing [sic] in Rage and Terror, but my Sister has a way of causing my belly to open up without injury, permitting the demon to spring out. I glimpsed the vile creature for only an instant: it is naked and black, it is made of blood & slime glued together; but immediately upon being brought out into the light, it turns to vapour in my Holy Sister’s hands ” (617; emphasis in original). Sugar’s crisis of conscience after this leads to her to urge Agnes to go out on an expedition for the Convent of Health, especially after Agnes’ correspondence with Emmeline Fox and William’s discovery of her book, exposing her fantasy of returning to her pristine and prepubescent “Sun Body” bathed in a great pillar of flame: “I was most especially delighted with my bosom, so small and smooth, my lower parts, free of gross hair, and of course my face, with all the cares erased” (646; emphasis in original). Rackham terms it “Madness,” and then rifles through the spiritualist pamphlets and other texts to cleanse her environment and also perhaps to abate her religious delusions (647). It is out of Sugar’s duty to Agnes as her Holy Sister that she awakens her before dawn in order to send her on her rail journey to the Convent of Health.

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Emancipated at last, her head aches in the spot where her tumor resides, reminding the reader, again, of the raw materiality of her madness (666).

The Woman in White and the Singularity of Vision The 2011 BBC series of The Crimson Petal and the White streamlines the shifting narrative strategies of Faber’s novel in favour of the single-point perspective afforded by film. There is no room for an intrusive explicit narrator or voiceover; the burden of telling the story found the novel lies primarily with Sugar. The establishing shot in the first episode follows her through the streets of St. Giles, reminiscent of Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White: “What sort of a woman she was and how she came to be out alone in the high road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place” (1999 [1860], 24). What follows in Munden’s film is a narrative that seesaws back and forth between Rackham and Sugar, with Sugar variously as the object of desire to the former and the moral centre of the series narrative as it proceeds towards its conclusion. Just as in The Woman in White when the approach of Anne Catherick signals to Walter Hartright that something deeply wrong is afoot, the visual rhetoric of Agnes Rackham’s beginning and ending scenes with her “guardian angel,” Sugar, roots the film version of The Crimson Petal and the White in sensation fiction, lending the narrative the moral heft the novel version often mutes with its multiplicity of ironising narrative layers. According to Nicholas Daly, the popular 1860s image of the woman in white is rooted in the initial sightings of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858 (2009, 2). The visual career of this figure was later amplified by James McNeill Whistler’s painting Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (1862) which served to shock viewers out of the convention of narrative painting, and in Daly’s view, replace content with the “pure form” of the feminine ideal, featuring alabaster skin and red hair (81–82). There is no narrative announced by the white, robed figure—it is for the sharp-eyed viewer to notice and investigate in order to uncover the mystery.11 Like Walter Hartright, Sugar is the only character in her narrative to notice and be troubled by the woman in white; like Hartright, she is here to help the woman trapped in the asylum (Fig. 7.1).

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Fig. 7.1 At the end of episode one, Agnes appears as an apparition to Sugar from her bedroom window

The moment establishing the relationship between Sugar and Agnes is grounded in cross-purposes for each character. Sugar sees the mansion for the first time to gauge Rackham’s wealth: In awe, she smirkingly murmurs, “My God … William Rackham … you’ll keep me better than you do now” (Coxon 1); Agnes, clutching a rosary, has just been invasively and painfully “examined” by Doctor Curlew. Agnes’ fixed stare, which is then returned by Sugar, signals her fascination. After a few moments holding Agnes’ gaze, Sugar shyly departs, with Agnes gesturing feebly after her. In this instance, the woman in white is the desiring subject, as Agnes finds her Holy Sister at last in the guise of a red-haired young woman in a dirty green dress. The climax of Sugar and Agnes’ filmic narrative occurs in episode three in a scene that compresses a number of elements from the “Holy Sister” encounters and which takes place after Rackham rapes the seemingly insensate Agnes before she is to go to the asylum. Shattered and weeping, Agnes crawls slowly on the carpeted stairway in a way reminiscent of both the similarly steady single-perspective hallway sequences in The Shining (1980) and the “spider walk” scene in The Exorcist (1973) (Fig. 7.2).

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Fig. 7.2 Near the conclusion of episode three, Agnes urges her traumatised body to escape

The exchange between them assigns Agnes’ trauma firmly to the actions of both Rackham and Curlew, rather than demons, tumors, or strange birds: AGNES: They give me poison. They hurt me… he hurts me… And his doctor does the same. In the same place always. SUGAR: Doctor hurts you …. AGNES: Pushes inside … he digs away at me with his sharp beak. They’re going to kill me …. Worms have eaten my diaries…no one will know I existed. (Coxon 3)

Sugar then assures Agnes that no one is going to hurt her anymore and that she is about to be sent away to the Convent of Health; as Munden

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frames it through these emotional, intimate interactions, Sugar’s connection is immediate. Given the denials proclaimed by the men in her life, Sugar is the only one who understands the depth and causes of Agnes’ pain. To some degree, the film version compromises the idea that Agnes is a madwoman; as Sugar bears witness, the answer to her trauma is all too clear and could have been, as the case of the sexually battered Elizabeth, included in Sugar’s book. In contrast to Faber’s novel, which is distinctively neo-Victorian in its polyvalent narrative pastiche, the BBC rendition decides on a singularity of approach to the problem of Agnes Rackham’s madness. To a certain degree, she plays the role of the woman in white for Sugar who, like Hartright, frees the mysterious figure from an all too pedestrian domestic fate. As Gregory Currie notes in Narratives and Narrators, the problem with determining narrative purpose, drawing on the familiar “focalizing terminology” from Mieke Bal and Gérard Genette, is to solve the function of the focalising in the text (2010, 138). The way in which the series firmly locates the narrative burden with Sugar’s perspective allows her act as the conduit for the testimony of Agnes Rackham. Rather than the textual narrator offering Agnes to the reader as simply a narrative specimen for dissection and study, the viewer cannot keep her at such a distance. The woman in white demands our immediate attention and sympathy, holding the viewer’s gaze, as she fills the screen.

Notes 1. The account given by Deborah Epstein Nord of Flora Tristan’s memoir Promenade dans Londres deems her to enjoy a liminal subjectivity as a prostitute in 1840s London; Tristan herself remarks at one point that prostitution is either “sublime or madness” (1995, 124). Nord notes that the figure of the prostitute is of course manifestly opposed to the domestic sphere by virtue of “her ability to subsist by her own labor” (135). 2. Silvana Collela notes that “Faber’s narrative experiment neither mourns nor derides the legacy of Victorian fiction. It may promise the consolidation of tradition but does not endorse the idea of stability and permanence which goes with it” (107). 3. Throughout the era of the Victorian novel, Jane Wood declares that delirium offered an opportunity for sensation fiction to open a window into supernatural insights, specifically the works of Oliphant, Mrs. Henry Wood, Eliot and Gaskell (112–14).

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4. Coordinate with the current thinking about transmission through inheritance and the character of insanity with regards to mothers and their daughters is this passage in Borderlands of Insanity, by popular essayist and physician Andrew Wynter: The mental likeness is, however, the most important of the two, as we often see children partaking of the father’s features and of the mother’s temperament. In such cases the child would possibly inherit the mother’s insane temperament, transmitted into some disorder of the nervous system, such as hysteria, epilepsy, or neuralgia; for nothing is more common than to find mere nervous disorders changed, by transmission from parent to child, into mental disorders, and vice versa. (1875, 53) 5. There is a further irony of the placement of “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” in the narrative of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Princess. Though the Prince has been defeated, he sees that the Princess is drawn to him and spells out his assurances of his love from his sickbed to her: …let her make herself her own To give or keep, to live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood. For woman is not undevelopt man, But diverse: could we make her as the man, Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this, Not like to like, but like in difference. (1847, 7: 256–62) The emphasis on “distinctive womanhood” nevertheless makes it plain that in all her “diversity,” there is still a defined role for the Princess to play, one that would prevent her from the attainments reserved for men. 6. Akihito Suzuki concludes that interments at Bethlem often were grounded in lay familial assessments of someone’s behaviour, heavily dependent on opinion and the creation of a narrative around individual madness (1999, 120–21). 7. Faber underlines the horror of Agnes’ birth narrative with the irony of Sugar’s gradual awareness of her own pregnancy while she is reading the relevant portions of Agnes’ diaries. Sophie will be an accidental witness to Sugar’s intentional miscarriage of her potential half-brother in the Rackham factory lavatory (782). 8. There is a striking similarity between this and the story of Freud and Breuer’s Anna O. Anna has a similar habit of day dreaming, but is mature enough to distinguish reality from fantasy (Breuer 1957, 22). Through the “talking cure,” Breuer assists Anna in overcoming her hallucinations

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due to her trauma over the death of her father; Agnes’ narrative(s) of childhood, adulthood and married life do not have enough separation to make such an intervention possible. 9. In Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Canonization, Tricia Lootens explores the paradox of the Virgin Mary as “semisecularized” household model for matriarchs, who must also be free from the stain of sexual corruption (1996, 53–54). 10. Rackham obliquely acknowledges his part in her trauma of sexual initiation, tying his forcing himself on her in the present moment to her inability to cope with sex their wedding night: “I never meant to hurt you, on that first night,” he assures her, but due to the anesthesia, she cannot really respond to his entreaties. Once finished, Agnes murmurs, “numbered all my bones,” drawn from Psalm 21, but in this case is more directly related to the well-known Catholic prayer to be spoken kneeling before a crucifix. Upon Rackham’s leaving, she wets the bed just as her unknown daughter does and deliriously moans the word “dirty” over and over (Faber 614–15). As Herbert Tucker notes, sexual knowledge, even without any sort of contact, is impossible without a concomitant loss of innocence, which explains Agnes’ retreat into childhood (1993, 68). 11. Julian Wolfreys observes in his study of Virginia Woolf’s brief story “A Haunted House” that the uncanny “effaces” realism, destabillising the “solidity” of realist narrative (2002, 142).

Bibliography Bachman, Maria K. “Concealing Minds and the Case of The Woman in White.” In Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment, edited by Albert D. Pionke and Denise Tischler Millstein, 75–94. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Booth, Alison. “Screenshots in the Longue Durée: Feminist Narratology, Digital Humanities, and Collective Biographies of Women.” In Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan Sniader Lanser, 169–93. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. 1961. Translated from the French by Meyer Barash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Collela, Silvana. “Olfactory Ghosts: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White”. In Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, 85–110. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. 1860. Edited with an introduction and notes by Matthew Sweet. London: Penguin Books, 1999. Coxon, Lucinda. The Crimson Petal and the White. Episode 1. Directed by Marc Munden. BBC Two. April 6, 2011. ———. Episode 2. Directed by Marc Munden. BBC Two. April 13, 2011. ———. Episode 3. Directed by Marc Munden. BBC Two. April 20, 2011. ———. Episode 4. Directed by Marc Munden. BBC Two. April 27, 2011. Currie, Gregory. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Daly, Nicholas. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Eslick, Mark. “Agnes Wickfield and Victorian Mariolatry.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 122 (2012): 62–77. Faber, Michel. The Crimson Petal and the White. London and New York: Harcourt, 2002. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lamarque, Peter. “Narrative and Invention: The Limits of Fictionality.” In Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, edited by Cristopher Nash, 131–53. Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge: 1994. Lootens, Tricia A. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Victorian Literature and Culture Series. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Maudsley, Henry. Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Company, 1886. Munden, Marc, dir. The Crimson Petal and the White. Episode 1. BBC Two. April 6, 2011. ———. Episode 2. BBC Two. April 13, 2011. ———. Episode 3. April 20, 2011. ———. Episode 4. BBC Two. April 27, 2011. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Schatz, Stephanie L. “Lewis Carroll’s Dream-Child and Victorian Child Psychopathology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (2015): 93–114. Showalter, Elaine, and English Showalter. “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” Victorian Studies 14, no. 1 (September 1970): 83–89. Small, Helen. Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800– 1865. Oxford, UK: New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

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Suzuki, Akihito. “Framing Psychiatric Subjectivity: Doctor, Patient, and RecordKeeping at Bethlem in the Nineteenth Century.” In Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective, edited by Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, 112–36. Studies in the Social History of Medicine. London: Routledge: 1999. Taylor, Beverly. “‘School-Miss Alfred’ and ‘Materfamilias’: Female Sexuality and Poetic Voice in The Princess and Aurora Leigh.” In Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, edited by Anthony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor, 5–29. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992. Tennyson, Alfred. The Princess. 1847. In Tennyson: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks, 219–330. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Tucker, Herbert F. “Representation and Repristination: Virginity.” In The Ring and the Book. In Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, edited by Lloyd Davis, 67–86. SUNY Series, the Body in Culture, History, and Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Wood, Jane. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wynter, Andrew. Borderlands of Insanity. London: Robert Hardwick, 1875.

CHAPTER 8

The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and Ripper Street Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

It all began back there in the Garden of Eden—the pernicious perception of woman as an evil and mad conglomeration of dangerous ovaries, blood, nerves, emotions, seduction, sin and disease. Persisting into the nineteenth century was the notion that Eve was the “Mother of our Miseries” (Poovey 1988, 9) and that she was responsible not only for the reason why women suffered because of their reproductive organs but also and no less than for the fall of mankind. Man’s propensity for sin is rooted in “the fall,” but the Woman is to blame. Widely misquoted from the Bible, the allegation and the consequence proliferated throughout the nineteenth century that because Eve disobeyed God and worse, led her husband into disobeying God, from thenceforth all females were to suffer the “woman’s curse.” The Victorians’ perceptions of the Woman, particularly about the Sexed Woman, are complex and obscured by ever-evolving theories about the female body. The first half of this chapter will exhume myths about

B. Ayres (B) Department of English, Liberty University, Red Lion, PA, USA S. E. Maier University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick, CN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_8

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women’s sexuality that were disseminated as if they were scientific facts— most of them advanced by male physicians as if experts on the subject. The second half will examine several neo-Victorian narratives within the BBC Ripper Street series that challenge, critique and/or correct such sophistries. These narratives of women’s various unmentionable madnesses begin early; Victorian women’s physical and mental troubles, often—synecdochically, menstruation—were called “the curse.” Our neo-Victorian sensibilities, however, might propose a corrective here: According to the Bible, God never put a curse on women. The King James Version of the Genesis account reads, “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field” (3:14). As for the woman, He said “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (3:16). Regardless of the biblical wording, throughout the ages, women have been told that their entire sexual apparatus was a curse. It must have escaped many a patriarch’s notice that biblically and ironically, desiring a husband to rule over woman was designated as a form of punishment, and that such an oppressive hierarchical position was negated by Christ’s death on the cross. To those who continue to believe that the Bible teaches that all women should be subservient to men, they seem to think that all women are wives—which of course most women were expected to be in the ancient days. Regardless, all the relevant scriptures express conditions and expectations of the men in their treatment of women, such as in 1 Corinthians 11:3: Men should treat a wife in the way Christ treats men. In Ephesians 5:25 men are to love their wives with the same sacrificial love that Christ has for the church. Nowhere in the New Testament are men given the licence to bully or oppress women. In fact, in God’s eyes “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 AV). From the very beginning of human existence, according to Genesis, it has been a satanic and human condition to misread God’s word. Satan was able to tempt Eve by misquoting God: “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” (Genesis 3:1). Eve corrects him but then misquotes God from her perspective: “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it,

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lest you die.’” This “do not touch” injunction makes God sound like an overbearing, unreasonable beast. Besides, the woman did not even know what was meant by “death.” Throughout history, most cultures have practiced a religious knack of subordinating women and regarding her as a scapegoat for the evil and sin in the world. By the second century, further proof was offered that women were incapable of being independent or trusted to have any value in the world, other than to make babies, and since that was a woman’s lot, that too was denigrated. She was controlled by her “wandering womb,” so claimed the medical writer, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, warning that that womb “could travel far enough up the woman’s inner cavity to strangle her, cutting off her breathing so quickly that she would not even have a moment to cry out for help” (quoted in Allen 2000, 13). But medical men could be useful by forcing her to breathe in “old urine, burnt hair, and pitch, to drive her womb away from the respiratory organs, while, at her genitals, cinnamon and other delightful fragrances should be placed to lure it back down” (Allen 13). St. John Chrysostom, a fourth-century advocate for marriage, nonetheless, saw the whole business of women, intercourse and reproduction as vile because the “whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum and the fluid of digested food…. If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulcher” (quoted in Warner 2013 [1976], 59). The nineteenth century threw its strength behind the metaphoric corset and images of women as marble, the sepulcher from which the future was to arise. Modern critic Anne Digby has called “it”—that is the female reproductive system—“women’s biological straitjacket” (1989).1 Women long understood that their primary point of existence was to produce children and were told that being a mother was an extremely noble calling. But in 1817 Princess Charlotte endured fifty hours of labor, gave birth to a large stillborn baby boy and then she died five-and-a-half hours later. No one could account for what went wrong, but it reminded women how dangerous it was to be a woman (Coote 1818, 342–45). Victorian scientific discourse objectified the female body and regarded Woman as a “moral, a sexual, a germiferous, gestative and parturient creature”; such was the declaration of a physician made to a body of medical graduates in 1847.2 Another physician made this scientific observation:

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“The Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it ” (Holbrook 1891, 15; emphasis in original). Most physicians on both sides of the Atlantic believed that the uterus was connected to the central nervous system. The President of the Medical Society of the State of New York said in his 1891 anniversary address that the “reproductive organs are in intimate relation with all the other organs through the ganglionic system, and with the brain through the cerebro-spinal system as well” (Potter 1891, 50); further, “the relation of the ovaries to the brain and nervous system is an intimate one” (51) while any “imbalance, exhaustion, infection, or other disorders of the reproductive organs can cause pathological reactions in parts of the body seeming remote” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 1999 [1973], 113). The patriarchal argument was that the male intellect was controlled by the brain whereas, unfortunately, the female was controlled by her nerves and emotions since “Physicians saw woman as the product and prisoner of her reproductive system” (112). Although Victorians were dissecting cadavers and conducting empirical studies of women’s reproductive system, their conclusions were strongly informed by prevailing masculine assumptions regarding the social roles that women were to serve. Any and all social deviation by a woman was believed to impair all aspects of female reproduction and could lead to insanity, sterility or degenerate offspring (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 122). Moreover, a BritishAmerican gynaecologist from Scotland argued that even normal functioning of women’s reproductive organs (meaning women who behaved themselves) could cause female insanity (Skene 1889, 929–31). The thinking was that since women’s genitals were “hidden”—perhaps both secretively and treacherously—inside her body, women could not control them, unlike men whose genitals were external and could be controlled by their brains (Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 183), besides which, the scientific community sought to prove what everyone knew, that men’s mental organs were larger than women’s brains.3 The contradistinction in society’s understanding of Woman lies between science and the arts. In 1867 political philosopher John Stuart Mill called for a parliamentary amendment that would give women the vote, and then Paul Broca, a French anthropologist, announced that it was time to address the “condition of women in society” lest women cause a “perturbance in the evolution of the races.”4 J. McGrigor Allan, an anthropologist, stressed that “Thousands of years have amply demonstrated the mental supremacy of man, and any attempt to revolutionise the education and status of women

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on the assumption of imaginary sexual equality, would be at variance with the normal order of things” (emphasis in original).5 Others said the problem was that her genitals were just like a man’s, only inverted, and it was this inversion that caused cerebral imbalance and disturbances and weakness of a woman’s will. Simply, women could not be relied upon to behave and control themselves (Malane 2005, 33).6 This defect, inherent in all women, would definitely cause hysteria at different points in their lives, and could lead to lesbianism or other “medical” ailments. Apparently the logic of these savants ran short: If men were so adept with sexual self-control, then why was there such an abundance of prostitutes throughout England and Wales, and why did men need or “[find] their main sexual outlet in the prostitutes who were so widely available, while their wives were confined within an ideology of ‘purity’ and good for little more than raising children” (Tosh 2007 [1999], 57)? Through the stages of womanhood—from menstruation through pregnancy, childbirth and lactation, ending with menopause—women’s reproductive systems “determined all of a woman’s other physical and social experiences,” so Carroll Smith-Rosenberg deduced from her indepth reading of nineteenth-century medical tomes (1985, 22–23). Victorian women were “dominated by their reproductive processes”; it was the “reason and rhythm of women’s lives” (23). Besides the unfortunate location of women’s sex organs, “It is as certain as any physiological law, that the brain and ovary cannot be developed at one and the same time,” William Warner Potter said (48). Edward Hammond Clarke agreed, making the comparison, “One cannot mediate a poem and drive a saw simultaneously” (1873, 40–43). A female who expended her very limited amount of energy—that should all be reserved for her reproductive activities—in such things as injudicious reading, rigorous study, “improper clothing,” excessive factory work, but also in an indulgence of idleness—could result in “weak and degenerate offspring” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 114). At worst, she could become sterile (115). Women should be prohibited from too much thinking and education, for as Dr. Potter is widely quoted for supposedly saying, “Why spoil a good mother by making an ordinary grammarian?”7 “Sociobiologists … remind us,” Patricia Vertinsky asserts, that “as long as there are entrenched social and political distinctions between sexes, races and classes, there will be forms of science whose main function is to rationalize and legitimize these distinctions” (1990, 3). Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, an early gynaecologist in England and not in Asia, the Middle

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East or Africa, recommended a clitoridectomy for any woman who was “indifferent to the social influences of domestic life” (1866, 14–18). One case Brown cited involved his own patient who just would not snap out of puerperal insanity. After having been pregnant for much of her 23 years of adult life, she got to the point that she wanted to kill her husband (78). Dr. Baker Brown performed a clitoridectomy on her. Afterwards she was “sulky” and said that she “shall soon die” because the doctor had “unsexed her.” However, she was made to walk out with her husband every day while the husband was so grateful that “his home was now one of comfort and happiness both night and day” (79). Her despair was ignored and its cause unconsidered. Baker Brown, in his arrogance, had “no hesitation” and was “certain” that his surgical treatment was “a permanent cure as in acute nympho-mania” (70). One might, more accurately, conclude as a modern reader that the woman’s despair germinated in first, being bodily forced to destroy herself through multiple pregnancies, and second, suffering the amputation of her clitoris; her inner rage was fueled by having no control over her own sexuality. Either she was forced to have too much sex that resulted in unwanted and dangerous pregnancies or else she was to enjoy no sex at all. Yet, the diagnosis and subsequent surgical procedure was beastly nymphomania, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “uncontrollable or excessive sexual desire, spec. in a woman.”

Puberty and Menarche For the Victorians, the “central metaphor … picture[ed] the female as driven by the tidal currents of her cyclical reproductive system, a cycle bounded by the pivotal crises of puberty and menopause and reinforced each month by her recurrent menstrual flow” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 183). Puberty was considered “the most psychologically dangerous periods of the female life-cycle” with “menstrual discharge … predispose[ing] women to insanity” (Showalter 1985, 56). The lateVictorian physician, Dr. Walter Taylor, told women to consider themselves “an invalid once a month” because the “monthly flow aggravates any existing affection of the womb, and readily rekindles the expiring flame of disease” (1871, 285). The onset of menses was thought to produce terribly unstable brains (Clouston 1904 [1887], 521); consequently, such young women should avoid any “unusual religious services, exciting preaching, and ‘revival meetings,’” which, this Scottish psychiatrist added,

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were usually “attended by person with weak heads, excitable dispositions, and neurotic constitutions” (42). “Whatever stimulates the emotions leads to an unnaturally early sexual life,” George Napheys wrote in 1878 with absolute certainty (29; emphasis in original). Because starting the menses early would result in a “feeble middle-life” (26), Napheys provided a list of things to avoid: “Idleness of body, highly-seasoned food, stimulating beverages, such as beer, wine, liqueurs, and in a less degree, coffee and tea, irregular habits of sleep, …. late hours, children’s parties, sensational novels, ‘flashy’ papers, love stories, the drama, the ball-room, talk of beaux, love, and marriage,” and he denounced “the power of music to awaken the dormant susceptibilities to passion” (29). An expert on midwifery and diseases of women, Dr. Edward John Tilt, proffered his own list of what was necessary to reach “full perfection of womanhood” which began with delaying the first period through the “absence of sofas to lounge on—the absence of novels fraught with harrowing interest … absence of laborious gaiety, of theatres, and of operas—the absence of intimacies which are of a too absorbing nature, and a wholesome subjection of every minute to rule and discipline” (1851, 31). John Haslam, just one of many physicians and other men who shared his convictions, believed that women were afflicted with all manner of diseases during their periods,8 while George Fielding Blandford observed that “the period of pubescence causes a greater functional change in a girl than in a boy, with an increased risk of functional disturbance” (1892, 61). “We may assume,” Fielding continued, “that at this time every girl is in a condition of peculiarly susceptible of nervous irritation” (61). Once menarche began, to ensure a “healthy development of her reproductive organs,” a young woman should devote herself to domestic tasks, such as “bed-making, cooking, cleaning, and child-tending” and avoid “strong emotions,” “down beds, corset, or liquor and other stimulating beverages” (Smith-Rosenberg 187). Not exactly a medical man but whose word was nevertheless highly respected because he was a phrenologist, Orson Squire Fowler gave all kind of advice and instruction about gender and sexuality in his Private Lectures on Perfect Men, Women and Children in Happy Families. “Spare menses,” Fowler said, cause many and aggravate all diseases, by leaving surplus albumen in its victim’s system to create pains and humors. Nature must rid her of it somehow, else she dies, and so burns up in her all she can, which fevers

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and morbidizes her nerves and feelings, unfits her to bear, and makes her most ugly and hateful, especially to men, and often fairly insane against her husband; besides sending her thick blood tearing through her brain, torrent-like, to gorge, lacerate and soften it. (1883 [1880], 188)

His description is obviously phallocentric and anti-suffrage, but he was not alone. Irregular monthlies or courses, as they were called, were supposed to be very dangerous. John Thornburn, Professor of Obstetric Medicine at Victorian University (in Manchester) blamed irregular menstruation on “an increase in the nervous and vascular tension of the whole system, the former being shown by increased liability to all forms of explosive nerve disease” (157; emphasis added). Even the end of woman’s cycle could be blamed on the rejection of the passive life expected of a proper, angelic woman; for example, the “most significant cause of a woman’s menopausal disease,” that was believed by “virtually every doctor,” was due to women’s “violation of the physiological and social laws dictated by her ovarian system” (Smith-Rosenberg 192). These violations of convention included “education, attempts at birth control or abortion, undue sexual indulgence, a too fashionable life style, failure to devote herself fully to the needs of husband and children—even the advocacy of woman’s suffrage—all might guarantee a disease-ridden menopause” (192; emphasis added).9

Sexual Desire and Nymphomania Before the late twentieth century, women’s sexuality was not their own. If there ever were a good use for the term “the body politic,” then it would be best used to refer to women’s sexuality, for literally, women’s bodies, until recently but not universally, have been political pawns for men. Take for instance, sexual desire. Up through the eighteenth century, it was understood that women could and should be aroused, with the belief it would make her fertile and able to conceive (Evans 2014, 81). As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and others have noted, throughout the eighteenth century through the Regency, men wanted women to enjoy lusty sex and multiple orgasms, and indeed, perceived frigidity as a pathological problem (1985, 23). In fact, countless medical articles suggested remedies for female frigidity, such as “‘hot foods,’ made up of genital organs of creatures well known for their amorous propensities” (like “Partridges,

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Quails, Sparrows, etc. being extremely addicted to Venery”) (quoted in Boucé 1982, 38). This view of Woman radically altered once, by some fluke of nature, a woman (Victoria) came to be seated on the throne; men figured it high time for women to be reined (pun intended) in and controlled, beginning with the regulation of their sexuality. Once considered pathological, sexual frigidity suddenly became a virtue and characteristic of the modest woman, with her only sexual desire being to reproduce (Smith-Rosenberg 23). That great Victorian expert on sexuality, William Acton, commented that he “should say that the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” (1862, 101). He explained, “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions” (102). If one were to ask him about prostitutes who plied their trade, Acton argued that they only “seem to prove the contrary” to the rule of modesty because of “mercenary motives”; vanity, giddiness, greediness, love of dress, distress, hunger, make women prostitutes, but not generally sensuality (105). Despite a Victorian tendency to put women on a pedestal as pure and angelic, in 1871 Horatio Robinson Storer concurred with John Baptista van Helmont’s contention that “woman was what she is, in health, in character, in her charms, alike of body, mind, and soul, because of her womb alone” (80). Van Helmont compared the “raging Womb” to the “be-madding fury in the Spittle of a mad Dog”; “every Disease therefore of the Womb is porestative [sic], being directed by the government of the Womb, either on it self [sic], or on the Body of the Woman” (1664, 608–9). Storer’s The Causation, Course, and Treatment of Reflex Insanity in Women confirms “from the evidence of experts in insanity, there is reason to believe that [women’s] sex lies at the foundation, physiologically and pathologically, of much of the mental derangement that occurs in women” (1871: 150). A woman was totally controlled by her wandering womb because “unsatisfied,” it “yearn[ed] for the delights of sex and fertility” (Allen 2000, 13). Queen Victoria was greatly instrumental in both enforcing and challenging sexual ideologies. She was often perceived as the “model of bourgeois domesticity and family values” but unhinged the ideology of domesticity each time she made known her great dislike of pregnancy and childbirth (Marland 2004, 2). Starting with the birth of her second child,

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Edward the Prince of Wales, her Royal Highness felt “occasional lowness and tendency to cry” and maligned pregnancy as “wretched” for “one becomes so worn out and one’s nerves so miserable” (quoted in Snow 2008, 82). The queen became unusually uninterested in anything political (Marland 69). It was natural (remember Eden), the doctors and clergy argued, for a woman to suffer giving birth, so most of them opposed any anodynes. Regardless, Queen Victoria remarkably insisted upon the anaesthetic of chloroform when giving birth to her eighth child, Leopold, on April 7, 1853. As Marland astutely mused, the “new woman” of the Victorian period was different from the eighteenth-century woman as well as from the “New Woman” at the end of the century who had “ambition, drive, independence of mind and efforts to construct a new morality” (6). Nineteenth-century British and American physicians “began to transpose the Cult of True Womanhood (originally phrased in the language of religion) into a medical and scientific dogma” wherein “any violation of the cult—such as demands for education or for employment outside the home or the practice of fertility control—called forth furious jeremiads from the professions” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 23). The Victorian ideal remained unchallenged by medical or scientific men who still believed any woman who desired mental and physical activity made her “sickly, unhealthy, a victim of her fragile nervous system and unpredictable reproductive organs” (6). Blandford was alarmed about by what he counted the subtle and graduate onslaught of insanity brought on by masturbation that he believed “manifested in unpleasant conceit and exalted self-feeling, with delusions in accordance; this gradually increases, nor is there any great hope of cure, for the brain seems to have undergone permanent damage from the constant irritation to which it has been exposed by the practice of the habit” (62). Whereas nymphomania could be cured, he thought masturbation so alters and impairs the brain by “unceasing demands made upon it, and the constant excitation caused by the act,” that such behaviour is incurable (63). Henry Maudsley, a pre-eminent British psychiatrist, assured men (and women?) that a virtuous woman would never learn to be a nymphomaniac and that “sexual ideas and feelings arise and display themselves in all sorts of insanity,” in puerperal mania, for one, but also in the insanity brought on my menopausal women (1873, 81–82). Husbands, by all means, should not try to sexually stimulate menopausal wives; rather, Maudsley argued that if menopausal women should become sexually aroused, the

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only thing to do was to interject ice water into the rectum or try adding leeches to the labia and cervix.10 “Moral Insanity” was a diagnosis coined by Dr. James Cowles Prichard in 1835. Specifically, Prichard defined it as “madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect, or knowing and reasoning facilities, and particularly without an insane illusion or hallucination” (1837 [1835], 16). In her rear-view mirror,11 Hilary Marland defined “moral insanity” as “deviance from socially accepted behavior” (2004, 40), and Carolyn Christensen Nelson observes that many end-of-the-century critics accused the New Woman fiction of being “neurotic literature that merited condemnation for its unhealthy effect on readers” (2001, 225).

Childbirth, Puerperal and Lactational Insanity The physician, George Fielding Blandford, believed that childbirth weakened the “nerve-power” of the brain (61), explaining that the “uterine organs,” in want of “sympathy” that would “Light up the mischief in the unstable cerebral cells, and the train of evil commences” (61); likewise, Burrows warned that gestation is a “source of excitation” that “sometimes provokes mental derangement” (363–64). At even greater risk for mental problems was the woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child because of shame, and the probability of insanity increased in proportion to the increase of number of births of illegitimate children by the same woman (93).12 John Tuke said that breastfeeding could lead to lactational insanity, and was more likely to occur with increased pregnancies and breastfeedings (1864–1865, 1022). G. Fielding Blandford concurred, quoting Tuke in his book on insanity. If the term “lactational insanity” was not enough to terrify women and put them into a depression that made them ignore their infants and refuse their breasts, then Blandford’s threat of exophthalmia (when the eyeball protrudes from its orbit) and bruit de diable (a humming sound that comes out of the neck) (276) surely should have. In 1794 Thomas Denman was the first British midwife to write about the mental condition of women regarding childbirth and breastfeeding, a condition he called “mania lacteal,” and was certain that there was a direct connection between the uterus, breast and brain.13 Robert Gooch was the first to write about “puerperal insanity” in 1820 (Marland 29) who

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described such behaviour as where the “patient bellows, recites poetry, talks bawdy, and kicks up a row that there is the devil to play in the house … every precaution must be taken to prevent her doing injury to herself, to the infant, to her friends.”14 Marland points out that the Victorians defined puerperal insanity as a madness that afflicts women during pregnancy or several months after delivery (3). George Man Burrows noticed the madness of such a patient who was often antagonistic to the infant and might become violent to the baby and to herself (1828?)15 just as other physicians discovered that such women “bullied the servants, broke the china, tore their clothes, roamed the streets, and displayed an overt sexuality, making vulgar and suggestive comments to complete strangers” (Marland 5). The Victorian version of what we now recognise as postpartum depression was believed to encompass these elements of madness, as well as “relatively brief attacks, nervous upsets, violence or delusions, and long-term manifestations of mania or deep and protracted melanchol ia, which put at risk the life of the mother and child” (2004, 3). By the middle of the Victorian period, the reality in England and Wales was that 63% of women who were married had five or more children (Ross 1993, 92). Those London poor who could not afford a midwife gave birth in lying-in hospitals (Marland 17), and by the 1870s, more than half of them were giving birth to five to nine babies (Ross 93)16 with women thirty-five or older often having nine children or more (94). Women who suffered from puerperal insanity accounted for nearly 10% of all asylums in England and Wales (Marland 20); however, between 1842 and 1847, 62–79% of the cases were considered healed within six months (63).

Menopause and Old Maids Once a Victorian woman transitioned into menopause, she might have hoped that “the woman’s curse” expired. However, Dr. W. Tyler Smith termed menopause “the death of the reproductive facility” and, like most doctors, figured that she was now ready to suffer from a progressive form of insanity called “climacteric.”17 After all, it was reasoned, menopause affected not only the brain; it “implicate(d) every organ and every function of the body.”18 Walter C. Taylor, a psychiatrist and coeditor of the Journal of Mental Science, informed women entering menopause that the “age of pleasing is past, but not always the desire” which could result in insanity, most certainly would if the woman never had any children, and

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could cause one of the most dreaded symptoms of the nineteenth century: paroxysms. The prognosis was cheerful in that most women recovered from it if they received “suitable treatment” (1848, 90–91), and if they refrained from “endeavor[ing] to appear young when she [was] no longer so, and with[drew] from the excitement and fatigues of the gay world even in the midst of her legitimate successes” (93). Women who did not have children suffered even more than other women because her body was not used the way it was designed and that was to reproduce. The spinster was prone to more disease, including “cancer and other degenerative ills” and a shorter life span.19 Even more perilous and far-reaching was the danger that such a woman was to “society—and herself” (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 23). Maudsley was convinced that a woman who was forced to repress her sexuality would suffer “from ovarian or uterine disease with the most frequent common symptoms being sexual hallucinations” that were, he stated, “par excellence, the insanity of old maids” (1868, 421; emphases in original).

Mad Women Vertinsky has offered the significant observation that the “labelling of normal female functions such as menstruation and menopause as signs of illness requiring rest and medical observation did not, in itself, make women sick or incapable of vigorous activity. It did, however, provide a powerful rationale to persuade them from acting in any other way” (11). With hundreds of physicians, anthropologists, theologists and myriad of men from other professions alarmed at women’s complaints and advocacy of suffrage, educational and vocational opportunities, amassing all the patriarchal power they could muster and decrying women as diseased wombs, it is no wonder that women were called mad and were told, “Give it a rest, darling.” If they did not behave in the home, then they would be given rest and ice baths aplenty in an accommodating mental asylum.

Neo-Victorian Revisions of Female Sexuality These well-documented opinions regarding the many ramifications of female sexuality as outlined by the medical and male-dominated scientific communities leave out the most important voice: What does Woman think of her own body, mind and/or manifestations of mania? In novels that were written during the Victorian age, there is a variety of coded

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discussions of bodies and desire(s), but they are easily outpaced by the idealisation of women as paragons of passive virtue—the Angel—or in the disease expressed in the devaluation of her oversexualised destructive Other—the Fallen Woman—and why the former social understanding of Woman must prevail over the latter construction. Neo-Victorian novels, “as genre, as ‘new’ discipline, as cultural happening, as sociopolitical critique, as reinvigorated historical consciousness” (Kohlke 2008, 1), are able to investigate the construction of woman’s body for her rather than by and for herself. Neo-Victorian novels that “desire to re-write the historical narrative of that period by representing marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian” (Llewellyn 2008, 165) are essential on the question of the unmentionable madness of being a woman. Because the neo-Victorian novel “embraces a kind of democratism of imaginative representation that is not always found in Victorianism” (167), it recreates the possibility of different readings of women’s bodies and mental illness(es). Historical women’s lack of knowledge regarding medical, sexual and contraceptive issues, the deliberate alienation of women’s bodies as neurotic, nymphomaniac or lesbian, the medicalised misunderstanding of childbirth and its often resultant puerperal insanity, as well as the marginalisation of old women and old maids are all addressed in contemporary narratives that revisit, in dialogue (Bormann 2002, 62), the complexity of the Victorian age without erasure of women’s narratives. The unmentionable, or wilfully silenced, aspects of women’s physical lives, and how their bodies were interpreted for them, are at the core of these narratives. It is essential that embedded in these texts there is “the documentary ‘evidence’ with which to access the past, while composing them with contemporary concerns and cultural contexts” so that “an individual perspective on the historical phantoms [can] thus be resurrected in imagination” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2014, 504). One such resurrection is Ripper Street, the BBC UK/Amazon series that ran for five seasons from and 37 episodes from December 30, 2012 to October 12, 2016 which may seem an odd place to look for historical phantoms, or maybe not. Neo-Victorian literature, or media representations, “telling stories about the past that matter, making them matter, is itself not without risk; it threatens to collapse critical distance and elide a rigorous selfexamination of the value judgements and moral categories underlying our selections of what matters enough to tell it in the first place” (Kohlke 11;

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emphasis in original). One such place to tell these stories is in traditional written narratives, and another is in transmedia representations; of these, “television programmes have proved to be singularly influential in determining and reshaping popular perceptions of the Victorian, the mythos of the medium blending with that of the period” (Cranfield 2016, 1) because historically informed analysis can still observe the ways in which specific Victorian “tropes and discourses reappear to service the needs, fantasies, and desires of our own age” (3). Matthew Macfadyen, the actor who plays Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, would disagree; he believes the project is a serious one because “it certainly feels resonant now. Ripper Street deals with subjects like child gangs, child slavery, pornography, striking, protests, and vigilantes” and is so because it “is to do with us feeling adrift” just as people had in the “dire poverty in the East End” (Moir 2013, 3F). Nowhere is making the stories of women’s bodies and minds more apparent in the stories told about the madness(es) of the East End of Whitechapel. Any discussion of women of and in Whitechapel is filtered through the historical lense of madness; the very existence of Whitechapel in the cultural imagination, in a way, relies on an historical knowing of the insanity that lurked in Jack the Ripper’s killing field. The opening scene of Ripper Street evokes the slum tourists who come to view the urban, ugly scenery of claustrophobic streets, brawls for money and all manner of “iniquity” (Warlow 2012, 1:1, 48). East London 1889: the unknown assailant who took the lives of at least five women—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Kelly—in the fall of 1888 is in the past but the overwhelming insecurity of the not knowing, the noncapture of the perpetrator, frames all of its neo-Victorian stories. The detached medicalisation of women’s bodies is part of the mythos of any narrative of the Ripper; hideous portraits of the devastated victims are ubiquitous in any consideration of the historical facts with the women’s own narratives silenced by their deaths.20 It may be argued that such television detective programmes relegate gender as “far from progressive, depicting a reductive gendered essentialism whose underlying ideology betrays an overt, and troubling, misogyny at odds with their anachronistic interest in scientific ‘progress’ and rational thought” (Meldrum 2015, 202); further, she claims such programmes “make no attempt to show the married women as domestic or ministering angels” with the detectives wives are shown [as] powerless, feckless, or both” (208). Or another argument might be that it is the BBC’s

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“period drama … anti-women orgy of gore” (Moir 3F), a gaslit piece that somehow evaded the censors. Neither is the case in Ripper Street when the entire show run is considered. While many police procedurals, or even neo-Victorian narratives make much of madness, particularly women’s madness(es), the many portraits of the women of Ripper Street consider the lives of women, not as caricatures of degradation or defilement nor as exemplars of Victorian medical received knowledge; rather, it challenges such assumptions and dry case studies with actualised victims, heroines, villains, daughters and suffragettes. Unlike other narratives that might exclude women except as embodied victim, criminal seductress or active investigator (Meldrum 202), women’s roles are expanded here. In particular, the traumatised bodies of these women appear in several episodes where various discourses of pseudoscience, medicine and alienism are demonstrated as facile, incapable of understanding the needs of the women unless under the direction of and by women. To frame the many engagements of the series with gender, race, religion, class and politics, the first episode “I Need Light” offers a mix of Ripper lore and female victimhood. A woman’s body has been left with the seeming graphia “carved” (Warlow 2012, 1:1, 4:06), in the modus operandi of the serial killer; however, in this case, the men of H Division protect this female victim from the voyeuristic public. They take her quickly from murder scene, secreting her body back to the station house where they hide her in a cell before the feared actions of mob hysteria can arise. Profoundly burdened by his inability to catch the Ripper, Reid carries her to the Black Mariah that awaits and he demands Sergeant (later Detective Sergeant) Bennet Drake to “tell no one … just get her hid” (6:30) from the mob and the press. The assumption that she is a “tart” is quickly cast off because she is, in fact, Maude, a violin teacher who had left the slum but has had to come back to use her body in pornographic images in order to support herself and her husband. Even if she were, Reid “tries to do justice to his district’s citizens, especially the women selling their bodies …. To demonstrate and elicit sympathy for the deaths and suffering of the ‘prostituted other’” (Ruiz 2017, 42).21 The refusal to allow public exploitation of Maude’s body, and the male-authored madness enacted upon it, suggests that most women of the Lehman Street area are more complex than assumed.

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Sexual Desire, Nymphomania and Slumming Sex is, necessarily, prevalent in Ripper Street ’s depiction of Whitechapel since many of the women in that area eked out a bare minimum of existence off the pittance of their sex work. Such is a reality of the East End that establishes an initial connection “between the past and the present in a way that respects the reality of the past, the needs of the present and the historical specificity of both” (Hadley 2010, 84). “Long Susan” Hart begins the series as a Madam, a brothel keeper who looks after her girls. Less a procurement than a business contract that is fully outlined in a preliminary meeting, Susan lays out that she is fiercely protective of her girls, promising to keep them “free from harassment of any kind” and promises to keep the women “fed, safe and softened” (Rutterford and Warlow 2013, 1:4, 0:17–0:20) at Tenter Street rather than on the streets. The scenes of partially clad women lounging about are contrasted with a sexual reversal where ex-military, ex-Yankee Pinkerton, Dr. Homer Jackson, enjoys an enthusiastic sexual encounter with Rose, whose sexual pleasure he places above his own; she recognises their mutually pleasurable transaction without payment but likewise admits the situation “is all topsy turvy I’m sure” (Warlow 2012, 1:1, 7:06) from even a brothel’s social conventions and her expectations. Jackson’s progressive love for and care of women is instantly contrasted with the misogyny of the Ripper’s shadowed crimes, but also with medical men’s depersonalisation of women’s bodies. Sexual exploitation of girls and women is exposed; for example, a direct commentary on sexual slavery occurs in “What Use Our Work?” (Warlow 2013, 1:8) where a one-time Ripper suspect, Victor Silver (along with his sister Clara and brother Barnaby), tricks women into meeting him in guise of an Argentinian gentleman, then drugs and ships to South America to be sold to with the youngest—an orphaned, prepubescent girl—being the one who will gain the best price among bidders. The turn towards the idea of female complicity in sexual enticement in the neo-Victorian narrative is in another 1894 storyline where the salaciousness of members of the upper-class results in “slum tourists” who come from positions of aristocratic entitlement to be amused by the music halls and the women of Whitechapel as participants for their sexual follies (Warlow 2015, 3:6). Lady Vera Montacute, bored with her husband and fascinated by the life she sees in the streets of Whitechapel, she seeks sexual excitement. To that end, a flower seller, Ida Watts, is paid to change her appearance,

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to take self-medicating cocaine-morphia mix with her, and to appear as twins so her husband might find a titillating ménage à trois sexually interesting to satiate her queer desire. In the jail, she flirts with the young constable PC Bobby Grace, promising him she will “imagine you, you and your girl” (15:27). Her aristocratic husband, Lord Montacute, finds her desire to include another woman appalling. Contrary to Maudsley, a decent woman—usually equated with an aristocratic woman, the very ideal Angel in the House—Lady Vera does have a sexual appetite. It is apparent that there is a problematic equation between her sexuality and his manly distaste (40:48) for what is suggested to be her deviant (possibly lesbian, and definitely cross-class) desire that she hopes he might glorify in with her so she will not feel so alone in all that she felt (48:12). He is physically unable to have sex; the “arrangement” (41:24) devastates him when the two women laugh at his physical impotence. Lord Montacute feels no regret killing Ida nor for allowing Vera to hang for he is protected by social convention and class—he feigns memory loss. The facts of her fingerprint, via nascent technology, prove that Lady Montacute is innocent; however, she signs a confession of homicidal madness rather than return to his Lordship. Reid begs her to save herself; she will not, seemingly believing death preferable to a non-authentic life.

Questionable Pregnancy and Deathly Childbirth The questions of pregnancy and childbirth are not glossed over with any sense of nostalgia or sentimentality for pending motherhood; rather, the il/legitimacy of those who can/not give birth and how is fraught with difficulty of choice or whether women even have any choice(s) to emphasise the continuum of in/fertility in women. Women of Whitechapel birth children, lose children, abort fetuses, cannot conceive and protect nonfamilial children. Stereotypes or textual expectations do not hold—the unspeakability of the multiplicity of possible results of sexual encounters are made manifest. A child wanted: Women unable to have children feel the judgement of patriarchal expectation that their duty is to give men and Empire children. Rose, once she becomes Mrs. Drake, cannot conceive a child, blaming her barrenness—“a dry old hat she keeps between her legs” (Warlow 2016, 4:1, 42.33) as a judgement of destiny upon her past rather than the potential impotency of Drake from years of bodily abuse as a prizefighter, soldier and policeman. Susan, three years after birth and raising

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her son at Newgate, is about to be hanged, and must place her son, Connor, in another woman’s care—she chooses Rose. Rose’s guilt over her barrenness is assuaged when she takes in Susan and Jackson’s son, but once the child is taken from her again by the couple—Susan knows “it will kill her” (Warlow 2016, 4:2, 34:15)—Rose loses her ability to remain stable, betraying all of those to whom she was once loyal. In another situation, Mrs. Gable laments how society blames women for barrenness; yet another, the sadistic prison doctor, Dr. Carlyle Probyn, extorts money from panic-stricken Susan to help her evade death by hanging so she might live to raise her child while another child, this time a biracial baby, outlives his mother in “The Strangers’ Home—Pt 2” (Warlow 2016, 4:2). Unmarried Kay Teague commits suicide, either from postpartum depression, or from the madness of knowing that Victorian society demands that she be cast out by her father for loving a British-Indian scholar. This time, the child of two worlds is welcomed in the arms of his dignified grandfather, Risaldar-Major Haroun Al-Qadir. A child unwanted: “Live Free, Live True” (Bennette 2015, 3:7) is a wrenching episode that empathises with rather than spectacularises the plight of a woman of Whitechapel who finds herself unwillingly pregnant. Young and frightened, this young, uneducated woman visits a chemist, John Currie; in a confined space, like a confessional, she admits “It has made me grieve so sir” (36). Among the bottles of opium and laudanum intended to soothe nervous women, she pays her money to be given a secretive drink by a middle-aged man but upon leaving, she vomits, hallucinates, raves, falls in a fit and bleeds against the ravaging pain caused by the concoction of pennyroyal, Spanish fly and lead. In a clearly focused criticism of women’s lack of choices, the “doubling of the investigative and historical gazes” (Meldrum 202) allows for Jackson’s disgust to be justifiably apparent when, as the forensic expert at H Division, he confirms that while the potion will, indeed, abort the fetus, it damages nerves and traumatises the brain unlike other abortive home remedies. This barbarity leads directly to the outrage of the female doctor of the Obsidian Clinic— founded by and for women and children—Dr. Frayn, a recent medical graduate. She laments: “I do not treat them. I repair them. I patch them up” (36) after the women have resorted to botched procedures that leave their bodies a wreck, their uteri barren and their lives scarred by avoidable physical trauma. Dr. Frayn recognises the trauma is not just physical because finding oneself having to make such a decision may be a “wound itself never heals” (9:53). She educates Reid that, “Like any doctor in

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this city, I could end their troubles safely. Easily. But it is illegal. So I must turn them away to be mangled, shredded” by the quacks of the backstreets and the alleys for even “to speak of contraception is obscene in the eyes of the law … I am maddened by it” (10:11). These ideas are further complicated when a well-known doctor, Dr. Anthony Rolle of the Malthusian League, convinces Dr. Frayn of the value of teaching women about contraception and in performing appropriately medically supervised procedures via internal interventions. The men of Whitechapel, exemplified by Reid’s knowledge of criminal behaviour and Jackson’s medical acumen, also seek abortionists but this particular set of male practitioners are not ignorable quacks. Dr. Rolle, who has experimented with his Malthusian principles on these women whom he claimed to help, is countered by the revulsion of Jackson, Reid and Drake. While the women came to end unplanned pregnancies, Reid is horrified that “these men mutilated these women” (15:04), killed them and poisoned them without any consideration of the women’s individual rights over their own bodies. While the Chemist provided non-medically approved means, he sends them on to the male abortionists who have a well-stocked surgery (not an amateur concern as expected), a “medical facility—God only knows what a villainy is made there” (31:37). He is right; he finds records of what they have done to hundreds of female patients who trusted them: sterilised the women without their knowledge or consent. Susan, previously Madam and now philanthropist, creates the free Obsidian Clinic to help women and to educate nurses in training the local women into positions of respectability in Whitechapel and hopes to create a medical school for women. A safe, compassionate space would allow for patients to have more control over their circumstances without fear of reprisal or inability to pay. A woman of intensity and paradox (according to Drake, a past madam but a woman of decency with her own body denigrated by her landlord), Susan uses her new riches to fund the reinvention of woman’s physical lot in Whitechapel. She admits she wishes to stave off their despair to give them some choice and agency. There is no voyeurism here for the Ripper Street audience but a strong voice for those women previously silenced in their bodily and psychological sufferings; a madam become a philanthropist and a woman doctor come together with a combination of means, wisdom and education to act without patriarchal influence.

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Bodies and minds have a close connection on Ripper Street. In the ironically titled “The Good of the City” (Rutterford and Warlow 1:4), deals directly with the physical and mental illnesses of a young woman, perhaps barely eighteen, who has previously worked for Susan who returns after two years to beg for help and protection; she appears in virginal white, begging to sweep the floors if she might return to the safety of the house. The Madam asks, “Has one of our gentleman made you his own?” but quickly sees that Lucy Eames is mentally distraught and bodily exhausted, half mad when she says “I know not what will come of me” (03). Susan’s honest reply is that “The truth of this world is that men have designed it for their own purpose and pleasure. And you, my darling, there is not one primitive desire in their childlike minds you do not fulfill”; Lucy, in despair, sees it differently, pushing back against the idea of being the object of men’s need with “‘Tis my curse Miss … one from which all the world profit ‘cept myself. Seems a curse I can’t escape” (42). Lucy later appears but her dress is now covered in blood and she has mentally dissociated, unable to process what has happened to her except that someone somewhere is dead, murdered. The sensitivity and complexity of the men of Lehman Street is not uncomplicated by their own complicity in a variety of circumstances but at this moment they quickly realise Lucy’s fragile mental state; she has been abused as well as restrained. Constable Hobbs (of approximately the same age) finds Lucy “sad to me sir, not bad” (12:22). In a round of the asylums, Hobbs finds she has been treated at Lark House in Bethnal Green by the famous Dr. Karl Crabbe who has “made a progress with hysterics that no other doctor of the mind has yet” (12:32). Reid discovers she is pregnant, of which Lucy seems ashamed, but she is unable to distinguish her circumstances because she forgets even where she is, seeing only darkness in her mind’s eye. In spite of anyone’s declaration that God would build a woman around a uterus, here that womb belongs to a mere girlchild; blessedness is not what is apparent in Lucy’s circumstance. Reid finds an herb dropped at the crime scene which he recognises from confronts Jackson’s medical room at Tenter Street—pennyroyal—that when “brewed strong as an infusion may bring on miscarriage” (28:58). When confronted about Lucy’s pregnancy, Susan “mourns for her once more” (29:25). If Lucy were no longer pregnant, then she could come back to the house of women, a community of support that she so dearly needs. “Silent in her distress” (12:03), Lucy falls in an epileptic attack and into what appears to be catalepsia. Dr. Crabbe returns the nightgowned,

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unspeaking Lucy to her room, a whitewashed space at Lark House where he then injects her with, one assumes, laudanum, into a deep state of oblivion. Drake and Reid go to the clean asylum with meticulous female nurses but male superiors, and madwomen who wander in silence or participate in patient dances. Dr. Crabbe denies knowledge of Lucy’s children or pregnancy declaring “My patients, past present future, I have no family of my own and as a consequence they are doubly precious to me …. I will not judge them nor demand their secrets” (41:36). Lucy believes the world and God’s law says that she is not a lady even when Reid begs to help her: “will you name that despair”—name the father—and in return, it will be his “gift to guarantee your safety” (43:45). The very idea of naming her abuser sends her into a mental break; the medical man, Crabbe, pacifies her with more pharmaceuticals. When Reid takes the children to the orphanage run by the clear-eyed, pragmatic Russian Jewish immigrant, Deborah Goran, he tells her “It is men who are the ruin of this family” to which she responds, “This family and many like them” (18:35). Believed to be her siblings, they are, in fact, Lucy’s children by the upstanding, married Stanley Bone, the County Councillor and advocate for the underground railway as well as “the march of progress” (10:57) that flattens the rookery of which he is the secret slumlord. The Press, represented by Fred Best of The Star, makes reference to the Councillor’s nerves and provides Reid with damning evidence that in his youth, Stone had been beset with epileptic fits with the cure found by Dr. Crabbe. To hide his past, Crabbe warns Bone to remember how “first you came to me, cursed by fits” (49:15). Crabbe brags that the mentally ill Lucy was merely a body object of male projection, a “gift to you [Bone] in return, a child blooming into woman” who is “all used now and must have her mind cleaned of all she knows of you” (49:46). This hideous, patriarchally motivated declaration is made as Crabbe draws open the curtain on an electric chair, an early technological embodiment of electric shock treatment. Lucy “grows ever more disturbed” and Stone agrees “she must be silenced” (50:34) with the excuse to “bring her a more permanent peace” (50:52). In a final act of degradation, Crabbe equates Lucy’s mind and body with a slum that must be demolished to facilitate masculine advancement. Given no consideration or information, Lucy does not understand what is about to occur, perhaps believing it to be a treatment for her epilepsy or depression. Bone says “goodbye, my love” (51:42) then her happiness to see him melts into confusion as to where she is to be taken,

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a reminder of the many women who were removed to sanitariums to be brought to heel by the complicity of the medical establishment.22 Here, it is the law that will protect her in time from a barbaric lobotomisation.23 Under the care of Mrs. Emily Reid, wife of Reid, at the safe house/shelter, hidden away in what “is a benefit to those [they] house” (53:22)—abused and fleeing women24 —Lucy comes healthily back to her self, happily embracing her children and able to stand firm in her confrontation with the gentrified slumlord in her new life surrounded by the women and men who have cared for her mind and body. Lucy’s relief is palpable—the law stands with her and the support of women has allowed for her self-refashioning.

Puberty and/as Trauma for Girlchildren Prepubescent girls appear across a variety of streetwise orphans, virginal beauties to be sold, and innocent victims. “The Beating of her Wings” (Finlay 2014, 3:2) finds a young girl, perhaps aged eleven to thirteen, who has been living in a cage under Horace Buckley’s home. Buckley and his wife are childless but that they have taken in, hidden and cared for this girl, all confirmed by her physical well-being and the clear declaration by Dr. Frayn that she has been unmolested—this is not a case of sexual exploitation. Given the name “Alice,” she is discovered but Dr. Frayn informs Ms. Hart that there is more concern for the “health of her mind than her body” (1:15). Upon awakening, the girl expresses her fears in a kind of speaking in images—butterflies, a wicked king, stolen wings—and she implores that she “must be in my pupa” (24:43), the only home she has known, where she might transform into a woman. Alice’s distress at finding herself ripped from security emphasises a young woman’s lack of agency to determine her own fate, while two mature women—Susan and Dr. Amelia Frayn—stand by her side seeking to help the girl come to the clarity of her situation. We are informed by silent title at the beginning of the episode that it is 1894. In 1893, psychology is a nascent field with the physician Josef Breuer and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud having published what was to become the introduction to Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria) in that same year. The ideas contained therein regarding symbols and hypnosis, as well as Dr. Frayn’s knowledge of them, demonstrate her intellectual capacity in her ongoing effort to act in the best interests of her patients’ bodies and minds. Susan stands in agreement:

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MS. HART: There must be more we can do than stupefy her. DR. FRAYN: There is a new thinking on the Continent. This man, Breuer, calls it the cathartic method. A therapy for the mind. The parts of the mind beneath the mind. (25:10)

In time, “the fractures of her mind may heal” (Finlay 2015, 3:3, 32:03). It finally unfolds that “Alice” is Mathilda Reid; the hope that her father felt outlasted the grief and despair of her mother who has died. The patience and female nurturance Mathilda receives from Dr. Amelia Frayn’s femalecentred medical practice, taking into account both body and mind, allows for her full recovery. The medical clinic thrives under her leadership, able to provide support to the community with an ambulance, a league of nurses in the traditional Florence Nightingale approved uniform, and a supply of drugs to treat those people in need.25

Lost/Found Children and Postpartum Despair To bring a child into the world is to live in fear of what might befall the child, to the point where women’s worst nightmares often are realised. Childbirth for the women of Whitechapel is to chance with death. “Am I Not Monstrous?” (Warlow 2013, 2:2), with the subnarratives of Joseph Merrick and Victorian Freak Shows, with opening credits of an aborted being in a jar, opens with the scream of the young Stella Brooks who enters the doors of Whitechapel Hospital, begging anyone to “get the beast out before it cleaves me in two” (0:39). Shortly after the child’s birth, it is kidnapped by his grandfather and Stella, trying to save her boy, is pushed down the stairs to her death. The society-lauded scientist, Dr. William Corcoran, feels he is justified as a proponent of eugenics where all weakness might be bred out of lineage, including perceived weaknesses of mind or body, that had occurred in Stella (she has a vestigial tail) and his own sons’ mental weakness. Again, women’s lives are demonstrated as having been insignificant in comparison to men’s ideas of social progress and scientific control. A stunning example of how man’s failed fidelity brings madness to women’s bodies, Reid finds a woman, Leda Starling, walking the street to find her son, whom she has taken to be looked after at the workhouse, disappears (Bennette 2016, 4:3). Initially unable to hold a thought for any length of time, Leda is found to suffer from tertiary syphilis with

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occasional lucidity but bouts of mania, obsession and despair. The physical disease that must have come to her body via a sexual partner has created her mental illness; however, she is able to retain the image of her son. Reid believes her. The corrupt Master of the workhouse, Cornelius Wilde, seeks to have a mother’s knowledge—however distorted by dis/ease— dismissed as the insanity of a madwoman. The workhouse is investigated and is exposed as a social experiment where children with weak or ill bodies are left to die, literally buried in lime under the floorboards. There are many more episodes that suggest interrogating the complexity of women’s need for endurance that, when weakened by circumstance, medical challenges, childbirth and/or psychological trauma. These neoVictorian narratives reveal sexualised or medicalised violence that can now be represented from the Victorian past to mirror our present day (Ruiz 42). For example, in an episode set in 1897, “A White World Made Red” (Young 2016, 4:4), young immigrant women whom no one will miss are drained of their blood in order to give a medical man, Frederick Treves, a chance to save his daughter from Porphyria via early transfusion; such a commentary on the throwaway attitude towards the women of England is juxtaposed in the series against Queen Victoria’s jubilee. The power of Victoria is in stark contrast to the powerless women of the Empire who, in Lehman Street, try to reclaim themselves from a variety of men who would see them suffer. In addition, the narrative arc infers that Susan’s intense hatred for her father is because he has abused her when she was a young girlchild (Warlow 2013, 1:7; Bennette 2015, 3:7; Warlow 2015, 3:8). Medical history and women’s history of trauma are reflected upon in Ripper Street ’s act of denunciative critical consideration that removes any Victorian veneer to expose the intensity of abuse and/or trauma suffered by abject, and decent, women of all ages.

Threats, Menopause, Grief and Old Maids Traumatic threats and scandalous exposure of women’s sexuality are neoVictorian stories represented here; the unmarried women—even those woman seemingly unbothered, liberated like a woman reporter, Rachel Castello, are threatened with rape if she does not submit to Inspector Jedidiah Shine’s interrogation, or a City Counsellor, Jane Cobden, is threatened with scandalous exposure for her unconventional, but consensual, sexual relationship with Reid if he does not break it off. In this episode, “Become Men,” another set of young women seek revenge

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under the firebrand leadership of Raine Thornell; they have “been illused” as matchgirls who have or may have developed phossy jaw, then to be followed by necrosis of the jawbone, “absesses lead to brain inflammation, then mutism then death” (Dickens 2013, 2:3, 28:38). The effect of the phosphorus from matches at male-run factories leads to the madness of the women exploited by them; the leader, Raine, begs, cries and appeals to Susan, “tell me I am not mad…tell me I am not mad” (51:20). In rebuttal, one of the male victims holds up his hand, missing his first finger via Raine’s vengeance, to declare “This is how much damage women cause, but I would rather lose each remaining finger than shake hands with her [Councillor Comden]” (54.19). Women’s physical illness is equated with progressive social ideas; clearly, the inference is that women who seek to better themselves and society are, by definition, both aggressive and violent, but Reid seeks to reassure her that not all men are of this view. The neo-Victorian men try—Reid will support women’s advancement while Jackson apologises that he could not understand Raine—and yet, only women fully understand each other based on life experiences while in a female body. The instability into which women in grief are cast is expressed in complex ways from barely constrained rage to hallucinatory desires. Grief and mourning create the inability for communication between sexes that leads to the internalisation of grief, often turning to self-inflected wounds. Woman’s mourning and grief exists in a nexus of unintelligibility to men. From the beginning of the series’ run, Reid and his wife have been haunted by the loss of their young daughter, Matilda, who is presumed lost in the Thames. Their partnership irrevocably altered by their loss, while Reid holds hope seemingly existing in denial that she might yet be found, Emily’s grief is profound and exhausting. Her weeds are worn much like a coffin; stiff and without yielding to hope or her husband’s entreaties, Emily finds solace in the Church until she demands to finalise her sorrow that Matilda’s room must be cleared. Emily meets with another woman in mourning, a widow Mrs. Gable, whom she asks to support her home for women and children so she might provide them with care, compassion and safety to escape the streets and abuse: MRS. GABLE: And improve them also? EMILY: If they seek to improve themselves, we will help them. MRS. GABLE: Through prayer and their promise of chastity?

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EMILY: Through whatever means they choose for the mselves. MRS. GABLE: No mention of their sin? (Croghan 2013, 1:3, 22:14)

In an enlightened, revisionary response, Emily refuses rather than capitulate to those conditions in the knowledge that the emphasis on God and judgement will frighten them away since the women have been conditioned to internalise their own guilt. With that comment, Mrs. Gable’s grief turns to rage over the hypocrisy of a system that saw her husband as a “good man” with a “family who would say how unlucky we were not to be blessed with children, the imputation begin how unlucky he was to be burdened by so barren a wife,” a curse she believes she is plagued with because he went “prowling through your whitechapel laneways” and infected her with their foulness (22:52). Emily’s physical illness—poison by ergotism and antimony—leads to hearing her daughter’s laughter in the house in a gothicised hallucination that ends in light and joy until she is found by Drake. Thought dead, Emily regains consciousness to Reid, believes she has seen Matilda, only to wake and find it is all untrue. The grieving mother and the widow come to an agreement that Emily’s work will be funded by Mrs. Gable, a means by which to support the women of Whitechapel in their distress.26 Fortified by the lightened clothing she wears that symbolically declares her mourning over, Emily advocates for recovered women—like Rose who wants a different life and a repeatedly beaten woman, Kathleen— who seek to escape domestic abuse, prostitution and/or destitution. She declares to Reid that she “would do more with my life than sit by the fire in grief and anxiety” (17:53); she asks that he allow her to find meaning in her life after their loss. Her reprieve is temporary. Reid discovers that one of the five people who survived might know if Mathilda survived; with new hope, Emily is devastated when she finds Reid has found comfort and forgiveness elsewhere in the arms of the maternal Deborah Goren. In series two, set in 1890, after the revelation Reid feels he has caused his child’s death because he could not save her, the combination of her grief and depression cause Emily’s mind to split from reality. Her story elided for the most part, she is incarcerated in a mental institution between 1889 and 1890 then commits suicide between 1890 and 1894. At one point, Emily’s despair is enacted in public display on the street—she has made manifest Reid’s failures and his inability to understand her mental fragility caused by grief for a girl-child lost.

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Woman’s Unmentionable Madness(es) There is one character who exemplifies Woman’s understanding of how her body is viewed and how it is entrapped by conventions—both medical and social—in the late nineteenth century: George Tate. Tate is, perhaps, the exemplar of neo-Victorian critique of the way women, her sexuality and her perceived madness(es) necessitated extreme measures to reach any measure of independence. “Become Man” (Dickens 2:3) might put forward a league of outlaw women who capture and extort toffs for money to live off their hypocrisy, but it is Tate in “Live Free, Live True” (3.7) who explains the many unmentionable realities of Woman. Tate demands of the young girl, Mary, who is not his own biological child, “What bastard had his way with ya?” (3.7.3:32); she will not tell George because “there is too much to lose” (Bennette 3:7, 3:46) if she tells who the father is. Working as a mason at Obsidian, Tate makes a living to look after the two of them. In the midst of the raw emotions of ending her pregnancy, she is distraught that “I have brought all this trouble to [Tate’s] door. If he should be discovered, the fault it mine” (3:42) because “Father and mother he’s been to me” (25:26). Tate attacks Edwin Havelock who has seduced Mary; arrested, Tate’s story unfolds. He is a man who lives his life outside the law, and Mary is under his protection since she was fifteen, now twenty. “An ordinary man? … No, Mr. Tate. Not ordinary for you do not officially exist” (33:04). Reid asserts, “you are an illegitimate man” (34:03).27 Thinking him navy, army, absconder, convict, Tate counters them with a riddle: “A convict I never was but a prisoner. I have never left these streets but I’ve been to places I’d thought never to see” (38:55). Over ice cream, Drake speaks to the young Mathilda, trying to entertain her while he figures it out; ironically, he cannot but she immediately asks: “Is it a girl” (39:21). He laughs until she explains the boundaries of her girlhood. Mistaken, Reid assumes him a predator; rather, Tate wishes to save her from the vileness of men’s attentions and “the sorrowful consequences come upon her” (34:38) because “George Tate” is historically Sarah Elizabeth James who Drake sees wished to “flee the bounds of a woman’s life … free to do as you please” (44:08). Picture of a little girl and her mother, is in fact herself with her mother, the mother through whom twelve children “ripped their path through her” causes Tate to rage, “Who would be a woman, who would be a wife?” (45:28). Admitting, “You have unmanned me” (45:08), she maintains her independent choice of gender: “I’m the man

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who will hang for it” (47:43). In her despair, Mary pleads, “Must he wear this dress; must he be robbed of even his dignity as he goes to the gallows” (51:48)? For a Victorian woman to embody mentally and/or physically a transgender or transvestite life must, of course be one that would evoke labels of madness from medical men; the rejection of such a lack of compassion is in the neo-Victorian men of H Division recognition of the unfairness of the medical and social laws, and the devastating length to which a woman’s life is a prison dictated by the patriarchal demands placed by society upon her mind and body. These unmentionable topics of women’s bodies were used to determine woman’s madness. Rather than nostalgically look back to woman’s idyllic image, some postmodern transmedia adaptations present “innovative strategies of … texts approaching history” (Gutleben 2001, 62). Perhaps the women were just righteously mad.

Notes 1. The phrase was the title of Digby’s article. 2. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg (1999 [1973]) quote on 113 from Charles D. Meigs (5). 3. The leading expert on brain sizes was Havelock Ellis. See especially 1894, 96. 4. See quotes on 415 from Paul Broca (1868, 50). 5. See quotes in 415n.2 from J. McGrigor Allan (1869, 213). Allan’s article appears in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, which carries another article of warning about Amazonian women, by Luke Owen Pike titled “On the Claims of Women to Political Power.” 6. Worthy of note is that “inversion” became the code word in the nineteenth century for homosexuality, first introduced in the 1897 English translation of Havelock Ellis’ book Sexual Inversion. The book was highly controversial, given Ellis’ claim that “while homosexuality or inversion is an eternal given, understandings of homosexuality are culturally produced and thus subject to change over history and between cultures” (White 2002, 66–68). 7. Several books and websites quote this and attribute it to Potter and his anniversary address to the Medical Society of the State of New York in 1891. It is cited, for example, in Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg 125n18; however, I have been unable to find the quote in the address or elsewhere. 8. Marland quotes on 108 from John Haslam (1798, 6).

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9. Although Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg’s publications deal primarily with American medicine in the nineteenth century, Vertinsky concludes from her own research that American and British physicians concurred and collaborated on their perceptions of women’s reproduction, all of them regarding women as diseased because of their reproductive systems (17). 10. Showalter quotes on 75 from W. Tyler Smith (1848, 607). 11. By “rearview mirror,” I am borrowing Simon Joyce’s phrase to indicate that the perspective of the past is reflected only by a mobile force that is in motion (2002, 2007). 12. Marland quotes on 154 from Henry Parsey (1869, 11). See also Robson (2017, 236). 13. Marland quotes on 14 from Thomas Denman (1801, 494–503). The term was published in the 1801 edition (Marland 291n34). 14. Marland quotes on 4 from Robert Gooch (1831, 290). 15. Marland quotes on 4 from George Man Burrows (1828, 368). 16. According to reports from the General Lying-In’s Outpatient Midwifery Service, 1877–1882 (93). 17. Showalter quotes on 58 from W. Tyler Smith (1848, 601). 18. Ibid. 19. Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg quote on 113 from Porter (1855), and Pomeroy on 113 from Porter (1855). 20. Hallie Rubenhold’s recently published The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019) seeks to rectify their neglect and to attempt to reconstitute the biographical details as available. 21. Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz uses this term specifically for the prostitute who “simultaneously becomes ‘the other’ because of her condition as a social outcast, as an outsider, as an individual outside the norm. This situates her as the ‘prostituted other’” (64n2). 22. Many other neo-Victorian novels deal with this particular trope, including Fingersmith by Sarah Waters discussed here. See Friars’ chapter in this volume. 23. Lobotomies sever the connections in the patient’s prefrontal cortex. 24. Domestic abuse of different sorts appears in several episodes with a particular focus on the destroyed lives of women; in one situation, a cult leader has enthralled his dispossessed victims and ordained a woman as his consort as he keeps her child from her, while in another situation, for example, in “A Man of My Company” (1.7), a prostitute has been found by Deborah Goran and brought to Edmund Reid’s wife, Emily’s, shelter. Relying on her husband’s compassion and desire to see abusive men punished, Emily brings Reid immediately to here her first-hand narrative, that her abuser was “Whod’ya think? A man” (1.7.28:59). He is able to convince the victim to tell him who the perpetrator is. In “Become Man”

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(2.3), the strong, rebellious leader has her back stitched by Susan who sees her many scars; while one is from a recent skirmish, and another from a carriage from when she was small, there are many huge wounds of which she says “must a woman explain how she came by such… stripes” and Susan replies “By the hands of men” (2.3.33:58). 25. Particularly meaningful is the women’s work when they arrive among the rubble of a train crash (Warlow 2015, 3:1); the uniforms, ambulance and doctor instantly calm the mass panic. 26. In another investigation of one woman’s grief, Mrs. Wakefield, a woman in deep mourning clothing that demonstrates for all to see the destroyed state of her emotional life, is cared for by Jackson at the station but she “refused [his] laudanum” responding strongly “I do not wish to be tranquilized” (Finlay 2014, 3:3, 20:47). The assumption that her intense grief is in need of doping is refuted by her choice. The victim of fraudulent clairvoyants, she has been convinced of several visitations by her dead husband. She is, as a widow, treated with respect even though her denial is demonstrably upsetting to both herself and the men because they do not have any comfort level with women’s language for grief or her state of mind. “You must think me a stupid, stupid woman” (45:50) when she is told he is alive. Mrs. Wakefield becomes homicidal, kills her husband and his music-hall mistress in an act of what she believes is appropriate revenge. 27. Of Susan’s intrusion into business: she is often reminded that she is a woman without the mind for business. She feels no remorse to use the potential for blackmail to protect her position hardly, and ultimately criminally, won. Susan vomits when she leaves the men’s club after the interaction through which she held her strength. Susan, in a parallel story, remarks that legitimacy is a lie. “A promise of inclusion, but it’s purpose is to exclude, to control” (41:10)—she confesses to Dr. Frayn that she is pregnant. “It seems I must choose my prison” (41:46). Change occurs; Drake’s behaviour towards Rose becomes much more liberated.

Bibliography Acton, William. The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life. 3rd ed. London: John Churchill, 1862. https://books.google.com/books?id=cVX7PaDkzGYC. Allan, J. McGrigor. “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 7 (1869): 195–219. https:// books.google.com/books?id=T8g6AAAAcAAJ. Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Baker Brown, Isaac. On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866. https://books.google.com/books?id=myBFAAAAcAAJ. Bennette, Rachel. Ripper Street, Series 3, episode 7/“Live Free, Live True.” Directed by Saul Metzstein. BBC One, September 11, 2015. ———. Series 4, episode 3/“Some Conscience Lost.” Directed by Luke Watson. BBC One, September 5, 2016. Blandford, George Fielding. Insanity and Its Treatment: Lectures on the Treatment, Medical and Legal, of Insane Patients. 4th ed. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1892. https://books.google.com/books?id=LO4RAAAAYAAJ. Bormann, Daniel Candel. The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel. “Some Sexual Beliefs and Myths in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” In Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, edited by Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 28–46. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982. Broca, Paul. “On Anthropology.” Anthropological Review 6 (1868): 35–52. https://books.google.com/books?id=Bsg6AAAAcAAJ. Burrows, George Man. Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical of Insanity. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1828. Clarke, Edward Hammond. Sex in Education: Or, a Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873. https://books.google.com/ books?id=cwATAAAAIAAJ. Clouston, T. S. Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases. 1887. 6th ed., Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1904. https://books.google.com/books?id=9e6st5PTkYYC. Coote, J. A Biographical Memoir of the Much Lamented Princess Charlotte Augusta. London: John Booth, 1818. https://books.google.com/books?id= NIo1AQAAIAAJ/. Cranfield, Jonathan. “Introduction: Victorian Television.” Victoriographies 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–4. Croghan, Declan, and Richard Warlow. Ripper Street. Season 1, episode 3/“The King Came Calling.” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One, January 6, 2013. Denman, Thomas. An Introduction to the Practice of Midwifery. 1794–1795. 2nd ed. London: J. Johnson, 1801. Dickens, Marnie. Ripper Street. Series 2, episode 3/“Become Man.” Directed by Christopher Menaul. BBC One, November 11, 2013. Digby, Anne. “Women’s Biological Straitjacket.” In Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall, 192–220. London: Routledge, 1989. Ellis, Havelock. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters. London: Walter Scott, 1894. https://books.google.com/books?id= qips3MAHciQC.

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Evans, Jennifer. Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England. Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2014. Fee, Elizabeth. “Nineteenth-Century Craniology: The Study of the Female Skull.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 415– 33. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/stable/pdf/44450930. pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fl2b_100k_with_tbsub%2Ftest&refreqid=search% 3A93961591f004ff646688e4ea7df47184. Finlay, Toby. Ripper Street. Series 3, episode 2/“The Beating of Her Wings.” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One, August 7, 2014. ———. Series 3, episode 3/“Ashes and Diamonds.” Directed by Anthony Byrne. BBC One, August 14, 2015. Fowler, Orson Squire. Private Lectures on Perfect Men, Women and Children, in Happy Families. 1880. Sharon Station, NY: Mrs. O. S. Fowler, 1883. https:// books.google.com/books?id=oDan2vKSVH4C. Gooch, Robert. A Practical Compendiums of Midwifery; Being the Course of Lectures on Midwifery, and on Diseases of Women and Infants, Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, by the Late Robert Gooch, M.D. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831. Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Brill, 2001. Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Haslam, John. Observations on Insanity: With Practical Remarks on the Disease, and an Account of the Morbid Appearances on Dissection. London: F and C. Rivington, 1798. Heilmann, Ann, and Llewellyn, Mark. “On the Neo-Victorian, Now and Then.” In A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 493–506. Somerset: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Holbrook, M. L. Parturition without Pain: A Code of Directions for Escaping from the Primal Curse. New York: M. L. Holbrook, 1891. https://books. google.com/books?id=XZxFAAAAYAAJ. Joyce, Simon. “The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror.” In Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, 3–18. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. ———. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter.” Neo-Victorian Studies 1, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 1–18. Llewellyn, Mark. “What Is Neo-Victorian Studies?” Neo-Victorian Studies 1, no. 1(Autumn 2008): 164–185. Malane, Rachel. “Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences.” Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Marland, Hilary. Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

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Maudsley, Henry. The Physiology and Pathology of Mind. 2nd ed. rev. London: Macmillan, 1868. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZntaAAAAcAAJ. ———. Body and Mind. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1873. https://books. google.com/books?id=Vs5fbyGxGcQC. Meigs, Charles D., Delivered Before the Class of the Jefferson Medical College, January 5, 1847. Philadelphia: T. K. and P. G. Collins, 1847. Meldrum, Claire. “Yesterday’s Women: The Female Presence in Neo-Victorian Television Detective Programs.” Journal of Popular Film & Television (2015): 201–11. Moir, Jan. “Who Decided to Make the BBC’s Sunday Night Period Drama an Anti-women Orgy of Gore?” Daily Mail, January 7, 2013, 3F. https://www. dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2258723/Ripper-Street-Who-decided-makeBBCs-Sunday-night-period-drama-anti-women-orgy-gore.html. Napheys, George Henry. The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother. Philadelphia: H.C. Watts Company, 1878. https://books.google. com/books?id=lP6BStd8XJgC. Nelson, Carolyn Christensen. A New Woman Reader. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001. “nymphomania, n.” OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/view/Entry/129426? redirectedFrom=nymphomania. Parsey, Henry. “Dr. Parsey’s Report.” In Annual Report for Warwick Asylum, 5– 12. 1869. https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b30312954#?c=0&m=0&s=0& cv=10&z=-0.3111%2C0.326%2C1.7521%2C0.8842. Pike, Luke Owen. “On the Claims of Women to Political Power.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 7 (1869): 47–61. https://books.google. com/books?id=T8g6AAAAcAAJ. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Potter, William Warren. “How Should Girls Be Educated? A Public Health Problem for Mothers, Educators, and Physicians.” In Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York. Philadelphia: William J. Dorman, 1891. https://books.google.com/books?id=CR512hz2KgIC. Prichard, James Cowles. A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. 1835. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1837. https://books. google.com/books?id=0PIRAAAAYAAJ. Rampton, James. “Matthew Macfadyen: Watching the Detective.” The Scotsman, December 30, 2012. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/tv-radio/ matthew-macfadyen-watching-the-detective-1-2712200. Robson, Alastair. Unrecognized by the World at Large: A Biography of Dr Henry Parsey, MD, Physician to the Hatton Asylum, Warwick. Leicestershire: Matador, 2017.

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Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rubenhold, Hallie. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. Ruiz, Maria Isabel Romero. “Detective Fiction and Neo-Victorian Sexploitation: Violence, Morality and Rescue Work in Lee Jackson’s The Last Pleasure Garden (2007) and Ripper Street ’s ‘I Need Light’ (2012–2016).” Neo-Victorian Studies 9 no. 2 (2017): 41–69. Rutterford, Julie, and Richard Warlow. Ripper Street. Series 1, episode 4/“The Good of This City.” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One. January 20, 2013. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Skene, Alexander Johnston Chalmers. Treatise on the Diseases of Women. New York: Appleton, 1889. https://books.google.com/books?id= fvhCAQAAMAAJ. Smith, W. Tyler. “The Climacteric Disease of Women.” London Journal of Medicine 1 (1848): 601–9. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———, and Charles Rosenberg. The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America. 1973. In Women and Health in America: Historical Readings, 2nd ed., edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt, 111–30. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Snow, Stephanie J. Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anesthetics Changed the World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008. Storer, Horatio Robinson. The Causation, Course, and Treatment of Reflex Insanity in Women. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1871. https://books.google.com/ books?id=y2o_tVwjdyMC. Taylor, Walter C. A Physician’s Counsels to Woman in Health and Disease. Springfield: W. J. Holland and Company, 1871. https://archive.org/details/ physicianscounse00tayl/page/n8. Thornburn, John. Practical Treatise on the Disease of Women. 1885. Philadelphia: Samuel M. Miller, 1887. https://books.google.com/books?id= K0gSAAAAYAAJ. Tilt, Edward John. On the Preservation of the Health of Women at the Critical Periods of Life. London: John Churchill, 1851. https://books.google.com/ books?id=u80_AAAAcAAJ. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. 1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Tuke, John. B. “On the Statistics of Puerperal Insanity as Observed in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, Morningside.” Edinburgh Medical Journal 10 (1864– 1865): 1013–28.

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Van Helmont, John Baptista. “Of Things Conceived, or Conception.” In Van Helmont’s Workes, 606–13. London: Lodowick Lloyd, 1664. https://books. google.com/books?id=JxZmAAAAcAAJ. Vertinsky, Patricia. The Externally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Warlow, Richard. Ripper Street. Series 1, episode 1/“I Need Light.” Directed by Tom Shankland. BBC One, December 30, 2012. ———. Series 1, episode 7/“A Man of My Company.” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One, February 17, 2013. ———. Series 1, episode 8/“What Use Our Work?” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One, February 24, 2013. ———. Series 2, episode 2/“Am I Not Monstrous?” Directed by Tom Shankland. BBC One, November 4, 2013. ———. Series 3, episode 1/“Whitechapel Terminus.” Directed by Andy Wilson. BBC One, July 31, 2015. ———. Series 3, episode 6/“The Incontrovertible Truth.” Directed by Anthony Byrne. BBC One, September 4, 2015. ———. Series 3, episode 8/“The Peace of Edmund Reid.” Directed by Saul Metzstein. BBC One, September 18, 2015. ———. Series 4, episode 1/“The Strangers’ Home—Part 1.” Directed by Kieron Hawkes. BBC One, August 22, 2016. ———. Series 4, episode 2/“The Strangers’ Home—Part 2.” Directed by Kieron Hawkes. BBC One, August 29, 2016. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. 1976. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. White, Chris. Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook. 1999. London: Routledge, 2002. Young, Justin. Ripper Street. Series 4, episode 4/“A White World Made Red.” Directed by Luke Watson. BBC One, September 12, 2016.

CHAPTER 9

Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Its Adaptation Barbara Braid

Neo-Victorianism has had a queer relationship to the past as a genre of in-betweenness, locating itself between the Victorian era and contemporariness, between popular genres and literary fiction1 and between historicity and fantasy. The disruptive and subversive quasi-authenticity of neo-Victorian fiction is problematic for its more conservative readers and critics, as it is consciously performed, often presentist and anachronic and, therefore for some, manipulative or not authentic enough. This fluctuation of fact and fiction is what makes it a queer project for the future, a kind of history writing that has been proposed by such queer scholars as Michel Foucault who had perceived his own works as a “game of truth and fiction—or if you prefer, of evidence and fabrication—[which] will permit us to see clearly what links us to our modernity and at the same time will make it appear modified to us” (Foucault; quoted in Halperin 1995, 25). Like Foucault, who devoted his academic life to examining the cultural presence of those who had been invisible and silent in the

B. Braid (B) Institute of English, Szczecin University, Szczecin, Poland © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_9

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past—the mad, the criminal, the deviant—neo-Victorianism has been perceived as a postmodern project of “writing history of those without one” (Freccero 2007, 198) which “is a fantasmatic activity that describes an impossible wish; it involves following traces that are lost [and] listening to voices that ‘could have’ spoken (but, it is implied, did not)” (198). That this is a queer project is explained by Lynne Huffer who, in her comment on Michel Foucault’s 1961 introduction to History of Madness where he defines the role of madness in history as “a thing in becoming which is irreparably less than history” (Foucault 1961, xxxi), says: in our habitual, retrospective reading of history as a teleological story, we imbue the events of the past with meanings that shut down other, nonteleological possibilities for apprehending ourselves in history. This teleological production of the past, and of ourselves, as meaningful and coherent unities denies existence, as part of history, to the nonsensical, the inchoate, the obscure murmurings of the mad “thing in becoming.” … Thus to occupy that historical future … is, indeed, to take up an impossible position: to be mad. But that impossible, queer position—the position of madness—is also, politically, the one we must hold. (Huffer 2009, 18–19)

In this fragment Huffer suggests that in history there are always the queer spaces of incoherence that resist meaning-making of our knowledge systems. These mad and queer spaces are what neo-Victorian fiction finds most interesting to excavate; and hence, by extension, neo-Victorianism becomes a queer project, invested in madness as an alternative way of “knowing” history. Therefore, I posit the project of neo-Victorian fiction and study as mad and queer because it sheds light on what has been renounced by history, that is, on what has been misunderstood or omitted, “the nonsensical, the inchoate, the obscure” (18). In the light of the above, such a role means positioning neo-Victorianism within the “thing in becoming” (18), the unreason, the incoherence and madness. Moreover, Huffer calls this position of madness a queer one as it is one that is oppositional to what is assumed certain, reasonable or essential. Neo-Victorianism is thus a mad and queer political project of fleshing out the phantasm of the silent ghosts of the past, whose class, race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality—in other words, Other ness—is made visible in history only in the corner of the eye. Echoing the above argument presented by Huffer, Carla Freccero notes, “queering of history and of historiography itself reworks

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teleological narratives of reproductive futurity that locate in a culminating endpoint the ‘truth’ of the past and the present and thus may open up spaces of foreclosed possibility” (195). Thus, neo-Victorianism opens futures for queer subjects—the Others—by rejecting the logocentric concepts of “truth” or “fact.” However, while filling in those gaps in history can be seen as a legitimate role of the historian, it is also an inherently paradoxical and impossible project, for language used in order to shed light on what is hidden in history is inescapably imposing logocentric thinking on queer spaces in history that cannot be grasped. In The Writing of History, quoting Alphonse Dupront, Michel de Certeau comments: “the sole historical quest for ‘meaning’ remains indeed a quest for the ‘Other,’ but, however contradictory as it may be, this project aims at ‘understanding’ and, through ‘meaning,’ at hiding the alterity of this foreigner; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs” (1988 [1975], 2). By trying to give voice to those queer “things in becoming” (Huffer 18), we are imposing a coherence that is foreign to the elusive spectre of the Other. Thus the teleological project of the historian results in removing the queer impossibility and incoherence of the past Other by enclosing them in a “scriptural tomb” (de Certeau 2). Yet, the “scriptural tombs”— in the case of our discussion, neo-Victorian texts—cannot hold the Other, and, as Certeau states, create a space for the revenant Other to come back nonetheless: “these voices—whose disappearance every historian posits, but which he replaces with his writing—‘re- bite’ the space from which they were excluded; they continue to speak in the text/tomb that erudition erects in their place” (quoted in Freccero 197). Thus, the paradox and impossibility—indeed, madness—of queer history is its constituent. As is seen above Gothic vocabulary is often used to describe this neoVictorian and queer historical project; Freccero, for instance, says that queer history “involves openness to the possibility of being haunted, even inhabited, by ghosts” (194) while Carol Ann Howells uses the concept of the uncanny to explain that literature may “offer an alternative perspective that undermines any discourse of totalizing authority, revealing what ‘out to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’” (Howells 2003, 28). The kind of historical writing that “undermines any discourse of totalizing authority” (28) is, indeed, a queer writing in a sense that it escapes the discipline of knowledge. The constant tension

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and play between fact and fiction, narrative instabilities and formal eccentricities in neo-Victorianism are necessary spaces for the queer Other to be voiced. Our history is therefore inexorably haunted by the “uncanny Other … assiduously forgotten, carefully hidden or locked up” (27). Howells’ words bring to mind the most notorious madwoman, Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre (1847), locked up in the attic and hidden from view, yet escaping at times to wreak havoc on the seemingly stable household of Thornfield. Queer history has thus been designated a role of a madwoman to continuously destabilise the “scriptural tomb” of a historical text (de Certeau 2). Hence, as I argue in this chapter, a madwoman is a fit metaphor and a narrative figure to perform a destabilisation of historical accuracy, coherence of a narrative or, indeed, any stability or certainty, thus being at the same time a queer figure. This approach to the madness motif in neo-Victorianism will be here discussed as exemplified by two texts of culture: Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996) and its adaptation in the form of a television series written and produced by Sarah Polley and directed by Mary Harron (2017). That Margaret Atwood’s project of fictionalising the story of Grace Marks, a notorious murderess who lived in Canada in midnineteenth century, is a queer one transpires from her admission that it is in the blanks and gaps in history, “the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (1998, 1509), where her interest lies. Atwood’s novel, like many other neo-Victorian texts of culture, finds itself both in the past and in the present, “pointing to the in-between space between Now and Then, casting doubts on historical certainties and challenging any notion of an authentic national identity that derives from the legitimating narratives of history, hinting at instabilities and gaps within collective and subjective memory” (Howells 25). This reflects the purpose of queer historicity, which, according to Freccero, pinpoints the fact that “the borderline between then and now wavers, wobbles and does not hold still” (196). In this queer historical context, I am going to explain in more detail what I mean by perceiving a madwoman figure as a queer one, contrasting this concept with the previously contested feminist understanding of this motif. I will also discuss the main character’s representation in both texts as a madwoman, indicating the instability and queer madness of her narrative.

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Queerness as Non-normativity and the Madwoman This discussion should start from a definition of queer, as its association with madness is not obvious. In the beginning of the establishment of queer studies as an academic discipline, a discussion emerged on the relationship between LGBTQIA identities, social positioning and life experiences and the term “queer,” and the general consensus seems to be that, while “queer” might be used to represent non-binary lived experience, its meaning is much more open. One of the earliest definitions of queer, offered by Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick in Tendencies, states that “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to [are]: The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” (1994, 8), reflecting the discussion above on the Other hidden in the gaps and on the margins of history. Other queer scholars stress the non-normalcy as the defining element of queerness; Michael Warner says that queer is “resistance to regimes of the normal. … ‘Queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual” (1993, xxvi). David M. Halperin concurs, stressing that queer is what is non-essential: As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. … It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community—for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire. (62; emphasis in original)

What transpires from this quotation is the fact that queer should be extended to all aspects of non-normativity, including also incoherent representations and self-identifications that are typical for representations of madness. Comparing Halperin’s wide definition of queer with Andrew Scull’s recent definition of madness proposed in his book on the history of insanity as a cultural phenomenon and motif, one notes an overlap in

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these terminologies, as both the mad and the queer are in opposition to “the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin 62): Those who lose control of their emotions, whether melancholic or manic; those who do not share the common-sense reality most of us perceive and the mental universe we inhabit, who halluci-nate or make claims about their existence that people around them conclude are delusions; those who act in ways that are profoundly at variance with the conventions and expectations of their culture, and are heedless of the ordinary corrective measures their community mobilizes to induce them to desist; those who manifest extremes of extravagance and incoherence, or who exhibit the grotesquely denuded mental life of the demented: these form the core of those we look upon as irrational, and are the population that for millennia was regarded as mad, or referred to by some analogous term. (Scull 2015, 11–12)

The difference between these two approaches is perhaps that Sculls looks at the uncontrolled, the unreasonable, the eccentric and the extreme as radically different to himself, thus orientalising the mad subject, while queer theory readily embraces their deviance from the norm and appropriates it as a legitimate form of self-expression. Yet, an important similarity between the concepts of madness and that of queerness is the refusal to conform to the regimes of normality and its disciplinary measures. Another element that these two concepts have in common is the insistence on the possibility to self-construct. Drawing on his earlier claim that queer is an “identity without an essence” (Halperin 62), Halperin stresses that “queer politics [is] defined … by an ongoing process of self-constitution and self-transformation …, anchored in the perilous and shifting sands of non-identity, positionality, discursive reversibility, and collective self-invention” (122; emphasis in original). Similarly, madness is also a performative cultural phenomenon, both as a performance and as an experience that accentuates the performative aspects of our societies. Voyeuristic pleasures of the eighteenth-century Bedlam visits, or the nineteenth-century medical displays in Salpêtrière were, ostensibly, didactic or scientific, yet the theatrical aspects of these displays cannot be omitted. The lunatic (most often unconsciously) parodies social roles that do not suit the context, becoming an uncanny portend of how social roles are being naturalised and disciplined. Another performative aspect of insanity is reflected in the illocutionary act of proclaiming one insane by a psychiatrist, as evidenced by David Rosenhan’s experiment in 1973, where medically sane subjects, once proclaimed insane on the basis of

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fake symptoms, could not easily shed this identification: “Having once been labelled schizophrenic, there is nothing the pseudopatient can do to overcome the tag. The tag profoundly colours others’ perceptions of him and his behaviour” (Rosenhan 1973, 253). Considered insane, the mad subject is assumed to be incoherent and his or her mad identity is being performatively imposed on them. For Judith Butler, drag is a phenomenon that has a potential to expose performativity of gender; the contrast between what is perceived as “natural” gender and the “imitated” one shakes our certainties of what reality of one’s gender is: “In such perceptions in which an ostensible reality is coupled with an unreality, we think we know what the reality is, and take the secondary appearance of gender to be mere artifice, play, falsehood, and illusion” (1997 [1990], xxii; emphasis in original). In 1991 in an essay titled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler explains: “This is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. In other words, the naturalistic effects of heterosexualised genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity, one that is produced by the imitation of its effect” (1993 [1991], 313; emphasis in original). Similarly, a figure of a madwoman—especially a Victorian madwoman—is a factor that destabilises the more generally constitutive phantasms of our social life. This would be true about any mad subject; but the Victorian madwoman, due to gender-related discourses of insanity that prevailed in the Victorian period is particularly queer, as she exposes the performativity of gender in the specific time and place.2 Thus, like a drag queen, a madwoman becomes a queer subject that is “‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate” (Butler 1997 [1990], viii). Thus, as a marginal Other, the madwoman becomes one of those unliveable and incoherent subjects, “those who knowingly occupy such a marginal location, who assume a de-essentialised identity that is purely positional in character, are properly speaking not gay but queer” (Halperin 62). Perhaps an important caveat here should concern the word “knowingly,” for it is obviously problematic to say that insanity is a position one would choose in full awareness. What I would like to stress at this point, however, is that my discussion concerns madness as a narrative figure that features in texts of culture, distinct from lived experience of those who

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suffer from mental illness. Instead, the person who knowingly chooses a marginal location for their character is the creator of the cultural text, thus consciously focusing on an element that may become a queer, destabilising factor in their text. It has to be stressed that, even though scholars of the budding mad studies see similarities between their own concerns and those of queer studies—most prominently, “challenging existing binaries” and “critiquing prevailing normalities” (Spandler and Barker 2016)—and even though some aspects, such as Richard Ingram’s proposition to “us[e] madness to study the outside world” (quoted in Spandler and Barker) and Lucy Costa’s suggestion to “stop studying mentally ill people and start studying sane people, normals, well-adjusted, balanced and secure people. Flip the questions. Question the questioners” (Costa), have a lot in common with the queer project of “undo[ing] the moi—to interrogate the humanist illusion of an unsplit, self-identical, coherent ‘I’” (Huffer 23), mad studies are ultimately a project related to social realities of people affected by mental illness, survivors, those who benefit from—or, rebel against—mental health system. In this discussion, however, both terms “mad” and “queer” are used as narrative concepts, deployed to examine narrative instabilities and subversions. My use of both these terms is more suited to what has been proposed by Sue-Ellen Case who applies queer theory “at the site of ontology, to shift the ground of being itself” (1991, 3). While for Case, in her discussion of queer Gothic, the queer is the transgressor of the life/death binary, I am interested in the transgression of another binary, that of normal/abnormal; therefore, the madwoman is a perfect queer figure to discuss these transgressions. Again, Case uses the term “uncanny” to discuss the queer as the taboo-breaker and the monstrous (3); the madwoman’s uncanniness lies in her insane presence in seemingly “sane” contexts, leading to destabilisation of naturalised concepts of normalcy. Thus, the abnormal is what queer and mad have in common; commenting on Case and Warner’s definitions mentioned above, Donald E. Hall notes that “we see how ‘normal being’ (as well as possibilities for ‘abnormal being’) becomes the common terrain of investigation in queer theorization and critique” (56). Her abnormality and deviance in behaviour and language and her uncanny appearance in seemingly stable and sane contexts allow the madwoman to be a queer signal in the texts in which she appears, in order to interrogate the politics of a coherent, unsplit subjectivity.

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Admittedly, for several decades now female insanity has been a compelling subject of feminist studies, which see in this figure a symbol of female rebellion against patriarchy or, quite opposite, of silent subjection. Feminist approaches to female madness in the Victorian period either interpret the madwoman as an icon of female rebellion or anger,3 or as a failure to be such an icon.4 The madwoman, therefore, has become a feminist cliché, first as a triumphant embodiment of feminine anger, then as an illusion of power: a madwoman’s lack of coherent expression and voice, paired with her lack of credibility in the eyes of the patriarchal society, mark her as a victim of oppression rather than its defiant opponent (Caminero-Santangelo 1–5). In his analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Hall quotes Ruth Robbins, who notes that “there are more spaces to conquer than attic rooms” (122). Yet, when the madwoman figure is perceived from the perspective of queer theory rather than feminism, a new possibility opens; she is then an indicator of the fact that “the aim of the oppositional politics is … not liberation but resistance” (Halperin 18; emphasis in original). In his analysis of Victorian female madness, Hall similarly arrives at the conclusion that “madness is not ‘liberation,’ but … liberation is a highly problematic construct. … Successes are always complex and imbricated with pre-existing terms. And even a binary of success/failure needs deconstructing in a queer reading” (Hall 124). Such a queer deconstruction has been offered since by Jack Halberstam, in his The Queer Art of Failure (2011), where he calls for “addressing the dark heart of the negativity that failure conjures … darker territories of failure associated with futility, sterility, emptiness, loss, negative affect in general, and modes of unbecoming” (23). A madwoman’s refusal to take part in the system at all, represented by her victimisation, masochism or silence, conventionally seen as failure of a feminist subject, for Halberstam constitutes the only feminist subject there is: “ultimately we find no feminist subject but only subjects who cannot speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse ‘being’ where being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject” (126; emphasis added). The mad subject as a feminist/queer subject is also referred to by Halberstam in Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (2012), where “gaga feminism” is defined as “performances of excess, unreadable appearances of wild genders; and social experimentation” (xiii). Thus, as a queer subject, the madwoman’s failure to liberate herself is less important

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than the disruption of stabilities of gender, language, narrative, knowledge and social roles that her uncanny presence injects into her contexts. Before I move on to the discussion of Alias Grace and its adaptation, I would like to offer one more caveat: This chapter is not to argue that Grace Marks was necessarily a queer character (although her relationship with Mary Whitney and an attempt at its reproduction with Nancy Montgomery may be examined in the view of the lesbian continuum), but that she is a queer signal, a textual sign contesting what is normative and naturalised in our societies which provokes a subversion of normativity and assumed certainties, such as ontological claims on stability of self, or logocentric approaches to language and narrative. Therefore, this discussion is not an analysis of a queer character, but of a madwoman as a queer narrative catalyst which queers the context she is inserted into.

Grace Marks: A Victorian Hysteric As it was mentioned before, Grace Marks is a historical figure: an Irish servant who arrived in 1940 to Canada and, three years later at the age of 15, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper and mistress Nancy Montgomery. During her incarceration, Grace Marks spent some time in the lunatic asylum: she was sent to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto on May 4, 1852, where she stayed for over a year, until her return to Kingston Penitentiary on August 18, 1853 (Knelman 1999, 680). Among various documents and press reports on the case, one text that stands out and served as an inspiration for Atwood is Susana Moodie’s Life in the Clearings (1853), where the Canadian writer recounts her meetings with the notorious murderess in the asylum, in the fragments that feature in Atwood’s novel in the form of epigraphs: “Among these raving maniacs I recognised the singular face of Grace Marks—no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment. On perceiving that strangers were observing her, she fled shrieking away like a phantom into one of the side rooms. It appears that even in the wildest bursts of her terrible malady, she is continually haunted by a memory of the past” (1997 [1996], 51). Moodie’s descriptions of Grace Marks as a raving lunatic strengthens the stereotype of a Victorian madwoman as a dangerous fiend. On the basis of this and other available documents describing Grace Marks’s behaviour during her capture and trial, in her article Judith Knelman

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suggests that Grace Marks could have been suffering from bipolar disorder (681). Yet, even though Knelman mentions the sensationalism of Susan Moodie’s depiction, which “owed much to the Newgate novel and the vogue for sensational crime reporting” (681) and the stereotypisation of the press accounts of Marks’s behaviour (679–80), she fails to recognise the fact that a convincing diagnosis is impossible to make exactly due to unreliability of these accounts. One should not assume that Grace Marks’s “period of rebellious and determined resistance to authority” (681) can be proof of her manic-depressive state—or any mental disorder, for that matter—without incriminating oneself in the same misconstruction of female anger as insanity of which today’s historians of psychiatry and feminist critics accuse the Victorian mind doctors. In Atwood’s novel, such a young, ambitious mind doctor who experiments with the budding science of psychology while attempting to crack the enigma of Grace Marks is Dr. Simon Jordan. To overcome Grace’s amnesia and determine her role in the murders, he applies a method of association, akin to the “talking cure” and psychoanalytical treatment that are several decades in the making. He also falls for the stereotype of the Victorian madwoman (Darroch 2004, 106); when he meets Grace Marks for the first time, he initially seems to see “the cornered woman; the penitential dress falling straight down, concealing feet that were surely bare; the straw mattress on the floor; the timorous hunch of the shoulders; the arms hugged close to the thin body, the long wisps of auburn hair escaping from what appeared at first glance to be a chaplet of white flowers—and especially the eyes, enormous in the pale face and dilated with fear, or with mute pleading” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 68). He expects a classic hysteric figure: “all was as it should be. He’d seen many hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris who’d looked very much like this” (68). He soon realises that his assumption that Grace Marks is a timid, desperate madwoman is just a trick of his own mind: There was a different woman—straighter, taller, more self-possessed, wearing the conventional dress of the Penitentiary, with a striped blue and white skirt beneath which were two feet, not naked at all but enclosed in ordinary shoes. There was even less escaped hair than he’d thought: most of it was tucked up under a white cap. Her eyes were unusually large, it was true, but they were far from insane. Instead they were frankly assessing him. It was as if she were contemplating the subject of some unexplained experiment; as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny. (68)

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Grace Marks already performs the role of the destabilising, queer element in this scene, by overturning the expected division into the observer and the observed. While the logic of the institutionalised discipline would put Dr. Jordan, the psychiatrist, in the position of the one who examines, assesses and proclaims the patient insane in an illocutionary act, it is the patient here who is contemplating the doctor from the shadows where she had been hidden, as if he was “some unexplained experiment” (68). Thus, not only does Grace perform the flipping of the questions proposed by mad studies (Costa), but also queerly refuses to perform the prescribed role in the logic of institutional discipline. Yet, Grace Marks’s memories about her time in the lunatic asylum are unfortunately typically traumatic (Atwood 1997 [1996], 36–38). This part of the novel presents the Victorian mental health institution in realistic terms, reflecting the research of the historians of psychiatry. Grace’s observations on the patients in the asylum indicate that she recognises that some of them might be battered wives, alcoholics or the homeless, which brings to mind the assertion made by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady that “not all women in the asylums were actually insane; asylum populations also included many women who were senile, tubercular, epileptic, physically handicapped, mentally retarded, or otherwise unable to care for themselves” (1987 [1985], 54–55). Yet, in the novel, Grace also mentions women who were driven insane by the traumatic experiences, like losing their families. The television series offers short flashbacks to the time Grace Marks spent in the lunatic asylum, “a gibbering madwoman, shrieking like a phantom and running around like a singed monkey” (Polley 2017a, ep. 3). The possible abuse from the hands of the caretakers and mind doctors is only hinted at in the novel (Atwood 1997 [1996], 38), yet directly addressed in the adaptation; in the last episode, Grace tells Jamie about the doctor who “would put his hand up [her] leg … to check [her] progress” (Polley ep. 6). Altogether, these elements make for both historically accurate and realistic depiction of the conditions in the lunatic asylum, shown with the contemporary understanding of the varied reasons that led women to incarceration in these institutions, as well as an insider’s perspective that is lacking from Victorian accounts like those offered by Moodie. What should be also noted, however, is that imposing our contemporary perspective on a nineteenth-century experience is, in fact, presentist, even if it is accepted by a contemporary viewer or reader as authentic.

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The readers/viewers of neo-Victorian texts often enjoy a superior pleasure in having greater awareness of mental issues that contemporary psychiatry allows. This feeling of having an upper hand in this narrative situation is also evident in the fact that we are privy to confessions and thoughts, as well as documents and letters, from various sources; we have more information about Grace than Dr. Jordan and actually also intimate awareness of Dr. Jordan’s thoughts and feelings. As a result, “there is a peculiar pleasure in knowing more than Jordan, the expert, and for post-Freudians perhaps an additional satisfaction in retracing the common narrative trajectory of the ambitions male analyst’s misunderstanding of, and overinvolvement in, his female patient’s story of seduction, violence and betrayal” (Darroch 114). What is more, both the novel and the series are not free from anachronism, particularly in Atwood’s reference to the psychiatric treatment used by Dr. Jordan and later by Jerome DuPont. While the former, as it has been mentioned, applied the protopsychoanalytical method of associations and the talking cure, the latter claimed to be “a trained Neuro-hypnotist, of the school of James Braid” (1997 [1996], 95). The methods used by Dr. Jordan and his Janetian approach to trauma only became known in the final decades of the nineteenth century (Darroch 107). Admittedly, Braid coined the term “neurohypnology” already in 1841 and “hypnotism” in 1845, thus it is possible that in 1850s, when the novel takes place, his achievements would have been known to the medical establishment. However, Knelman notes that “we have here, through the catalyst of hypnosis (sometimes known as “somnambulism”) and spiritualism, a misleading and indeed anachronistic reconstruction of nineteenth-century theories about multiple personality” (682). Nevertheless, such inconsistencies in the chronology of the applied references to nineteenth-century psychiatry and a presentist approach should not be perceived as a negative tendency in a neo-Victorian novel which, after all, is not a subgenre of a historical novel but rather a genre in itself. Katharine Harris, commenting on Diana Wallace’s statement that “historical fictions are often judged on their perceived ‘authenticity,’ not only whether they get their facts right, but also whether they are imaginatively ‘true’ to their period’” (quoted in 2017, 197), notes that neo-historical fictions, including neo-Victorian ones, “push beyond what we know or think is ‘true’ about the past in order to invent new histories” (197). The “illusion of authenticity” (de Groot, quoted in Harris 198) that neoVictorianism creates is a conscious aesthetic choice—and, I would argue,

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a queer one in a sense that it exposes the artificiality of what is assumed to be “realistic.” Neo-Victorianism embraces anachronism and presentism and freely manipulates time scales, pinpointing the fluidity of distinctions between past, present and future. Such a discourse where then and now fluctuate and become fragmentised and interspersed is a mad/queer one. This is evident not only in the casual treatment of chronological accuracy but also in Grace’s “mad” recollections of past traumas, memories and dreams, both in the novel and in the adaptation, as they intervene in her storytelling—made especially queer as they are evidence of the instability of her identity and her role as a narrator of her own story.

A Madwoman’s Queer Identity and Narrative As noted by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, the madwoman motif in (especially Gothic) fiction often represents the careful balancing of female identity between the images of the Angel in the House and a monstrous woman: “madness and womanhood both define an idealised sensitive femininity and its opposite—the evil woman locked away in a convent to expiate her crimes” (2016, 34). Similarly, Grace Marks epitomises, in the eyes of male characters in the novel especially, femininity in its either pure, innocent form, or a monstrous, hysterical one (Darroch 106) and the latter seems to be stemming from “the deviance always potentially present in the sexualised female body” (King 2005, 72). Both Dr. Jordan and Jamie Walsh fall for this dichotomy of femininity; for the latter, during the trial, “from being an angel in his eyes, fit to be idolised and worshipped, [she] was transformed to a demon” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 418). Interestingly, even though Dr. Jordan claimed to be under no illusion about the dark side of femininity (100), when it came to Grace Marks, he chose to see her as a damsel in distress, in spite of her apparent madness and her murderous past. From the beginning, he saw Grace as “a nun in a cloister, a maiden in a towered dungeon, awaiting the next day’s burning at the stake, or else the last-minute champion come to rescue her” (68); and even though these tropes would mark her as a madwoman of Gothic fiction (Talairach-Vielmas 32–34) or a witch, in his eyes these were images of innocent, angelic femininity—especially that such a scenario would put Dr. Jordan in a role of a male saviour. It eroticises Grace in his eyes because of her subservient position in relation to him, not only as his patient and a prison inmate, but also as a female servant.

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That her class makes Grace an erotic object in male eyes is evident throughout the novel and its adaptation; Mary Whitney’s example shows how a maid may easily become sexual prey for upper-class men. Later, in the scene where Mr. Kinnear observes Grace as she washes the floor on all four, her “backside moving back and forth with the scrubbing, like a dog waggling its rump” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 320), his gaze resembles the well-documented eroticisation of the female servant by Victorian men of upper class: Arthur Munby’s fascination with Hannah Cullwick or Walter Benjamin’s similar enamourment with servants depicted in his childhood memoirs A Berlin Chronicle (1932) (Stallybrass and White 1986, 149– 150), or the Rat Man and Wolf Man studies by Sigmund Freud (Stanley 2003, 317).5 In a similar vein, in Dr. Jordan’s memories of childhood and youth, young female servants feature as hints of early erotic fascinations (Atwood 1997 [1996], 64) and the nostalgia these memories evoke suggests that he is unaware of his own exploitation of women who were financially dependent on himself and his family (King 76), just as he is oblivious to his eroticisation of Grace, who is socially and institutionally his inferior. Indeed, in his dream recalling his childhood invasion of the maids’ privacy, when he used to steal to their attic rooms to rummage through their drawers—an image with sexual undertones—he images “women, the maids. Sitting on the edges of their narrow beds, in their white cotton shifts, their hair unbound and rippling down over their shoulders, their lips parted, their eyes gleaming. Waiting for him” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 159). He is not much different from the Parkinson’s son, the man responsible for Mary Whitney’s demise; yet, such a realisation escapes Dr. Jordan. He is attracted to submissive women who are inferior to him, yet his own narrative subjectively fails to recognise that he, too, is cast as a villain in this story of female victimisation. His unconscious need to be positioned as a dominating subject in his desire for Grace and his emotionless exploitation of his relationship with the landlady, Mrs. Humphrey, indicate “an element of sadism in sexual desires of even the gentlest of men” (King 76) in the construction of Victorian male sexuality. Moreover, Dr. Jordan’s professional interest in Grace is also eroticised, as is evident in the language of penetration he uses when addressing the issue of Grace’s amnesia (cf. King 74): “My object is to part of her mind that lies dormant—to probe down below the threshold of her consciousness, and to discover the memories that must lie buried there. I approach her mind as if it is a locked box, to which I must find the right key” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 153). His gradual succumbing to

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the seduction by Mrs. Humphrey, in the adaptation of the novel culminating in a very brutal sex act “in absentia” of Grace, shows the cruel strain in him; the graphic scene ends with his spiteful comment: “I always wanted to do that with someone else. Not you” (Polley 2017b). Linked to the later image of his erotic dream of visiting the maids’ room, trying to open the doors, “lifting the latch, pushing gently” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 159), the symbol of door opening is one of the penetrative desire to possess femininity—for which Grace is the epitome as a mysterious and elusive figure. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White understand the female servant persona featuring in late nineteenth-century culture as one that introduces the male subject into the darker side of life and eroticism, a figure of “nether world,” like prostitutes (150), “a symbolic site for social transgression and transgressive desire” (Stanley 384). I would argue that in spite of her liminal positioning, an eroticised maid kneeling down and scrubbing the floor is not a queer figure, even though she might represent a transgression of class boundaries for the man who desires her. However, as she is the object of male voyeurism and lacks subjectivity, in this repetitive scenario such a figure would not normally have the power to perform similar transgressions herself. Nevertheless, Grace Marks in Atwood’s novel and its adaptation manages to escape the position of being an object of male gaze—either by disappearing from it, or by manipulating it, or, most often, by becoming a mad/queer “thing-inbecoming” (to use the Foucauldian term mentioned earlier), an ambiguous self that escapes dichotomies and labelling. She resists both Mr. Kinnear’s eroticisation as well as Dr. Jordan’s scientific gaze: “He wishes to go home and say to himself, I stuck in my thumb and pulled out the plum, what a good boy am I. But I will not be anybody’s plum. I say nothing” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 46). By infantilising him in this and other moments, when she muses that gentlemen “are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do” (249), which is, as Jeanette King notes, by extension a feminisation in the light of the Victorian infantilisation of women (78) and, by feminising him in the hypnosis scene as she penetrates his erotic secrets (Davies 2012, 84),6 Grace performs a transgressive and queer, carnivalesque reversal of the roles in the power struggle between them. While the whole novel and its adaptation are based on Grace telling her life story, paradoxically she manages to “resists the confessional moment” (Butler; quoted in Huffer 23), which, according to Huffer, is a queer

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sentiment—to refuse to be explained and confined within the frameworks of discourse—and also a mad one, as “the structure of madness is allied with the structure of language in its différance” (26). Grace is a conscious “storyteller, with strong motives to narrate but also strong motives to withhold” (Atwood 1998, 1515) and aware of the meaning-making that is involved in narrating the story and gives power to its narrator: “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 345– 46). Telling a story is an engagement in creating it out of chaos; again, Grace’s conscious engagement in it gives her power to create both her own identity and to create history out of the mad “thing-in-becoming.” Grace’s awareness of these discourses and social relations, and possible ironic manipulation of Dr. Jordan’s infatuation with her and his attitude to women—as the hypnosis séance would show—reveal these discourses to be imposed, not essential. When Jeremiah the Peddler (a figure playing an important role in Grace’s exoneration, as he later becomes Jerome DuPont, the mesmeriser) first meets her, she tells her, “you are one of us” (179). Himself a travelling salesman, later a mesmeriser, performer and an impostor, he plays the part of a trickster who destabilises the identities by performing new ones and crossing the boundaries of social roles, hiding on society’s margins. Grace is like him, a trickster, that is, a queer figure on the margins and the Other. Both cross the invisible social borders, which, as Jeremiah says, are “like passing through air, you wouldn’t know you’d done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same” (309); “m]adness and reason are so interwoven … at this ‘border’ that one differentiates between them with great difficulty” (Morra 1999, 125). Identity, Atwood’s novel posits, is performative, and a label attached by those who observe the subject and impose a role on them. Even though we are privy to Grace’s most intimate thoughts as the narrator in the novel and the voiceover in the television show, we are not given a simple answer as to who she is. Instead, Grace opens her story with a description of what other people think of her: I think of all the things that have been written about me—that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard

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forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good gift with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? (Atwood 1997 [1996], 25)

Grace’s queerness lies in the fact that she is all these things at once; her identity is like the quilt she is making, patched up from various fragments, events and experiences, some of them traumatic. The same scene in the television adaptation which opens the first episode is given a twist by means of performing these various identities. Sarah Gadon, the actress playing Grace in the adaptation, is acting out the cunning Grace, the innocent Grace, the confused Grace and other figures mentioned in this quotation by means of mimics and facial expressions and subtle changes in her posture. This scene—one which is an addition in comparison to Atwood’s novel—is a disconcerting way to start Grace’s story, as noted by the actress herself: “The motif of a woman looking in a mirror is one that you see over and over again in film and TV, but that image is usually constructed by a male artist … Sarah [Polley] said, ‘Grace is now going to sit with every claim that has ever been had over her identity, and she’s going to sit comfortably in them, which is going to deeply unsettle you’” (quoted in Reilly 2017). The overt performativity of this scene makes us question Grace’s identity and, what is perhaps the crux of both the novel and its adaptation, her guiltlessness; if she is able to perform these various identities, the viewer questions who she is beyond these performances and whether it is possible that she is manipulating those around her—most prominently, Dr. Jordan—to believe in her innocence. Perhaps the meaning of this scene is the fact that there is no stable identity underneath the performance; one can be “all of these different things at once” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 25) as one is not only one thing at all. Contesting a possibility of an internal, essential identity and a possibility to name it—as it is discourse that creates identity, not the opposite—shows the connection between identity and a narrative; an unstable

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narrative undermines the possibility of a stable identity. According to Hall, who discusses Foucault’s concepts of discourse and identity, “individual personhood (subjectivity) is created through an internalisation of discursive categories and the interests and biases that they reflect” (Hall 2003, 65). In this perspective, a lack of narrative stability both in the novel as well as its adaptation also undermines the certainties of identity as such, and in particular, of Grace’s identity because she is the crucial puzzle of both texts. The television series successfully attempts to recreate the instable narrative style of the novel, by means of contrasting the voiceover presence of Grace with what she chooses to tell Dr. Jordan and with the omniscience of the camera, while the patchwork of the novel’s storytelling is translated into interrupting visual images (VanArendonk 2017a). This instability is visually expressed by the Rashomore effect applied by the creators of the series. That various versions of the same event are shown in the series from different perspectives is signalled by cinematography of the scenes, as explained by Brendan Steacy: “Grace is a kind of unreliable narrator, so trying to distinguish truth from fiction figured into our visual approach to shooting. There were times when we weren’t sure whether a certain point should be rendered as ‘truth’ or not, so at times it was kind of strange and a little funny just trying to figure that out. Plus we wanted those distinctions rendered in a subtle enough way that the audience could interpret them as they wished” (quoted in Martin 2017). The effect is highly ambiguous and even more disconcerting as the medium of televised narrative is more compelling for the viewer to assume that what is being shown is what happened, as noted by Kathryn VanArendonk: “In the show … it’s harder to remember that Grace might be making it all up. As viewers, we’re less trained to doubt something we watch with our own eyes unless it’s being actively undermined with noticeable visual clues. … The show doesn’t prepare us to be on the lookout for narrative trickery” (2017b). Such confusion was originally offered by the novel in terms of the “polyphony of voices” (Howells 31), especially at its beginning, where existing documents are combined with folk songs, poems, press cuttings and Susanna Moodie’s memoir fragments. Even when later Grace Marks takes over the narrative, this is counterpointed by Dr. Jordan’s reflections and the letters exchanged between him and his colleagues or family. At the end, after the hypnotist trance when Mary Whitney’s voice became apparent, exonerating Grace from the crime she has been imprisoned for, the variety of voices representing Victorian institutions—medicine, religion, judiciary system—offered a range of explanations, from spiritual

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possession, to dédoublement, to trickery. The hypnosis scene is queerly transgressive, as Mary Whitney’s voice “allows her to surreptitiously subvert the script of Victorian femininity—to ‘talk back’—without calling the integrity of her own ‘voice’ into question” (Davies 81). It also further codes Grace as a madwoman, “psychologically deviant, reinforcing the stereotypical view of woman as inherently unstable, prone to hysteria and insanity, her innocence always under threat from darker forces” (King 80). The reader is offered so many contradicting possibilities that the result is ambiguity and doubt, not only in Grace’s mental state and capacity for murder, but even in the text itself; one starts to question the genre of the novel: is it neo-realist or a Gothic one? The answer will depend on whether we believe Grace suffered from a dissociative personality disorder or became a victim of a possession by the spirit of Mary Whitney. The only voice that is not heard is that of Grace herself; therefore, the reader must decide on his or her own which explanation—if any of the above—is valid, or whether the whole narrative is true. After all, we know only that Mary Whitney was a servant next to Grace in the Parkinson household because she told us so; it could be equally possible that the whole story, including Mary’s existence, is an elaborate hoax to free Grace from prison. The proliferation of doubts and questions at the end of the novel indicates the madness of Grace’s narrative, in a sense that it is a queer story lacking a stable “truth” or a single ending. Moreover, the split self, in the image of dédoublement revealed in the hypnotic séance, is a queer concept, as argued by Huffer, who talks about a split as a defining element of the queer in-betweenness in the context of her own development as a queer scholar (1–10). A similar split—a refusal to be located in either of the binary terms—may be found in the neoVictorian madwoman such as Grace Marks, who is found split between reason and unreason; the reader/viewer might wonder whether she is suffering from a mental disorder and would she be considered for psychiatric treatment in contemporary times, or whether she is victimised as insane by the stifling social expectations towards women in the Victorian era. The fact that it is often impossible to find a definite answer to this question is what makes the neo-Victorian madwoman “split,” or, in other words, queer—non-binary, both sane and insane, and neither of the two, at the same time. In Alias Grace, however, this concept is also interestingly symbolised in the split personality motif that might be one of the readings (yet not the only one) of the hypnotic séance. Split between Grace and Mary, her identity is divided between the normative,

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disciplined one (Grace) who hides her feelings and ideas and manages her duties and social expectations well and the rebellious Mary, named after her rebellious and opinionated friend, who might have been the one who participated in the murders and is the voice revealing the hypocrisy of the Victorian gender and class roles. The persona of Mary Whitney is to Grace what Bertha Mason is to Jane Eyre: the mad embodiment of her anger and the symbol of queer anger that disrupts through deviance and chaos.

Conclusion: Being Queered by the Madwoman Throughout the novel, Dr. Jordan paradoxically and gradually moves towards madness, to exchange places with Grace at the end (Morra 126). In their very first meeting, when he mistakes Grace for a helpless, Salpêtrièresque madwoman, he warns himself to “resist melodrama, and an overheated brain” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 69). Yet, Dr. Jordan’s journey from reason to madness, culminating in his amnesia and a metaphorical imprisonment in his body as a result of wounds received in the Civil War, the turning point is sexual violence he uses against his lover, Mrs. Humphrey (464). In the novel, when she proposes to kill her husband, Dr. Jordan briefly considers a melodramatic scenario, involving the murder of Mr. Humphreys, then their servant Dora and, finally, after their escape to the United States, Mrs. Humphreys herself. That this narrative is a twisted version of Grace Mark’s story escapes him. In the end, Dr. Jordan admits that he has “come very close to nervous exhaustion over this matter” (490). The reason for his brush with madness is the queerness of the story: “Not to know—to snatch at hints and portents, at intimations, at tantalising whispers—it is as bad as being haunted” (490; emphasis in the original). He has been queered by the madwoman he was examining— who penetrated him, instead of being penetrated himself, and escaped his institutionalising gaze and his discourse. Dr. Jordan is not the only one who has been queered; the madwoman “‘queers’ the reader in the discomfort [she] causes us” (Hall 116). The game of hide and seek is played by Grace not only at the expense of various institutions that attempt to confine and define her; it is also played at the expense of the reader of the novel and the audience of its adaptation. The gaze of the audience in the hypnotic séance is doubled by the audience at the television screens; the veil Grace wears during the séance reflects the gaze like a mirror and turns it back to its audience

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in the living-room of the governor’s house, but also our own livingrooms. The madwoman as a queer signal provokes us to question whether the voyeuristic pleasure, belonging to Dr. Jordan and, much later, more ostensibly and deviantly, to her husband Jamie Walsh, belongs also to us. When Jamie Walsh, as part of the foreplay, asks: “Tell me again about the lunatic asylum. Tell me again how you were ill-treated” (Polley 2017b, ep. 6), he represents the contemporary viewers who expect sensational depictions of sophisticated tortures in the nineteenth-century asylum; as Kathryn VanArendonk mentioned, “the series’ final question is why, exactly, watching a woman in pain is something we find entertaining” (2017b, ep. 6). By recreating women’s sexualisation, victimisation, trauma and imprisonment in Victorian patriarchal society, neoVictorianism also poses a danger at feeding the scopophilic desire of its audience. Grace Marks, the queer madwoman, “Our Lady of the Silences” (Atwood 1997 [1996], 433), is impossible to define within a single identity and a coherent narrative, affirming “‘the philosophical impossibility’ of capturing madness and speaking its truth” (Huffer 28). Hence, her role in the murders and her mental state remain ambiguous. In this respect, Alias Grace and its adaptation follow Halberstam’s call to “suspect memorialization … because memorialisation has a tendency to tidy up disorderly histories” (Halberstam 2011, 15; emphasis in original). As memory is a disciplinary mechanism (15), the failure the viewers experience when expecting a neat closure and explanation is a queer one, as it pinpoints the impossibility to delineate sanity versus insanity, or truth versus fiction. Instead, what Grace does offer us is ambiguity, fragmentation and narrative slippage—a queer kind of memory.

Notes 1. This concept was commented upon by Patricia Pulham in her unpublished paper “Reorienting Neo-Victorian Literature: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Borrowed Prestige,” presented at the conference “(Neo-) Victorian ‘Orientations’ in the Twenty-First Century,” on May 16, 2019, in Malaga, Spain, where she described this field as “caught between contemporary literature scholarship where their interventions may appear unwelcome and Victorian studies in which they may feel infantilised by the parental authority of a long-established field that necessarily deals with many of the same topics.” I would like to thank prof. Pulham for graciously sharing this fragment of the manuscript with me.

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2. See, for instance, Showalter (1987 [1985]). 3. See Gilbert and Gubar (2000 [1979]), Showalter, and Ussher (1991, 2011). 4. See Felman (1975), Caminero-Santangelo (1998), and Baym (1991). 5. For a detailed discussion on the erotic fascination of Victorian upper-class men with female servants and the floor-scrubbing scenes, see Stallybrass and White 49–170. 6. Helen Davies argues that the ventriloquist behind Grace Marks was Jeremiah the Peddler vel Jerome DuPont, therefore the penetration of Dr. Jordan’s mind is performed by him, not Grace, becoming a queer act in more senses than one (84).

Bibliography Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. 1996. London: Virago, 1997. ———. “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction.” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1503–16. Baym, Nina. “The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don’t Do Feminist Literary Theory.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 154–67. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” 1991. In Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 307–20. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak, or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” Differences 3, no. 2 (1991): 1–20. Costa, Lucy. “Mad Studies—What It Is and Why You Should Care.” Mad Studies Network. 2014. https://madstudies2014.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/ mad-studies-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-care–2/. Darroch, Heidi. “Hysteria and Traumatic Testimony: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 103–21. Davies, Helen. Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. 1975. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (1975): 2–10. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. 1961. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006.

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Freccero, Carla. “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 194–213. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012. Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Howells, Carol Ann. Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Katharine Harris. “‘Part of the Project of That Book Was Not to Be Authentic’: Neo-Historical Authenticity and Its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 193–212. King, Jeanette. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Knelman, Judith. “Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us? Missing Links in Alias Grace.” University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1999): 677–86. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. London: Routledge, 1994. Martin, Kevin H. “Beauty and Ambiguity in ‘Alias Grace’: Varying Visual Styles, One True Crime Story.” Creative Planet Network. 2017. https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/news-features/beautyand-ambiguity-alias-grace-varying-visual-styles-one-true-crime-story–636423. Morra, Linda. 1999. “Articulating Madness: The Foucauldian Notion of Madness and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” The West-Virginia Philological Papers 45: 123–29. Polley, Sarah. Alias Grace. Episode 3. Directed by Mary Harron. CBS. October 9, 2017a. ———. Episode 6. Directed by Mary Harron. CBS. October 16, 2017b. Reilly, Phoebe. “Alias Grace: How a True-Crime Drama Became the Most Relevant Show on TV.” Rolling Stone. 2017. https://www.rollingstone. com/tv/tv-features/alias-grace-how-a-true-crime-drama-became-the-mostrelevant-show-on-tv–127693/. Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179 (1973): 250–58.

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Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization. A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. 1985. London: Virago, 1987. Spandler, Helen, and Meg-John Barker. “Mad and Queer Studies: Interconnections and Tensions.” Mad Studies Network. 2016. https://madstudies2014. wordpress.com/2016/07/01/mad-and-queer-studies-interconnections-andtensions/. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22, no. 2 (2003): 371–86. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. “Madwomen in the Attic.” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 31–45. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Ussher, Jane M. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ———. The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience. London: Routledge, 2011. VanArendonk, Kathryn. “How Does Netflix’s Alias Grace Compare to Margaret Atwood’s Book?” Vulture. 2017a. https://www.vulture.com/2017/ 11/netflix-alias-grace-margaret-atwood-book-comparison.html. ———. “Let’s Talk About the Ending of Alias Grace.” Vulture. 2017b. https:// www.vulture.com/2017/11/alias-grace-lets-talk-about-the-ending.html. Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 10

Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful Tim Posada

An Old Monster The old monsters are gone. The old curses have echoed to silence. And if my immortal soul is lost to me, something yet remains—Vanessa Ives. (Logan 2016c, 3:1)

As Showtime’s critically acclaimed neo-Victorian series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) came to an abrupt conclusion after three seasons, it appeared to betray the series premiere’s promise of more evolved female representation. This might not sound surprising from a horror series that features familiar male characters in a shared Victorian setting including Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, his monster, the Wolf Man, Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray. Thanks to literary and popular culture poaching, Penny Dreadful is frequently compared to the neo-Victorian comics series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1 which portrays nineteenth-century literary characters like Captain Nemo, Tom Sawyer and the Invisible Man on a superhero team. Yet across Victorian and late nineteenth-century

T. Posada (B) Saddleback College, Rancho Cucamonga, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_10

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science fiction and horror literature—at least among popular works now lauded as timeless classics—is a general lack of emphasis in female characters. Penny Dreadful ’s two female protagonists, even, are either an original creation (Vanessa Ives) or popularised in both pre- and post-Victorian popular fiction (Frankenstein’s bride). To start, Frankenstein (1818) predates the Victorian era, and the bride—fiancée Elizabeth in the novel and Brona Croft/Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper) in Penny Dreadful —did not gain much public interest until the premiere of Universal Picture’s 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, one of the many highly marketable monster movies at the time (Clarens 2004). The bride serves as one of two characters Penny Dreadful adapts from classical Hollywood including Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), whose born name is Ethan Lawrence Talbot, similar to Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, who first appeared in the 1941 Universal monster film. Even if the bride and Vanessa (Eva Green) are extra-Victorian characters, both Hollywood and late nineteenth-century horror fiction salivate at the sight of damsels locked in the grips of dominating men or their own hysterical emotions and the Penny Dreadful series finale appears to invoke that long-standing trend as a piece of NeoVictorian media that poaches material from horror literature (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Hollywood (The Wolf Man, Bride of Frankenstein), Victorian history and Varney the Vampyre (1845–1847), the only penny dreadful actually mentioned throughout the series (Poore 2016, 64–65). Complicating matters, the series’ primary female protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) “are both socially vilified and victimised as fallen women and monstrous madwomen on account of their gender and sexuality” (Kohlke 2018). By the series’ finale, Brona flees London, abandoning plans for a bloody women’s revolution against patriarchy, while Vanessa cedes to Dracula’s advances (even though she resists Satan’s seduction a season prior) and then sacrifices herself to prevent the apocalypse. For Melanie McFarland, Vanessa’s decision to join Dracula contradicts her story to this point: “The same character who crushed Satan at the end of season two, who defeated him with the simple declaration that, although she was no more important than a blade of grass, ‘I am,’ bafflingly swooned into Dracula’s kiss in the third-to-final episode with virtually the same declaration: ‘I accept … myself’” (2016). This finale seems to conclude the way many other stories do across genres and time periods: An emancipated woman dies leaving patriarchy intact.

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Neo-Victorian media are often characterised by the dual mission of historical “recycling” and contemporary commentary (Kohlke). As a highproduction series, Penny Dreadful authentically displays a Victorian setting but it stumbles in other ways, like the Irish accent employed by English actor Billie Piper—odd for a series filmed in Dublin (Murphy 144)—or references to Sir Malcolm’s (Timothy Dalton) African “expedition to find the source of the Nile,” a task completed more than thirty years prior to the series’ time period (Poore 72). While accents and timelines might be considered acceptable discrepancies, this neo-Victorian horror drama also rarely feels bound by the literary characters it adapts or the Victorian norms it confronts throughout twenty-seven episodes. The same McFarland article contends that the finale cannot undo all that came before. While the ending remains suspect, a familiar conclusion for a female hysteric, a transcendent image of the Victorian woman emerges, ready to confront the female hysteria of the time. She does this as victim, victor and villain, always upstaging male characters whom prove equally and often more hysterical than her; but Penny Dreadful ’s efforts to reclaim the hysterical woman fall prey to similar challenges faced by feminist theorists.

Diagnosing Hysteria While hysteria was a common diagnosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the arrival of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1952), an official diagnostic guide of the American Psychiatric Association, hysteria would only be used to describe “conversion hysteria” and “anxiety hysteria,” along with several references to “hysteria” as a symptom without clear definition. The next edition in 1968 introduced “hysterical neurosis” symptoms of which involved “emotionally charged situations and are symbolic of the underlying conflicts” (DSM –II 39). The 1980 edition renamed this neurosis “conversion disorder” (DSM – III 18) and come the arrival of the DSM –V, the only officially recognised use of hysteria related to “laughing hysterically” (DSM –V 2014, 374). Hysteria would slowly fade from formal medical terminology, but it remains part of Western vernacular, employed to describe the mass hysteria of mobs or protestors, public figures who act hysterically through emotionally charged behaviour, and as a common narrative trope: the hysterical woman.

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The hysterical woman transcends genre barriers, from Queen Daenerys Targaryen’s vengeful decision to wipe out a city with her dragon in Game of Thrones (2011–2019) to mutant Jean Grey’s inability to control her superpowers in both X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and Dark Phoenix (2019). In these cases, hysterical women succumb to the allure of their power; their emotions overpower them and havoc ensues, much like the shy high schooler with telekinetic powers in Carrie (1976). Few pop culture stereotypes more effectively exemplify the long-held myth that women are too emotional—too hysterical—to perform jobs more suited for men, from soldier and police officer to CEO and politician. Consistent across all iterations of female hysteria in pop culture, fiction and nonfiction, is an excessively emotional reaction that becomes overly coded by gender (Neroni 2005, 60). In particular, horror films exploit the excessively emotional women, conjuring updated and, in Penny Dreadful ’s case, literal imagery from hysteria’s complex history. From irrational Final Girls running into serial killers’ traps to Scream Queens voicing their fear moments before death, horror cinema has gripped tighter on hysteria rather than follow the DSM ’s lead. Carol J. Clover’s quintessential Men, Women, and Chain Saws records the fetishistic interest in female suffering on display in horror films (1993, 70) and the modern rise of horror television series presents renewed interest in the subject. Angela M. Smith directly connects hysteria and horror cinema by revisiting the practices of famed nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, a champion of hysteria studies and mentor of Sigmund Freud on the subject. At the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, Charcot developed a reputation for exhibiting women experiencing hysterical seizures for live weekly audiences of fellow practitioners and the general public. His most popular subject was a fifteenyear-old, Augustine, captured in a photograph entitled “Attitudes Passionnelles Extase” (Regnard 1878). For Smith, Charcot’s exhibitionism, particularly his extensive photo archive, “resonates with typical scenes from classic horror films” specifically considering Augustine a precursor to “horror-film visions of vulnerable, beautiful young women sleeping or fainted on their beds” (2011, 167–68). For horror cinema to invoke Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière would turn out to be quite fortuitous come accusations of scripted exchanges. After Charcot died in 1893, critics dubbed him a “charlatan,” alleging he “coached his hysterical female patients in their performances” (Showalter 1993, 314).

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Charcot’s exhibitionism peppers its influence across an array of horror examples, especially exorcism films, which almost exclusively feature female’s bodies on hysterical display: The Exorcist (1973), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010), The Conjuring (2013), and The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). While men occasionally succumb to possession—as seen in Deliver Us From Evil (2014) and season two of Fox’s The Exorcist (2016–2017)—most feature the contortions and bodily horrors of women resulting in various media coverage condemning the horror subgenre for “shaming women” as Mic argues (Hermosillo 2013). Exorcism films also seem to replace the public voyeurs Charcot invited to the Salpêtrière with a room of men (i.e., priests, fathers, spouses) attempting to expel the evil within. Such tactics present a kind of historical revisionism that dignifies spectatorship with the naive defence that witnesses—voyeurs, really—must be present. Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Conkel and Kaufman 2018) parodies exorcism tropes by featuring several witches, whose connections to hysteria date back centuries, exorcising a demon-possessed man (ch. 6: “An Exorcism in Greendale” 1.6). Penny Dreadful ’s use of exorcism is less revisionist than the series’ poaching of adapted characters. One sequence featuring Vanessa having sex with a demon who appears to her as Sir Malcolm—though her mother sees only Vanessa thrusting her pelvis in the air (Logan 2014a, 1:5)—appears designed to rival the shock of The Exorcist ’s Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair/Mercedes McCambridge, voice) violently masturbating with a crucifix. Beyond shock and homage, Penny Dreadful also takes aim at the horrors of psychiatry in its infancy. Called alienism at the time, this distant predecessor of contemporary practices too confidently attempted to fix without testing, frequently relying on confidence and masculine deduction, based on conclusions from modest lab testing. By noting the undeserved hubris of Victorian era medicine, Penny Dreadful subverts a common narrative tool of the exorcism film: formal diagnosis. While the term “hysteria” dates back centuries, late-Victorian psychoanalysts commonly applied it to a series of female ailments, though Freud never clearly defined the concept, instead relying on a “working hypothesis” according to his colleague and competitor Carl Jung (1961, 10). For Charcot, female hysteria originated from “an overpowering emotional experience,” most commonly “1) marital turmoil, 2) unrequited love, 3) religious ecstasy, 4) superstitious fear, and 5) death of a family member,” all of which often occurred “in domestic settings” (quoted in Micale

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1990, 406). As a neo-Victorian work, Penny Dreadful applies many (if not all) of these causes to Vanessa, who would eventually be diagnosed with hysteria, even though she is actually possessed by a demon (possibly Satan himself). In a flashback episode, the series explores Vanessa’s relationship with her family’s coastal neighbours, the Murrays including Sir Malcolm, Vanessa’s best friend Mina (Olivia Llewellyn) and brother Peter (Graham Butler). Vanessa first experiences marital turmoil when she witnesses her mother, Claire (Anna Chancellor), and Sir Malcolm having an affair. Years later Vanessa makes a pass at Peter, who denies her, prompting Vanessa to engage in infidelity with Mina’s fiancé. This scandal leaves Vanessa bedridden and unable to speak or care for herself. Dr. Christopher Banning (Frank McCusker) has the answer, which he provides for Vanessa’s father, ignoring both Vanessa and her mother sitting next to him in the doctor’s office: “Hysteria of a psychosexual nature can be treated. The treatments involve narcotics and escalating hydrotherapy. Cold water reduces circulation to the brain, thereby reducing the metabolism and motor activity. The agitation and mental trauma will slow and then cease. I’ve seen it work, Mr. Ives, you can have no doubt” (Logan 2014c, 1:5). Rather than appease Mrs. Ives claims that her daughter was being tormented, the doctor holds strong to a rational diagnosis of Vanessa’s ailments. For Freud, this diagnosis would be worthy of praise, according to an essay honouring Charcot’s work upon his death. As opposed to the “dark and superstitious” Middle Ages, which would interpret hysteria as demon possession, Charcot not only transcended archaic “religious terminology” but also resisted such an overdetermined “explanation of hysteria, although he drew copiously upon the surviving reports of witch trials and of possession, in order to show that the manifestations of the neurosis were the same in those days as they are now” (Freud 1962, 20). To blame demon possession for hysteria, Freud says, is a matter of superstition, while a concrete diagnosis also prescribes with the same undeserved confidence as those from the Middle Ages. Alas, by praising the Middle Ages at all for clearly identifying the manifestation of the neurosis, it allows hysteria to maintain its patriarchal foothold, as Penny Dreadful reveals through criticism of Vanessa’s own diagnosis. Horror cinema commonly challenges the wisdom of the academic elite, and once Vanessa’s first doctor briefly observes her condition, he confidently diagnoses her with psychosexual hysteria. Unfortunately, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out in the groundbreaking Invention of

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Hysteria (2003), Charcot provided other practitioners, like the overconfident one treating Vanessa, “a great etiological ragbag” of possible causes: “moral impressions,” “fears,” “the marvelous,” “exaggerated religious practices,” “epidemics,” “imitation,” “untimely experience of hypnotization,” “traumatism” or “nervous shocks,” “earthquakes” and “lightning,” “typhoid fever,” “pneumonia,” “scarlet fever,” “the flu,” “articular rheumatism,” “diabetes,” “impaludism,” “syphilis”—of course syphilis— “chlorosis,” “overwork,” “hemorrhages,” “masturbation,” “venereal excesses”; but also “continence,” “intoxication,” “tobacco,” “camphor,” certain “professions,” certain “races,” “Israelites,” and so on. (72)

As Didi-Huberman’s list (laughably) reveals, Charcot’s resistance to a clear explanation of hysteria sent him and his followers into a sea of diagnostic options. Vanessa’s circumstances affirm the norms of “nineteenth century society and culture” since “women were believed to embody the traits of dependency, sensitivity, impressionability, domestic virtue, and affective over cerebral modes of perception” (Micale 1990, 409). The particulars of her condition matter less than her sex and gender in Victorian society and male medical practitioners, under the broad definition of hysteria, can freely choose how to proceed. Penny Dreadful, then, rightly criticises the common sense of the era, which subverts the norms of contemporary horror cinema. According to Vice, for example, modern horror cinema often serves as popular “Christian propaganda” through stories with overt affirmations of faith and pointed critiques of “scientific medical treatment,” especially in exorcism stories: “This phenomenon of battered women seeking exorcisms could suggest that many of those who believe they are victims of possession could really be suffering from psychological trauma” (Hesse 2016). Like other horror media, Penny Dreadful notes the hubris of medical diagnosis amidst a world of great mystery. Unlike horror media depicting contemporary settings, however, the scientific medical treatment under scrutiny bares more in common with superstition and pseudoscience than modern advances. No amount of cold water can quell the demon residing in Vanessa, nor can cold water help other women diagnosed with hysteria. Throughout three seasons the hysteria diagnosis is not disproved but given supernatural rationale. As Lauren Rocha says of Vanessa, “The manifestation of the demon during periods of sexual expression and the

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demon’s intent to use Vanessa for reproductive purposes points to the gendered emphasis of her body” (2016, 36). This aligns with other neoVictorian novels, like Possession: A Romance (1990) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which “suggest that erotic love is dangerous because it is ‘egotistical and acquisitive’ and can lead to possessive madness in the lover” (Renk 2015, 576). Similarly, Vanessa’s sex life is a matter of great importance to supernatural monsters in London (Dorian Gray, Satan, Dracula, even the more noble Ethan, who cannot control his werewolf side), as coitus leaves Vanessa not only vulnerable to her partner but any voyeuristic supernatural force, always characterised as male or obeying a male villain’s orders. These monsters seem quite aware of the hysteria diagnosis and its common usage against women, weaponised for nefarious, world-ending objectives. Once Vanessa’s possession returns Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) performs a physical examination during which the demon within taunts Frankenstein for his lack of sexual experience. Afterwards, he claims Vanessa has “a deep psychosexual responsiveness” triggered by “something or someone.” As a scientist who has witnessed the paranormal and occasionally reanimates corpses, he is willing to believe “something” (in this case, Dorian Gray, played by Reeve Carney, whose supernatural origin and occasional affinity for murder remain a mystery) traumatised Vanessa, causing her current dilemma; however, he still attempts to interpret her symptoms through Victorian medical norms shared by Vanessa’a previous doctor. Upon learning Vanessa socialised with a man the night before her symptoms began, he proposes an explanation: “Alright, let’s imagine this. She has an erotic encounter with this man, perhaps her first. We don’t know. And it evolves into some sort of sexual extremity or perversity that produces feelings of guilt or shame. That might stimulate psychological break or dissociation, which—” (Logan 2014e, 1:7). At this point countless spiders emerge from a deck of cards on a nearby table, overflowing into a mound that spreads across the floor. Whatever possesses Vanessa gazes upon the men surrounding her as well, ready to taunt them for their primitive tools of analysis. On two occasions, supernatural occurrences prove the emerging field of psychotherapy in the Victorian era cannot help Vanessa, even if they contain a glimmer of truth, as they lead scientific minds astray. After all, Frankenstein does believe her possession will be fatal and encourages the others to let her go. As noted, sex ends poorly for Vanessa, twice resulting in demon possession and, in season three, a seductive trap laid by Dracula (Christian

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Camargo), disguised as Dr. Alexander Sweet. Condemnation of sex, however, is not the point. Instead, Vanessa’s ability to find happiness, to be vulnerable, to enjoy bliss, creates an opening for inhuman monsters to control her; and for supernatural reasons, Vanessa holds the key to great evil: namely, her womb is the key to invoking yet another component of hysteria’s history. The term hysteria reportedly dates back to 1900 BCE in reference to a woman’s wandering womb. “The Greeks believed that the womb began to travel around the body if the woman was sexually frustrated,” Barbara Creed says, also noting that the womb has long been considered “an object of horror” that “signifies sexual difference” (1993, 56–57). In Penny Dreadful, both Dracula and Satan are aware of the womb’s power, continually vying for Vanessa’s willing submission throughout all three seasons. These inhuman entities, like their human counterparts (or vice versa, depending on theological arguments about the origin of evil in human or supernatural actions), weaponise hysteria to subdue women. Monsters see the womb as a sight of power, a male limitation that must be exploited for patriarchal, dominating ends. Fear of the womb, however, drives mortal physicians to assert control over women’s bodies, minds and mobility. As Creed notes, many fictional examples, from Frankenstein to The Fly (1986), depict male mad scientists “attempting to create new life but succeeding only in constructing monsters” (1993, 56). The womb clearly drives Frankenstein mad especially when all three of his reanimated corpses fail to meet his expectations. As for the other men, male hysteria, in fact, marks them with a greater degree of madness than befalls Vanessa.

Fragile Male Superegos Historically, hysteria was almost exclusively a female diagnosis, but Charcot championed male hysteria as well, chronicling more than sixty cases during the 1880s (Micale 1990, 365). Rather than merely define male hysteria based on symptoms common among women, Charcot believed male hysterics were not feminine but “robust men presenting all of the attributes of the male sex” (quoted in Micale 380). He understood the severity of this claim amidst Victorian patriarchy (though he would most assuredly not consider himself or his female exhibitionist practices female exploitation), but he held to the belief that a man became “hysterical for the same reason as a woman,” which was “a fact which will have to be

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accepted” (quoted in Levin 1974, 382). Once Charcot died and his reputation came under scrutiny, his work on male hysteria would not survive criticism; and despite shared interest in male hysteria by Freud, his primary emphasis on female patients aided in male hysteria’s omission from the history books (Showalter 314–15). Of course, male hysteria remains clearly identifiable across popular culture, from The Shining ’s (1980) Jack Torrance to the Incredible Hulk’s depictions in Marvel Comics and Marvel films. Penny Dreadful, in particular, provides a menu of male hysterics including a gunslinger who cannot control his wolf side, a mad scientist, that scientist’s rage-filled creation and a nobleman who fails to protect his children. As Rocha notes, these characters’ “fragmented identities oppose the notion of the self-composed man, a Victorian masculine ideal”: “Sir Malcolm is wracked with guilt over the death of his son, Peter, whom he abandoned in Africa in order to pursue his ambition; Ethan Chandler grapples his monstrous side that is revealed to be responsible for London’s Jack-the-Ripper-esque bloody murders; and Victor Frankenstein struggles to come to terms with the monster that he has created” (33). Each of these failings manifests hysterical symptoms, according to Charcot’s diagnosis, all thanks to “working, drinking, and fornicating too much” (Micale 1990, 406). As Evelyn Poole/Madame Kali (Helen McCrory), the primary antagonist of season two, says, “When men become mad, they quite lose their dignity” (Logan 2015c, 2:9). For Charcot male hysteria is the result of “a physically traumatic event” at work coupled with “venereal infection or alcoholic excess” (Micale 406). The male hysterics of Penny Dreadful have easily diagnosable origins. Sir Malcolm’s son dies while the nobleman seeks to map a continent, what would qualify as work for a man of his privileged stature. Previously perceived to be a proper gentleman, a hero even, “Sir Malcolm is revealed to be an exploitative sexual adventurer whose explorations have more to do with ego than with the desire for scientific discovery” (Murphy 143– 44). Further, Dr. Frankenstein becomes a morphine addict once exposed to cocaine as a child with asthma (Logan 2014e, 1:7). His extracurricular obsessions exacerbate his addiction (his choice of substance). Unable to create life himself, Frankenstein’s male hysteria prompts him to reanimate corpses with the help of his own “uncanny man-made womb” to employ Creed’s diagnostic terminology (2005, 43).

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That creation abandoned by Frankenstein eventually takes the name John Clare (Rory Kinnear) and undergoes his own trauma as well. Lacking the guidance of his creator and in solitude, he traverses “London, cruel as the harlot’s curse,” shunned for a disfigured face (Logan 2014b, 1:3). While John does not enjoy drink, intercourse or work, he still remains an example of a robust man, killing Frankenstein’s second attempt at reanimation as “a mercy” (1:3) and later Abraham Van Helsing (David Warner) to incentivise Frankenstein to create a reanimated mate for John (Logan 2014d, 1:6).The latter action exemplifies the “manly emotions” of male hysteria, including “rage, jealousy, and agitation” (Micale 1990, 406). The only character seemingly free of most symptoms of hysteria is Dorian Gray. An immortal whose power resides in the hidden portrait of himself that embodies all his sadism, Dorian easily qualifies as a monster. He kills to protect his identity (Logan 2015b, 2:8) and in support of something that piques his interest (Logan 2016a, 3:1). Hardly robust, Dorian bears much in common with “the idle middle-class woman” Elaine Showalter describes as characterised by loneliness and narcissism (303). While women approach such things with far less social mobility, Dorian seems to perceive life with the same sense of purposeless. As an immortal, he is an observer more than a fully engaged subject, much like Victorian middle-class women who were not permitted an identity beyond that of their family or spouse. He would certainly be considered “unmanly, womanish, or homosexual,” as Showalter describes the “effeminate” connotations of male hysteria during the nineteenth century (289), because he enjoys orgies with men and women and, in one instance, publicly courts a transgender prostitute, Angelique (Jonny Beauchamp), whom he supports through a public outing event at his mansion. In an age that predates the midtwentieth century usage of the term transgender, the more problematically employed term homosexual, first recorded in 1891, would likely by lobbed at him. Sadly, he would later poison Angelique for discovering his secret portrait, his affections turning to the recently reanimated Brona/Lily. This is not a transition from queerness to heterosexual coupling, Saverio Tomaiuolo argues, “as his desire to be with Lily stems from his monstrosity, not her femaleness” (2018, 167). As an immortal Dorian does not worry about women’s rights or the traumas of mortality, like other candidates for male hysteria.

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During the late nineteenth century a frequent cause of male hysteria in the workplace was a “train crash,” which Charcot recorded in five instances, along with similar traumas like a blacksmith injury to a bricklayer and chimney cleaner falling great distances (Micale 1990, 386). This iteration of male hysteria would eventually fall under the contemporary posttraumatic stress disorder, which applies to Ethan Chandler even before his encounter with a werewolf curse. As a soldier in the cavalry during the American Indian Wars, he participated in and witnessed multiple brutal massacres. Throughout season one, this piece of his backstory overtly drives his characterisation. When Ethan first appears during a Wild West show as an expert gunslinger, donning a caricatured moustache, “he exhibits an almost exaggerated masculinity; even when he loses his fake beard, the heavy American accent remains and reveals the continuous performance of this masculine subject” (Schäfer 2016, 45). This overbearing machismo immediately results in a bit of casual sex between Ethan and a female spectator impressed with his ability to shoot the feather atop her spring bonnet (Logan 2014a, 1:1). Along with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from military service, Ethan also has a secret: He plays host to a werewolf curse which leaves countless dead bodies throughout London. His ability to roam free throughout the city, undiscovered by local authorities, is one of many examples of failed male authority throughout Victorian London (Rocha 37). As the first season progresses, Ethan and Sir Malcolm’s monsterfighting team also fails to save Mina, and the series comes to a close when that same team cannot protect Vanessa from harm. “Thus,” Rocha argues, “Penny Dreadful depicts an unstable society where gender order is unable to be restored as men fail to save women who in turn threaten to derail and reconstruct society” (38). The Victorian era associated masculinity with “strength, logic, rationality, independence, productivity, and emotional self-confidence” (Micale 1990, 409) and the men of Penny Dreadful embody a veneer of these attributes but their failings throughout each season expose a problem with such allegedly stable markers. John Clare is incredibly strong but emotionally weak. Ethan seems an obvious example of independence as an American traveller abroad (American individualism is a long-standing trope, after all) but he is actually running from his own demons and a demanding father in the United States. As a scientist Frankenstein should embody logic and rationality, but his own hubris, addiction, and sexism parading as virginal innocence hinder his moral compass. Lastly,

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Sir Malcolm appears emotionally self-confident but he is prone to murderous outbursts (Hinderaker and Wilson-Cairns 2016, “No Beast So Fierce” 3.6), ignores his own infidelity when confronted with Vanessa’s (Logan 2014c, 1:5) and uses Vanessa’s own guilt and physical pain to locate his missing daughter (Logan 2014e, 1:7). For Bernice M. Murphy, these male characters’ failures stem from the series’ overemphasis on “the male fear of ‘unrestrained’ female sexuality and power that informs so many classic horror tropes” (145). While monsters are drawn to Vanessa, she occasionally subdues them with her empathy (John Clare), her love (Ethan Chandler) or her self-actualisation (Satan). Her ability to succeed where her surrounding male hysterics fail makes a suitable, albeit problematic, example of the new hysterical woman, who wishes to transcend—or reclaim—a trope while acknowledging its historical and cultural role.

A New Hysterical Woman In Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze which claims popular film employs a heterosexual male point of view through the film apparatus, she argues that an “alternative cinema” that seeks to not only confront but transcend the male gaze can “only exist as a counterpoint” (1989, 16). This is a central problem when discussing a new kind of hysterical woman. Can a term like “hysteria,” with centuries-old negative baggage, be successfully reclaimed? If Mulvey could not imagine the entire medium of film escaping patriarchy, then can an oft-sexist rhetorical and diagnostic term be redeemed? Penny Dreadful certainly tries to reimagine the hysterical woman as more positive, perhaps feminist, similar to “‘feminine protolanguage’ [that] could be functionalized as a space for marking feminist reaction and resistance to the patriarchal oppression it indexed” as Cecily Devereux says on hysteria and feminism (2014, 20). To begin Vanessa does not exemplify a common narrative figure of the Victorian era: the New Woman. For Stephanie Green this figure’s emergence during various era comes “at moments of cultural anxiety and change” amidst “changing attitudes of women” (n.p.). Similarly, Showalter highlights the correlation between rising interest in hysteria and the Victorian New Woman, during which “patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters, one obvious defense was to label women campaigning for access to the universities, the professions, and the vote as mentally disturbed” (305). Conversely Vanessa does not wish to

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openly subvert patriarchy. She might sympathise with the cause, herself a sexually liberated woman (demonic possession aside), who also befriends lower class folks and, for a time, resides with a hedge witch, Joan Clayton (Patti LuPone), who performs abortions for local girls (Logan 2015a, 2:3). Instead, as Green argues, Brona better exemplifies a unique interpretation of the Victorian New Woman, what she calls “the New Gothic Woman,” characterised by an aggressive desire for social change within the confines of Gothic genre storytelling. While Vanessa enjoys the company of other men as equals, Brona “is bent on revenge against man for the abuse suffered during her former life” (Green). To this end in season three, Brona plans to spark a women’s rebellion by creating more reanimated immortals like herself whom “[reject] the idealism of the late-Victorian suffrage campaigners seeking equality” (Green) instead favouring female superiority, Green argues. Vanessa is a different kind of threat to patriarchy. In place of Brona’s physical strength and ability to rally other women to her cause, Vanessa presents the possibility of stoic transcendence. Always the proper Victorian woman, Vanessa enjoys a degree of cultural capital—her hysteria mostly hidden from public view—as a moral exemplar and agent of change, which befits the heroes and heroines of a series about evil that lurks in the shadows. This alone should not and cannot be the only example of alternative womanhood, but it serves as a compelling example of saviours hidden from public view throughout history. According to Mark S. Micale, “hysteria has served as a dramatic medical metaphor for everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable in the opposite sex” (1989, 320). A great mystique surrounds Vanessa throughout season one, as noted by other studies that deem her “mysterious” (Rocha 33, Murphy 142), while a Showtime character bio for Vanessa begins with “Poised, mysterious and utterly composed, Vanessa is a seductive and formidable beauty full of secrets and danger.” More mysterious than her card-reading gifts and powers as a daywalker, a light witch, is her ability to enchant whomever she encounters, friends and foes, humans and monsters, outsiders and the bourgeoise. She also proves unmanageable by the men who seek to treat her like a damsel. During the pilot for example, Vanessa approaches Ethan after his Wild West performance to put his gun to work for her and Sir Malcolm fighting vampires. When Ethan inquires about Sir Malcom’s position on the matter, Vanessa responds, “I can speak for him,” which “accentuates her status as an equal or even superior to him” (Schäfer 45). This is

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one of the many ways Vanessa “moves” throughout London society more freely than other Victorian women, especially those who populate horror films depicting the same time period. Later in the same episode when the protagonists encounter a nest of vampires, “Vanessa’s calm attitude and confident behaviour as well as her ability to move around freely and unhindered during the struggles between Ethan, Sir Malcolm and the vampires denote performative differences” from other female characters often “restricted to a domestic and hence feminised sphere” (45). As Vanessa’s suffering unfolds across two seasons, her desire to find peace—to end the hysteria—becomes a weapon to subdue her. In the second-season finale, a marionette serving as a medium for Satan proposes that she ends her suffering by giving into him; “No more anguished nights of terror,” he promises, “only the peace of being who you were meant to be” (Logan 2015d, 2:10). Following Satan’s proposition Vanessa provides her answer: “You offer me a normal life,” she says. “Why do you think I want that anymore? I know what I am. Do you?” She then recites an exorcism in a language created for the series, Verbis Diablo: “Etsi wesrat khedekareb emi. Emi nebratronak nüllaan. Maa’. Etsi an nat ashgagna non dünasse. Itsi maa’ ebdee nüllaan. Emi nebratronak.” An alienist witnessing this event (a woman speaking gibberish to a doll) might be inclined to surmise quickly Vanessa’s hysteria has worsened since her last diagnosis; however, Vanessa’s words are not the ravings of a mad woman, though she is filled with righteous anger in this moment. They translate to “I have the power to kill. I am your master now. Die. You cannot fight. You must die now! I am your master!”2 which prompts the marionette to recite a counter spell, but Vanessa’s efforts succeed, and Vanessa victoriously responds, “Beloved, know your master,” (Logan 2015d, 2:10) as she crumbles the doll’s face in her hands. Rather than end her suffering Vanessa asserts that her abnormalities are not a weakness but integral to who she is. This invokes conclusions of the new feminist criticism that emerged in the 1980s. Around the same time the DSM removed hysteria from the list of formal disorders—supporting the notion that is was not “a medical condition but a cultural one, an embodied index of forms of oppression”—it became an object “at the centre of a new discourse of academic literary feminism” (Devereux 20). When Vanessa refuses to let Satan end her suffering, she both acknowledges the demon’s role in creating that suffering in the first place and transcends its overdetermining grasp on her. Similarly, when the DSM finally omitted hysteria from its list of disorders it, too, sought to solve a

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problem it created. Feminist theorists sought to take control of something previously managed by mostly male gatekeepers. The rhetorical point, according to Penny Dreadful ’s second-season finale, is the primacy of female agency: She is the master of her body and soul, despite supernatural attempts to control her physical form. Conversely, Brona’s women’s rebellion amounts to a far less agentive story arc. In season two, she emerges as a violent defender of women against patriarchy. By season three, she liberates women from torturemurder peep shows (Logan 2016a, 3:1) and street life: “Hers is a vision of a future in which female dominance is all and, as a force of destruction, she too is doomed to fail,” Green says. However, her lofty goals are cut short by Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) and Dorian, a former ally and lover who tires of her campaign to subvert social order. After capturing and chaining her, these three men, two of which are medical practitioners, proto-mansplain her ailment to her with patronisingly simple medical discourse akin to hysteria’s diagnostic criteria: DR. JEKYLL: We’re going to make you better. BRONA/LILY: Better than what? FRANKENSTEIN: He means we’re going to make you well. DORIAN GRAY: As you were before. BRONA/LILY: As I was before what? FRANKENSTEIN: Before, when you were happy. BRONA/LILY: When you were happy, you mean. FRANKENSTEIN: Lily, we’re going to try to make you healthy, take all your anger and pain, and replace them with something much better. BRONA/LILY: What? FRANKENSTEIN: Calm, poise, serenity. We’re going to make you into a proper woman. (Logan 2016c, 3:7)

Frankenstein’s words would terrify Vanessa, who described her own tenure in a mental asylum as a kind of “torture.” “It’s meant to make me normal, like all the other women you know,” she says. “Compliant. Obedient. A cog in an intricate social machine” (Logan 2016b, 3:4). Similar to Vanessa’s fatal conclusion, Lily does not transcend—gain agency—but appeals to Frankenstein, who redeems his own actions by releasing her. She then flees London, ending her story ambiguously. While this can be interpreted as a return to the status quo, the preservation of patriarchy in Victorian London, series creator John Logan proposes a

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more optimistic conclusion. “Lily is left empowered,” he says, “walking out and choosing to live any sort of life rather than live the compromised life with Dorian” (Ryan 2016). Certainly her lofty goals are “compromised” when executed next to an immortal whose indifference to human plight dictates his every whim, but as one of only two female protagonists, her final moments seem less significant than those of the rest of the male cast. Meanwhile, Vanessa spends much of season three unknowingly courting Dracula and doubting her faith, following the events of season two. “I’ve lost the immortal part of myself,” she says (Logan 2015d, 2:10). She then submits to Dracula’s allure until Ethan confronts her in the finale. For a second time, Vanessa pleas for Ethan to end her life. “You must help me defeat the forces of darkness and deny them their prize for all time,” she says. They both recite the Lord’s Prayer before Ethan shoots Vanessa. Smiling, Vanessa says, “Oh Ethan, I see our Lord,” and then she dies (Logan 2016d, 3:9). As an example reclaiming hysteria, this conclusion overdetermines Vanessa based on her womb, her ability to birth the end of humanity. Devereux similarly worries that “insisting on the centrality of the womb” when reclaiming hysteria might be “dangerous” if it centralises “the uterus as a space for the construction of feminine subjectivity,” though she adds that “rejection of hysteria as a condition of femininity in patriarchy” conversely “obscures the fact of patriarchy’s continued and renewed pressures” (40). Logan says this ending is actually a form of “empowerment”: “She owns her life, and at the end of the day, she owns her death,” he says, later adding, “she gets what she wants, which is to die and go to Heaven and be with God. That’s a shocking message for 2016, to tell that story, but that’s what it is. It’s about a woman who believes in something deeply and is willing to sacrifice her life to attain it” (Ryan). The message might not be as shocking as Logan believes, considering the role of faith among non-Western audiences and those who believe in its power, not merely its colonial and patriarchal perversions. Analysing late nineteenth-century South Asian novels, Krupa Shandilya highlights the Indian woman’s role amidst colonialism, Victorian influence, and religion. Rather than consider “tradition” a site of oppression, Shandilya contends that this Indian female figure’s religious practices can be a site of feminist agency, a site of resistance against (colonialist, masculine) rationalism (2017, 9). Returning to Vice’s correlation between horror cinema and Christian propaganda

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such films can “utilize childish notions about holy water and crucifixes” to support “proselytizing” and “missionary” agendas (Hesse n.p.). Penny Dreadful ’s conclusion seems to support this notion with Vanessa’s restored faith and peace with God, but if the series is Christian propaganda, it depicts a far more progressive faith. Vanessa beds whom she wishes, communes with an accused witch who performs abortions, speaks for herself rather than merely represents Sir Malcolm’s interests and perhaps has erotic feelings for Mina (Logan 2014c 1:5). Despite her proximity to social taboos, she still dies in God’s favour. The God of Penny Dreadful accepts a hysterical woman as she is, seeing not a woman overdetermined by madness but someone who fought for her faith and maintained as much control as outside oppression would permit. As Logan says, the series finale “gives closure to Vanessa Ives, and without Vanessa Ives, the show shouldn’t go on” (Ryan). Without this leading female hysteric, the series could only depict the male hysterics who proved far less popular, far less intriguing. This is the paradox at work in hysteria: to confront tensions among religion, science and culture, revealing both liberating potential and possible trappings. As a neo-Victorian series, however, Penny Dreadful does not leave Vanessa to her own devices but introduces Dr. Florence Seward (LuPone) who becomes the best female ally in her life. A brilliant alienist she eventually bridges science and the supernatural when she joins the fight against Dracula (Logan 2016d, 3:9). Certainly Frankenstein merges these fields, but Dr. Seward introduces a unique form of counter-memory. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), she is a gender-flipping woman with an established medical practice before the twentieth century and an example of “the transformative feminine” (Green n.p.), never employing the rhetoric of hysteria Instead she favours female elevation through plane speak and sound diagnosis. She does not reclaim hysteria, but she is a psychiatric ideal, an example of allyship for so-called hysterical women to come.

An Old Curse In a 2014 column the conservative news magazine the Washington Examiner bemoaned how liberal public figures “are feeding an outrage machine by telling women they should be offended by anything and everything” (Schow 2014). On trial here was writer-actor Lena Dunham’s critique of the phrase “TMI” which she argued contains a sexist connotation (i.e., “women can’t handle that much info”). Dunham’s statement is less

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important than how the Examiner frames its argument by employing the phrase “feminist hysteria,” indifferent to (or perhaps employed confrontationally as a tactic against perceived political correctness) hysteria’s sexist history (doubling down, by not only using the term as an attack against a woman but also deeming feminism hysterical in this context), which is of no interest to the columnist. Penny Dreadful faces a similar uphill battle in its depiction of hysterical women and the Victorian asylums that housed them. Victorian iconography might be generations removed, but contemporary usage serves as a reminder that the past, like a curse, haunts Western society, from the Examiner’s flippant use of the term (Schow n.p.) to the short-lived series Hysteria (2014) which included imagery from Charcot’s archive in its opening credits. Still other examples seek to reclaim the term. In a 2019 Nike ad for example, pro tennis player Serena Williams says, “If they want to call you crazy, fine. Show them what crazy can do” (quoted in Salam 2019). Responding to the ad, The New York Times highlights the long tradition of the hysterical woman, even interviewing Showalter, who notes how the ad invokes 1890s “politicization of the word.” On Williams, The Times claims “no better woman” can “lead the charge of reclaiming the word ‘crazy,’” following criticism against her “for what she has said, has done, has worn and looks like” (Salam). Clearly, Frankenstein would object to Williams’ behaviour but he is merely a pawn in Penny Dreadful ’s visually loud exploration of hysteria. While the series finale met with mixed reviews, the series stylistically depicts crazy by highlighting a historical moment that failed to treat mental disorders because it could not see the toxicity of its own patriarchal practices. Unfortunately the series more effectively calls attention to troubling social norms than satisfyingly concludes its women’s stories, though obsessive—sometimes hysterical—character analysis does uncover promising slivers of hope.

Notes 1. Akıllı and Öz (2016, 27), Green (2017), Manea (2016, 41), Murphy (2014, 142), and Poore (2016, 67).

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2. This language was created by David J. Peterson, creator of languages for films and television series, including Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Game of Thrones. He interpreted this passage in the forum: “Ask the Author: David J. Peterson,” n.d., Goodreads, https://www.goodreads. com/author/show/508612.David_J_Peterson.

Bibliography Akıllı, Sinan, and Seda Öz. “‘No More Let Life Divide…’: Victorian Metropolitan Confluence in Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey 28, no. 1 (2016): 15–29. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Mental Hospital Service, 1952. ———. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1968. ———. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980. ———. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2014. Clarens, Carlos. “Children of the Night.” In The Horror Film, edited by Stephen Prince, 58–69. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, MA: Princeton University Press, 1993. Conkel, Joshua, and Mj Kaufman. “Chapter Six: An Exorcism in Greendale.” Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Directed by Rachel Talalay. Netflix. October 26, 2018. Creed, Barbara. Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. ———. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Devereux, Cecily. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave.” ESC 40, no. 1 (March 2014): 19–45. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1893–1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1962. Green, Stephanie. “Lily Frankenstein: The Gothic New Woman in Penny Dreadful. Refractory 28 (June 2017). https://refractory-journal.com/green. Hermosillo, Maribel. “Why Exorcism Movies Are Secretly All About Shaming Women.” Mic, September 12, 2013. https://www.mic.com/articles/63143/ why-exorcism-movies-are-secretly-all-about-shaming-women.

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Hesse, Josiah. “Why Are So Many Horror Films Christian Propaganda?” Vice. October 18, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gqkj84/why-areso-many-horror-films-christian-propaganda. Hinderaker, Andrew, and Krysty Wilson-Cairns. “No Beast So Fierce.” Penny Dreadful. Directed by Paco Cabezas. Showtime. June 5, 2016. Jung, C. G. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. Edited by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, MA: Princeton University Press, 1961. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “The Lures of Neo-Victorianism Presentism (with a Feminist Cast Study of Penny Dreadful ).” Literature Compass 15, no. 7 (May 2018). https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12463. Levin, Kenneth. “Freud’s Paper ‘On Male Hysteria’ and the Conflict Between Anatomical and Physiological Models.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 377–97. Logan, John. Penny Dreadful. Season 1, episode 1/“Night Work.” Directed by J. A. Bayona. Showtime. April 28, 2014a. ———. Season 1, episode 3/“Resurrection.” Directed by Dearbhla Walsh. Showtime. May 25, 2014b. ———. Season 1, episode 5/“Closer Than Sisters.” Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Showtime. June 8, 2014c. ———. Season 1, episode 6/“What Death Can Join Together.” Directed by Coky Giedroyc. Showtime. June 15, 2014d. ———. Season 1, episode 7/“Possession.” Directed by James Hawes. Showtime. June 22, 2014e. ———. Season 2, episode 3: “The Nightcomers.” Directed by Brian Kirk. Showtime. May 17, 2015a. ———. Season 2, episode 8/“Memento Mori.” Directed by Kari Skogland. Showtime. June 21, 2015b. ———. Season 2, episode 9/“And Hell Itself My Only Foe.” Directed by Brian Kirk. Showtime. June 28, 2015c. ———. Season 2, episode 10/“And They Were Enemies.” Directed by Brian Kirk. Showtime. July 5, 2015d. ———. Season 3, episode 1/“The Day Tennyson Died.” Directed by Damon Thomas. Showtime. May 1, 2016a. ———. Season 3, episode 4/“A Blade of Grass.” Directed by Toa Fraser. Showtime. May 22, 2016b. ———. Season 3, episode 7/”Ebb Tide.” Directed by Paco Cabezas. Showtime. June 12, 2016c. ———. Season 3, episode 9/“The Blessed Dark.” Directed by Paco Cabezas. Showtime. June 19, 2016d. Manea, Dragos, . “A Wolf’s Eye View of London: Dracula, Penny Dreadful, and the Logic of Repetition.” Critical Survey 28, no. 1 (2016): 40–50.

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McFarland, Melanie. “How Penny Dreadful ’s Surprise Series Finale Betrayed Its Best Character.” Vox, June 30, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/6/30/ 12053744/penny-dreadful-finale-recap-vanessa-ives-dies. Micale, Mark S. “Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth Century France.” Medical History 34, no. 4 (October 1990): 363–411. ——— “Hysteria and Its Historiography: A Review of Past and Present Writings (II).” History of Science 27, no. 4 (December 1989): 319–51. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Murphy, Bernice M. “Penny Dreadful: Season 1 (Showtime, 2014).” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13 (Summer 2014): 142–46. Neroni, Hillary. The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic.” Victoriographies 6, no. 1 (2016): 62–81. Regnard, Paul-Marie-Léon. “Attitudes Passionnelles Extase.” 1878. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Paris, France (origin of photo). http://www.getty.edu/art/ collection/objects/145321/paul-marie-leon-regnard-attitudespassionnellesextase–1878-french–1878. Renk, Kathleen. “Erotic Possession, the ‘Phantasm,’ and Platonic Love in Two Neo-Victorian Novels.” Critique 56, no. 5 (October 2015): 576–85. Ryan, Maureen. “Creator John Logan and Showtime’s David Nevins on the Decision to End ‘Penny Dreadful.’” Variety, June 20, 2016. https://variety. com/2016/tv/news/penny-dreadful-ending-season-3-series-finale-creatorinterview-john-logan-david-nevins-1201798946. Rocha, Lauren. “Angel in the House, Devil in the City: Explorations of Gender in Dracula and Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey 28, no. 1 (2016): 30–39. Salam, Maya. “Taking Back ‘Hysterical.’” The New York Times, February 26, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/sports/serena-williams-nikead.html. Schäfer, Dennis. “Nosferatu Revisited: Monstrous Female Agency in Penny Dreadful.” Gender Forum 60 (2016): 43–56. Schow, Ashe. “Feminist Hysteria Is Causing the Infantilization of Women.” Washington Examiner, October 9, 2014. https://www.washingtonexaminer. com/feminist-hysteria-is-causing-the-infantilization-of-women. Shandilya, Krupa. Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late NineteenthCentury South Asian Novel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017.

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Showalter, Elaine. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender.” In Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, 286–344. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Smith, Angela M. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Tomaiuolo, Saverio. Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. “Vanessa Ives.” Showtime. https://www.sho.com/penny-dreadful/cast/vanessaives.

CHAPTER 11

The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock John C. Murray

This discursive chapter examines the ways in which mental disorders are depicted by fictional characters in various episodes of the BBC’s series Sherlock. By analysing and evaluating the tensions between fictional and historical notions of mental disorder, it will probe the symptoms represented by the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Jim Moriarty and Eurus Holmes. As the neo-Victorian series advances its narrative arc and explores the relationships between the three characters, it reproduces oppressive therapeutic labels of the late nineteenth century, which are used to oversimplify mental illness and all its varying complexities. Viewers are left to debate the intentions of Sherlock’s executive producers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. They provided their audience with either incorrect or incomplete explanations of the mental disorders that shaped the behavioural identities and personalities of adaptive, embryological and non-canonical characters such as Sherlock’s sister, Eurus. The series uses these three characters to explore mental disorder and, in so doing, teach moral lessons to its viewers (Buckingham 1987, 84).

J. C. Murray (B) Department of English, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_11

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Modern viewers of the series deploy tropes about the characters’ disorders to mythologise further the criminal deviant, the dispassionate detective and his estranged sister. Viewers are able to participate in the reparative processes of adaptation through critical discussions which challenge (mis)representations and correct presumptive biases of a television audience that may be equally ignorant of Conan Doyle’s original characters and stories and mental illness. The viewers’ knowledge of mental disorder is articulated from the perspective of an educated, Caucasian male of middle-class privilege: Dr. John Watson. He assumes the role of surrogate for viewers through experiencing, interpreting and explaining Sherlock’s abnormal behaviour to the characters that populate their fictional world. Watson also represents the audience’s apprehensions concerning mental illness and his surrogate position becomes noticeable during his encounter with Sergeant Donovan, who forewarns him about Sherlock: DONOVAN: Right, bit of advice then: stay away from that guy. WATSON: Why? DONOVAN: You know why he’s here? He’s not paid or anything. He likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. And you know what? One day just showing up isn’t gonna be enough. One day we’ll be standing round a body and Sherlock Holmes’ll be the one who put it there. WATSON: Why would he do that? DONOVAN: Because he’s a psychopath. Psychopaths get bored. (Moffat 2010, 1:1, 31:48–32:17)

The episodic structure of the series, centred on Sherlock and Watson’s investigative work, enables viewers to compartmentalise and dissect Sherlock’s eccentric behaviour and thought patterns while managing their scepticism about how his mental disorder is portrayed. Viewers are asked, both subtly and indirectly, to intervene and interpret his idiosyncrasies by their frequencies within episodic stories. Viewers assume a non-obtrusive perspective as detached observers of neo-Victorian drama; however, Sherlock’s participatory model of television inspires viewers’ investigative and therapeutic deductions. Through remote interventions within the series, viewers are able to experience, diagnose, popularise and, inevitably, glamorise mental illnesses from within the receptive space of their televisual enclosure. Viewers help to perpetuate a therapeutic culture that blurs the porous boundaries between fictional characters and the mental disorders they may

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(mis)represent. The series is framed around antisocial personality disorders that are revealed to viewers through various characters. It relies periodically on misused or misunderstood diagnostic labels, such as psychopath and sociopath, to simplify the viewers understandings of the characters’ disruptive, antagonistic and unpredictable behaviour patterns. Benjamin Poore claims the descriptive “slippage between ‘psychopath’ and ‘sociopath’ [has been] a boon for the self-help and television industries, since they can project whatever meanings are useful at any given moment onto them” (2017, 27). These slippages drive episodic storylines forward through micro-narratives embedded within both the Moriarty and Eurus story arcs. The micro-narratives personalise stories and facilitate emotional bonds between viewers and the characters they observe and attempt to diagnose remotely. Viewers are allowed to peak through the “magic window” of television and believe the “[televisual] content is an unaltered, accurate representation of real life” (Caputo and Rouner 2011, 596). The misrepresentation of mental disorder is further demonstrated through the characters’ misdiagnoses of their own conditions. “Oh, do your research. I’m not a hero. I’m a high-functioning sociopath” (Moffat 2014, 3.3, 1:21:39–1:21:44)—Sherlock utters these words before he shoots Charles Augustus Magnussen in “His Last Vow” which was a nod to Conan Doyle’s original story “His Last Bow.”1 His self-diagnosis becomes a convenient narrative device for simplifying viewers’ conceptions of mental illness and conditioning their attitudes and responses to how it is depicted. Sherlock rejects one label but merely assumes another one without addressing the stigma it may carry with it. Bran Nicol characterises it is a “significant departure for Sherlock Holmes adaptations to explicitly define Holmes as pathological” (2013, 128) and similar to the psychopathic villains he confronts. Their shared pathologies prevent a clear distinction between normal and abnormal which inhibits viewers attempts to identify them as good or evil. Moffat and Gatiss used a “modern template of the psychopath” to reconfigure traditional conceptions of the Victorian detective and his archenemy (Poore 25). In adapting the character of Moriarty, they force us to question, as Jamey Heit argues, “if villains cannot help themselves, are we right to call them villains?” (2011, 8). The neo-Victorian series distorts Victorian conceptions of the hero and villain, which were influenced by normal and pathological distinctions in behaviour, in order to subvert viewers’ expectations for character development. Scott Parrott and Caroline Parrott observe: “The nature of crime-based dramas

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(which center around law and order, hero and villain) provides television producers an opportunity to either perpetuate the longstanding and often unfounded association between mental illness and criminality or to produce counter-stereotypical and more realistic portraits in which anyone—including the ‘good guys’—might experience and even thrive with mental illness” (2015, 641). It produces a morally grey area that leaves viewers susceptible to the manipulations of a psychopathic character of Jim Moriarty which is artfully portrayed by Andrew Scott. His antagonistic depiction of the criminal-mastermind leaves viewers unsettled in their conceptions of social identity and mental identity. “Antagonists should engage others,” as Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen theorises, “as objects to be used as means to ends that represent the autotelic aspirations of psychopaths, such as dominance and hedonic gratification” (2016, 117). Moriarty demonstrates these aspects of behaviour which are not driven by greed or covetousness but by his egotistical desire for supremacy. Sherlock encounters Moriarty in “The Great Game” (Gatiss 2010, 1:3). He appears as Jim from I. T. During their encounter, Sherlock analyses his body language and subtextual cues to typify him as gay before dismissing him from further inquiry. Sherlock exhibits unconscious biases against Jim and misjudges him based on a presumptive glance. During the episode Moriarty assumes the proxy voices of various hostages including the crying lady, the scared man and the blind lady in order to direct Sherlock through a series of time-limited puzzles. The hostages’ lives hinge in the balance as Sherlock and Watson attempt to locate them before their bombs are detonated. Watson confronts Sherlock about his lack of sympathy for Moriarty’s victims, specifically the blind lady who is murdered as she begins to describe her captor’s voice: WATSON: There are lives at stake, Sherlock. Actual human lives! Jus-just so I know, do you care about that at all? SHERLOCK: Will caring about them help save them? WATSON: Nope. SHERLOCK: Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake. WATSON: And you find that easy, do you? SHERLOCK: Yes, very. Is that news to you? WATSON: No, no. SHERLOCK: I’ve disappointed you. WATSON: That’s good, that’s a good deduction, yeah.

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SHERLOCK: Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist, and if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them. (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 49:51–50:31)

Marie-Luise Kohlke argues that much “like their nineteenth-century literary forbears, many neo-Victorian fictions sport glamorous and hardened villains in equal measure and sometimes within the same guise as protagonists … Moriarty-type masters of complicated intrigues and moral monsters vie with relentless pursuers of justice, often just as prepared to resort to unorthodox and illegal means to accomplish their retribution” (2008/2009, ii). The neo-Victorian series Sherlock departs from its Victorian predecessor, particularly as informed by nineteenth-century psychiatric practices through which sufferers of pervasive mental disorders were removed from public view and hidden away from society in shame. Instead the series places mental disorder in the foreground and, in so doing, leaves it open for discussion, interpretation and explanation. Sherlock unknowingly arranges a midnight meeting with Moriarty at a London swimming pool in order to verify his involvement in the death of Carl Powers, a schoolboy who died from a fit after visiting the location. Sherlock arrives to find Watson wrapped in a bomb and Jim standing before him: MORIARTY: Jim Moriarty. Hi. Jim? Jim from the hospital? Oh, did I really make such a fleeting impression? But then, I suppose that was rather the point. Don’t be silly. Someone else is holding the rifle. I don’t like getting my hands dirty. I’ve given you a glimpse, Sherlock, just a teensy glimpse of what I’ve got going on out there in the big bad world. I’m a specialist, you see. Like you. SHERLOCK: Dear Jim, please will you fix it for me to get rid of my lover’s nasty sister? Dear Jim, please will you fix it for me to disappear to South America? MORIARTY: Just so. SHERLOCK: Consulting criminal. Brilliant. (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 1:22:15–1:23:22)

Moriarty criticises Sherlock for typifying him and failing to recognise how easily he was disguised in plain sight. Sherlock constructs a psychological profile of Moriarty that is biased and flawed. He deploys a binary of good and evil rather than recognising Moriarty’s abnormal behaviour as part of a pathological condition. Consequently, he develops conclusions that

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distance him from uncovering the truth about his nemesis: “Although I have loved this, this little game of ours. Playing Jim from I.T. Playing gay. Did you like the little touch with the underwear?” (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 1:23:59–1:24:09). Moriarty reveals the reach of his criminal enterprises and the influence he would have on consequential events that occur in subsequent episodes. He demonstrates unpredictable and threatening behaviour characteristic of a psychopath: MORIARTY: Sorry, boys. I’m soooo changeable! It is a weakness with me, but to be fair to myself, it is my only weakness.You can’t be allowed to continue.You just can’t. I would try to convince you, but everything I have to say has already crossed your mind. (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 1:27:54– 1:28:15)

Moriarty lurks in the shadows as the mastermind of murder-for-hire schemes that enhance his criminal reputation. He displays symptoms of ennui that are noticeable in Sherlock as well. Moriarty’s emotional shallowness and reactive aggression further exemplify his psychopathic tendencies: SHERLOCK: People have died. MORIARTY: That’s what people do! (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 1:24:11– 1:24:13)

Moriarty distills meanings and values through chaos and fear. Through his intellectual and emotional arrogance, he strengthens his egocentric beliefs and instantiates behavioural unpredictability which Sherlock struggles to rationalise fully. He also exhibits changes in demeanour that add more layers to his psychological identity. Changes in his speech patterns, for example, reflect his mood fluctuations that oscillate across a wide spectrum of emotions such as anger, happiness, flirtation, evasion, sympathy and cruelty. During their confrontation, Moriarty uses feminine and masculine registers to modulate his tone and avoids gendering performative qualifiers that have been used to signify stereotypical identities in fiction and reality. “The Reichenbach Fall” episode reveals the apogee of Moriarty’s criminal enterprise. Moriarty disguises himself as a tourist and wanders through the Tower of London before knocking out a security guard. With a few

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swipes of his smartphone, he opens the vault at the Bank of England, unlocks the cell doors throughout Pentonville Prison and adorns himself in the Crown Jewels. Sherlock testifies against him during his trial at the Old Bailey House: “James Moriarty isn’t a man at all. He’s a spider. A spider at the centre of a criminal web with a thousand threads, and he knows precisely how each, and every single one of them dances” (Thompson 2012, 2:3, 16:11–16:23). Sherlock is held in contempt of court and remanded to jail. He is placed in a holding cell that appears to abut Moriarty’s cell, and their physical movements mirror each other while in confinement. In “The Final Problem” episode, Moriarty and Eurus meet and similarly mimic each other’s movements from behind a wall of glass (Gatiss 2017, 4:3). Gatiss described the encounter between Moriarty and Eurus as “evil [meeting] evil across a glass divide and morph[ing] into one another” (Stolworthy 2017). The noticeable patterns of mimicry may suggest Sherlock, Moriarty and Eurus’ reciprocal recognition of behavioural similarities that are characteristic of their shared psychopathic disorder. In “The Reichenbach Fall” episode Moriarty recognises that he and Sherlock not only share the traits of genius but psychopath as well. Sherlock acknowledges their emotional and behavioural similarities as well during their confrontation on the rooftop of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital: MORIARTY: Sherlock, your big brother and all the King’s horses couldn’t make me do a thing I didn’t want to. SHERLOCK: Yes, but I’m not my brother, remember? I am you. Prepared to do anything. Prepared to burn. Prepared to do what ordinary people won’t do. You want me to shake hands with you in Hell? I shall not disappoint you. MORIARTY: Nah. You talk big. Nah. You’re ordinary. You’re ordinary, you’re on the side of the angels. SHERLOCK: Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them. MORIARTY: No. You’re not. I see. You’re not ordinary. No. You’re me. You’re me. Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. (Shakes Sherlock’s hand) Thank you. Bless you. As long as I’m alive, you can save your friends. You’ve got a way out. Well, good luck with that [shoots himself]. (Thompson 2:3, 1:15:27–1:17:20)

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Moriarty’s suicide and subsequent resurrection at the end of “His Last Vow” presage Eurus’ arrival as the East wind, which brings with it a metaphorical storm of destruction: MARY: But he’s dead. I mean, you told me he was dead, Moriarty. WATSON: Absolutely. He blew his own brains out. MARY: So how can he be back? WATSON: Well, if he is, he’d better wrap up warm. There’s an east wind coming. (Moffat 2014, 3:3, 1:32:00–1:32:15)2

Watson and his wife Mary, reduce Moriarty’s reappearance to a binary of life and death. In so doing they apply a dichotomous pattern that is similarly used for diagnosing the mental disorders of other characters as abnormal or normal. When viewers reproduce this reductive patterning, they simplify the complexities of mental illness to convenient binaries of good and evil, and normal and abnormal. Moffat once described his version of Moriarty as “a malevolent child without limits” (and the character’s behaviour is made demonstrable by his ignorance of human experience and his susceptibility to lying (2012, 2:1). The series uses Moriarty as a figurative signpost to guide viewers through a collaborative televisual experience. Moffat and Gatiss provide viewers the opportunity to locate and decipher the coded pieces of Moriarty’s history and identity in order to better understand his mental disorder. As viewers work to resolve the inconsistencies in how mental illness is depicted within the series, they create new mythologies to explore the fictional life and death of Moriarty. Through various fan-based initiatives such as the “Believe in Sherlock” campaign, online petitions to resurrect Moriarty and role-player games on various social media platforms (such as Facebook, Scratch, Twitter and Tumblr) viewers have altered their conceptions of themselves as consumers and producers of televisual content. Ann McClellan theorises the ways in which “role play characters,” for instance, “must speak like their source characters, they must interact with other characters from the show in textually appropriate ways, and they must respond to new situations in ways that are consistent with their televisual counterparts” (2013, 139). Fan fiction, in all its various forms, progresses through stages of flattery and mimicry, but it yields its own system of language, beliefs and values that eventually help to distinguish it from its original source. In establishing such distinctions viewers likely envisioned a paratextual relationship

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with Moffat and Gatiss’ adaptation which was, itself, a paratext of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. For fans of Sherlock their new interpretive text was not subordinate to its source any more than the series was subordinate to its Victorian novel predecessor. Cultivation theory may provide a valuable theoretical framework for assessing how viewers unknowingly reflect the biases embedded in televisual content. Conceptually developed by George Gerbner and Larry Gross, cultivation theory examines media effect on viewers, concluding exposure to television shapes their perceptions of reality. Their study evaluated the ways in which entertainment television becomes the “primary common source of socialization and everyday information” for viewers, especially in defining the standardised roles and behaviours they may encounter (Gerbner et al. 1986, 18). Examining television’s influence on the “conception of social reality [… does not] necessarily imply a one-way, monolithic ‘push’ process. The effects of a pervasive medium upon the composition and structure of the symbolic environment are subtle, complex, and intermingled with other influences. This perspective, therefore, assumes an interaction between the medium and its publics” (Morgan et al. 2008, 37). Derogatory labels such as crazy, psycho, wacky, nutter, mad, lunatic, kooky, insane and so on, may be used to add humour to a scene; however, the terms also carry negative connotations. “The portrayal of the twisted or nutty character is either evil or funny, but it’s a negative stereotype” claims Dr. Gene Beresin, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (quoted in Disler 2013; emphasis added). Through derisive language, stereotypical characteristics are defined and applied haphazardly on television. Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim discuss how negative framing of mental health problems may be self-reinforced as “storytellers play upon existing public prejudices (to entertain or to create a dramatic effect); they also use their own tried and tested frames of analysis and depiction from past stories … with the assumed link between mental illness being rehearsed and reinforced by new events or storylines” (2011, 39). When used to diagnose a dramatic character, stereotypical terms muddle the distinctions between actual psychiatric disorders and fictional versions oversimplified on entertainment television. As Lesley Henderson asserts, “Entertainment television operates within limited ideological frames [in which] medication, treatment, and recovery tend to be obscured” (2018, 106). Inaccurate and highly dramatised depictions of

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mental illness invariably promote stigmas which may further undermine a sufferer’s ability to function within society. Characters like Sherlock may even help to “fuel public perceptions about [mental] disorder that perpetuate the division between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ thus supporting stigmatisation” (111). In applying this dichotomous pattern to Sherlock’s behaviour, other characters hinder his attempt to function fully within society. A lack of empathy and self-absorption prevent Sherlock from understanding Watson’s frequent frustration with him: WATSON: Well? You asked me to come, I’m assuming it’s important. SHERLOCK: Oh. Yeah, of course. Can I borrow your phone? WATSON: My phone? SHERLOCK: Don’t wanna use mine. Always a chance that my number will be recognised. It’s on the website. WATSON: Mrs. Hudson’s got a phone. SHERLOCK: Yeah, she’s downstairs. I tried shouting but she didn’t hear. WATSON: I was the other side of London… (original ellipsis) SHERLOCK: There was no hurry. (Moffat 2010, 1:1, 2:49–44:58)

Sherlock channels his cognitive energies and skills through his investigative processes. The repetitive patterns of investigative thinking, however, may forestall his emotional development. In Why We Love Sociopaths, Adam Kotsko explores the fictional representations of the sociopath as a “dominant figure on television” (2012, 1). He considers the ways in which viewers may be infatuated by the sociopath, who exists outside the boundaries of social norms “and yet is simultaneously a master manipulator [that] can instrumentalise social norms to get what he or she wants” (2). The fantasy of the sociopath, therefore, matures into a “thought experiment” through which viewers deemphasise “moral intuition, human empathy, and emotional connection” in order to more selfishly explore alternate realities of power and personal freedom (4). “Even fiction, though not literally real,” as Caputo and Rouner deduce, “is believed frequently to represent and reflect the way events occur and the way people behave” (596). The term “sociopath” has been used commonly in place of psychopath, particularly in either non-clinical or non-academic forums, but it is an incorrect label for Sherlock. In an interview with Vulture, Moffat comments on Sherlock’s

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behaviour and contradicts the character’s self-diagnosis. He offers us a glimpse into the character’s subconscious mind while impressing upon viewers the scope of Sherlock’s mental disorder: He’s not a sociopath, nor is he high functioning. He’d really like to be a sociopath. But he’s so fucking not. The wonderful drama of Sherlock Holmes is that he’s aspiring to this extraordinary standard. He is at root an absolutely ordinary man with a very, very big brain. He’s repressed his emotions, his passions, his desires, in order to make his brain work better— in itself, a very emotional decision, and it does suggest that he must be very emotional if he thinks emotions get in the way. I just think Sherlock Holmes must be bursting! (Martin 2014)

Moffat’s descriptions of Sherlock’s attitude and behaviour distance us further from the popular misdiagnosis of sociopathy which has been applied consistently, albeit erroneously, to the character within fan fiction. It provides us room for manoeuvre in positing a psychopathic diagnosis that more closely resembles the character’s evolution as written by Moffat and Gatiss. Unlike Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective, their adaptive character becomes less distinguishable from Moriarty because he embodies the same pathological tendencies. Robert D. Hare, creator of “Hare Psychopathy Checklist” which is the standard tool for diagnosing psychopathy, and industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, argue that “sociopathy is not a formal psychiatric condition” (2007, 19); instead, Hare asserts that it “refers to a pattern of attitudes, values, and behaviours that is considered antisocial and criminal by society at large, but seen as normal or necessary by the subculture or social environment in which it [was] developed” (19). As Elizabeth Howell explains, “The psychopathic character [should be] understood in terms of a dissociative structure of interlocking self-states in which a ruthless instrumentality is dominant and in which there is a severe dissociation of attachment need” (2018, 17). The Diagnostic Statistical Manual provides us with the criteria for categorising and applying psychiatric labels to various mental disorders. Surprisingly, sociopath and psychopath do not appear in DSM–V.3 Antisocial personality disorder would be their closest diagnostic match because the manual classifies it as an impairment of personality that is characterised by pathological personality traits (APA 2013, 633). Psychopaths are described as “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly

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plow their way through life …. Completely lacking in conscience and feeling for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret” (Hare 1993, xi). Sherlock, Moriarty and Eurus are characters with mercurial minds and unstable moral compasses that would satisfy the DSM–V criteria for psychopathic disorder. Neuroscientist James Fallon of UC Irvine School of Medicine has determined that psychopaths may be divided further into two subtypes: primary and secondary psychopaths (quoted in Lewis and Lee 2016). He explains that the primary psychopath inherits characteristics while the secondary psychopath’s characteristics are affected by environment. Interestingly enough Fallon claims the primary psychopath may be able to recognise and mimic feelings of affection but not fully experience them. Psychopaths are not capable of feeling emotions but are able to reflexively understand and perform them. Sherlock, Moriarty and Eurus demonstrate this capacity, with varying degrees of success. As a result, they are able to traverse the liminal space between mental health and mental disorder; however, it is usually the other characters who suffer the consequences of their decisions. In “The Final Problem” episode viewers unravel Sherlock’s childhood history and his relation to Eurus. Through Mycroft’s periodic use of trigger words, Sherlock has been conditioned to reimagine his childhood friend, Victor Turner, as the family dog, Redbeard. In so doing, he gradually purges his sister from memory and forgets her involvement in his friend’s death. During the episode Sherlock receives a phone call from a desperate young girl who is aboard a plane of unconscious passengers and crew members. The parallel plot is orchestrated by Eurus, who holds her brothers and Watson captive on the prison-island of Sherrinford (Gatiss 2017, 4:3). Eurus directs them through several moral problems that require timedbased decisions, a plan reminiscent of Moriarty’s tests in “The Great Game” (Gatiss 2010, 1:3), with each choice bringing an unanticipated consequence. During one scenario, Eurus provides them with a handgun and asks either Watson or Mycroft to kill the governor of Sherrinford in order to spare his wife from the same fate. They fail to oblige her request, so the governor commits suicide. Eurus shoots his wife afterwards to demonstrate her uncompromising pathological will. The next scenario offers Sherlock clues for solving a murder, which was committed previously by one of three possible suspects: brothers Nathan, Alex

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or Howard Garrideb. Eurus informs her captives that she will drown the guilty man. Sherlock correctly identifies the criminal but Eurus drops the other men to their deaths and drowns the guilty man as well, without differentiating their innocence or guilt. She criticises the banalities of normal feelings and thinks that Sherlock has anaesthetised himself to feeling because he recognises his own emotional abnormalities: his lack of empathy with respect to others; an inability to express genuine love and the absence of guilt or remorse for his problematic behaviour. Eurus enslaves her captives within a psychological madhouse in which she assumes a male-centric perspective towards the dominance of intellectually inferior subjects. The previous scene illustrates Eurus’ persistent pathological tendencies. The handgun is a phallic symbol for male virility and the male characters’ inability to fire the handgun may be an obvious symbolic allusion to male castration. Through their projection of impotence, weakness and failure, which are uncharacteristic of the traditional male hero, they exemplify disempowerment. Eurus replaces the dominant, male power structures imposed on her with a malicious and evil form of mind control: a psychological abuse that diminishes her victims’ self-esteem and selfconfidence. This conditioning is exemplified by the ways in which Eurus recruits her collaborators from among her prison guards and emotionally reprogrammes them to carry out her will. While navigating the labyrinth maze of rooms they discover an empty coffin appropriately sized for their friend, Molly Hooper, as Sherlock surmises. Eurus convinces Sherlock that Molly’s flat has been wired with explosives. It will be detonated if he does not persuade Molly to say “I love you” before his time expires: SHERLOCK: Molly, please, without asking why, just say these words. MOLLY: What words? SHERLOCK: “I love you.” MOLLY: Leave me alone. SHERLOCK: Molly, no, please, no, don’t hang up. Do not hang up. EURUS: Calmly, Sherlock, or I will finish her right now. MOLLY: Why are you doing this to me? Why are you making fun of me? SHERLOCK: Please, I swear, you just have to listen to me. EURUS: Softer, Sherlock.

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SHERLOCK: Molly, this is for a case. It’s a sort of experiment. MOLLY: I’m not an experiment, Sherlock. (Gatiss 2017, 4:3, 1:00:07–1:00:37)

Molly tells him he must say the words “I love you” first and his stuttered hesitance exemplifies his inability to empathise with her. Sherlock takes advantage of Molly’s sincerity to save her but he does not realise how his manipulative tendencies put her life in jeopardy. Sherlock is a master at deducing the flaws of human character but he masks his own through role playing and performance. In this case he exploits her friendship and loyalty then exposes her to the villainy of characters such as Eurus and Moriarty who have manipulated her as a pawn in their game of wits with Sherlock. Molly’s painful utterance of the phrase only underscores Sherlock’s neglectfulness towards her: “Eurus, I won. I won. I saved Molly Hooper!” (Gatiss 2017, 4:3, 1:02:45–1:02:47). Interestingly enough, the semantic order of his response may indicate his reflexively narcissistic reaction to the world around him. His victory is short-lived as Eurus informs him Molly was never in any danger: “EURUS. Look what you did to her. Look what you did to yourself” (2017, 4:3, 03:00–1:03:02). Viewers have expressed a general dissatisfaction with the aforementioned scene, particularly in how it depicts Molly’s experience of emotional and psychological abuse. It leaves her with unresolved emotions towards Sherlock. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Moffat comments on an alternate idea for the scene in which Molly would be “trapped inside the coffin and [Sherlock] had to solve a puzzle to get her out” (Hibberd 2017). In elaborating on the interplay between the characters, Moffat disquiets fans of the series by abruptly stating that Molly “probably had a drink and went and shagged someone” (Hibberd). The executive producer’s unsympathetic explanation provides no additional insight into his creative thinking, but it may indicate the reciprocal vulnerability he shares with his audience. Their experience goes beyond generalised effects and leads them to form impressions, which serve as a shorthand for translating circumstantial evidence into an explanatory story. It leaves writers and viewers responsible for the stories they mutually craft and dissiminate. Viewers locate in Sherlock what they expected to find because the series and its writers told them what they should look for within the characters: an artful misrepresentation of mental disorder. Television drama was created to entertain, but that outcome should not allow its creators to drift away from their accountability to viewers.

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Fictional characters are not supposed to have fully developed personalities because they lack the range of experiences by which we annotate and index the voluminous data of real life. Therein lies the limitations of viewers’ remote diagnoses. Creating fictional characters becomes a great responsibility, especially when they come to represent the selfdiscrepancies and emotional vulnerabilities we cultivate within ourselves and prescribe to other people. Cary Smith and Li-Ching Hung may provide a more palatable explanation of psychopathic personalities and the negative consequences of their actions: “The primary psychopath finds it impossible to develop a connection with others … this leaves the individual with the ability to cause great physical and psychic damage to others without compunction or guilt” (2013, 28). Sherlock is not able to recognise the harm he causes to other characters. When he does act on their behalf it is usually to correct his errors in judgment, which result in unintended consequences for them. Thus, Sherlock may share hereditary symptoms of mental illness with his siblings. Sherlock performs emotions he may not actually experience in order to influence the behaviour of other characters. For example, he often manipulates Molly’s affections to bend her to his will. During a Christmas party at Mrs. Hudson’s flat, Sherlock ridicules Molly’s appearance and behaviour and presumes her infatuation with a new love interest that turns out to be him: MOLLY: You always say such horrible things. Every time. Always. Always. SHERLOCK: I am sorry. Forgive me. (Moffat 2012, 2:3, 43:40– 43:43)

A short time thereafter Sherlock asks Mycroft, “Do you ever wonder if there is something wrong with us?” to which Mycroft responds, “Caring is not an advantage” (Moffat 2012: 2:3, 47:12–47:26). Mycroft reveals his concerns about hereditary mental illness as well but the series never addresses it fully. It is apparent that Sherlock recognises the effect of his aggressive behaviour traits on others but his awareness does not alter his maladaptive patterns which become self-reinforcing as demonstrated by his dispassionate apology to Molly. Much like Sherlock, Eurus’ pathological behaviour draws viewers’ attention to her persistent aggressive traits and her violent actions which are symptomatic of psychopaths; however, we also must consider how

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the character’s depiction may associate these traits with genius, a manifestation of high intelligence found in common among the Holmes siblings and Moriarty as well. There has been a long-standing belief that genius and madness share similar emotional and behavioural tendencies, and this belief has been echoed in the words of various literary, scientific and philosophical writers. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “Those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia” (quoted in Simonton 1994, 284; emphasis added). Eighteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer similarly argued, “It has often been remarked that there is a side at which genius and madness touch, and even pass over into each other …. This cannot be ascribed to chance, for on the one hand the number of mad persons is relatively very small, and on the other hand a person of genius is a phenomenon which is rare beyond all ordinary estimation, and only appears in nature as the greatest exception …. It might seem from this that every advance of intellect beyond the ordinary measure, as an abnormal development, disposes to madness” (1906, 246–48). English poet and playwright William Shakespeare created various depictions of mental disorder in plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. David Chan historicises the ways in which the “notion of the mad genius became more firmly endorsed in the mid–1800s. Under the influence of Darwin’s evolution theory and the revolutionary unrest of the period, genius came to be regarded as a mental disorder” (Chan 2001, 3). Chan evidences how twentieth-century psychiatrists such as Ernst Kretschmer considered the “psychopathic component” to be an “indispensable catalyst perhaps, for every form go genius.”4 These noteworthy thinkers in philosophy, psychiatry and literary drama provided us with descriptive examples of how genius was associated with madness, which was conceptualised within different socio-cultural spheres and historical periods. In so doing they contributed to our popular knowledge that has evolved and flourished because of our efficiency in disseminating emotional and value-laden images; however, these images often fail to represent reality with much accuracy, particularly on television. In portraying Moriarty as the Napoleon of crime and Eurus as a demon of immeasurable intelligence, the series characterises genius as a “frightening problem,” as Emily Asher-Perrin observes, and the “[final] episode lands a vague assertion that once a person hits a certain level of genius

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they are automatically a sociopath, incapable of seeing the value of life and morality” (2017). Sherlock’s writers do not attempt to unpack the causal relationship between psychopathy and predatory or impulsive, violent behaviours. In failing to do so they draw their audience’s “attention to one aspect of reality, while diverting [their] attention from another” (Parrott and Parrott 2015, 642). As Asher-Perrin points out, But even if there was never a name for a specific condition, the show has played with the veneer of “genius begets mental-illness-as-superpower” for years now, only to stretch that veneer to the absolute limit where Eurus is concerned; she begins as a towering villain who can control a person by blinking and speaking a few select words, but her genius is really meant to be a prison that has kept her completely isolated. Without a clear understanding of how mental illness truly affects people, none of this is wellconceived or even remotely respectful. It’s just there to make Eurus whatever the show needs her to be.

Sherlock’s writers titillate viewers by allowing the characters to be unpredictable, rather than addressing patterns of behaviour that are symptomatic of psychopaths. If it was the executive producers’ intention to excite viewers, then it may have served as entertaining shock value within the episode itself. If it was not their intention to do so, then they missed an opportunity to educate the neo-Victorian drama’s viewers on mental illness. Popular culture produces fictional, historical and biographical representations of the psychopath on television in order to satiate viewers’ consumptive desire for personalities that resist normalcy regardless of how inauthentic their portrayals may be. Therein lies the problem, as viewers’ psychological awareness of character disorders may augment their consumptive appetites for greater diversion vis-à-vis remote (albeit fictional) therapy. The representation of mentally ill characters on television tends to “overemphasize negative aspects” (Kimmerle and Cress 2013, 933). In an open letter to the BBC, the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) criticised its coverage of mental health issues on various entertainment and documentary television programmes. While not directly addressing Sherlock, HVN chastised the BBC for its general “failure to acknowledge that the origins of problems, and the things that keep them going, are often not simply in the brain but in the events and circumstances of people’s

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lives—including poverty, urban living, migration, childhood abuse, bullying, racism and other forms of victimisation” (“Open Letter” 2016). As viewers revel in a character’s lack of remorse, empathy, ethics or conscience, they begin to accept the “negative and stigmatized images of the mentally ill, such as violence, bizarre behavior and failure” (Signorielli 1989, 328). In celebrating a character’s misbehaviour, viewers unknowingly affirm and perpetuate stereotypes for their own amusement. They use social cues such as tweets, memes, GIF or videos, to illustrate the characters’ disorders and disseminate their findings through social media. These images become part of a larger narrative mosaic that extends the life of the characters and series within popular culture. The influence of their “transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new [visual] text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (Jenkins 2006, 95–96); however, an obvious alteration has been made and a transformation of character and story invariably takes place. The use of digital communication and social networking draws viewers into the construction of a therapeutic community in which various forms of non-episodic information is created, analysed, interpreted and often used to expand the history and identity of the leading characters within the series. Digital messages should serve as subliminal signals to enhance viewers’ awareness of mental disorders, even in the experimental space of televisual fiction. Such openness may introduce and familiarise viewers with the various types of mental disorders depicted in Sherlock; however, one must question its value, particularly when it is used to disseminate artificial and misleading notions of mental health, which are replicated and standardised throughout the symbolic communities of television viewership. As Jonathan Bignell and Jeremy Orlebar argue, “Television … is negotiated between texts, institutions, and audiences in a radically flexible way that suggests both televisions specificity and also its connection with other media and with culture in general” (2005, 60). A more recent study conducted by Emily Tanner substantiates further the systematic ways in which television and social media glamorise mental disorder. For example, Tanner addresses a “disturbing sub-culture on Instagram in which young people are sharing messages which promote dangerous (even deadly) behaviours” (2015, 109). To her, young people are consciously incorporating symptoms of various mental disorders within their personalities and behaviours. Identifying with the character in such an intimate way “may involve cognitive and affective states that facilitate loss of self-awareness, forgetting the self and becoming the other.”5

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In so doing, they deploy mental disorder as a coping mechanism for reallife issues and blur the lines further between fiction and reality. Brigitta Höijer points out that “people bring basic perspectives, interpretations, cognitive schemas or social and cultural frames of reference with them to an interpretive situation, such as the viewing of a television programme …. Ideas and interpretations are thought to at least partly reflect some external reality; there is some kind of relationship, although incomplete, between sociocognitive representations and the social and material reality” (1992, 278). Viewers may perpetuate stereotypes of mental disorder which remain uncontested and uncorrected in popular knowledge. The stereotypes become a convenient tool for proliferating misguided social interactions, particularly with people of varying behavioural or mental disorders. Scott Parrott and Caroline Parrott’s study reflects on the creation of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes for mental illness in U.S. television, particularly in crime-based dramas. They deploy cultivation and framing theories in order to examine how television portrayals may impact viewers beliefs, particularly those who may be suffering from existing mental health disorders (642). They evaluate both theories within their theoretical study, which examines how dominant frames of reference have been used to depict sufferers of mental illness as deviant, criminal or violent. In so doing they illustrate the potential effects of stereotypical characterisations on viewers but they are not able to provide the empirical data needed to fully evidence their persuasive argument. Elaine Sieff articulates the ways in which framing may be used to propose uncorroborated evidence of disorders and predict behaviour patterns. She provides examples of subtextual meanings, such as “mental illnesses makes people violent” or “more likely to be criminals,” to demonstrate how disorders may be oversimplified and used to associate violent actions with mental illness (2003, 263); however, many people with mental illness are not violent, so it cannot be used to guide expectations of anticipatory behaviour in a general sense. Only the writer of a character truly knows what he or she is thinking, what their choices may be and how they will act. Viewers lack such omniscience and rely on “situational … and contextual factors” (Parrott and Parrott 643) to inform their understanding of individual choices. These factors may multiply and commingle across various platforms, including episodic television, in which viewers cleverly try to interpret subtextual meanings through various televisual

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codes. For example, characters may be coded to match a personality disorder. John Fiske argues that, “codes are links between producers, texts, and audiences, and are the agents of intertextuality through which texts interrelate in a network of meanings that constitutes our cultural world” (1987, 4). Representational coding may include physical gestures, speech and emotional responses that are used to portray psychopathy as a type. These types are used to group all sufferers of psychopathy rather than differentiate between the most extreme cases among them, such as Moriarty, Sherlock and Eurus, and the meanings encoded within their archetypal portrayals. These coded patterns serve to oversimplify “complex hierarchical structures … for the sake of clarity” (Fiske 4). The popularity of these characters demonstrates viewers’ “public appetite for the sort of difficult characters who aren’t immediately lovable or [understandable]” (Woods 2014). It may reveal the audience’s reception of the characters as representative of an outsider group, which is depicted stereotypically within remote televisual configurations that seek to collapse the emotional and spatial distance between them. In mapping and exploring the psychiatric behaviour of Moriarty and Eurus, the series challenges the masculine and feminine tropes of nineteenth-century fiction, particularly in addressing Victorian notions of the hierarchical male villain or the “docile, passive, and domestic aspects of feminine behavior” (Jockers and Kirilloff 2016, 3). In so doing, it attempts to offer viewers a non-gender-biased investigation of mental disorder. Eurus and Moriarty embrace the fluidity of identity and employ flirtation, manipulation and aggression as performative strategies for achieving their objectives; however, the series characterises Eurus as a violent and dominant female that has been incarcerated on the island-prison of Sherrinford for everyone’s protection. Sherlock has expunged her from his childhood memories, which may have shielded him from recognising his own pathological behaviour. Her appearance is strategically designed as a plot device that cannot suffer close scrutiny because the narrative arc subverts the character as a female transgressor. Sherlock’s writers ended up creating a female villain that comes to embody traditional nineteenth-century feminine tendencies, rather than embracing a genderless portrayal of psychopathy. In many ways Eurus satisfies the gendered model of late nineteenth-century mental disorder, which defined the “common characteristics” of female madness as “antimaterial, selfish, willful, violent, [and] erotic” (Theriot 1993, 17). Much

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like her Victorian female predecessors, Eurus is confined within an asylum for failing to satisfy the normative expectations of female behaviour, which were and still are prescribed and delivered through an androcentric discourse: in this case it is through the deliberative machinations of both her actual male writers and fictional male captives: EURUS: Why am I here? MAN: Why do you think you are here? EURUS: No one ever tells me. (Gatiss 2017, 4:3, 25:47–25:52)

The character’s madness is denoted by the murders she commits in both the past and the present and the logic she provides to rationalise her motivations. Eurus’ knowledge of her madness may be assumed to develop, much like her genius, from childhood into adulthood. Her dual labels are also considered by Sherlock and his fellow captives who presume Eurus’ genius may have catalysed her psychopathic tendencies. Eurus indicates either an unwillingness or inability to differentiate between good and bad during a previously recorded psychiatric evaluation, which is viewed by Watson and Mycroft while Sherlock gains entry to his sister’s cell: EURUS: Am I being punished? MAN: Were you bad? EURUS: There’s no such thing as bad. MAN: Well, not good. EURUS: Good and bad are fairy tales. (Gatiss 2017, 4:3, 26:04– 26:10)

Much like his sister, Sherlock does not accept responsibility for the deaths of victims regardless of their innocence. He exhibits a moral anaesthesia that is not only reminiscent of Moriarty and Eurus but also easily associable with psychopaths. The mental disorders of characters in the series are often separated from the various factors that may have influenced their development. The character of Sherlock, for example, uses a network of homeless spies to help him acquire pieces of investigative puzzles that fall outside his purview: SHERLOCK: Homeless network. Really is indispensable. WATSON: Homeless network?

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SHERLOCK: My eyes and ears, all over the city. WATSON: Ah, that’s … clever. So you scratch their backs, and … SHERLOCK: Yes, and I disinfect myself. (Gatiss 2010, 1:3, 1:04:33– 1:04:44)

Sherlock’s witty retort to Watson underscores how socioeconomic stigmas may have triggered the debasement and alienation of the homeless characters that populate his network of spies. The homeless characters’ circumstances are never addressed fully by Sherlock or the series’ writers through either anecdotal or empirical ways of knowing. Sean Brayton argues that fictional portrayals must demonstrate their “relation to other vectors of power and identity (i.e., race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.)” (2017, 286) which may affect viewers’ understandings of the “social origins” of mental illness as Stephen Harper concludes (2009, 15). Bereft of such rich and elaborate commentaries, the series fails to “individualise madness,” violence and the “pitfalls of late capitalism to support an increasingly problematic narrative of neoliberalism and [populism conceptions of] mental health” (Brayton 283). Through role-playing Eurus disguises herself as other characters, including the fearful daughter of serial killer Culverton Smith, Watson’s sympathetic therapist and a random, flirtatious woman with whom he has an emotional affair. In so doing Eurus shows more desirable traits of feminine behaviour that may symbolise her disillusionment with male-centric, oppressive conceptions of love. Shoshana Felman argues that female madness might be “a request for help” (1997, 118); she contends further that the “socially defined help-needing and help-seeking behaviour is itself part of female conditioning, ideologically inherent in the behavioural pattern and in the dependent and helpless role assigned to the woman as such” (118). It also harkens back to the domestic subjugation of women in the Victorian period. Victorian women and children were grouped “together as helpless creatures needing the protection of strong men, [who] were indignant at the knowledge that women had to support themselves, that they suffered degrading wrongs” (Neff 1966, 14). In this context Eurus embeds herself within the trope of the fearful young girl to test Sherlock’s deductive skills in decoding her symbolic cry for help. Sherlock deduces her trope, and she assumes a docile and submissive position of reliance on his male affection. By reducing Eurus’ character to passive compliance, the series weakens its own construction of her psychopathy, genius and villainy. Eurus is returned to Sherrinford for

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further observation, with occasional visits from Sherlock and her family. They will affirm her desire to be loved and recognise her inability to love them in kind. The series hints at Eurus’ emotional healing; however, such representations are unsatisfying because they oversimplify the complexities of the character’s continuing psychopathic disorder which would not be “cured” simply through her family’s unified expression of love. Instead it would require a consistent level of responsiveness to emotional and behavioural disorders that would be more measurable and predictable than those found in Sherlock’s fictional iterations. The performative aspects of Eurus’ psychopathy would likely continue beyond this episodic point. She would cycle through any number of scenarios to manipulate others and regain control. The neo-Victorian series created some difficult problems for itself. It attempted to differentiate Sherlock from its Victorian predecessor by adding new layers of mental and behavioural complexity to its namesake (and to his rivals as well). In so doing, it allowed some wiggle room for characters such as Sherlock, Moriarty and Eurus to grow and develop emotionally. Such transformations would be difficult if not impossible for true psychopaths to accomplish. In failing to portray the psychopath, however, the series may have succeeded in an unexpected way. Through its (mis)representations of mental disorder, it has stimulated critical discussions that may challenge and correct the presumptive biases of uninformed minds.

Notes 1. Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” first appeared in Strand Magazine under the title “The Adventure in the Final Problem,” which was published in December 1893. 2. See chapter four “Die mythologischen Windgottdarstellungen,” in Kora Neuser’Anemoi. Studien zur Darstellung der Winde und Windgottheiten in der Antike (1982). In ancient Greek mythology Eurus was the East Wind, a child of Aeolus and one of the Anemoi or wind gods, which included Boreas (North Wind), Notus (South Wind) and Zephyrus (West Wind). 3. This study will refer to the DSM–V version, which was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). 4. Kretschmer and Cattell (1931, 20); quoted in Kessel (1989). 5. Cohen (2001, 250–51); quoted in Caputo and Rouner (598).

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Lewis, Tanya, and Samantha Lee. “Here’s How to Tell a Psychopath from a Sociopath.” Business Insider. January 16, 2016. https://www.businessinsider. com/how-to-tell-a-psychopath-from-a-sociopath-2016-1. “The Making of Moriarty.” Masterpiece. December 10, 2012. http://mptlegacy.wgbhdigital.org/wgbh/masterpiece/sherlock/moriarty.html. Martin, Denise. “Steven Moffat Explains the Origins of Sherlock’s Best-Man Speech.” Vulture.com. January 27, 2014. https://www.vulture.com/2014/ 01/steven-moffat-sherlock-holmes-best-man-speech-interview.html. McClellan, Ann. “A Case of Identity: Role Playing, Social Media and BBC Sherlock.” Journal of Fandom Studies 1, no. 2 (2013): 139–57. https://doi.org/ 10.1386/jfs.1.2.139_1. Moffat, Steven. Sherlock. Season 1, episode 1/“A Study in Pink.” Directed by Paul McGuigan. BBC America. October 24, 2010. ———. Season 2, episode 1/“A Scandal in Belgravia.” Directed by Paul McGuigan. BBC America. May 6, 2012. ———. Season 3, episode 3/“His Last Vow.” Directed by Nick Hurran. BBC America. February 2, 2014. Morgan, Michael, James Shanahan, and Nancy Signorielli. “Growing Up with Television: Cultivation Processes,” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, 3rd ed., edited by in Jennings Bryant and Mary B. Oliver, 34–49. New York: Routledge, 2008. Neff, Wanda F. Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Neuser, Kora. Anemoi. Studien zur Darstellung der Winde und Windgottheiten in der Antike. Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1982. Nicol, Bran. “Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the TwentyFirst Century.” In Sherlock Holmes and Conan: Multimedia Afterlives, edited by Sabine Vannacker and Catherine Wynne, 124–39. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. “Open Letter about BBC Coverage of Mental Health.” Hearing Voices Network (HVN). February 21, 2016. http://www.hearing-voices.org/news/bbsopen-letter2016/. Parrott, Scott, and Caroline T. Parrott. “Law & Disorder: The Portrayal of Mental Illness in U.S. Crime Dramas.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, no. 4 (2015): 640–57. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08838151. 2015.1093486. Poore, Benjamin. “The Villain-Effect: Distance and Ubiquity in Neo-Victorian Popular Culture.” In Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and Transformations in Popular Culture, edited by Benjamin Poore, 1–48. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017. Riddle, Karyn. “Cultivation Theory Revisited: The Impact of Childhood Television Viewing Levels on Social Reality Beliefs and Construct Accessibility in

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CHAPTER 12

Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives Sarah E. Maier

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or ‘feeling one’s way in’] is developed by experience. Albert Einstein, “Preface” to Max Planck’s Where Is Science Going? (1933)

Neo-Victorian narratives like Wendy Wallace’s The Painted Bridge (2012) and Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (2005) seek to deny any nostalgic or veiled representation of madness to demonstrate how the Victorian burden of proof was on those persons, in this case women, whom society treats as insane to prove sanity but also exposes how individual difference—or inclination, habit, nature, imagination—is often turned into a weapon to traumatise and silence persons who do not adhere to social

S. E. Maier (B) University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_12

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expectations but see life “otherwise.” As Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have pointed out, the neo-Victorian novel “does not dramatize an opposition between (post)modern self and Victorian other, so much as the self-as-other” particularly in narratives of trauma (2010, 13; emphasis in original). Neo-Victorian narratives of madness consider how there may be demonstrated intellect, rational behaviour and no outward signs of illness but Victorian society may deem him/her unfit; above all, the “lunatic” is victimised if appearing to hold ideas that move beyond convention whether it be in resistance to treatments, spectral visions and/or unconventional beliefs. Neo-Victorian narratives scrutinise how creative self-perspectives and/or imagination may have been derogated as madness but, in fact, creativity and/or what might be termed excessive intellectualism or misguided self-authority over own’s own person are not necessarily madness but rather a refusal of social constraints and silencing. In the nineteenth century, asylums, rest homes, water-cure clinics and other metaphorically named places became not only legitimate dwelling places for those female members of society needing solace and routine, but they specifically became a place for specialists to treat illnesses such as hysteria or neurasthenia with the clientele of the establishments preponderantly female. While some of these nineteenth-century women suffered from ailments as diverse as anorexia, “lactational insanity” and/or “puerperal insanity”/postpartum depression,1 they were just as often sent away by family, husbands or employers because they were poor women, female servants, deserted women, widows or women with illegitimate children (Showalter 1980, 161–62). They might also be disobedient, misbehaving women who required time to achieve the desired humility thought to be appropriate for a proper Victorian woman.2 Many assumptions were made about women’s symptoms, or worse, there were no symptoms except deviation from conventional norms of angelic womanhood were seen as in need of a cure. It is as an investigation of gendered mis/understanding that the two novels, The Painted Bridge and Pinkerton’s Sister, situate themselves as neo-Victorian revisionings of madwomen; in the first case, Mrs. Anastasia (Anna) Palmer and in the second, Miss Alice Pinkerton, are cast outside of society for their behaviour in these twenty-first-century novels. While it would be anachronistic to read a Victorian novel through the lenses of modern-day knowledge of mental illness, these neo-Victorian narratives seek to provide the female characters of these novels with a voice. It is imperative to hear these women’s own narrative(s) of their supposed

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insanity and to consider how women’s stories were critically misinterpreted by men, medical or otherwise, who had a “lack of consideration for physical symptoms and causes of illness” or where the stories are made to suit “the needs of [their] theories and interpretations rather than serving an effective diagnosis and treatment of the patient” (Muller 2009, 88). It is not necessary to “present a measured view or depict both sides of [this] conflict objectively; with unashamedly partisan outrage, it can denounce the suffering of the forgotten of history, the excluded, the outcast, the downtrodden, the marginalised” (Kohlke and Gutleben 19), in the Victorian world. The medical men’s blind misdiagnoses may include an unwillingness to believe women when they convey their truthful accounts of their experiences in an unusual or creative manner. Set in 1859, The Painted Bridge tells the story of Anastasia (Anna), a young woman who enters a loveless marriage to a curate, Vincent Palmer, as a means of escape from her family home is then cast aside into Lake House to rest and recuperate. Privately licensed houses like Lake House in The Painted Bridge were often family-run businesses passed from father to son, with no medical knowledge required. It was not until 1859 when the Commissioners of Lunacy considered granting licenses solely to certified physicians and that such places should be limited to only one sex with assurances of fresh air and the ability to roam freely in the institution.3 Men were given positions of authority to observe or ignore, treat or mistreat, free or confine, reward or punish the women under their care. Believing she is on a visit to friends of her husband, she enters the ivy-covered house, immediately recognising something is amiss because the library seems “a funny old place …. It doesn’t look as if anyone ever reads the books” (Wallace 5). The appearance of the house belies the mistreatment within its walls; the non-physician owner, Quierios Abse, has inherited the management of the asylum from his father, and he runs it as a business. He could care less about the women who are suffering from mental illness, or those who are wronged, “abandoned by husbands or brothers who would neither pay their costs nor remove them. A good cure rate impressed the families but depressed the revenue” (17), so he would seek to extend their treatment, preferring loose, non-time limited diagnoses like hysteria which would allow him to continue to charge on a continuing basis. In fact, “he disliked lunatics above all other kinds of people” (123). Anna physically and emotionally resists her incarceration, calmly stating her situation to Abse as a mistake that has been made by her husband,

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the Reverend Vincent Palmer. Anna tries to maintain a sense of agency in spite of her circumstances to the point where, in self-imposed silence, she “wouldn’t—couldn’t—utter a word” to any of the women because she “must keep herself separate, prove that she wasn’t one of them, that she didn’t belong here and never would” knowing that she “would need all of her strength in this place, especially if they decided to try to cure her” (20). Reverend Palmer has silenced her voice in the outside world, but she controls her own actions within her current environment of the asylum. In her first meeting with Abse, she is informed that two doctors—who may or may not have been alienists—signed the certificate of commitment as did her husband4 ; while there, she will be seeing Dr. Higgins as well as Dr. Lucas St. Clair, one for her body and mind and one for therapy via her photographic portrait. Anna’s desire to free herself leads her to question the ironically named, matron, Mrs. Makepeace: “When? How soon can I meet him?” “Next time he comes to Lake House. By then, we can hope for an improvement in your state of mind.” “I don’t need improvement. There is nothing wrong with my mind.” Makepeace smiled properly for the first time and reached out her hand. “You are hardly in a position to be the judge of that.” (26)

Higgins immediately confirms this complicit diagnosis, indicating Anna is not well but, “On the contrary. You are suffering from hysteria. Most of your sex do, at some time in their lives” (34). The assumption by such Victorian doctors, according to Ekbert Faas, was that women with any lack of conventionality would manifest hysteria or “the phenomenon of double consciousness” that was “familiar to an age as obsessed with the self and its ever-threatening disintegration as the nineteenth century” (1988, 40). Aside from lumping all women together without distinction or respect, Dr. Higgins proceeds to drug Anna against her will with an emetic, which leads to a flashback to her doctors in Dover who had given her syrups, tonics and “Morphine, in extremis ” from which she instantly ascertained “a doctor could be a brute” (35) without compassion or understanding. From Abse, who with no medical knowledge added on other treatments, Anna learns more cruelty; he has no interest in Anna’s story. He willingly subjected her to a whirling chair that results in “her skin no longer contained her …. Her self had been driven out of her. Anna felt a pure, detached sorrow that this was her life” (207). The

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continued horrific abuse is compounded next when she is haphazardly shorn, her scalp “blistered with hot irons” then “frozen with crushed ice that had been packed in an India rubber cap” (209). Anna separates from herself, and sees “herself as if from above, as if she floated over the woman she had been” and the next week, comes “the leeches, applied to her private places” which feels to her “to be someone else this was happening to while she watched from above” (209) until “She was not there” (210). Wallace clearly implies that what was intended as a punishment and a fear-mongering experience (218) by the asylum master perpetrated upon a sane woman has caused Anna’s mental break, a dissociation that is defined by Putnam in “Pierre Janet and Modern Views of Dissociation” as “disturbances in sense of self and memory” coupled with “headaches and gastrointestinal problems” (1989, 420) where, in “response to a single acute traumatic experience, one dissociative state may be created” (423). Pierre Janet, the nineteenth-century psychotherapist, published L’Automatisme Psychogique (1889) in which he pioneered work on dissociation and its relation to trauma, and in particular, childhood trauma and abuse. Otto Van der Hart and Otto Horst, in “The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet,” clarify that Janet believed that hysteria could follow stressful events, but that it is too broad a term; rather, Janet concentrated a great deal of his work on defining how dissociation plays a role in what is now termed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (1989, 1). Indicative of these very symptoms while despondent, violently ill and exhausted, Anna asks her nurse, Lovely, how anyone gets out of Lake House, to which Lovely responds, “It depends mainly on what happens outside. Who wants them out. Who wants them in” (36). With her lack of guile, Lovely admits the diagnosis of mental illness has little if anything to do with the women themselves. From a twentyfirst-century perspective, the incongruity of the lack of diagnoses with the erasure of the women from their own lives within a family unit or community is manifestly unjust. The women of Lake House exemplify this injustice; Mrs. Lizzie Button is a mother of three who may have suffered from what is now recognised as postpartum depression but has been condemned to the asylum at her mother-in-law’s insistence; Mrs. Violet Valentine, another patient, is merely an elderly woman whose own family has cast her out and Miss Talitha Batt’s madness was to defy her racist family for the love of a man “dressed in a purple tunic patterned with gold, his eyes were piercing, his skin brown and he had a red dot between

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his eyes. He looked like a prince” (189). For these reasons, these women have been locked away. The simple answer from the simple servant sets the neo-Victorian inquiry into motion as to why Anna is, indeed, in Lake House. Following in the path of many other Victorian and neo-Victorian mystery novels, this metafictional narrative unpacks a/the “madwoman” wherein the novel discloses her story, uncomfortably, piece by piece, clue by clue. While still at home with her husband in the parish, Anna had read there was a great storm on the Welsh coast that had drowned many sailors and that the community was in need; in an act of charity, she gathers clothes to donate to the survivors into a bag; she then took trains, coaches and walked to reach Wales. Her own father had been a sailor drowned at sea, so she felt compelled to offer her help. In addition, the reader learns that when she left the parish to go to Wales, it was without permission or consultation with her husband because Palmer was at a “funeral and although she hadn’t intended to conceal the trip from him, she found she wanted to get away before he returned” (38), leaving him only a note. Anna arrived in Wales because she knew what she must do. She took a deep breath and waded into the shallows, first gasping then crying out loud from the cold … plunging her arms in deeper. She knew even as her empty hands trawled through the water, her fingers in violent pain from the cold, that she would find nothing. The sea had swallowed hundreds of adult men, without trace. And the newspaper report had said that the boy had been rescued alive. Yet she’d been compelled to search for him in the water. She couldn’t quite understand it … asking herself what she’d imagined she might find. (39)

There is one problem: “No one knew anything of a small boy, brought from the water still breathing” (40). This event is central to the misconception that Anna is suffering from hysteria—she has had a vision of the boy and felt she was called to save him. These visions are not new; rather, she has had them all of her life including when she once told her sister, Louisa, after their father’s death at sea, that “she believed God wanted her to go to the aid of seafarers” to which her sister asked, “Are you mad? … Are you out of your mind, Anastasia?” (50). At Lake House, she meets Abse’s daughter, Catherine, who assumes Anna is mentally ill. Directly, Caroline asks what is wrong with her; Anna says, “I am called to help the

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drowned” and Catherine confirms, “you really are a lunatic. No one can help the drowned” (59).5 In the nineteenth century, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, a psychiatrist at Springfield Asylum and Surrey County Asylum, thought that photography could be used to diagnose patients with mental illness; Dr. St. Clair is a representative of the early practitioners of this idea who stated in his “On the application of photography to the physiognomic and mental phenomena of insanity” which he read before the Royal Society of London in 1856, that photography gave permanence to his female patients and presented a faithful record, free altogether from the painful caricaturing that disfigured portraits of the mentally ill (Diamond 1856, 88–89).6 According to Sander Gilman, Diamond believed that clinical photographs could be taken for three purposes: to “record the appearance of the mentally ill for study (ascribing to the theories of the physiognomy of insanity accepted at that period); it can be used in the treatment of the mentally ill through the presentation of an accurate self-image; and it can record the visages of patients to facilitate identification for later readmission and treatment” (1976, 7–8). Anna agrees to let St. Clair take her photographic portrait in an attempt to bolster his hypothesis that if a clear photograph is taken of a patient, then the patient removed from participation, then scientific objectivity and study of the photograph would then lead to accurate diagnoses. He takes pictures of all of the women, then labels them, only a few with names, but more often “labeled by their illnesses: ‘Hysteria,’ ‘Epileptic mania,’ ‘habits of intemperance,’” as well as “Convalescence” and “Melancholia” (49). The intent must have been similar to Cesare Lombroso’s theory that one could identify atavistic behaviour from physical traits and photographs of individuals, rather than through direct interaction or interview. From these traits or details could develop patterns or types of dangerous persons.7 The ability to spot such an individual would justify their marginalisation and/or incarceration. In their initial photographic session at Lake House, St. Clair originally “thought her a lunatic” who is “‘troubled by visions’” but Anna directly disputes this verdict with “‘I am not troubled by visions. I see them. I have done since I was a child” (114–15; emphasis in original) and explains why she went to Wales. More importantly, she recognises this discomfort of society: “I know people find it distasteful to hear a woman speak of these things,” things that are inappropriate for female consideration like dead bodies, as she admits to him, “I saw terrible things but wanting to help does not make me mad” (116).

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By the end of their interview, St. Clair is uncertain. Anna hopes that, if she allows herself to be the object of his gaze in a photograph, his scientific objectification of her external self as sane will free her to the outside world. Neo-Victorian fiction often seeks restorative justice; Anna’s search for freedom is set forth in such a manner that the reader will see how the neo-Victorian novel “frequently reassigns prominence from the voices at the centre of Victorian history to the figures at the margins” such as those persons “who were vilified or eclipsed by the historical record” (Carroll 2010, 195). When Anna returns, she is met with the death of the mentally rational Miss Batt. Miss Batt committed suicide as an act of refusal to continue being confined.8 The same night, Anna has an intense dream of her mother who, when dying, screamed, “Where is my Antony? My baby boy? What have you done with him?” as she is stupefied with morphine so she will be silent (190). Anna comes to ask who Antony is, and it provides impetus for a brief escape with Catherine to her sister, Louisa, for help. Upon returning Catherine to Lake House, Anna is caught because Louisa has given her up. Anna’s case is then pronounced “moral insanity” by Abse who also asserts that such a disease is “most often beyond cure” (204) and possibly, to a Victorian; she is so labelled to indicate to anyone who inquires, like the visiting Magistrates, that she is rife with a plethora of symptoms and manifestations. Abse can then rationalise that Anna must remain continually incarcerated, not only for her own sake but also to prevent her moral contagion from infecting anyone else. Such vague definitions allowed for multiple mis/uses. James Cowles Prichard wrote A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind in which he defined “moral insanity” as “madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations” (1837, 16). This was the view of conventional society, via the medical man, that held that a woman like Anna lacked moral strictures. The ethical question and/or morality of viewing such physical abuse at the asylum, followed by Anna’s psychological breakdown, is addressed directly by the neo-Victorian critical perspective; the narrator makes clear that by no means is any of this treatment even remotely humane. To reject fully the notion that it can even be considered as such is made evident when it is revealed that Anna does not suffer from visions per se

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but from a fragmented memory: Her younger brother, Antony, drowned accidentally when she was playing with him on the beach and she was unable to save him (285). The medical men believe she is suffering from illusions; she is, however, being deluded about her past. Furthermore, her past experiences collapsed into repressed memories that afflicted her with a sense of self-censure and guilt. Anna suppressed the memory, but the Welsh sea catastrophe made it surface. Anna’s family had never discussed either her brother or the incident with Louisa because their “Mother thought [she was] too young to remember. But [she] remembered better than anyone” (286). According to twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries studies, professionals now understand that “amnesia (forgetting autobiographical information) is a common and significant symptom associated with dissociative disorders” (Freyd 1996, 87), and clearly, Anna may, indeed, need psychological treatment, but this was not the reason she was brought to Lake House. The sad irony is, of course, that Palmer assumed that she was mad rather than considering that she might have just been touched by God and needed spiritual healing that he, as her minster, should have provided. If not that, then, as a Christian, he should have at least shown her compassion. In truth, she was committed to Lake House because her husband, Palmer, wanted rid of her; he already had an actress mistress and child; he had married the socially acceptable Anna as cover for his hidden life. He did not want an unconventional wife. Anna’s vision of a boy drowning was of her brother, not a boy in Wales; her vision was, in fact, fact. Dr. St. Clair is unable to prove the idea of objective diagnoses through photography, a much different result than he had anticipated when he was asked to give a presentation of his work before the Alienists’ Association at the prestigious bastion of male thought, the Pall Mall Club. At the end of the novel, and after Anna has been set free having made her case to the magistrate, Sir John Earle, for the legal release of herself and some of the other women, the narrative considers St. Clair’s view of the women in his photographs. He undergoes a radical shift in perspective after he saw a particular image in a London shop window “of a girl wearing a dress tied with a satin sash. She was aged about ten and had been pictured stepping through a huge, ornately carved frame as big as she was, passing through it as if it was a doorway. She was half in the frame, half out of it, in the act of escaping it even as it captured her” just as images are fugitive (126). The girl, both in and out of the frame, reminded him that there is more than a static image of a person, and that a photograph can be

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deceiving. If not handled carefully, then he realised there can be an “apparition of a negative shadow” which may or may not be a faithful record (126–27). When he decided to and took time to reconstruct Anna’s second image, he replaced what looked like a “textbook madwoman from the old days, a caricature” after Abse has physically abused her; when he filled in the overexposed “absences on the plate, clear spaces on the glass where there ought to have been flesh” (245) and in so doing, St. Clair has allowed Anna her dignity finally perceiving that she has been stripped of her humanity. The photographs work, just not in the manner expected. St. Clair realises “Fallaces sunt rerum species. The appearances of things are deceptive” (267). The girl—her image—had “given him an idea” (130): his scientific, objective hypothesis is radically flawed. This image of the girl escaping but captured parallels the confinement of Alice Pinkerton in Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister. This neo-Victorian novel addresses childhood from the perspective of the girlchild-becomewoman who looks back to tell her story of abuse and trauma as well as to make manifest the implications for her psychological sense of being. The narrative opens with “The madwoman in the attic was standing at the window” (3), launching into immediate intellectual parallels with Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Antoinetta Rochester (née Mason) from Jane Eyre (1847), as well as with groundbreaking feminist criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which then signals the complexity of the novel to follow. So far unnamed, the madwoman is presented “gripping one of the vertical iron bars almost at the limit of her reach, and she rested her bowed head—too heavy to hold upright—against the upraised arm, her face hidden, her eyes closed. Her left arm hung loosely against her nightgown, drawn down—it appeared— by the weight of the hairbrush she was holding. It was as if she had been standing there all through the night, struggling against sleep and dreaming, waiting to glimpse the first glimmerings of light in the low winter sky” (Rushforth 3). This description is followed with the observation that “Yesterday she had been on display” where “guests had studied her, eyeglasses raised, spectacles specially polished, elbows vigorously nudging each other in a see-what-she-says sort of way” (3). Reminiscent of Jean-Martin Charcot’s performative hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris,9 any suggestion that this madwoman is one of those women is immediately eliminated by the narrator who tells us the “madwoman’s name was Alice Pinkerton, and she would soon be thirty-five years old” who, “If she was a madwoman, she was a pedantic madwoman” because “Charlotte

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Brontë was quite specific about where Bertha (Alice sometimes thought of Mrs. Rochester by just her Christian name, as if she knew her well) was: in a room on the third story, the floor below the attics” (5). Although not a bildungsroman in the usual sense, given the limited time frame of the novel (one day), this is a case where the very literate adult protagonist “recounts and reinterprets her/his childhood retrospectively from the grown-up point of view, even if narrating her/his child-self in the first person” (Kohlke 2011, 24). Two important aspects of the text are revealed here; first, Alice is clearly aware of how she is viewed since the narrative focalisation is most often from her perspective, and second, she is literate. Indeed, she is more than literate. Rushforth’s novel is highly intertextual, a feature of much neo-Victorian fiction that often “partakes of the kind of intertextual decentering” (Letissier 2015) and self-conscious play (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4) that is experienced here. Dozens of texts are mentioned or discussed by Alice but are not mere name or title-dropping. The references are preponderantly those from an upper-class education but mixed with current, even sensational, texts including repetitive significant references to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859), Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).10 Within the entire novel, many more follow, juxtaposed with Anna’s critical analysis of the texts, thoughtful consideration of parallels between situations and satirical comparisons to neighbours and/or social conventions. George Letissier, discussing neo-Victorian characterisation, sees character as “slowly-built, carefully assembled mental representation that may potentially differ according to readers … the neo-character—to coin a neologism—is predicated upon an experience of reading, or textual reception, which triggers a second degree creation. This would account for the artistic pole. However, the aesthetic one is equally decisive as there can be two modes of reading, one relating to the neo-character without any previous knowledge; as sheer novelty, the other one implying a forewarned reader who may have a stock of knowledge about previous Victorian characters” (2015). Certainly, throughout the narrative, it becomes clear that Alice conceives of the world around her in terms of the imaginative worlds as presented to her in over one hundred fictional texts, popular songs, hymns, folklore, mythology, poetry, drama and artworks that highlight or

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interpret Alice’s experiences, particularly her reconfigurations and engagement of/with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (1865/1871). The reader, in order to keep pace with the nuances presented by Alice on her own state of mind, must be an avid reader, particularly of nineteenth-century and earlier texts, or one would surely give up on trying to follow her logic. Alice is adamant that she is not the madwoman of Jane Eyre; instead, she empathises with how “Jane possessed no home to which she could write: her home was memory and imagination … and these she carried about within her” (8). Alice, like Jane, is in but not of a family home, and this entire new-Victorian narrative, contained in a tome of 729 pages, takes place over the course of one day in Alice’s life while she remains apart from society, perhaps agoraphobic, perhaps confined. To that end, she compares herself to Dorian Gray and Mr. Hyde, both of whom have selves whom they attempt to isolate in rooms “in which a monstrous thing had been created long before the portrait had ever been painted” (9), and pities Wilde at his trial for his difference, wondering if he thought of Stevenson’s “‘My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’” (9), a foreshadowing and tease of what might be to come in Alice’s story. Unwilling to be one of the “Women bent over their cross-stich, bent over their canvases, wasting the hours in filling wildernesses of whiteness, as if somehow attempting to occupy the vast unused vacancies of their minds,” Alice believes that of all the colours available—viridian green, manganese violet, raw sienna, gamboge, brown madder—women “should know all about Madder” (11) so they might engage with life in a meaningful way. When they attempt “to convert her into a nurturer, discreetly displacing her destroying self” that she sees in the “looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall”11 much like “Alice, the other Alice—the Alice Through the Looking-Glass Alice” (19) with whom she identifies. Alice has a kinship with the Victorian Alice who sees words go backwards in the glass because Anna had this sensation of reversal most of all when she gazed into her own reflection. What she saw was not who she was. … But not Alice. Alice had Dr. Jekyll’s mirror, not Dorian Gray’s, and the Looking-glass was not her face. There were no beautiful things in Looking-glass House when she saw into it. (20)

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Phrases from novels, secondary and multiple voices in italics, disjointed flashbacks and timelines create disorientation in the narrative but the postmodern structure seeks to include multiple perspectives all filtered through Alice’s mind. After these thoughts on mirrors, one such voice intrudes with “To dream of seeing yourself in a mirror, denotes that you will meet many discouraging issues, and sickness will cause you distress and loss in fortune” (21–22; emphasis in original) which then leads to a consideration of how so “many of the novels owned by Alice’s mother contained scenes of madness and the asylum” for women while Shakespeare’s heroes “lived best within the mind, where everything could become internalized and intense” (23) without censure. Alice’s internalised intensity is exactly what is the crux of the narrative. Believing something is wrong with her, Alice goes in search of answers. Her desire to know results in over seven years of treatment at the Webster Nervine Asylum in Pougkeepsie as the patient of “Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (the—nudge, nudge—mad-doctor)” who has spent “years of dithering and denying, the various experiments, and then the seven years of treatment. More experiments” (25; emphasis in original) follow. More doctors and “cures” follow making Alice even more sure that “what need had she of a man?” and, like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March, “‘An old maid, that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps’” (33). The voices of the Bearded Men—those like her father, male family friends, society men and mostly, male doctors—pop in the discussions with requests like “Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton?” (58; emphasis in original). The early sections of the novel, with the byzantine intertextuality and metafictionality, beg the question: is there something “wrong” with Alice? A specific book launches the next phase of the narrative when at age seventeen or eighteen, she read the newly published A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) by Stevenson which, upon reading, leaves her pained from “lines that were as deep and as dark as anything in the later adult novel” (59). Alice understands that it has awaken “memories that she had wanted to remain undisturbed, memories in which she had partly been herself gazing at the little girl she had once been, and she had partly been the little girl, aware of being gazed at by someone older” (59–60). Alice has previously seen herself and not herself in the mirror, an interesting metaphor for dissociation that has been her survival mechanism. Onno Van der Hart and Rutger Horst, discussing Janet’s nineteenth-century

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contextual studies, set forth that he although he believed hysterical symptoms or what is thought to be hysteria may, in fact, be covering a deeper, narrower issue, other psychiatrists might not make the connections; Janet found that “most of these patients also suffered from unresolved—i.e., dissociated-traumatic memories” (1989, 4). Such dissociative states might be of a lesser complexity as in the case of Anna Palmer where the cause and effects may or may not be direct, but in both cases, these women have suffered trauma in their childhoods. Anna’s trauma manifests in visions or, perhaps, more accurately, in delusions of reality; in the first case, a vision or illusion that deceives the bodily eye by false or unreal appearances or mental state involving the attribution of reality to what is unreal (OED) whereas a delusion is the fact or condition of being cheated and led to believe what is false (OED) or misunderstanding where she is not in full knowledge of the facts. Alice’s web of literary images sought to protect her against uncontrolled manifestations of what she considers her demons but just might be the truth of her past. Alice’s memory allows her to remember the phrase, “If you tell anybody, the wind will get you” (61; emphasis in original), and it begins to coalesce fragments in her mind; she realises these words were said to her and to her African-American childhood maid/friend, Annie, by her father when they were girlchildren. She remembers “the voice that had made her frightened of the wind and the moon” because her “father had known it when he had done what he had done to her. The use of these words proved it” (61). The ambiguity of “to her” is referentially either to Annie or Alice; pedophilia and child abuse are now revealed as at the crux of Alice’s inability to engage with life. Self-blame is not uncommon; the search for answers began with her own “attempts at finding some sort of a ‘cure’ for herself” with Andrew Jackson Davis, Dr. Twemlow, Dr. Severance of Staten Island, then Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, the whole time believing intrinsically that “perhaps she would not have been thought of (by some people) as being a madwoman. She was surely well within the permitted range of strangeness, particularly when she paused to compare herself with some of the people she knew” (63). Alice’s recognition of her difference from other women in her family and social circle is compounded by her keen awareness of how she is viewed. The neo-Victorian narrative disjunctions purposely disorient, unlike their realist Victorian counterparts, which result in a kind of pulling the rug out of the reader’s sense of order compounded by the flashbacks and

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intertextual references. Without pause, Alice defiantly tries to reorient herself, self-consciously aware that she prepares for “Another busy day in the life of a madwoman” with a possibility that it “was time to wander about the house, ignite a few bed-curtains, rend a few wedding veils, that sort of thing” (62) since she had “been told over and over. A woman should not overexcite her brain. It was injurious. It—ahem—interfered with her— ahem, ahem—womanly functions” (64). The doctor’s denial of her intellect in an effort to save her body for potential procreation is denigrating. Her reading takes on new interpretations when she tries to illuminate her past because “lines and meanings altered as you altered, and they became new” (89)—Alice now sees her father pictured in a newly conceptualised circle in Dante’s hell— and must provide insight given the failure of the medical men who treat her with hypnotism, mesmerism, electrotherapy, hot baths, cold baths, massage, cloud reading and, ultimately, through the Freudian talking cure, and who try to label her demons as hysteric or neurasthenic, or cast her as suffering from dread or dementia. Two incidents control Alice’s life and are relayed through the lens of Lizzie and Laura, the two sisters in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862). Like Lizzie and Laura, Annie and Alice share the first trauma. They are repeatedly sexually and emotionally abused; Annie by Alice’s father, and Alice by her father’s “special friend,” but possibly also by her own father. When the father requests that Alice bring him the newspaper, she “shook slightly in her hands, as if from a distant subterranean tremor” (118) and begins to stutter, behaviours not evident previously elsewhere in her story. As the eldest daughter, Alice wonders “why hadn’t her sisters helped her to save Annie” (115) just as Annie had tried to save her. Alice knows “Papa had destroyed Annie, coldly and deliberately, and she was the only person who knew” (116) that without intent or understanding, she had helped the illiterate Annie read the advertisements for “THE DESIRED EFFECT” offered by Madame Roskosch who offered a “SURE CURE FOR LADIES IN TROUBLE” (116). Alice feels responsible and looks for Annie for weeks when she does not return, believing that her unknowing act of reading to Annie resulted in her friend’s death at the hands of an incompetent abortionist. The collapse between the two girls (one upper class and white, one lower class and black) demonstrates that “in neoVictorian fiction [any] distinction repeatedly collapses…. With childhood per se—regardless of class and economic security—depicted as a nightmare rather than a carefree dream of joy and innocence” (Kohlke 120; emphasis in original), perhaps to shed light on historical reality through

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recovery of the child’s or children’s voice(s) still not always heard even in the present day. Alice begins to comprehend that she “had experienced one of those moments that sometimes happened when a certain passage in a book was read, a certain picture contemplated. It happened over and over. Time ceased to exist, and she became one with what she read, what she contemplated, within the work of art, like her namesake Alice within the lookingglass” (Rushforth 119). While her mother, Lucinda Brouwer, who “was always known by her husband’s name” (349), has “been struck down into silence and invalidity” when her father commits suicide (not because of guilt over the abuse her perpetrated but because of monetary losses), Rushforth’s narrator leads Alice’s mind to understand that “perhaps being ill was the only way she had to show that she was a woman—frail, delicate, well-bred, too gentle for the rough world” (345). They are incompatible women; Alice, “not destined to be a genteel lady, or an Ideal Mother” (479) seeks the truth not the denial of her mother. In contrast, Alice’s voice is reconstructed as she grasps at a memory but “it wasn’t that the memory came to her; she entered the memory, like stepping inside a painting” (429): It was linked with her feeling cold. As she did now. It was linked with her sitting down. As she was now. It was linked with her face being fixed in one expression. As… It was…. (429)

Alice now knows She must not speak for this one hour. She must not move. She must not think anything, or feel anything. The hour would pass. (522)

This self-preservation is compounded when her father demands her surrender because as his “Little Woman,” she must agree to the predator’s promise that every time she looks up at the moon, she will think “of me, your Papa” (536). This day, the day of the narrative, is confirmed as January 20th, 1903 with a reference to John Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes; it

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is twenty-five years after the day she “walked down the stairs in darkness to see Annie, and helped her find the woman who would kill her. Fifteen years ago, in another blizzard, she had gone downstairs to find her father’s body” (662). Finding her dead father is the second incident that compounds Alice’s traumatic psychological life.12 The mysteries of the novel—Was she abused? Did she kill her father in an act of justifiable homicide?— are solved by Alice’s will to understand herself, whether through novels, medical textbooks, or by knowing when the many doctors are incapable—for all their fashionable cures and newly published Viennese methods—to save her; she must save herself. Alice’s persistence seems to be a literary embodiment of what Daphne Grace, in her recent consideration of traumatised and/or abused patients Beyond Bodies, described as a patient’s ability to know “instinctively that the separation of mind and body was not a dualism of any value to the reality of … experience” (2014, 66). Alice, from the neo-Victorian perspective of looking back to Pinkerton’s Sister, is interpreted here as a disconnect, “a reaction to intense trauma” but it could be argued it is also a “label for [the] desperate, but very sane, response to the impossible social positioning in which women could so easily find themselves” (78). To take this conception one step further, it makes sense that, following Susan Sontag, “Insanity is a kind of exile” (1978, 35) into one’s own understanding of one’s own truth. This desire, as expressed by Alice, parallels what Grace articulates as the need to “interpret life through different modes of intuitive and emotional experience” (78) as well as through one’s own self-defined vocabulary. Alice Pinkerton chooses literature as the language with which to construct who she now is. She is Alice; not Alice in the looking-glass but Alice who went through “a concealed door that was disguised as a lookingglass, and they would walk through the looking-glass into the cold bare room beyond, dirty and cobwebbed, its nearer wall lined with the fake books” (Rushforth 720) while the matron of the asylum walked towards her with her sisters who implore Alice to calm herself. The neo-Victorian novel ends seemingly ambiguously as to whether she somehow still in her family home or the entire text, including the opening reference to a recent event, is a series of flashbacks, and Alice has long been incarcerated by her sisters. Janet considered flashbacks and intrusive thoughts to be dissociative phenomena (Van der Hart and Horst 7), so it is not insignificant that the narrative framework parallels the potential for comprehending her past. The assumption is that trauma in a fictive consciousness asserts that

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“the response to a painful past is in some way going to involve dislocations of memory, intrusions of unconscious memory, or dissociation” (Matus 1270).13 While the nineteenth-century sciences of memory “sought to take over, then, were explanations and narratives of interiority—how people explained themselves to themselves” (1264); Alice chooses to explain herself through subjective creativity and imagination, not the supposed objectivity of science. Alice eventually imposes self-discipline while she is alone in her room with paper and pen; she writes five hundred words a day, creating narratives to redress the silence forced upon her by the sisters whom she protected with her own bodily and psychological sacrifice. A contemporary perspective might see Alice as suffering from schizotypy, a mental illness that, alongside originality, “show[s] similar functional brain activity patterns during creative ideation” which “strongly supports the contention that similar mental processes may be implicated” (Fink et al. 2014). That is not to say Alice is schizophrenic (a different illness), but that her mental processes—given her need for both creative language in reading and language creation in her writing—might draw their parallels of self-understanding from her literariness. The very intertextuality of the narrative draws on a kind of cognitive disinhibition, a psychological state defined by Shelley Carson, where this mental state “provides an interfacing link between creative genius and increased risk for psychopathology” (2014, 198) if left unaddressed. Indeed, Alice uses her creativity to uncover her traumatic past and give it voice in the form of both the novel and her continued writing. She is able to “combine or recombine bits of information in novel or original ways to arrive at an idea or product that is useful or serves a purpose” (Carson 199). Ironically, this disinhibition sounds like Carroll’s Alice, and Alice Pinkerton, where revisiting the difficult and the creative, this capacity may, as argued by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation, “regress … to the games of the underground, without losing contact with the surface, seems to be the essence of the poetic, and of other forms of creativity” (1990, 317). Although Alice’s childhood has been traumatic and scarred by sexual abuse, it is seen as an “ethical failure of care and protection” (Kohlke 135) by Victorian society from the novel’s neo-Victorian contemporary positioning that still has well-earned and reasoned cultural anxiety about the welfare of children and the protection of childhood. There is ongoing value to examine the interdisciplinary reciprocity of psychiatric history and Victorian literature in neo-Victorian novels like The

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Painted Bridge and Pinkerton’s Sister. Such a reading of the neo-Victorian desire to interrogate and recognise “the value of viewing the discourse of literature and medicine in an interactive mode, embracing both disciplines in such a way as to enrich our understanding of both and to enable us to appreciate their complementarity” (Blumenthal 1995, 4), particularly when the neo-Victorian novel seeks to engage with the silent or silenced voices of history, or hystery, in the marginalised girlchildren and women of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. See Maier and Ayres, this volume Chapter 8. 2. For discussions of the proper versus. improper woman, a good place to start is with Lyn Pykett’s study, The “Improper” Feminine (1992), where she points out that some women writers, particularly New Woman writer “George Egerton,” “sought to appropriate the culturally ascribed role of hysteric and to use it actively, rather than merely to bear it as the nark of the wounded victim” because to reverse those “negative associations of feeling and the feminine, and instead analyse and celebrate the vitality and complexity of a specifically feminine feeling” (169). 3. See Showalter 184–85. 4. This method of declaring a wife insane is a historical reality, now trope, that is also brought to bear in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) and others. 5. There is no doubt that throughout this novel, Abse is unable or unwilling to see the mental illness of his own daughter who suffers from anorexia nervosa and takes sustenance only from a rosebud like the carnival headliner she worships, “The Fasting Girl.” Catherine’s physical illness is a result of her understanding that no one listens to her, and her questioning of her father as to whether “Locking up women who are perfectly well? Depriving them of their liberty, for money?” (199) is morally and ethically acceptable. In response, Abse threatens to put her in the dreaded Chair to force feed her like the other women. 6. See Sander Gilman’s Face of Madness, or for some of Welch’s portraits, see the National Portrait Gallery at https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/ search/person/mp07880/hugh-welch-diamond. 7. For a solid discussion of Lombroso, see Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration. 8. Unknown to Anna, she may have provided the means for Miss Batt’s escape; when she left with Catherine, she had left her penknife behind. Miss Batt’s method of suicide was to slit her throat—Anna does not find her knife on her return.

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9. Beginning as a neurologist, but later psychotherapist, Charcot organised “Tuesday Lectures” that were, essentially, viewings of the women of the Sâlpetrière by society members. In addition, he took photographs of the patients in white nightgowns in various poses he considered hysterical. Like other medical men of the nineteenth century, Charcot’s view was that women were much likely to be hysteric than men as evidenced by his two famous hysterics, Louise Augustine Gleizes and Marie “Blanche” Wittmann. See Georges Didi-Huberman for a full discussion. 10. In the first seven short chapters totaling fifty-two pages, Alice refers to and/or discusses aspects of Greek and Roman mythology, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1308–1320); Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817); Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900); Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853); Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847); Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (1887–1893); George du Maurier’s Trilby (1895); George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) and Mill on the Floss (1860); Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891); George MacDonald’s Princess books (1872–1883); Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592); Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863); William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610), King Lear (1606) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888); Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1832); Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); plus authors Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Charles Darwin; Emily Dickinson; Alexandre Dumas; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Edgar Allan Poe; Sir Walter Scott and Walt Whitman amongst others. 11. Notably, this phrase recurs in early versions of the tale Snow White, as found in the Brothers Grimm folktales. 12. There is another episode of importance in Alice’s life; she was a twin, but her twin is only represented to her via a tombstone. Although this incident obviously occurs before cognition, it must in some way affect Alice but is not discussed as traumatic in the novel. 13. For further discussion of this idea Jenny Bourne Taylor’s “Obscure Recesses” (1997).

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Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c. 1848–c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Prichard, James Cowles. A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1837. Putnam, Frank W. “Pierre Janet and Modern Views of Dissociation.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 4 (1989): 413–29. Pykett, Lyn. The “Improper” Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rushforth, Peter. Pinkerton’s Sister. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2005. Showalter, Elaine. “Victorian Women and Insanity.” Victorian Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 157–81. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1978. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Obscure Recesses: Locating a Victorian Unconscious.” In Writing and Victorianism, edited by J. B. Bullen, 137–79. London: Routledge, 1997. Van der Hart, Onno, and Horst, Rutger. “The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 4 (1989): 1–11. Wallace, Wendy. The Painted Bridge. New York: Scribner, 2012.

Index

A abortion, 90, 140, 174, 186, 242, 246, 295 abuse child, 35, 50, 85–86, 127–129, 133–138, 183, 189, 298 patient, 59, 64, 67–68, 214, 283 spousal, 40, 42, 90, 100, 115, 139, 193, 196, 214 accoucheur, 52 addiction, 197 alcohol, 10, 12, 15, 27–45, 56, 100, 109, 185, 214, 238 drug, 10, 12, 59, 81, 184, 185, 188, 238, 240 gambling, 15, 100, 109 sex. See nymphomania agency, 15, 18, 19, 57, 89, 122, 127, 151, 186, 189, 244, 245, 284 alienist, 8, 243, 246, 284, 289 amnesia, 213, 217, 223, 289 angel, 12, 78, 136, 138, 147, 152–155, 158, 174, 175, 180, 181, 184, 216, 282

anorexia, 78, 137, 282, 299 Aref, Nessa and Hall, Alysson The Autobiography of “Jane Eyre” , 12, 29, 37–44 Atwood, Margaret, 128 Alias Grace, 127, 131, 132, 141, 203–224 Austen, Jane, 5, 27, 97, 100, 136, 300 B Balogh, Mary, 14–15 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 74, 76, 77–92, 300 Bible. See religion bildungsroman, 44, 128–130, 291 birth control. See contraception Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, 13, 14, 98 Booth, Wayne, 122–123 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 121 breastfeeding. See lactation Brontë, Anne, 300 Brontë, Branwell, 27, 29–30, 33, 46 Brontë, Charlotte, 46

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7

303

304

INDEX

Jane Eyre, 1, 2, 15, 27–45, 49–68, 73, 97, 122, 131, 206, 291 Brontë, Emily, 8 Browning, Robert, 15, 121 Byatt, A.S., 6, 14, 131, 136, 236 C Charcot, Jean-Martin, 18, 69, 80, 122, 232, 233, 234–235, 237–240, 247, 290, 300 childbirth, 16, 51, 52, 55, 79, 169, 171, 175, 177–178, 180, 184–189, 190 Christianity. See religion class, 4, 18, 30–31, 45, 50, 51–52, 53, 55, 63, 91, 97, 122, 135, 171, 182–184, 204, 217, 218, 223, 225, 239, 242, 254, 274, 291, 295 Collins, Wilkie, 98, 121, 135, 155, 158, 291 Contagious Diseases Acts, 54, 55 contraception, 44, 174, 186 D delusion, 63, 64, 74, 146, 147, 151, 153, 157, 176, 178, 208, 294 demon, 1, 67, 125, 157, 160, 216, 219, 233–236, 240, 242, 243, 268, 294, 295 devil. See Satan Dickens, Charles, 7, 57, 128, 154 David Copperfield, 56, 128 Martin Chuzzlewit , 20, 31, 56–57 Oliver Twist , 55, 56, 135 Our Mutual Friend, 4 Pickwick Papers , 20 “Steppers”, 19 A Tale of Two Cities , 3, 14 doppelgänger, 1 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 255

E Eliot, George, 55, 139, 161, 300 epilepsy, 100, 162, 187, 188, 214, 287 evil, 1, 3, 53, 140, 153, 167, 169, 177, 216, 233, 237, 242, 255, 257, 259–261, 265 F Faber, Michel The Crimson Petal and the White, 15–16, 137, 141, 145–161 femme fatale, 15, 121, 131, 135–139 femme fragile, 131, 135–138 fin de siècle, 57, 137 Fish, Laura Strange Music, 13, 74–92 Foucault, Michel, 80, 81, 86, 122, 129, 145, 203–204, 221 Fowles, John, 4, 128, 129 The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 236 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 102, 162, 189, 215, 217, 232, 233, 234, 238, 295 G Gamp, Mrs.. See Dickens, Charles, Martin Chuzzlewit Gaskell, Elizabeth, 28, 99, 161 gender, 150, 173, 181, 182, 194, 204, 207, 209–210, 212, 223, 230, 232, 235, 236, 240, 246, 258, 272, 274, 281–299 genitalia, 16, 90, 150, 169–177, 196 ghost, 12, 19, 29, 34, 49, 59, 65, 82, 102, 109, 114, 125, 134, 157, 163, 192, 205, 206, 212, 223, 247, 282 Gilbert, Sandra, 1, 15, 33, 58, 73, 81, 122, 225, 290

INDEX

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 15, 79–80, 121, 211, 299 God. See religion Gothic, 15, 49, 121, 125, 131, 140, 193, 205, 210, 216, 222, 242 Gruss, Susanne, 13, 14, 98 Gubar, Susan, 1, 15, 33, 58, 73, 81, 122, 225, 290 Gutleben, Christian, 5, 11, 86, 122, 129, 195, 282, 283

H hallucination, 18, 108, 148, 162, 177, 179, 193, 288 Hardy, Thomas, 129, 136–137, 300 Harris, Jane Gillespie and I , 15, 123, 132–141 haunting. See ghost Heilmann, Ann, 5–8, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 129, 140, 180, 291 Heyer, Georgette, 14 homosexuality, 9, 15, 17, 63, 67, 68, 100, 122, 129, 133, 138, 171, 180, 184, 195, 203–212, 214, 216–224, 225, 229–247 hypnosis, 189, 215, 218, 219, 221–223, 235, 295 hysteria, 11, 15–18, 57, 69, 78, 79–84, 85, 91, 121, 122, 162, 171, 182, 187, 212–216, 229–247, 282–287, 290, 294, 295, 299, 300

I insane asylum. See mental asylum insanity, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17–19, 27–45, 49–51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 73–75, 80, 85, 88, 90, 104, 112, 121–123, 133, 141, 152, 153, 155, 156, 162, 170, 172,

305

174–181, 191, 204–224, 261, 281–283, 287, 288, 299

J Jack the Ripper. See psychopathology

K Kaplan, Cora, 6, 8 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 11, 13, 14, 86, 125, 129, 130, 180, 230, 231, 282, 283, 291, 295, 298

L lactation, 171, 177 lesbian. See homosexuality Lewis, Matthew The Monk, 138, 152, 264, 292 Leyshon, Nell The Colour of Milk, 15, 123, 125–132 Lindner, April Jane, 12, 29, 37–41, 44 Livesey, Margot The Flight of Gemma Hardy, 12, 29, 34–37, 44 Llewellyn, Mark, 5–8, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 129, 140, 180, 234, 291 lobotomy, 189, 196 lunacy. See insanity lunatic, 214

M malady, 212 mania, 16, 30, 60, 176–179, 191, 212, 287 Marland, Hilary, 175–178, 196 marriage, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 66, 75, 79, 99, 103–116, 130, 146, 153, 169, 173, 181, 283

306

INDEX

masturbation, 136, 141, 176, 233, 235 melancholy, 9, 100, 178, 208, 287 menopause, 16, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178–179, 191 menstruation, 16, 20, 152, 153, 156, 168, 171, 174, 179 mental asylum, 11, 16, 49–68, 75, 150, 155–156, 159, 178, 179, 187, 189, 212, 214, 224, 244, 247, 273, 282, 283, 285–288, 293, 297 metafiction, 3, 4, 6, 9, 122, 125, 128, 146, 286, 293 midwife, 49–53, 56, 157, 173, 177, 178, 196 midwife, male. See accoucheur miscarriage, 15, 100, 162, 187 misogyny, 11, 38, 181, 183 moral insanity, 12, 18, 177, 288 morality, 9, 18, 30, 32, 34, 37, 42, 44, 46, 51, 53, 54–55, 112, 123, 126, 129, 146, 158, 169, 176, 180, 235, 240, 242, 253, 256, 257, 262, 264, 269, 273, 288–289 motherhood, 12, 29, 169, 184 N narcissism, 141, 239, 266 neo-Regency, 14, 97–116 neurasthenia, 282, 295 Nightingale, Florence, 54, 56, 57, 190 Nünning, Ansgar, 123–124 nurse, 31–32, 49–68 nymphomania, 16, 129, 172, 174–177, 180, 183 O Olson, Greta, 123–124

Other, 40, 55, 64, 73–75, 78, 133, 139, 140, 180, 204, 205–206, 209, 219

P patriarchy, 1, 2, 12, 17, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 60–63, 67, 75, 80, 89, 121–122, 127, 129, 130, 137–140, 141, 179, 184, 229–247 Penny Dreadful , 229–247 Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 27, 121, 300 Poovey, Mary, 122, 167 postcolonialism, 1, 2, 9, 58, 74–78. See also Other postfeminism, 2, 19 postmodernism, 5, 8–9, 98, 101, 128, 145, 148, 195, 204, 293 postpartum depression, 16, 178, 185, 190–191, 285 pregnancy, 16, 35, 41, 42, 51, 54, 77, 85, 91, 139, 157, 162, 171, 172, 175, 178, 184–189, 194, 197 prostitute, 34, 50, 51, 54–56, 99, 100, 145, 152, 161, 171, 175, 183, 193, 196, 239 psychopathology, 152, 181, 196, 254–275 PTSD, 14–15, 97–116, 117, 240, 285 puberty, 16, 172–174, 189–190

Q queer. See homosexuality

R race, 2, 6, 13, 43, 73–92, 170, 171, 182, 185, 204, 274 rape, 15, 50, 77, 88–90, 100, 101, 114, 125, 126, 140, 157, 159, 191, 295

INDEX

religion, 9, 33, 41, 55, 85, 91, 93, 112, 113, 125–131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 145–161, 163, 167–169, 176, 182, 186–188, 193, 221, 245, 246, 283, 286, 289 reproductive organs. See genitalia Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, 1–2, 12, 15, 58–59, 122, 129 Ripper Street , 16, 180–195 Rosenberg, Charles, 170–172, 176, 179, 195, 196 Rushforth, Peter Pinkerton’s Sister, 18, 281, 282, 290–299, 300 S salaciousness. See nymphomania sanitarium. See mental asylum Satan, 3, 54, 86, 168, 178, 230, 234, 236, 237, 241, 243, 292 scapegoat, 12, 28, 34, 45, 59 schizophrenia, 40, 209, 298 Scott, Sir Walter, 5 séance, 215, 219, 222, 223 sex, 11, 16, 34, 37, 41, 50, 52–55, 67, 90, 163, 167–177, 178, 183– 184, 189–190, 191, 216–218, 223, 233, 234, 235–237 sexual abuse. See rape sexual deviant. See homosexuality sexuality, 6, 8, 12, 13, 16, 29, 52, 62, 68, 87, 122, 168, 169, 174, 179–189, 191–195, 204, 207, 209, 217, 224, 230, 274 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 229, 230, 237, 238–241, 244, 246–247 Sherlock, 18, 253–275 Shoemaker, Sarah Mr. Rochester, 2, 12, 34, 50, 59–61

307

Showalter, Elaine, 11, 12, 16, 57, 58, 69, 73, 78, 81, 85, 87, 91, 122, 156, 172, 196, 214, 225, 232, 238, 239, 241, 247, 282, 299 Shuttleworth, Sally, 6 slavery, 50, 74, 75–78, 125, 181 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 170–176, 179, 195, 196 sociopathology, 255, 262–264, 269 spectrality. See ghost spiritualism. See séance spousal abuse, 15, 28 Stevenson, Robert Louis Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 229, 230, 244, 291, 292, 300 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 229, 230, 236–239, 245, 246, 300 suicide, 10, 33, 59, 61, 89, 102, 104, 106, 112, 115, 117, 133, 185, 193, 260, 264, 288, 296, 299

T transgender, 129, 195, 239 trauma, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 76, 83, 86, 90, 97–99, 109, 122, 130, 133, 148–150, 152, 155–157, 160, 161, 182, 185, 189–190, 214–216, 220, 224, 240, 281–299. See also PTSD

U uterus, 79, 169, 170, 172, 175, 177, 179, 185, 187, 237, 245

V vicar. See religion virginity, 111, 135–137, 153, 154, 158, 163, 187, 189, 241

308

INDEX

W Wallace, Wendy The Painted Bridge, 18, 281, 282–290 Waters, Sarah Affinity, 131, 139, 141 Fingersmith, 12, 50, 61–68, 131, 139, 141, 196, 299

Wilde, Oscar, 292 Dorian Gray, 135, 229, 230, 236, 245, 291, 300 Wolfreys, Julian, 11, 163 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 68, 99 Maria, 49–52 womb. See uterus