| This study draws upon a diverse range of nineteenth-century British and American prose fiction to explore the related problems of the representation and interpretation of literary signs and symptoms of madness. More narrowly, it focuses upon some of the linguistic, corporal, and physical manifestations associated with the eruption of the unconscious in selected prose works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James, amongst others. From a representational standpoint, the argument attempts not only to elucidate what the literary symptom "means"--to examine its "special communicatory powers" from historical and theoretical perspectives--but also to show how it means: how it functions as a vital rhetorical entity within the text, especially in metaphorical and metonymic capacities, and how it as often as not also entails the dynamic interrelation of different signifying modalities, intersemiotic processes foregrounded in analyses of texts such as Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, Collins's Heart and Science, and James' The Turn of the Screw. Moreover, as works such as "Love and Freindship" (sic) and "The Yellow Wallpaper" also serve to illustrate, literary forms of disorder presuppose the reader's active rhetorical involvement with the very modes of "madness" diagnosed "in" literature. Readerly participation in what Shoshana Felman has termed "the madness of rhetoric" points to one way in which madness effectively resists definitive attempts to delimit it. In this respect, nineteenth-century fiction compels readers to explore the implications of their engagement with a form of a madness acted out in language, to trace, in their own writing, the surreptitious re-presentation of symptoms similar to those depicted by the authors under consideration. To begin to comprehend the madness of nineteenth-century fiction, therefore, is necessary to grapple with the question of how readers also finally figure in some form of the very contradictions and delusions they strive to figure out.; The methodology of this study reflects its concerns with the nineteenth-century science of psychiatric symptomatology and contemporary psychoanalytic semiotics, combining more traditional psychoanalytic and historicist approaches to literature with the poststructuralist strategies and insights of Lacanian critics such as Shoshana Felman. |
