Romantic madness: A cultural study, 1780--1850 (John Clare, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Belcher, Urbane Metcalf, John Perceval, James Tilly Matthews)

In this study, I explore how English writers around the turn of the nineteenth century—John Clare, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Belcher, Urbane Metcalf, John Perceval and James Tilly Matthews—form their self-identities in response to the definitions of psychiatry. These seemingly disparate writers are united by the fact that they establish literary identities that conflict with a mad identity created by the definitions of madness and thereby resist these definitions. For Clare, a patient of moral management, the definitions of psychiatry were objectifying and alienating. He attempted to resist these effects by choosing a literary identity that was counter to its definition of him as voiceless in his madness. In his asylum poetry, he adopts the identity of boxer Byron, the prolific poet, a rebellious and communicative figure. By contrast, Wollstonecraft chooses for herself literary identities that offer her a vocal position at the very centre of society: at first she chooses the literary identity of the female writer of sensibility in Mary; then she adopts the identity of the writer of the school of reason in her polemical works, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. These identities oppose the definition of madness as she, and others, saw it: bestial and socially disruptive. In my discussion of this attitude, I argue that Wollstonecraft saw madness as a manifestation of the abject, as the concept is outlined by Julia Kristeva. Finally, in Chapter 3, I illustrate how four “mad writers” fight the definition of madness as that which robs a writer of the value of his words by choosing the literary identity of the writer of authority in their works of protest. I also indicate that William Belcher, John Perceval, Urbane Metcalf, and James Tilly Matthews succeed in partly redefining madness by making the implicit argument that madness provides them with a unique kind of authority, which was thought to be utterly divorced from the world of madness.