| British gothic novels of the fin de siecle, together with contemporary works in psychology, anthropology, and politics, depend upon maps and mapmaking to furnish an illusory unity to three vital sites that their authors and readers believed to be on the verge of falling to pieces: the mind, the metropolis, and the Empire. Resisting psychological, urban, and imperial disintegration, these texts employ both literal maps and cartographic metaphors in an attempt to represent and to integrate imperiled spaces. It is immaterial whether these spaces are real or imagined, exterior or interior, objective or subjective, since all terra incognita must be explored and mapped. Gothic fictions, scientific treatises, and sociopolitical documents chart both the lunatic asylum and the lunatic's disordered brain, both the slums of London and the constitution of the slum dweller, both the federated empire and the federated psyche.;To demonstrate how maps of the mind and of the asylum combat insanity, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) together with treatises on madness and madhouse management written by the leading psychiatrists Henry Maudsley (1835--1918) and Charles Mercier (1852--1919). To analyze what I term "the cartography of deviance," a project of mapping London's degenerate population, I situate Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde (1886) alongside Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (1889--1903) as well as texts in phrenology and criminal anthropology. To investigate the close relationship between the cause of imperial federation and the emerging psychological concept of an imperial identity, I link H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) to the tracts of the Imperial Federation League, to a field of study known as "the new geography," and to a map of the psyche designed by the psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers (1843--1901). |
