It is an intrinsic part of human
nature to question the things which we do not understand, and nowhere is this
more apparent that in the study of the mind. However, eminently more
fascinating than the idea of sanity is its antithesis: madness. From the
medical Renaissance, when human dissections first revealed the duality of the
body and mind, and up to the present day, as groundbreaking scientific
discoveries emphasise the new importance of genetics in mental illness, the study
of the mind has held us in its thrall for hundreds of years. The loss of mental
control which madness represents, along with its bedfellows melancholia and
mania, is an aspect of Gothic literature which remains relevant to a modern
audience, particularly in this day and age when statistics show that the number
of antidepressant prescriptions written by GPs increased by 95% in the 10 years
between 1999 and 2009.
The themes of madness, melancholia
and mania run like threads throughout much of the work contained within the
19th century Gothic genre, fitting comfortably as they do with other common
Gothic preoccupations: wanton women, forced imprisonment, drug addictions and,
most importantly of all, that deeply Gothic type of tragedy in which a
character is dragged towards a particularly dark fate and yet is powerless to stop
his or her descent. Dracula, Frankenstein and the poetry of Keats,
particularly Ode on Melancholy and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, all feature varying degrees of this Gothic
type of madness and are the perfect works with which to effect an exploration
of madness in literature as well as forming interesting tableaux of generalised
Victorian attitudes towards mental illness. As a young Victorian woman, you might
be taken to a 'clinic' because you suffered from 'great irregularities of
temper', were 'too assertive' in sending visiting cards to men and spent 'much
time in serious reading';
the literature of the time tends to reflects this kind of mentality. Though psychiatric
treatment has been called the hidden side of medicine, many families have had
some experience of mental illness in their recent history, making this subject
one to which many people might relate.
These themes are central to 19th
Century Gothic literature, helping to create that atmosphere which readers
think of as particularly 'Gothic' and which is still an important part of
contemporary writing. While not necessarily the most outwardly important theme
of these works, the theme of madness is present and relevant in Dracula, Frankenstein and the poetry of Keats, and a little exploration
reveals that the themes of madness, melancholia and mania are more central to
these texts than perhaps some people imagine.
The idea of mental illness in Dracula is central to the novel on many
levels, drawing as it does from both the belief in science that was a notable
part of the Enlightenment as well as the backlash against it, which was
characterised by a belief in the supernatural and which led to the Victorian
popularity of ‘spiritualist’ pastimes, such as sรฉances and fortune telling. These
two opposing schools of thought are portrayed in Dracula through the juxtaposition of Seward’s study of psychiatry
with the uncontrollable loss of sanity represented by vampirism. Seward is
written as a modern man, striving to make sense of the chaos in the minds of
his patients, especially that of his ‘pet lunatic’ Renfield; ‘Why not advance
science in its most difficult and vital aspect – the knowledge of the brain?
Had I even the secret of one such mind – did I hold the key to the fancy of
even one lunatic – I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch compared
with which Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s brain knowledge would be
as nothing’. The fact that Seward himself, the man who uses science and logic
to solve the problems he faces in his day to day life, actually begins to doubt
his own sanity – ‘What does it all mean? I am beginning to wonder if my long
habit of life amongst the insane is beginning to tell upon my own brain’ – is
Stoker’s way of showing that the cracks formed by the limitations of logical
thought can easily be preyed upon by the mental parasites of madness,
melancholia and mania.
Like Mary Shelley and John Keats, Bram Stoker
had some medical knowledge, in this case learnt mostly from his older brother,
William Thornley, who was famed (and knighted) as the President of the Irish
College of Surgeons and as a member of the Medico-Psychological Society. The
fact that he held appointments at the two major Dublin asylums, left him
‘well-placed to advise on the activities and thought-processes of the doctors
in Dracula’.
The knowledge obtained through this family connection allowed Stoker to explore
numerous types of mental illness in his writing, all of which add to the text
in different ways. The mysterious character of Renfield, with his moments of
alarming lucidity interspersed with periods of mania during which he becomes
increasingly childlike, is genuinely
disconcerting to the reader, while his perceived lack of free will plays into
what was the contemporary fear of wrongful admittance to asylums.
Many adaptations of Dracula, both on film and on stage, merge
the characters of Jonathan and Renfield into one character, usually called
Renfield, as in the 1931 film Dracula
and its Spanish-language counterpart Drรกcula.
While this does simplify the story, it removes the enigma surrounding Renfield and
actually reduces the power of the plot; Jonathan/Renfield must either be locked
in an asylum or be a functioning member of society – he cannot be both and so,
by necessity, a large section of the story must be removed. The asylum episode
is a main component of Victorian Gothic or sensationalist literature, as shown
in Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in White. However, the
character of Jonathan is also central to the presentation of madness in Dracula. His entrapment in Dracula’s
castle is marked by periods of melancholy and mania, and the reader is never
entirely sure quite how much he has recovered even when he has left the care of
the nuns. The manner in which Jonathan
is ‘infected’ with his madness and the way in which he carries it back into
England ‘plays into contemporary notions of criminality and degeneration theory
as well as an expression of fin-de-siรจcle concerns regarding the fear of the
infiltration of syphilis into the Victorian family home.’
This is reinforced by the theory that Stoker himself died of tertiary syphilis,
and the way in which ‘Dr Van Helsing, in an up-to-date manner, recommends
‘sterilisation’ of the earth-boxes to prevent the spread’.
The fear of the infiltration of
syphilis demonstrates the double standard perpetuated by the Victorians
regarding sex and the treatment of women in general. Multiple sources give
statistics showing that levels of diagnosed mental illness were far higher in
women than in men. However, the repression of women and the constriction of
their place within society meant that it was far easier for them to act in a
way which was considered ‘unacceptable’ and therefore easier for them to be
diagnosed as mad. As vampirism begins to
take hold of Mina, her moral impurity is shown by her increasingly loose grip
on sanity – ‘It is all strange to
me!’. Madness in literature was
often associated with ‘wanton women’, and Stoker’s work can be interpreted as
punishing Mina’s impurity with bouts of melancholy, just as Stoker punishes
Lucy’s rather free-spirited approach to relationships with a horrendous descent
into vampirism, a bloody staking and her eventual, tragic death.
The themes of madness, melancholia
and mania in Dracula point to wider
issues regarding repression and mental illness that were at large in 19th
century society. The whole concept behind Dracula
would not have been nearly as effective in an atmosphere of sanity; it was
the repression and darkness of Victorian society which helped to create and
maintain the instability and horror of Stoker’s novel. Seward’s ‘habit’ of
taking chloral hydrate, ‘the modern Morpheus’, points to the culture of drugs
which existed fairly openly until the legislation of supposedly ‘medicinal’
prescriptions in the early 20th century. Although Seward denies that
he is addicted to chloral, saying ‘I must be careful not to let it grow into a
habit’, the fact that he stays awake all night when he does not take any points
to something darker; ‘long-term use of chloral hydrate is associated with a
rapid development of tolerance to its effects and possible addiction’.
Similarly, many sources use letters
written by Keats as evidence that his poetry was inspired by the effects of taking
opium or laudanum. In Dowsed with the
fume of poppies: Opium and John Keats, William B. Ober links a letter
written by Keats to his older brother with the dreamy, languid style of Ode to Indolence, Ode to a Grecian Urn and
Ode to a Nightingale.
Ober calls the opening lines of Ode to a
Nightingale ‘pharmacologically explicit’; it is possible that, during the
aftermath of his beloved brother’s death and as his own health worsened, Keats
fell prey to a deep depression – ‘melancholia’, in the language of the time –
and withdrew into the numbed and distant world of the opium-eaters. Hints of
this kind of sensuousness and exoticism can be seen in poems such as The Eve of St Agnes, where Porphyro woos
his lover with a feast emphasising the ‘luxuriousness and eroticism’
of food:
‘While
he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From
silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.’
Though Dorian Gray was perhaps not an
average Victorian, when Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘There were opiates for remorse,
drugs that could lull the mortal sense to sleep’, he was vocalising the Victorian
relationship between ordinary citizens and what would today be controlled
substances; even good, sensible Mina Harker asks Dr Seward for a ‘little opiate
of some kind, as [she] had not slept well the night before’.
The mental instability of many
Victorians, often caused by drugs such as chloral hydrate and opium, gave rise
to a theory regarding the supernatural elements of Dracula: Andrรฉs Romero Jรณdar
theorises in his essay Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A
Study on the Human Mind and Paranoid Behaviour that Stoker’s work can be
read as a testimony of folie ร deux
(‘shared madness’), a form of collective psychosis similar to that demonstrated
in Miller’s play The Crucible. The
first person view point of the novel, told as it is mainly through personal
letters, journals or transcribed phonograph recordings, makes this idea an
arguable theory: as Romero Jรณdar points out, early in the novel ‘Harker, as the
only source of focalization, depicts the Count as a Machiavellian, mischievous
figure... The attentive reader should ask him/herself whether we can really
trust his words’. This is a point also made in Timothy Morton’s lecture,
‘Frankenstein: Monsters R Us’, when he questioned the extent to which a reader
could ever truly trust a first person narrator and how this affects a reading
of the story-within-a-story narrative of Frankenstein.
The very nature of a first person narrative, closed off as it is from
external influences, seems to encourage an atmosphere of madness: it seems
fitting that it is a literary technique employed by both Shelley and Stoker.
If one form of mental illness was
to be selected to encapsulate the 19th century mentality, it is
likely that it would be hysteria: defined by Webster’s Online Dictionary as, ‘A
nervous affection, occurring almost exclusively in women, in which the
emotional and reflex excitability is exaggerated, and the will power
correspondingly diminished, so that the patient loses control over the
emotions, becomes the victim of imaginary sensations, and often falls into
paroxism or fits’. Though
hysteria was always thought of as a primarily female illness – the term itself
is derived from the Greek word for ‘womb’ – one of the main similarities
between portrayals of mental illness in Dracula
and Frankenstein is the way in
which both Stoker and Shelley write examples of male hysteria into their
novels, the most important of the men in question being Abraham Van Helsing and
Victor Frankenstein. Both authors choose
to bypass the stereotype of hysteria being an affliction for women, or occasionally
lower class men, and assign the disorder to their central, male characters. Stoker’s
description of Van Helsing’s hysterics as a reaction to Lucy’s traumatic death,
told from the point of view of Dr Seward, is an interesting one:
'The moment we were alone in the carriage he
gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He has denied to me since that it was
hysterics, and insisted that it was only his sense of humour asserting itself
under very terrible conditions. He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw
down the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge; and then he cried till
he laughed again; and then laughed and cried together, just as a woman does. I
tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but
it had no effect. Men and women are so different in manifestations of nervous
strength or weakness!'
In this passage, Stoker
acknowledges the stereotype of the female hysteric, and Van Helsing, rather
bizarrely, attempts to pass off his fit as merely seeing the funny side of distinctly
unamusing circumstances. However, by depicting the events through the lens of
Seward’s medical mind, Stoker reinforces the symptomatic nature of hysteria,
and Joanne Parsons theorises that
‘this feminised ‘madness’ is used as a means to illustrate the severity of the
threat that is posed by Dracula.’
The hysteria of Victor Frankenstein
is far more important within the book than that of Van Helsing; Shelley uses it
to point to other, more widespread issues about Victor’s masculinity and
sexuality. In the essay Androgyny in
Frankenstein, Brendan O’Leary writes that ‘even when Victor pulls out of
each of his hysterical states he is unable to return to his old masculine self’;
the episode after the creation of the Creature, when Victor falls into a deep
depression and is nursed back to health by Clerval, has a profound effect on Victor’s
mental and physical health. Frankenstein’s nervous fit in the aftermath of his
great and terrible achievement in bringing the Creature to life is reminiscent
of Van Helsing’s hysteria, though more dramatic and told from the perspective
of the sufferer:
‘I felt my flesh tingle with excess of
sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly. I was unable to remain for a single
instant in the same place; I jumped over the chairs, clapped my hands, and
laughed aloud. Clerval at first attributed my unusual spirits to joy on his
arrival; but when he observed me more attentively he saw a wildness in my eyes
for which he could not account; and my loud, unrestrained, heartless laughter
frightened and astonished him.’
This could be interpreted as being reminiscent
of puerperal fever, often contracted in the aftermath of childbirth; having
achieved the feat of creating a ‘child’ asexually, it would seem ironic that
Victor falls prey to hysteria, something so traditionally and intrinsically
feminine. Unlike Van Helsing, Frankenstein’s hysteria progresses to visual
hallucinations – ‘I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously,
and fell down in a fit’ – and he suffers from ‘a nervous fever’ for ‘several
months’. It is possible that Shelley visualised this as some form of
existential sexual crisis; did Victor create his creature to ‘satisfy a homosexual desire’, a ‘desire
that turns quickly to panic’?
Victor’s feverish observation at the ‘birth’ of his creation - ‘the beauty of
the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart’ – could
certainly point to internalised homophobia, and the shock of realisation was
perhaps strong enough to send Victor spiralling down into some sort of
psychosomatic brain fever.
The ideas of obsession and
‘monomania’ – a popular 19th century term used to diagnose someone
who unhealthily fixated on a single subject or idea – are important themes
within Gothic literature. The notion of focusing so intently on one thing that
everything else in your life suffers is prominent in works such as Wuthering Heights – Nelly speaks of
Heathcliff’s ‘monomania on the
subject of his departed idol’ – and no less than seven stories by Edgar
Allan Poe.
Victor Frankenstein’s monomania stems from the loss of his mother, driving him to
pour all of his time and energy into developing a way to cheat death and,
later, to create life. Even Victor himself accepts that his endeavour is an
unhealthy one, saying ‘I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole
purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself
of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation’ (emphasis mine). One critic commented on
Shelley’s inclusion of this level of obsession:
‘Mary Shelley's Frankenstein emphasizes the
dangers of monomania by illustrating how Victor Frankenstein's obsessive
pursuit to defeat death leads to the destruction of his own friends and family,
and eventually, himself. In the beginning Frankenstein is portrayed as a
bright and intelligent young boy with a deep interest in science.
However, his obsessive pursuit of his scientific "invention" and
consequent reckless disregard of moral and social values leads to the downward
spiral in his life.’
The theme of monomania in the
poetry of Keats is a different matter, since it seems to be more of a
reflection of Keats’ own obsessions and preoccupations than a conscious
inclusion to aid the development of a particular literary style. His sonnet When I have Fears that I may Cease to be,
written three years before his death vocalises his fears that death will cut
short his plans for poetic mastery – ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be/
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain’ – his brother Tom died in the same
year and Keats was obviously worried about the extent to which he had exposed
himself to his brother’s tuberculosis. Keats
focused on what some call the ‘small,
slow acts of death’ in everyday life – ‘The end of a lover’s embrace, the
images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not
only symbols of death, but instances of it’; Keats
works the theme of death into poems on entirely different subjects, such as Ode to a Nightingale – ‘Now more than
ever seems it rich to die,/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain’. Keats’
obsession with death and his own mortality weaves its way into most of his
poetry, whether Isabella’s brothers who ‘resolved in some forest dim/ To kill
Lorenzo, and there bury him’ in Isabella,
or the Pot of Basil, or the death of the year implied by the cycle of the
seasons in To Autumn. Keats sought to
become immortal through his poetry, just as Dorian Gray became immortal through
his portrait, though the poet succeeded where Wilde’s character failed - Keats’
obsessions with his work ensured his eternal remembrance.
Even after he had abandoned his medical career, Keats was left with the
mind of a doctor: the characters in his narrative poems are frequently
described in a symptomatic manner which gives clues as to what they are
feeling. Richard Marggraf Turley, in his book Bright
stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic literary culture, is of the opinion that Isabella ‘registers Keats’
interest in mental ailments typically associated with women, such as the newly
coined ‘monomania’, a category of melancholia with features of what would now
be classed as ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’; the mania with which she
searches for her ‘basil-pot’ in the final verses of the poem definitely points
towards some sort of debilitating obsession, something Keats would have been
familiar with after his experiences as a dresser in Guy’s Hospital, the lunatic
wing of which only admitted female patients after 1793.
Keats’ own periods of depression add
to the exploration of madness as a theme in his poetry. Melancholy was defined
as ‘mental confusion, madness, illusions, fear, anguish, disorders of the
consciousness that would be considered in nowadays as deep depression.’
In Ode on Melancholy, Keats utilises information
garnered from Burton’s The Anatomy of
Melancholy, which he was reading at the same time; ‘Keats echoes Burton’s
view that anyone subject to melancholy should make the best of his moods’.
Keats’ poem does just this, with the first stanza telling the reader what not
to do – forget your sorrow (‘go to Lethe’), commit suicide (‘kist by
Nightshade’) etc – and the second stanza telling the reader what to do instead
– ‘glut thy sorrow on a morning rose’. The fact that Keats includes obsession,
or melancholic preoccupation, in his list of things which those suffering from
depression are wont to do – ‘Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be/ Your
mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl/ A partner in your sorrow's mysteries’ –
shows that Keats had a full understanding of both the medical, symptomatic side
of depression as well as the human, emotional perspective. In his poetry, Keats
reconciles the two halves of himself; the trained doctor, and the grieving man.
It is clear that 19th century Gothic literature relied
heavily upon the themes of madness, melancholia and mania, and the fact that
modern readers remain preoccupied and enthralled by the horrors and obsessions
of the genre nearly two centuries later shows that the issues dealt with are
still prevalent within our society. When Bram Stoker, through the character of
John Seward, said that ‘I sometimes think we must all be mad and that we shall
wake to sanity in strait waistcoats’, he was putting into words that feeling
which so many of us have experienced when life seems unendurably complicated and
we wonder how we will ever be able to cling on to our sanity when all around us
seem to be losing theirs.
Guardian – ‘Antidepressant
use rises as recession feeds wave of worry', Rowenna Davis
‘Dracula (1897), Bram
Stoker - Psychiatrists in 19th-century fiction’, Fiona Subotsky
Madness and Literature Network – Dracula review, by Joanne Parsons
‘Themes’, by
Jessica Gatto, Kimberly Johnson, Brandon Morrison, Jonathon Thornton
APPENDIX 1
‘In an effort to relieve his low spirits, he went out on March 18, 1819, with some friends to play cricket and was hit in the eye by a cricket ball. W. J. Bate informs us that Brown "had a little opium and gave him some of it that evening as a palliative." However, in a letter to his elder brother George, then seeking his fortune in America, Keats wrote "Yesterday I got a black eye-the first time I took a Cricket bat-Brown who is always one's friend in a disaster applied a leech to the eyelid and there is no inflammation this morning. . . ." A few lines further in this journal letter, dated March i9th, Keats records a feeling of lassitude on the morning after: This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless-I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence my passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees this side of faintness-if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it langour-but as I am I must call it laziness-in this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like the figures on a Greek vase-a Al/an and two women-whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisenment.” It is unusual to sleep late after a painful injury to the eye, and the feeling of relaxation and indifference to the usual stimuli for pain or pleasure are certainly consistent with the after effects of a single dose of laudanunm; one would scarcely expect them from a leech. The allusion to figures on a Greek vase might bear some relationship to the Ode to a Grecian Urn written in May, about two months later. However, the entire passage seems more directly related to the Ode on Indolence, probably written at about this time’.
‘If any of Keats' poems shows the effects of opium usage, it is the Ode to a Nightingale, written in late April or early May of 1819, about six weeks after the incident of the cricket ball.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Antidepressant use rises as recession feeds wave of worry
Rowenna Davis
Women and Madness
Claire Jones
Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker - Psychiatrists in 19th-century fiction
Fiona Subotsky
Madness and Literature Network – Dracula review
Joanne Parsons
Wikipedia – Chloral Hydrate
Drowsed with the fume of poppies: opium and John Keats
William B. Ober
The Eve of St Agnes(notes)
Lilia Melani
Webster’s Online Dictionary definition: hysteria
Androgyny in Frankenstein
Brendan O’Leary
Themes
Jessica Gatto, Kimberly Johnson, Brandon Morrison, Jonathon Thornton
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley
Esther Schor
Frankenstein: the destructive power of monomania
Alisha Seam
Keats’ Odes: themes, motifs & symbols
Sparknotes editors
Gothic Literature Personified by Melancholy/ Malady in Literature
Blerina Berberi
Keats: selected poems and letters
Editor: Sandra Anstey
Reading the Symptoms: An Exploration of Repression and Hysteria in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Colleen Hobbs
Frankenstein’s Dream: an introduction
Jerrold E. Hogle
Dr. Frankenstein and the love which dare not speak its name
Bright stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic literary culture
Richard Marggraf Turley
