‘[S]he is in a highly hysterical state. She’s a woman who resists’: the Dangers of Spiritualism in J. S. Le Fanu’s All in the Dark (1866) by Valeria Cavalli

In this month's post, Dr Valeria Cavalli examines the  theme of spiritualism in Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novel All in the Dark (1866), and what the author's warnings about the dangers of spiritualism tell us about Victorian attitudes to women and madness. 

The dangerous habit of practising séances

When William Maubray is called to his dear aunt Dinah’s deathbed, he hopes that he will get there in time to say goodbye. He is certainly surprised, then, to find her in quite good shape, if not for her firm conviction that she is going to die before midnight. Dr. Drake explains to the puzzled young man that his aunt suffers from nothing more serious than the ailments of a woman of her age, but that she has recently fallen victim of self-deception. The eccentric old woman has in fact taken up the dangerous habit of practising séances, and the risk is that she will drive herself mad if she insists in taking seriously the ominous revelations of her spirit friend. Written in the peak years of Spiritualism, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s All in the Dark brings forth a way more terrifying reality than being haunted by ghosts, that is, being locked away in a lunatic asylum on the basis of one’s unorthodox creed.

The rise of spiritualism

Emerging in America in the late 1840s, Spiritualism spread almost immediately to Europe, finding fertile terrain in the state of religious uncertainty which was troubling part of the population, regardless of class, age, or gender. When scientific discoveries brought the credibility of the Bible into question, believers began to feel uneasy with the way Christianity explained the supernatural, and began to look for comfort in the occult. In fact, the occult could account for the supernatural according to the laws of nature: whatever forces were inexplicably ruling the Universe or man, they were completely natural, and their present state, if still unknown to science, was open to investigation. However, scientists and members of the Church together raised their voices in opposition to the movement from its very first appearance, and criticism poured from the pages of periodicals and newspapers.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. 

Image from: www.swanriverpress.ie/lefanu200,

Spiritualism and female transgression

As Alex Owen has pointed out in her Darkened Room (1989), many medical men regarded the movement with distaste and suspicion in part because of the increasing role it offered to women. In those years, the ideal woman was the submissive wife and mother, “the angel in the house” in charge of the domestic sphere. In giving women the authority and the right to exercise their innate spiritual powers, Spiritualism infringed on the culturally imposed limits of respectable womanhood. In the darkened room, not only did women become the principal actors of the séance, they also transgressed gender norms, by assuming male roles or highly sexualised trance personae. The subversiveness of the movement alarmed and alerted the medical profession, which was in charge of policing any deviations from the social order imposed by Victorian patriarchy. The emerging medical branches of psychiatry and gynaecology effectively teamed up to prove that women’s health depended on female biology. Since women’s role was primarily that of generator, physical and intellectual activities would compromise the balance of nerve force necessary for the functioning of the reproductive organs, thus causing mental instability. Most cases of insanity due to sexual illness tended to result in monomanias, among which Spiritualism was counted, and doctors began to consider any kind of suspension of everyday consciousness suspicious and to associate mediumistic trance, with its uncontrollable convulsions and frequent use of inappropriate language, with the pathological symptoms of hysteria.

'Queer fancies'

In All in the Dark, Dinah Perfect is depicted as a strong-willed, authoritative, and eccentric woman. Her faithful servant explains that Dinah has always been very extravagant, with her odd dispositions concerning her corpse and coffin:

She was very particular, […] and would have her way; […] she had her coffin in the house this seven years – nigh eight a’most – upright in the little press by the left of the bed, in her room – the cupboard like in the wall. Dearie me! ’twas an odd fancy, […] and she’d dust it, and take it out, she would wi’ the door locked, her and me, once a month. She had a deal o’them queer fancies, she had. [II, pp.168-9]

'She is in a highly hysterical state'

It is no surprise, then, that when the novelty of table-rapping reaches the Old World, it appeals mightily to a housebound, bored, middle-class spinster like Dinah, who is looking for excitement and escapism from the monotony of everyday life, and from the increasing fear of ageing and dying. However, Dinah’s credulity is quickly associated with hysteria. Echoing Dr William Carpenter’s theory on unconscious cerebration, the non-believing, sceptical (and alcoholic) Dr Drake describes the dangerous effects that Spiritualism could have on Dinah’s mind, by convincing her of the reality of her delusions to the point that her body comes to provoke the effects that she expects to happen. Dr Drake is afraid that Dinah will ‘frighten herself out of her wits’, and explains to William that Spiritualism can affect the nerves [I, p. 60]:

Why, you know what hysteria is. Well, she is in a highly hysterical state. She’s a woman who resists; it would be safer, you see, if she gave way and cried a bit now and then, when nature prompts, but she won’t, except under awful high pressure, and then it might be serious; those things sometimes run oft’ into fits. [I, pp. 38-9]

 

Wrongful confinement

 

At a time when the advances in the realm of the mind became increasingly associated with scandals related to wrongful confinement, Le Fanu questions the power held by Victorian psychiatry over extravagant and independent women. Dinah Perfect is certainly a bizarre character, with her many fancies and her addiction to table-turning. However, her oddities do not seem sufficient to diagnose her as incipiently insane. Dinah is an elderly woman troubled by the frightening thought of upcoming death. Her anxiety and hysterical crises echo the spiritual uncertainty that afflicted the author’s sister and wife, like many other Victorians. Moreover, her uneasy shifting between her family’s orthodox Christianity and the occult is reminiscent of Le Fanu’s own crisis of faith, which led him to find comfort in the doctrine of the Scandinavian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

 Le Fanu's wife Susanna (née Bennett), and his sister Catherine. All three experienced a crisis of faith at some point in their lives. The images of Susanna and Catherine appear in W. J. McCormack’s biography of Le Fanu.

'That foolish spirit-rapping'

Having experienced first hand the anxiety of spiritual doubt, Le Fanu is far from labelling Dinah mad, even though he does not sympathise with Spiritualism. In fact, all throughout the novel, Dinah sounds reasonable and practical, advising her ward on the importance of a good match in marriage, and her nephew on the more advantageous prospect of the Church rather than the Bar as a profession. Even on spiritual matters, the Rector confirms that, ‘I found her views […] all very sound; indeed, if it had not been for that foolish spirit-rapping, which led her away – that is, confused her – I don’t think there was anything in her opinions to which exception could have been taken’ [II, pp. 171-2]. On all subjects but Spiritualism, Dinah is perfectly sound. However, her fancy for table-turning would, for orthodox Victorian psychiatry, be a strong enough proof of her insanity, as the real case of Louisa Nottidge had shown.

Louisa Nottidge

Like Dinah Perfect, Louisa Nottidge was a wealthy middle-aged spinster who had also spent money ‘very wildly’ upon the word of a Spiritualist [I, p. 8]. In 1846, Nottidge decided to leave her mother’s home to follow the influential millenarian prophet Henry Prince. Prince was the founder of a small community in Somerset called the Agapemone (the Abode of Love), where he taught about free love and preached of everlasting life to a group of devotees who had agreed to donate all their wealth to the congregation. Three of the five Nottidge sisters had already joined the prophet (who had thus gained some £18,000), so that when Louisa communicated her decision to her mother, the latter had to act quickly in order not to lose another daughter, and her considerable fortune, to an unscrupulous charlatan. Mrs Nottidge had Louisa abducted and confined to the majestic Moorcroft House private asylum at Hillingdon, in Middlesex, on the grounds of theomania. Louisa spent seventeen months at the Hillingdon, and was released only because the Commissioners in Lunacy were summoned upon concerns about her failing health. After her liberation, Louisa joined the millenarian community, transferred all her possessions to Henry Prince, and took legal action against her wrongful confinement.

A fraudulent committal

Moorcroft House private asylum at Hillington.
This picture is taken from Sarah Wise’s Inconvenient People.

The case was heard in court in 1849 before the Lord Chief Baron, the Right Hon. Sir Frederick Pollock, while the attention it received in the press provoked responses from alienists John Conolly and Forbes Benignus Winslow, and Lord Ashley, Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy. The Lord Chief Baron accepted Louisa Nottidge’s plea and ordered a compensation for the damages received. The suit made clear that Louisa’s admission to the Hillingdon had not been fraudulently obtained, since two doctors certified her insane on the grounds that she had ‘estranged herself from her mother’s house […] to follow a person of the name of Prince, whom she believed to be Almighty God, and herself immortal’. However, as Joshua John Schwieso has pointed out, although the two doctors had been summoned by the family physician on the basis of their ‘experience in cases of insanity’, their biographies suggest that neither of them was an expert in the field. Despite all this, the final verdict was reached because the Commission in Lunacy, in the person of Mr Mylne, failed to convince the Lord Chief Baron of the necessity of keeping Miss Nottidge confined, as shown in the following report which appeared in The Times in 1849:

The Lord Chief Baron: Mr Mylne, was this lady in such a state of mind as to be dangerous to herself or to others?   

Mr Mylne: Not so as I was aware of; not so far as I knew. 

The Lord Chief Baron: If she were not so, then how was it that you kept her in this asylum for seventeen months?

Mr Mylne: My lord, it was no part of my duty to keep her there. I was only to liberate her if I saw good and sufficient reason for adopting that course. 

The Lord Chief Baron: It is my opinion that you ought to liberate every person who is not dangerous to himself or to others. If the notion has got abroad that any person may be confined in a lunatic asylum or a madhouse who has any absurd or even mad opinion upon any religious subject, and is safe and harmless upon every other topic, I altogether and entirely differ with such an opinion; and I desire to impress that opinion with as much force as I can in the hearing of one of the commissioners. […]You say unsound mind, Mr Mylne. Had she any unsoundness of mind upon any other subject under heaven except as to entertaining these peculiar religious notions?

Mr Mylne: Miss Nottidge did not exhibit any symptoms of insanity of any other subject, my lord, that I observed.

Not only did the Lord Chief Baron support an individual’s freedom to hold religious opinions (as long as they remained harmless to both the person and other parties), he, most importantly, stated that he ‘very much doubted whether, if in this case the plaintiff had been a man, or living under the protection of a husband, the defendants would have dared to have taken the steps they had’.

An unwarranted influence

This case made evident how women, and particularly single women, were in danger of wrongful incarceration, since their unorthodox religious views (Louisa’s own mother affirmed that ‘she worships a false god’) could be easily exploited for financial gain.[ix] In fact, in the case of Louisa Nottidge, what her family were trying to save was the £5,728 7s 7d that she had bequeathed to the prophet. After her death in 1858, which occurred while she was still residing at the Agapemone, the Nottidges brought Henry Prince to court and succeeded in obtaining the return of Louisa’s property on the grounds of the prophet’s unwarranted influence upon the deceased. Thus, in the early 1860s, the case of Louisa Nottidge received new attention in the press, both in England and in Ireland, and was associated with the increasing number of cases of wrongful confinement which were causing much sensation, both in real life and in fiction.

Spiritualism and madness

           

In All in the Dark, Dinah, unlike Nottidge, is surrounded by relatives and friends who love her for who she is rather than for her fortune, and who will miss her dearly after her death. However, in discursively associating Spiritualism with madness, Le Fanu is reminding the reader of the existing danger that even an incompetent doctor like Drake, with no specific knowledge or experience of insanity, could actually provide enough evidence to have a woman like Dinah confined on the grounds of her unorthodox beliefs. Furthermore, he is also presenting a reflection on the double standard with which Victorian psychiatry was dealing with its patients. After Dinah dies, her sceptical nephew William also becomes ‘addicted to the supernatural’ and begins to believe that he is haunted by the spirit of his dead aunt [I, p. 58]. He suffers from nervous strain and hallucinations, and also admits that ‘I think I’m growing as mad as […] poor Aunt Dinah’ [I, p. 216, my italics]. However, no judgement is made about the possibility of his being a case of incipient insanity. William’s temporary condition is attributed to the weight of financial and sentimental concerns which, combined with the strong tea he likes to drink (a recurring theme in Le Fanu’s fiction), the heavy tobacco he likes to smoke, and the supernatural stories he likes to read, provokes nightmares and somnambulistic states. Financial problems, disappointment in love, bereavement, and hereditary disposition were all considered by Victorian psychiatry to be factors in the detection of mental insanity. The fact that such connections are ignored in William’s case seems to validate the words of the Lord Chief Baron, who doubted whether the same precautions would have been taken if the plaintiff had been a man.

      

In All in the Dark, Le Fanu touches on the topical association of alternative spiritualities with insanity. Drawing upon his personal experience as well as his professional familiarity, in his work for the national and international press, with contemporary debates on these topics, Le Fanu investigates the power game played by Victorian psychiatry over difficult citizens, women in particular. Although the novel shows Le Fanu’s contempt of Spiritualism, it nevertheless dismisses the accusations of madness levelled at the believer, thus becoming a warning to women readers.

Dr ValeriaCavalli recently completed a PhD in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin entitled 'They said she was mad: insanity in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu' (2014). She may be contacted at cavalliv "at" tcd "dot" ie. Details of an upcoming conference in Dublin on J.S. Le Fanu (15-16 October 2014) may be found here.

Further reading

• J. S. Le Fanu, All in the Dark, 2 Vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1866), Vol. 2, pp. 168-9.
• For a historical context on Spiritualism and Victorian medicine, see Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Ch. 6.
• On Louisa Nottidge, see Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People; Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), Ch. 4; Owen, pp. 151-54; and Joshua John Schwieso, ‘‘Religious Fanaticism’ and Wrongful Confinement in Victorian England: the Affair of Louisa Nottidge’, Social History of Medicine (1996), pp. 159-74. 

“Is it in a crazy-house for females that I'm landed now?” Psychiatric institutions and the theatricality of madness in John Millington Synge’s drama by Claire Poinsot

In this month's blog post, Claire Poinsot, a visiting doctoral student from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, at CHOMI last year, writes about her research on psychiatric institutions and the theatricality of madness in the work of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge.

Raging madmen, true idiots born, and raving maniacs

When Old Mahon sees his son Christy being acclaimed by the villagers in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), he does not recognise the cowardly young man who tried to kill him a few days earlier. “Is it in a crazy-house for females that I’m landed now?” the old man exclaims, incredulous. The comical reference to the asylum here serves a pragmatic purpose – to emphasize the situational turnaround that made poor Christy a playboy. But one cannot help but notice the recurrence of such references to psychiatric institutions and symptoms in Irish drama during the Celtic Revival. John Millington Synge (1871-1909), one of the most famous playwrights of the period, peopled his plays with “raging mad[men]”, “true idiot[s] born” and “raving maniac[s]” “foaming”, for whom “madhouse[s]”, “crazy-house[s]” or more properly called “asylums” were the only possible end.

Could madness be a defining theme of Irish writing?

Did these representations of madness echo the actual structures and strategies of the care of the insane in Ireland? This would evidence the fact that the playwright knew about psychiatry; how could artists be acquainted with medical discourse? From a literary point of view, what did the recurrent reference to madness entail in terms of stylistic effects? Were these mentions of the various psychiatric symptoms, nosologies and institutions a mere stylistic effect, a hyperbolic vulgarization of the medical lexicon meant to emphasise the linguistic vivacity of the characters and the destabilisation of society during the nationalist struggle? In that case could madness, and more precisely identity and memory disorders be a defining theme of Irish writing? These are some of the questions I aim to bring into focus in my thesis.

Psychiatric discourse and Irish drama

The celebrated Irish scholar Declan Kiberd wrote that “the first [way to interpret a classic] is to interpret it historically, in terms of the ideas and events of its own age. One of the most useful services a scholar can perform is to create the conditions and materials out of which a work of art first came.”[1] With this quote in mind I came to the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland in April 2013 to try and recreate the medical context in which J. M. Synge’s but also W. B. Yeats’ plays were written. I meant to determine the extent to which psychiatric discourses pervaded Irish drama through newspapers articles, advertisements, and vulgarized representations of madness in paintings and other literary texts; this theory would help qualify the traditional representation of the Celtic Revival as a merely backward-looking movement.  In this post I would like to outline some of the key stakes of my research by focusing on the example of asylums in John Millington Synge’s drama.

John Millington Synge (1871-1909)
Image from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/fam/cgi-bin/family/individual.php?pid=I12183&ged=auden-bicknell.ged

A potent, dramatic setting

Though Synge deplored the effects of modernity on Irish traditions and literature in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World, he was concerned with contemporary medical debates. This can be linked to his declining health – he was to die of Hodgkin’s disease in 1909 - but also to an intellectual interest in the question of mental health in particular. The playwright repeatedly mentions asylums in his works, and also includes popular representations of madness, thus informing us of the way mental disease was perceived at the beginning of the twentieth century in rural Ireland. The system of care for the insane in Ireland had steadily developed since the end of the eighteenth century. In 1900 indeed, there were 22 district asylums, 12 private asylums, 4 charitable hospitals for the insane and a Central Criminal Asylum in the country. All in all 21,169 patients were accommodated in psychiatric institutions in Ireland according to medicine historian T. Percy Kirpatrick.[2] Asylums had therefore become a prominent part of the Irish landscape but still inspired awe and defiance, and playwrights were keen on exploiting this potent, dramatic setting.

Conflicting representations of the asylum

Synge used the asylum in his plays either as a fantasized place where patients were deprived of their freedom and individuality, or on the contrary as a place of quietness and beneficial isolation, far from the vicissitudes of society. Such conflicting representations of the asylum mirror those that could be found in newspapers as scandalous testimonies on the supposedly awful conditions of living alternated with laudatory praise of the board of governors’ and medical superintendants attempts to promote activities and humane care for the “lunatics”. The asylum is never the actual setting of the plays, but it features in several of them, most prominently so in his first play When the Moon Has Set Yeats and Lady Gregory rejected in 1901. The protagonist, Colm, hears a “nearly crazy”[3] woman moan and scream as he walks across the bogs. Bridget tells him about the tragic story of Mary Costello and her stay at the Asylum in those terms:

it’s ten years she was below in the Asylum, and it was a great wonder the way you’d see her in there, not lonesome at all with the great lot were coming in from all the houses in the country, and herself as well off as any lady in England, France, or Germany, walking around in the gardens with fine shoes on her feet. Ah, it was well for her in there, God help her, for she was always a nice quiet woman, and a fine woman to look at, and I’ve heard tell it was ‘Your Ladyship’ they would call her, the time they’d be making fun among themselves.[4]

The idyllic depiction of the institution is contradicted a few years later in The Shadow of the Glen (1903). In the following excerpt, a Tramp tries to convince a woman living in an isolated glen that living on the road is the ultimate form of freedom, though the life of a tramp is not devoid of fear. He admits it implicitly when he declares:

TRAMP (Speaking mournfully) […] If myself was easily afeard, I'm telling you, it's long ago I'd have been locked into the Richmond Asylum, or maybe have run up into the back hills with nothing on me but an old shirt, and been eaten with crows the like of Patch Darcy—the Lord have mercy on him—in the year that's gone. 

The Richmond Lunatic Asylum

The Richmond Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1815, was probably the most famous asylum in Ireland; it is here depicted as society’s attempt to regulate the outcasts’ alternative way of life, but also as an avowal of failure for those who are unable to cope with harsh conditions of living and a dreaded sanction for this lack of courage. As for the spectacular and apparently unrealistic case of Patch Darcy, he was probably inspired by the real case of farmer John Winterbottom Synge heard about when he was staying in County Wicklow. Winterbottom apparently did take off his clothes and ran away, only to be found dead weeks later.[5] Synge notes the importance of the structures of care for the insane in the Wicklow peasants’ imagination: “when they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow – America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse”.[6] Therefore the comparatively numerous references to asylums and workhouses in his drama correspond to his own almost anthropologist observations of Irish rural life. Real psychiatric institutions and cases were a source of inspiration for the Irish writer and give a somewhat realistic background to his depiction of madness whereas in other excerpts madness is staged in its popular conception. This shows how the beginning of the twentieth century was a transition from traditional views of madness to an increasingly scientific stance that began to pervade Irish society as a whole, with artists as the advance guard in the process.

The Lower House of the Richmond Lunatic Asylum (later Grangegorman)
Image from: http://pix.ie/limerickstudent/757250

A peculiar climate

As a layman, Synge had a limited knowledge of the aetiology of mental illness; he therefore resorted to traditional interpretations and attributed the seemingly high proportion of mental diseases in Ireland (a question that was a matter of debate and speculations at the time) to the peculiar climate of the island:  

[in Wicklow] when the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful, to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among the hills.[7]

Was insanity on the increase?

“Is insanity on the increase?”, Dr William Corbet wondered in 1874, or was it simply a matter of increased structures of care and a better knowledge of madness ?[8] Whether it corresponded to an actual observation or not, there was indeed an inflation of the number of insane at least in Irish drama…or to be fair of people labelled “mad”. Unsurprisingly, the words from the lexical field of madness that are the most commonly used in the Playboy are those that have “contaminated” everyday language as terms of abuse, such as “fool”, “mad” and its derivatives (“madman”, “madness”). This general hyperbole entails an exaggerated and deformed representation of Irish rural society and takes part in a process of rhetorical undermining of the characters by one another. One should keep in mind the comic potential of the medical terms of abuse and interjections for the audience, since almost all of the characters have their mental health questioned in the play, from Old Mahon whose “cracked skull” could cause delirious hallucinations to the Widow Quin who murdered her husband and Christy himself, “the loony of Mahon”. By repeatedly using the lexicon of mental illness, the playwright stages an unstable world, a society on the brink of collective madness where no truth or character is permanent but transitory and fluctuating.

Dottyville

The clinical symptoms of madness in the play are fascinating to analyse in that some of them actually resemble real clinical cases recorded at the time. To give but one brief example, Old Mahon tells the Widow Quin that he was once committed to a lunatic asylum where he had hallucinations probably caused by delirium tremens. He proudly presents himself as a “a terrible and fearful case”, and goes on : “there I was one time screeching in a straitened waistcoat with seven doctors writing out my sayings in a printed book.”  As often in an Irish context,[9] Mahon’s madness is attributed to an excessive drinking – a feature satirists were keen on using in pamphlets and caricatures. “I have never heard the men [in Kerry] talk for half an hour of anything without some allusion to drink”[10], Synge himself remarked in his notes. Mahon’s violence is such that he has to wear a straitened waistcoat, at a time when it was most often only used in potentially dangerous cases after the reports of the commissions denounced abuses. The description he makes of his hallucinations strongly resembles the clinical cases described by famous Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman  in the “Note on Hallucinations, II”  he read in front of the Medical Section of the Academy of Medicine in Ireland on March 13th, 1903.[11]  Incidentally Norman is well-known to us literature students because he is mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses as head of “dottyville”....the Richond Asylum! The sensation of having rodents crawl around or on him Mahon describes (“one time I seen rats as big as badgers sucking the life blood from the butt of my lug”) was frequently recorded by Norman in his case studies.

Madness and the limits of identity

“O, isn't madness a fright?”, the Widow Quin wonders in The Playboy. It is indeed since madness in literature is often evidenced by spectacular symptoms – hallucinations, fainting or raging fits etc. The example of spectacular manifestations of madness in drama are numerous - one can think of raving, half-naked Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear (even if his madness is feigned!), or of apathetic, hallucinated Martin who thinks he is a prophet in Yeats’ play The Unicorn from the Stars (1908). Interestingly enough “rage” and “raging” (and to a least extent “raving”) are often used by Synge. The dramatic dimension of mental illness corresponds to the popular representation of madness as can be found in numerous artistic productions and obliterate less “spectacular” symptoms (these adjectives are not chosen lightly in a theatrical context of course). My research will examine how madness allows the characters to experience the limits of their identity and memory and favours creativity and dynamism in language that may result in modern experimentations, which is one of the main ideas I would like to explore further in my thesis.

Literature and medicine

In this post I meant to give a brief overview of the way literature could echo contemporary debates of psychiatry, from the prominence of alcohol as a cause of mental disease to the use of straitjackets and the conflicting representations of asylums in society. Literature and medicine are by no means impermeable discourses but impact one another notably through a circulation of medical vocabulary in everyday speech. Researchers are increasingly interested in medical humanities and Irish literature has a lot to offer; let’s hope that this will lead to fruitful collaborations between historians and arts researchers such as the one I was lucky to experience at CHOMI.

Claire Poinsot is a doctoral student at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3. She may be contacted by email at claire "dot" poinsot "at" hotmail "dot" fr. 

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[1] Declan Kiberd, Irish classics (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2001), p.x.

[2] T. Percy C. Kirkpatrick, A Note on the History of the Care of the Insane in Ireland up to the end of the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: University Press, Ponsonby and Gibbs, 1931), p.34.

[3] J.M. Synge, When The Moon Has Set, in Ann Saddlemeyer, J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume III, Plays, Book I (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p.159.

[4] Synge, When The Moon Has Set, in Saddlemeyer, op.cit., p.161.

[5] TCD MS 6218, 23/7/1902, 30/7/1902 and 4/9/1902.

[6] J. M. Synge, “The Peoples of the Glens”,  In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (Dublin and London: Maunsel & Company, Ltd., 1919), p.27.

[7] J. M. Synge, “The Oppression of the Hill”, In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, p.14.

[8] William J. Corbet, On the Statistics of Insanity, A Paper read before the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, On Tuesday, 21st April, 1874 (Dublin: R. D. Webb & Son, 1874), p.4.

[9] See W. R. Dawson, Alcohol and Mental Disease, reprinted for the Author from the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, June 1908 (Dublin: John Falconer, 1908).

[10] J. M. Synge, “In West Kerry”, In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, p.100.

[11] Conolly Norman, “Note on Hallucinations, II”, read before the Medical Section of the Academy of Medicine in Ireland on March, 13^th, 1903, reprinted from the Journal of Mental Science, April1903 (Hanover Square and Dorking: Adlard and Son, 1903).