Inviolable Beauty: The Madwoman in the Sentimental Age

Neuendorf, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_3

Mark Neuendorf⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions ((PSHE))

178 Accesses

Abstract

The madwoman took on renewed significance in the culture of sensibility. Usually depicted as a figure of remarkable physical beauty, suffering undeserved distress, the female lunatic captivated sentimentalists, who sought emotional transport through the contemplation of her charms. However, this yearning for aesthetic, or sensual gratification during sympathetic engagements meant that supposedly benevolent spectators demanded increasingly stylised spectacles of sympathy towards which to direct their attentions and beneficence. Consequently, to attract benevolent regard, charitable subjects like the insane were required to conform to a waifish, submissive, and figuratively feminised ideal, inspired by Edmund Burke’s much-lauded concept of beauty. Failure to achieve this ideal could excite aversion in observers, bringing into sharp relief the precariousness of the sentimental vision of a social order built on sympathy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 99.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Philalethes [Hannah More], ‘To the Printer of the St. J. CHRONICLE. A TALE of REAL WOE’, The St. James’s Chronicle (10–13 November, 1781).
2.
Ibid.
3.
See, for example, Horace Walpole to Mary Hamilton, 7 October, 1783, in Walpole’s Correspondence, Vol. 31 (1961), 207–9.
4.
Dorice Williams Elliot, The Angel Out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 33–53; Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University Press, 1989); Johanna Smith, ‘Philanthropic Community in ‘Millenium Hall’ and the York Ladies Committee’, The Eighteenth Century 36, no. 3: The Contradictions of ‘Community’ (1995), 266–82.
5.
On women’s contributions to philanthropic causes and humanitarian reforms see Elliot, Angel Out of the House; Mary Lenard, Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224–47.
6.
Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 136.
7.
Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 97–111 (qtd. 100).
8.
Cecilia Lucy Brightwell ed., Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd edition (Norwich, 1865), 15.
9.
Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 115.
10.
On contemporary associations between sensibility and erotic sensuality see Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8; Jerome McGann, Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7.
11.
Vanessa Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001), 269.
12.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), 13.
13.
Ibid., 13.
14.
Ibid., 14.
15.
Ibid., 34.
16.
Ibid., 13.
17.
Ibid., 13. On the instinctive corporeality of Burke’s sublime see Ryan, ‘Physiological Sublime’, 271–3; Richard Shusterman, ‘Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 4 (2005), 323–41.
18.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 42.
19.
Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25–31.
20.
Amit Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 32; Jan Mieszkowski, ‘Fear of a safe place’, in Fear: Across the Disciplines, ed. Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 101–3.
21.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 13–4.
22.
Ibid., 74.
23.
Ibid., 18–9.
24.
Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror, and Human Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 5. On the gendering of the sublime in early modern aesthetic discourses see John Pipkin, ‘The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38, no. 4 (1998), 597–619.
25.
Daniel O’Neill, ‘The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Political in Burke’s Work’, in The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 197.
26.
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.
27.
Furniss, Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, 34.
28.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 100.
29.
Ibid., 18.
30.
Ibid., 25.
31.
Ibid., 97.
32.
William Musgrave, ‘“That Monstrous Fiction”: Radical Agency and Aesthetic Ideology in Burke’, Studies in Romanticism 36, no. 1 (1997), 12–13.
33.
Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63. Burke’s fantasy of feminine submission to masculine authority has an analogue in contemporary debates on marriage, which placed pressure on women to facilitate loving relationships. See, for example, Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), Ch. 2.
34.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 34.
35.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir By Lucy Aikin, vol. 2 (London, 1825), 214–31.
36.
Ibid., 215.
37.
Ibid., 215–6.
38.
Ibid., 216–7.
39.
R.S. Crane, ‘Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, ELH 1, no. 3 (1934), 227–9.
40.
Carolyn Williams, “The Luxury of Doing Good’: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society’, in Pleasure in the Eighteenth-Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1996), 77.
41.
Mark Koch, ‘“A Spectacle Pleasing to God and Man”: Sympathy and the Show of Charity in the Restoration Spittle Sermons’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 4 (2013), 482–3. See also, Crane, ‘Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, 227–9.
42.
R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1974), 78.
43.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 97. On the latent sensuality of Sentimental Journey see Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 315–9.
44.
Lance Bertelsen, ‘Committed by Justice Fielding: Judicial and Journalistic Representation in the Bow Street Magistrate’s Office January 3–November 24, 1752’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 4 (1997), 347.
45.
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 171.
46.
Ibid., 164.
47.
Ibid., 164.
48.
Indeed, even in the Jacobin republic of virtue, the sensibility of ‘natural’ virtue was of a different class to the ‘cold and abstract’ quality of ‘sublime’ classical republicanism; ‘sincere affection’ was always a ‘moral guide’ for French sentimentalists. See Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 37, 44.
49.
Amy Milka and David Lemmings, ‘Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom’, Journal of Legal History 38, no. 2 (2017), 158–160.
50.
Barbauld, Works, 220.
51.
Ibid., 222–4.
52.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 92–3.
53.
Ibid., 92; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 42.
54.
See Smith, Moral Sentiments, 42–3.
55.
William Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper; A Poem in Six Cantos (Philadelphia, 1787), 81.
56.
Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 91.
57.
Barbauld, Works, 224.
58.
Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 22 [emphasis added].
59.
On the relation between madness and moral and spiritual health in the early modern period see Porter, Madmen; Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Paul Laffey, ‘Insanity in Enlightenment England’ (PhD thesis: University of Western Australia, 2001); Philippe Huneman, ‘From a Religious View of Madness to Religious Mania: The Encyclopédie, Pinel, Esquirol’, History of Psychiatry 28, no. 2 (2017), 147–51.
60.
Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness, vol. 1, (London, 1782), 29–30. See also William Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic, vol. 4 (Edinburgh, 1788), 145–6.
61.
Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 56–64; Byrd, Visits to Bedlam.
62.
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London, 1771), 60–1.
63.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 601.
64.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, vol. 2 (London, 1768), 180. Sterne here is quoting 2 Samuel 12:3, part of the parable that relates a poor man’s devotion to his solitary goat.
65.
On the culture of sensibility’s cult-like preoccupations see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 258–62.
66.
W.B. Gerard, ‘Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria” as Model of Empathic Response’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, eds Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 493–7.
67.
Easily the most popular of these anthologies was The Beauties of Sterne; including all his Pathetic Tales, & most distinguished Observations on Life. Selected for the Heart of Sensibility, which went through over a dozen reprints across Britain and America in the 1780s. As Gerard notes, ‘[t]he reader engaged in Beauties would enjoy a proscribed, intimate experience with Maria, … presented with an emblematic or quintessential type of sentimental purity’ (‘Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria”’, 487).
68.
William Blake Gerard, ‘“All that the heart wishes”: Changing Views toward Sentimentality Reflected in Visualisations of Sterne’s Maria, 1773–1888’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 34 (2005), 236.
69.
Elisabeth Lebrun, quoted in Roger Hudson ed., Nelson and Emma (London: Folio Society, 1994), 197.
70.
For a consideration of the empathic quality of Maria’s ‘beauty’ see also Gerard, ‘Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria”’, 497–9. Though Gerard’s adoption of contemporary affect theory risks anachronism, his conclusions about the reception and consumption of Maria’s form broadly mirror my own findings.
71.
Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 179.
72.
Yorick, ‘Ode to Maria of Moulines’, Sentimental Magazine, or, General Assemblage of Science, Taste, and Entertainment 3 (1775), 134. This potent trope was not only adopted by imitators of Sterne, but a range of authors seeking to convey a sentimental madwoman’s unceasing beauty. See, for example, George Dyer, ‘Sonnet. On seeing a Beautiful Young Female Maniac in Bedlam’, The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (Sept. 1799), 218.
73.
[Miss Street], The Letters of Maria; to which is added, An Account of her Death (London, 1790), 98, 121.
74.
Ibid., 123.
75.
Van Sant, Sensibility, 51–3.
76.
Ryan Stark suggests that Sterne based the character of Maria on the biblical figure of Tamar, in a veiled allusion to prostitution (‘Sterne’s Maria in the Biblical Sense’, The Cambridge Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2016), 224–243).
77.
Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 177.
78.
Anon, ‘To the Willow, In the Character of Sterne’s Maria. By the Same’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle 55, no. 9 (1785), 736.
79.
Sally, ‘Sterne’s Maria’, The European Magazine, and London Review 36 (Oct., 1799), 235.
80.
Street, Letters of Maria, 121.
81.
Anon, ‘On Reading Sterne’s Maria’, The Town and Country Magazine, or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction. And Entertainment 19 (Dec. 1787), 571.
82.
David Solkin, Art in Britain 1660–1815 (Yale: Yale University Press, 2015), 235–7.
83.
Thus, text accompanying Robert Sayers’s 1787 print of Maria and her dog ranged through the woman’s sublime distress, before emphasising that the portrait was ‘design’d’ to convey ‘A Gentle Form [and] a Sentimental mind’ (Robert Sayer, ‘Maria at Moulines’, after Robert Dighton, 1787, hand-coloured mezzotint, from the British Museum online collection (2010, 7081.1286)).
84.
Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (26 April 1777).
85.
Quoted in Michael Birch, Mediating Mental Health: Contexts, Debates and Analysis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 78.
86.
Elizabeth Foster, quoted in Hudson, Nelson and Emma, 80. See also, Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, 23 August 1791, in Walpole’s Correspondence, Vol. 11 (1944), 340.
87.
Public Advertiser (4 October, 1779).
88.
Brightwell, Memorials, 15.
89.
Ibid., 17.
90.
In her ground-breaking critique of British psychiatry’s gendered ideologies, The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter first noted the objectification of the madwoman as plaintive waif, by male writers from the Romantic Age.
91.
Unlicensed public visitation at Bethlem was ended in 1770; from this point, visitors required endorsement from a hospital governor.
92.
In one highly stylised passage, la Roche described an abject encounter with Margaret Nicholson, the lunatic who had attempted the life of George III in August of that year. See Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786, trans. Clare Williams (London: J. Cape, 1933), 169.
93.
Ibid., 169–70.
94.
Ibid., 169.
95.
Porter, Madmen, 100; Jonathan Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital c1634-c1770’ (PhD thesis: QMUL, 1991), 69–70.
96.
Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 170.
97.
Ibid., 170. On the perceived ‘authenticity’ of mediated feelings in the eighteenth century see e.g. Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, ‘Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture’, in Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, 3–19 (esp. 6) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Aleksondra Hultquist, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Progress through the Passions’, in Kerr, Lemmings and Phiddian eds, Passions, 86–104.
98.
Brightwell, Memorials, 14–7.
99.
More, ‘To the Printer’.
100.
Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More, vol. 1 (London, 1834), 21.
101.
On Louisa’s confinement see Leonard Smith, Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815: Commercialised Care for the Insane (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 148–150.
102.
John Wesley, The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 4 (London, 1903), 210.
103.
Quentin Bailey, Wordsworth’s Vagrants: Police, Prisons, and Poetry in the 1790s (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 174.
104.
Arminian Magazine 5, no. 6 (1782), 321.
105.
Ibid., 324.
106.
Wesley, Journal, 255.
107.
Quoted in Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 56.
108.
Quoted in Ibid., 56.
109.
Quoted in Ibid., 56.
110.
Hannah More, Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons (London, 1782), 285.
111.
Ibid., 278.
112.
Scott, Hannah More, 57.
113.
Anon, “Louisa, the Lady of the Haystack”, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction: Being an Assemblage of Whatever can Tend to Please the Fancy, Interest the Mind, or Exalt the Character of the British Fair 3–6 (Jun., 1801), 423.
114.
Showalter, Female Malady; Gerard, ‘All that the heart wishes’.
115.
Ana de Freitas Boe, ‘“I Call Beauty a Social Quality”: Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More’s Rejoinder to Edmund Burke’s Body Politic of the Beautiful’, Women’s Writing 18, no. 3 (2011), 352–5; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 63–71; Michelle Faubert, ‘Introduction’, in Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, ed. Michelle Faubert (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012), 33–6.
116.
Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 362–3. See also Faubert, ‘Introduction’, 25–7.
117.
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 19.
118.
Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 364.
119.
Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 103.
120.
In a sense, the madhouse here was merely a plot device, used to accentuate sentimentalism’s ‘antiworldview’—that is, the respectable, sensitive woman shown powerless before the naked power of the masculine ‘World’ (see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, Ch. 5).
121.
Faubert, ‘Introduction’, 40.
122.
Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic, 1992), 211.
123.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman. A Posthumous Fragment. (Philadelphia, 1799), 44–5.
124.
Ibid., 45.
125.
On the emergence of the picturesque as the premier model for connoisseurship in the late eighteenth-century see Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
126.
Wollstonecraft, Maria, 37.
127.
Ibid., 31.
128.
Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, 19 August 1797, in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 435 [emphasis added].
129.
On the enduring ‘inconsistencies’ between Wollstonecraft’s political ideals, and her lived experience of sentiment, see Faubert, ‘Introduction’, 27.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Mark Neuendorf

Authors

Mark Neuendorf
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark Neuendorf .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Neuendorf, M. (2021). Inviolable Beauty: The Madwoman in the Sentimental Age. In: Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_3

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_3
Published: 20 November 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84355-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84356-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics