‘Running Mad’: Loco-Motion and the Madness of Language in Jane Austen’s ‘Love and Friendship’

Abstract

Just over a century prior to the appearance of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in America, the 14-year-old Jane Austen wrote what was to become the best known juvenile piece’ (Epstein 402) of her three-‘volume’ collection of early writings, the raucous and rattling burlesque entitled ‘Love and Freindship’ (1790). Written in epistolary form, Austen’s first-person narrative features the irrepressible Laura, a swooning heroine of sensibility whose self-professed propensity for ‘running mad’ poses a comic parallel to the sorts of logical contradictions inherent in Gilman’s text. Glaring absurdities result, indeed, from the ‘burden of self-consciousness’ placed upon the narrator by the epistolary mode, as Annette B. Hopkins long ago noted. She points specifically to how Austen’s heroine is at one point ‘driven to describe her own appearance in the process of going mad’ (41). ‘My voice faltered, my eyes assumed a vacant Stare, my face became as pale as Death, and my Senses were considerably impaired —,’ the blithely self-observant Laura thus confides, before fortuitously proceeding to recall, verbatim, the pith and substance of a ‘two Hours’ raving mad soliloquy.¹

These juvenile sketches provide an excellent antidote to the conventional view of Jane Austen as a calm, well-mannered novelist, confined to a narrow world of subtle nuance and at times crippling decorum. Here she forgets or has not yet learned to be constrained by her manners, and reveals that she knows more than a girl her age should.

Margaret Drabble, ‘Foreword,’ Jane Austen’s Beginnings, 1989

In the logic of the theme, contradiction is inadmissible. But the rhetoric of the text suspends that logic: it resides in thematic contradiction, functioning according to a different logic, that of the unconscious, which, as we know, knows nothing of contradiction. Rhetoric is nothing other than a mode of contradiction in the text.

Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness, 1985