Tea at Trianon: Wordsworth, Poetry and Mental Disorder

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Wordsworth, Poetry and Mental Disorder

From the Wordsworth Trust:

Wordsworth was certainly not alone in his attraction to the subject of mental and behavioural abnormality. During the 1790s (the decade in which Lyrical Ballads was first published), verse narratives of the mad, melancholic, and wild were all the rage in England’s newspapers. Readers craving “extraordinary incident” (Wordsworth’s expression) relished sensational tales about people made mad by incredible circumstances, while the more refined were invited to weep over the young and broken-hearted whose love brought them to the brink. Meanwhile, writers often ascribed to “lunatics” and “idiots” (both medical terms at the time) a unique form of wisdom or grace: there was holiness in the fool, just as there was often a kind of truth available in the obscure language and behaviour of “melancholics” and “maniacs.” The mad were often depicted in literature as solitary beings, traversing high cliffs or living in the wilderness, reflecting popular beliefs about their God-like or “natural” state of existence.

In many ways, Wordsworth’s poetry is part and parcel with this cultural moment: Lyrical Ballads is peopled with the mad, hysterical, and wild, figures which both fascinated and repulsed the popular imagination at this time. But Wordsworth’s poetry also dispenses with many of the common clichés about mental disorder, in its association with lost love, the supernatural, and other sensational affairs. Some of Wordsworth’s distracted figures, like the elderly father in Old Man Travelling, and the mothers in The Mad Mother and The Thorn, carry a trauma brought about by familial loss or separation. Other poems, like The Old Cumberland Beggar and Resolution and Independence, tell stories about the relationship between mental health and labour. The Ruined Cottage, The Female Vagrant and Anecdote for Fathers further reflect Wordsworth’s ideas about the social dimensions of mental health by confronting the relationship between poverty and mind disorders. (Read more.)