Tea at Trianon: The Portrayal of Mental Disorders in Literature

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

Friday, May 27, 2022

The Portrayal of Mental Disorders in Literature

From Crime Reads:

Madness lies at the dark heart of some of the greatest and most popular novels in the world, reflecting its power to drive a narrative; readers are deeply intrigued. We are reeled in by our dread of the unknown, by the unexplored darkness out there that it represents as well as the unnerving possibility that it is also inside us

Madness is of course an outdated shorthand term encompassing a variety of mental disorders and illnesses; the knowledge that so many of us are on a spectrum that ranges from mild anxiety to severe psychosis makes the literary portraits of the mentally unwell compelling as well as disconcerting.

The five books I describe reflect the age in which they were written; if mental illness is diagnosed by doctors it is also defined by society because society decides what makes behaviour unusual, undesirable or even ‘mad.’

For background: in the mid-eighteenth century the mentally ill were incarcerated in asylums, great warehouses that could each house a hundred thousand; these were more like prisons than hospitals though ironically asylum, a Greek word, means place of safety or refuge. Treatments were inhumane and could involve shackling, near drowning, removal of body parts, or deliberate infection with malaria. Mortality rates were unsurprisingly high. (Read more.)