Women and madness in the early Romantic novel
Injured minds, ruined lives
By Deborah Weiss
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- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 288
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: November 2024
Description
Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors - Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays - blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers - Edgeworth and Opie - located causality in less gendered and less victimized accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.
Contents
Introduction: Women and madness in the early-Romantic novel
1 Madness and Maria: The Wrongs of Woman and patriarchal control
2 Of Madness and monitors: Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock
3 Death by despair: Fatal melancholia in The Victim of Prejudice
4 Misplaced passions, erroneous associations and remorse: Madness reconsidered in Belinda
5 The impossibility of love-madness: The Father and Daughter
Coda: Wide Sargasso Sea: The erasure of love-madness and the mad woman's revenge
Bibliography
Index
Author
Deborah Weiss is Professor of English at the University of Alabama