Madwomen and Attics

Abstract

The chapter examines the evolution of the figure of the madwoman in Gothic narratives, focusing particularly on representations of emotions and on the ways in which definitions of madness evolved in the nineteenth century, from ‘passion’ to ‘moral insanity’ and ‘hystero-catalepsy’. Recognising that locking madwomen up has always been one of the most significant features of Gothic fiction, their imprisonment putting an end to deviance and thus maintaining the status quo, it also charts the changes in madwomen’s places of confinement - coffins and deadhouses more and more replacing attics in Victorian narratives that then capitalised on fears of premature interment. In the second half of the nineteenth century, such images of madwomen locked up in attics were revisited, as madness and ‘badness’ became the object of medical investigation and as research into mental physiology attempted to probe the mysteries of brain mechanisms. Sensation novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote the clichés of the genre, finding their sources of inspiration in real-life cases and denouncing the wrongful incarceration of women in lunatic asylums