Polish Romanticism and the Discourses of Madness and the Mental Asylum

Abstract

Summary This article deals with the problem of representation of psychiatric discourse and the mental asylum in the literature of Polish Romanticism. I am interested in both sides of the argument, i.e. the attempts to legitimize confinement in psychiatric institutions as well as the reasoning of the critics of that policy. My analyses, which draw on texts ranging from literary classics like Juliusz Słowacki’s Kordian to popular fiction (e.g. Ludwik Sztyrmer’s psychological thriller Phrenophagos and Phrenolestes and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s short story Bedlam), suggest that the psychiatric discourse in 19th-century literature employed three basic strategies of representation, i.e. legitimation, subversion and functionalization. If a fresh interest in institutionalized psychiatry was one of the key characteristics of the rise of modern society, the literature of Polish Romanticism was certainly part of it, even if its approach was dominated by ideas and attitudes that were hardly novel.