Reading 'Madness': Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1888 by Catharine Coleborne

Abstract

Catharine Colebome, Reading * Madness': Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1888 (Perth:API Network, 2007). ISBN: 9781920845346. 219 pp. Book Reviews EssayReview Reading Madness is an intriguing and innovative history of the lunatic asylum in Victoria,Australia,between the establishment of the colony's first such institution, at Yarra Bend in 1848, and the report of the Zox Royal Commission into Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate, nearly forty years later. Coleborne's chief concern is with the ways that our colonial forebears sought to make sense of madness by containing it within a system of differences- that is, by putting it into a language. The 'language of the asylum,9 as Coleborne analyses it, was structuredby the rigorous distinctions drawn between patient populations, enforced in the segregated spaces and iron routines of the institutionand disseminated in medical, legal, journalistic andbureaucratictexts. These texts, she contends, did not merely reflect, but actively constituted social relations by reconfiguring understandings of pathology and normality- both within the institution and beyond its walls. As its title suggests, this is a work written from a vantagepointbeyond history's ' linguistic turn.' By emphasising thefictive and generic dimensions of asylum documents, the way thatthey 'made up' the people they purportedto describe, Coleborne aims to deconstruct or problematise the key sociological categories of patienthood which earliermedical and social historians often took for granted. Class, race and gender appear in Reading Madness, not as natural 'givens,' but as cultural constructions embodied in institutional writing and circulated throughout the wider culture. The representations generated by the asylum, she insists, cannot be accepted as transparentdescriptions of an empirical reality,but must be interrogatedas rhetoricalvehicles for the 'production' or 'invention' of the proper patient, the authoritativedoctor or the ideal asylum. 170 Health&History, 2007.9/2 Health& History • 9/2 • 2007 171 The earlierchaptersof the book aredevoted to the asylum's "invention,9exploring the imagination and legitimation of a reformedandtherapeuticspacetoreplacethebedlamandthegaol. Inventing the asylum was not only an affair of state. Coleborne quotes from several colonial newspapers which agitated for separate institutional provision for Victoria's lunatics from the 1850s onwards just as vociferously as their contemporary equivalents decry the failures of deinstitutionalisation. Then, as now, community responses to the scandal of public madness were complex and ambivalent, as humanitarianconsiderations competed with an overriding fearof the Other.On the one hand, the mentally ill deserved protection and kindness- on the other, they requiredconfinement and control. Coleborne implies that this equivocal public discourse had specifically colonial overtones in a society seeking to harness economic dynamism and social mobility to the conservative values of gentility and public order. In the context of late nineteenth century Victoria, the asylum could be idealised as emblematic of a triumphant civilisation, emerging from the excesses and disorders of the past. As psychiatric statistics began to be gatheredand intercolonial comparisons were made, Victorians came to see themselves as living in 'the maddest colony' of the Empire, where, as the Ballarat Star put it in 1858, uniquely "violent and rapid changes in industry,wealth, social relations and civil status' had brought many to 'despair' and rendered them 'dangerous to society.' Against this background, the imagined curative institution would not only reform its inmates, but would palliate the ailments of an overheated and under-governedsociety. The tension between theidealised image of the asylum as a place of moral rectitude, caring medicine and peace and quiet, and a reality which appears to have been crowded, neglectful and routinely violent soon led- in Victoria as elsewhere- to a cycle of scandals and official inquiries, which Coleborne considers further 'wrote the mad' into the popular consciousness. Gender is a key theme of Coleborne's history. Her argument throughout is distinguished by its attentiveness to ways that the discourse of alienism was also a discourse on the 'natural'differences between the sexes. The legitimation of the asylum keeper as an expert capable of pronouncing on legal and social issues, she argues, was crucially contingent upon 172 BOOK REVIEWS his ability to naturalise the patriarchalorder and to camouflage its abuses. Exploring evidence given in criminal trials and case studies presented in medical journals, she notes that all forms of conducting unbecoming a Victorian woman...