Suffering, Emotion and the Claim to Sanity in an Eighteenth-Century Confinement Narrative

Abstract

This paper focuses on an eighteenth-century ‘wrongful confinement’ narrative exploring the ways in which appeal to emotion within it allows the author to countervail the label of madness conferred upon him through his incarceration. Alexander Cruden's (1699–1770) pamphlet The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured appeared in 1739 in response to the ‘barbarous’ treatment he experienced while confined in a private madhouse. Cruden's narrative has been discussed as a text that helps recover patients' voices in the history of madness. However, attention has been paid mostly to the evidential manner in which Cruden attempts to prove his sanity and the wrongfulness of his confinement. The present analysis contends that appeal to emotion is the most significant factor that helps Cruden reclaim sanity. It shows that emotional expression in Cruden's text helps mediate suffering that centres on cruelty and humiliation rather than physical harm. More than that, this emphasis on suffering as humiliation and indignity is a calculated act that appeals to compassion and identifies the author as a member of an emotional community that values it. This alignment with the culturally sanctioned emotion of compassion, it is argued, is the most effective way of reclaiming sanity in a social context.