The Madness of Free Indirect Style

Abstract

This chapter considers the emergence of moral therapy in early psychiatry in order to argue that the Romantic-era innovation of free indirect style shares an affinity with eighteenth-century psychiatric diagnosis and case records. While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management, as well as in the political literature of the 1790s and in Romantic-era realist prose fiction. Free indirect style has a monitory function that abetted the psychiatric practice of moral management in the late eighteenth century: as a strategy for mediating the voice of a speaker in a text, free indirect style allowed early psychiatrists, who believed madness was transmitted orally, to regulate their patients’ conditions by moderating their speech. Free indirect style continues to bear the traces of the madhouse in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. Free indirect style also thus inaugurates the association of the novel with the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, free indirect style allows the writer to intimate forms of pathology that the reader is invited to, in effect, diagnose.