Women, Religion, and Insanity in Mary Lamb’s “The Young Mahometan”1

Abstract

Mary Lamb’s short story “Margaret Green: or, The Young Mahometan,” in the Lambs’ children’s collection Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), turns on a girl’s conversion to Islam and her subsequent “delirious” concern for her non‐Mahometan mother’s eternal fate: a religious crisis which has been largely neglected in the criticism. The girl’s delirium corresponds to assertions in treatises of this period that either excessive fear of hell or religious conversion in itself could cause insanity. However, the story also exposes the overuse of labels of madness to discredit “radical” religious views, whether of Muslims or of dissenting Christians. Read in the context of Mary Lamb’s likely exposure via Coleridge to biblical criticism, the story critiques such labels by questioning whether Christianity rests on any firmer historical and rational bases than does Islam. Biographical evidence suggests that the story may register Mary Lamb’s own religious struggles and experiences of mental illness, but she takes no clear stand on the religious issues she raises; rather, she depicts the harm women suffer from censorship of their religious questions, and in the frame of Mrs. Leicester’s School she offers a glimpse of a community in which women may voice their religious views without being labelled “mad.”