260 BOOK REVIEWS No such questions are raised in Literature and Aging about, for example, the kinds of gender and race relationships implied in the portraits of two elderly African-American women, Phoenix Jackson and Aunt Munsie, who are dignified but poverty-stricken, uncouth, and forgetful— the former drawn by a middle-class white woman (Welty) in "A Worn Path," the latter by a middle-class white male (Taylor), in "What You Hear from 'Em?" Similar portraits of elderly African-American women are drawn by African-American writers (Gwendolyn Brooks, in "The Bean Eaters"; Lucille Clifton, in "Miss Rosie"; Bambara, in "Maggie of the Green Bottles"; and Sterling Brown, in "Virginia Portrait"). The editors seem more balanced in their representations of elderly white women, since several are by white women similar in class to those they represent (Denise Levertov's poems "A Woman Alone" and "The 90th Year"; Amy Lowell's poem "A Lady"; and Olsen's story, "Tell Me a Riddle"). Except for Olsen, these writers picture the elderly woman as still longing for lost loves and beauty, as do two white males (Canin, in "We Are Nighttime Travelers," and Bellow, in "Leaving the Yellow House"), who supposedly know what it is like to be an elderly white woman. The editors do not raise questions about such portraits except indirectly through Le Guin's "The Space Crone." Thus, this anthology is troubling rather than satisfying because there are too many omissions of other significant voices in American culture and there is no interrogation of such crucial terms as variety, literature, aging, interpretation, and representation in the light of recent interdisciplinary discourse. —Carolyn H. Smith University of Florida George MacLennan, Lucid Interval: Subjective Writing and Madness in History . Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. vii + 228 pp. Clothbound, $38.50. The interplay between madness and writing forms an eternally intriguing dimension of the history of consciousness. Though it has long attracted attention, however, scholarship on the subject has often been less than helpful. The extensive literature on madness and genius generated by fin-de-siècle psychiatrists from Lombroso onwards—works Uke Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop's The Great Abnormals (1925)—now appears Book Reviews 261 to betray a voyeuristic fascination with freakishness and a barely concealed need to turn artists and intellectuals into pathological cases. Likewise , the school of psychoanalyzing dramatic and Uterary characters— putting Hamlet on the couch—has come to seem a sterile endeavor: as Duncan Salkeld's Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) demonstrates, there are far more productive ways of analyzing the meanings of madness in Renaissance drama. Against the backdrop of such unsatisfactory approaches, often products of uncritical Freudianism, the attention recently given to the autobiographical writings of "mad people" is an auspicious sign. (In this review, mad people is to be understood as referring both to those labeled insane by society and by those identifying themselves as mentally disordered .) Starting with Dale Peterson's A Mad People's History of Madness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), there have been various attempts by historians to analyze the apologiae pro vita sua of the insane. Literary critics too have risen to the challenge. Drawing upon new poststructuralist sensitivity to semiotics and to inner textual logic or paradox, Allan Ingram's The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992) has examined the internal affinities between madness and bizarre discourse, both to probe the strategies of writers "out of their wits" and to explore the tropes by which poets and playwrights have identified lunacy through its stereotypical speech. In contradiction to Michel Foucault's notion that madness was "silenced" in the Age of Reason, scholars are now increasingly insisting on the continuing vitality of traditions, surviving from Renaissance philosophical philology, of privileging the utterances of the insane. Against this background, George MacLennan's study of the autobiographies of mad people from Thomas Hoccleve in fourteenthcentury England to Gérard de Nerval in mid-nineteenth-century France deserves a welcome. MacLennan is particularly concerned with, and sensitive to, self-representations of the insane. Often this takes the form of an assimilation (explicit...
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