In this seminar, we will examine how the novelists of the Victorian era dealt with the pressing social issue of madness in their work and investigate how their portrayal of mentally ill fictional characters reflected and shaped society’s attitudes towards madness. The great prosperity and industrial advancement Britain enjoyed in the 19th century made the Victorians a society that reacted to rapid social change with strict gender- and class distinctions, a concern with morality and a general support for reform movements. In this seminar, we will particularly focus on the role of gender in the complex discourse of madness by positioning 19th-century ideas and phenomena such as the madwoman or the lunatic asylum in their wider, socio-cultural, medical and psychological contexts. Thus, we will first familiarize ourselves with a variety of theories that tried to define madness in the 19th century and heavily influenced how the (allegedly) mad were perceived by the Victorians, before we approach our primary works Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Our literary examination will be based on primary texts by authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson and useful secondary sources will help us enhance our understanding and interpretation of the representations of madness in 19th-century British fiction.
