Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

observed a male patient leap on the back of his conductor 'in an almost total state of nudity'°.
In the nineteenth century, as Showalter had demonstrated, 'uncontrolled sexuality seemed
the major, almost defining symptom of insanity in women' 481 . Long before this, however, the
erotomania of mad-bawds and she-fools was a proverbial feature of the Bedlams of popular
literature, and must have been only too familiar to governors and staff at the real hospital. The
she-fool of The Pilgrim, for example, is well known to the keepers to be 'as lecherous. ..as a
she-ferret', and they are as careful as they can be to keep her under lock and key 482 . Just as
insanity gives rein to the sexuality of Ophelia in bawdy song, the madhouse bawd of Norlhwood
Ho sings 'scurvily' to her visitors about 'a comely mayd' whose 'maiden-head' she repeatedly
sold 483. Divines had been writing for centuries in condemnation of insane female lust. Burton
expatiated at some length in his Analomy of Melancholy on 'woman's unnatural, insatiable lust',
and spoke a great deal about female libido in his section on 'Love-Melancholy'484.
While Stone saw 1670 as a suitable dividing line between repressive sexual attitudes and an
ensuing century or so of permissiveness, as Gilman, Showalter and others have shown in studies
of Ophelia, it was the Augustans who censored the madwoman's libido 485 . Likewise, it was
only from the 1660s and 70s that Bethiem strove to segregate naked, and particularly female,
patients, from other patients and visitors of the opposite sex. As the Governors denounced the
'Lewdnesse' of visitors, and began to cover up their naked patients, moralists like Collier (1698),
denounced the 'Lewd' 'Freedoms of Distraction' on 'the Modern Stage' 6 . Collier opined that
480 'Dens un 8tat de nudit4 presque totale'. See Londres, vol. ii, 10-16.
481 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Cslltre 1830-1980, (London, Virago
Press, 1987; let edn, New York, Pantheon Books, 1985), 74-5, & chaps 3 & 6, asp.
482 Likewise, they appreciate the need with 'the Prentice' who 'thinks h'as lost his Mistris' to 'keep him from
women. As keepers their duty is conceived by Fletcher as keeping patients from the objects that inflame their
distractions. See III, vii, Is 1-11 & 26-51. See also scene where Pedro warns Alinda while she is disguised as
a patient, 'be not so full of passion,/ Nor do hang so greedily upon me;/Twillbe ill taken'; Ill, vii, Is 158-60.
The madness of lust, and of female lust in particular, is a theme at the very core of dramatic works like The
Changeling.
iv, iii, is 49-102.
484 3rd partition, sections 1-4, 466-660.
Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, part 5; Showalter, Female Malady, 10-11; (idem), 'Representing Ophelia',
in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, (ode) Patricia Parker & Geoffrey Hartman (London & New York,
Menthuen, 1985); Gilman, Seeing The Insane, 126.
486 Profaneness of the Stage, 10-11.
103