Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

the treatment of those designated as insane, who were not only expelled from society
by virtue of their "differentness", but were also confined in special places at the limits
of society, "hospitals", where they were imprisoned and "treated" along with other
"dangerous" deviants from the social norm such as criminals and paupers.9
Increasingly, institutions were provided for locking away the worst offenders, both to
prevent society itself "from being swamped and sabotaged, and as engines to reform
the delinquents"10. As Porter has furthermore pointed out, echoing Foucault, it would
be a mistake, in any case, to simply "depict the movement to institutionalize the mad
as repressive and punitive. What it principally was, was segregative"11. Internment is
an invention which assigns to the madman the status of an outcast. This move of
shutting away the difficult, the dangerous or just different was referred to by the
French philosopher Michel Foucault as 'The Great Confinement'.12 By this act of force
- exclusion and confinement- madness was separated from reason, the mad were
separated from the sane. While in the 16 th century the figure of the "wise fool" had not
yet been differentiated from connotations of knowledge and madness it had among
others represented a knowledge of "an other world", a world beyond sense perception,
the hospitalisation of the mad in the 17 th century could be seen as an attempt to tame
madness and preserve the realm of knowledge for reason. Madness retained its forms
and images - madmen "frenzied and ranting" - but the voice of madness was
silenced.13 Reason contained madness within its categories, spoke of madness, but did
not let madness speak its "wisdom".
In early public madhouses, lunatics were commonly handled with great harshness.
This, however, seemed quite defensible to influential currents of opinion. After all, it
was believed that the mad were the victims of their own vanity, pride, sloth and sin.
And "were not those who lost their minds by that very fact reduced to the condition of
a brute, capable to responding only to force and fear?"14 The overwhelming evidence
of mistreatment of the insane in the asylums throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th
9 cf. Jimenez, Mary Ann: Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane.- Hanover,
N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987.- p. 29
10 Porter, Roy: A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane.- New York: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987.- p. 16
11 Ibid., p. 17
12Although Foucault's approach to madness has to be localised within the structuralist framework, which I will come to
at a later point, I chose to present some of his statements throughout this chapter as his works, Madness and Civilization
(1963), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), deal to a large extent with the discourses of
psychiatry, medicine, and the human science respectively and the ways in which official discourse perceived, classified
and distributed such insubstantial "things" as sanity, health and knowledge at different times in the history of Western
culture.
13 Foucault, Michel: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.- First publ. in French 1961.-
Transl. by Richard Howard.- New York: Random House, 1965.- p. 36
14 Porter, Roy: A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane.- New York: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987.- p. 17
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