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

was merely part of a paternalist tradition in which "humanitarianism was inextricably
linked to the practice of domination".23
2.6. Darwinism
At the end of the 19 th century another change occurred as Henry Maudsley in 1873
started to argue against the claims of the moral managers. He saw man's life as
governed by genetic laws, and believed that thought and volition were determined by
them as much as are all other aspects of human life. He wrote:
Individuals are born with such a flaw […] of nature that all the care in the world will not
prevent them from being vicious or criminal, or becoming insane […] No one can escape the
tyranny of this organisation; no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which
unconsciously and irresistibly shaped his ends, even when he thinks he is determining them
with consummate foresight and skill.24
Whatever the complex intellectual and social changes that contributed towards this
position, it is a startling reversal of earlier accounts. Further encouraged by Darwin's
theories of evolution in geology, biology and the social sciences, the second generation
of nineteenth-century psychiatrists, sought to apply rigorous scientific methods to the
study of insanity, rather than rely any longer on the vague humanitarian sympathies
and administrative reforms of their predecessors. They insisted that insanity had a
physical cause that could be discovered by a sophisticated medical practice. Their focus
was on laws of selection and survival, which they believed operated as strongly in the
mental as in the social world. Darwinism emphasised the hereditary disposition to
madness and the congenital inferiority of the insane - madness as the mark of the
impotent and unfit. Whereas at least some early Victorian reformers deplored the
social problems that had brought so many wretched people to the asylums, Darwinian
psychiatrists sternly maintained that hereditary organic taint compounded by vicious
habits caused madness. Will, self-restraint and self-control were still considered the
ultimate development of mental health. It was maintained that those who crossed the
borderland into madness were individuals who due to hereditary degeneration or
diseased cerebral development could not control their lower nature and emotions. In
Darwinian terms, insanity thus represented an evolutionary reversal, a regression to a
lower nature. It was essentially the rich and the well educated, although increasingly
vulnerable to the neuroses of modern civilisation, who were perceived as a reservoir
23 Ignatieff, Michael: A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution.- New York: Pantheon Books,
1978.- p. 214
24 Maudsley, Henry: Body and Mind.- London: Macmillan, 1870.- p. 154.-
14