Alice Brumby abstract

							                                                                                Alice Brumby
                                                                         u0759054@hud.ac.uk




Madwomen Beyond the Attic: A Case Study in the Imagery of the Victorian Female
Lunatic


        Roy Porter has argued that the “interaction between literary criticism and the
history of medicine [has lead this discipline to] finally cease to limit itself to the
biographies of great doctors and address itself to the wider social and cultural history
of health and sickness.”1 This historiographical shift has opened up the relatively new
synthesis of literary and historical investigation into mental illness. Within this
debate, my paper explores how medical histories have themselves been written and
‘created’ through not only literature, but medical reports, and subsequent historical
and literary analysis. Through a close study of the imagery of the lunatic within
cultural representations and asylum reports, my paper combines in-depth case studies
with broader macrocosmic analysis, highlighting how ‘objective’ casebook histories
and much more subjective literary sources can be used together to investigate the
similarities and disparities between fiction and reality. By comparing and contrasting
mid-nineteenth century male and female casebook reports from the West Riding
Pauper Lunatic Asylum with cultural representations including Wuthering Heights,
my paper assesses whether Bronte’s novel, and by extension the medium of
nineteenth century realist literature, can truly be called ‘realistic’ in its depiction of
mental illness, or whether it will always remain an allegorical, polemic and purely
fictional literary source.




Alice Brumby has just received an AHRC scholarship for her doctorate at The
University of Huddersfield, which explores the relationship between mental illness
and the poor law from 1888-1929. Her BA dissertation in English and History won
the award for best interdisciplinary work at undergraduate level.




1
 Roy Porter, Foreword to, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth
Century British Prose, (London, 1997) p.xi