Women Writers and the Pathologizing of Gender in 18th-Century English Mad-Discourse

Abstract

One concern in the history of gendered psychiatric confinement is not that the field lacks good scholarship but that the extant scholarship is focused too narrowly on its height during the 19th century, neglecting the important temporal beginning of the trend in the 18th century. In the United Kingdom, it was in the 18th century that the move to confine became more widespread, prompted at the community, and more specifically, at the family level. This essay traces the philosophical changes in medical discourse as the move toward confinement began focusing more on the incarceration of women and the specific problem of their bodies as newly sexualized beings. Prior to the 18th century, the Galenic, one-sex model dominated both medical and social discourses. It was in the 18th century that women’s bodies became pathologized which prompted the ‘feminization’ of mental illness. Interestingly, women writers of the period both reiterated and resisted this pathologizing of the female body through their mad-discourse, that is, their writing-about-madness. Although the ratio of female to male madhouse admissions disproves the prevalent belief in the mass-incarceration of the ‘deviant’ woman, Francis Burney, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Eliza Haywood each reflect an emerging vision of this trope. It was the nature of confinement that so effected women’s writing reiterating the concept of the deviant woman unjustly confined which, in turn, helped advance this idea in popular culture and eventually into medical discourse. It was this cycle which led to the trope becoming reality in the 19th century as women internalized this threat because of its unique dangers to what was believed to be their inherent female qualities.