Olivia furiosa: Maniacal Women from Richardson to Wollstonecraft

Oliviafuñosa: Maniacal Women from Richardson to Wollstonecraft Jane Kromm Closer examination of the character of Lady Olivia in Samuel Richardson's TL· History ofSir Charles Grandison (1754) reveals that her erratic behaviour is symptomatic of the mental disorder mania, a condition whose status was then being revised in the medical circles of the day. A detailed analysis of the position of mania in contemporary medical texts will establish the groundwork for a discussion of isolated maniacal traits in Richardson's minor male characters and ofthe more developed delineation of the disorder in the figure ofOlivia.Just as Richardson's attention to psychology and character attracted serious commentary and many admirers, his treatment ofmania also provoked considerable reaction. The subject of this article shifts then to these reactions, and particularly looks at those women novelists who used mania in ways that responded to eighteenth-century medical discourse as depicted in Sir Charles Grandison. Largely a phenomenon of the 1780s and 1790s, this reaction occurs specifically in the juvenilia ofJane Austen and in mature works by Frances Burney and Mary Wollstonecraft, which contain an array offemale characters with maniacal symptoms. These figures, like Olivia, exhibit their deranged characteristics as they strain against the passive roles expected of them in male/female EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3, April 2004 344 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION relationships and in the pursuit of marriage. Along with the didactic figure ofa female lunatic who also evinces certain maniacal traits, the authors use these characters to expose the troubling social consequences of the role ofgender in disorderly behaviour and to address the limitations ofconventional notions ofgender more generally. In Richardson's TL· History ofSir Charles Grandison, Lady Olivia is a maniac along the lines set by traditional medical discourse: anger swells to raging fits that end in impetuous acts of violence.' This application of the novelist's clinical expertise is only one aspect of Richardson's larger familiarity with the medical canon and its eighteenth-century revisions. He also published works by eminent physicians such as George Cheyne and RobertJames, as is well known, and tenets drawn from these treatises recur throughout Richardson's novels and are especially notable in his treatment of temperament and constitution.2 While many studies have focused on the newly intriguing, increasingly nuanced forms of nerves and melancholia present in his fiction that were gleaned from these medical sources, Richardson's interest in concurrent changes affecting the more excessive ailment ofmania has received less notice.* Both Cheyne and James, however, contributed to a major shift in the medical history of the period when they relegated mania, that most extreme disorder, to the margins of medical thinking and limited its place in their nosological systems. In fact, this development provided Richardson with a timely directive for treating maniacal symptoms—in contrast to nervous sensitivity—as the least attractive and most status-lowering signs of mental distress among his characters. 1 On the history ofmania, see Kromm, TheArt ofFrenzy: PublicMadness in the Visual Cultureof Europe, 1500-1850 (London and NewYork: Continuum, 2002); StanleyJackson, Melancholy and Depression from llippocratic Times to Modem Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 254-59; and Roy Porter, Mind-forg'dManacles:A History ofMadness in Evgtandfrom lite Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). For mania in classical and medieval manuscripts, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). 2 Richardson published George Cheyne, Tlte English Malady (1733) and Robert James, Medicinal Dictionary (1743-45). See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 79, and G.S. Rousseau, "A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800," Hysteria before Freud, ed. Sander Gilman et al. (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993), p. 152. 3 See, for example, John Mullan, "Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians ," Eigltteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 25 (1984), 141-74; and also pertinent essays in Passion and Virtue: Essays on tlte NoveL· ofSamuel Richardson, ed. David Blewett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), and New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. AlbertoJ. Rivero (NewYork: St Martin's Press, 1996). OLIVIA FURIOSA345 Richardson established the devolution ofmania in Grandison without recourse to such...