"Turning the World Upside Down": Madness, Moral Management, and Frances Burney's The Wanderer

"Turning the World Upside Down": Madness, Moral Management, and Frances Burney's The Wanderer Justine Crump Philippe Pinel, physician to the lunatic asylums of Bicêtre and Salpêtrière in the 1790s, compared the repressive treatment of madness to political absolutism, in order to promulgate his innovative, liberationist therapies for the mad: In lunatic hospitals, as in despotic governments, it is no doubt possible to maintain , by unlimited confinement and barbarous treatment, the appearance of order and loyalty. ... A degree of liberty, sufficient to maintain order, dictated not by weak but enlightened humanity ... contributes, in most instances, to diminish the violence of the symptoms, and in some, to remove the complaint altogether.1 Pinel's politicization of the treatment of the individual lunatic can be inverted, by depicting social problems as a species of mental illness, subject to cure by the processes of political reform. Frances Burney's last novel, The Wanderer, utilizes both of these conceits, representing the treatment of madness as a product of social and political expediency, and criticizing social and political institutions by interrogating the rationality of their constitutive ideologies. The setting of The Wanderer during the most violent phase of the French Revolution is especially significant. The 1 Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, trans.· D.D. Davis (Sheffield: Cadell and Davies, 1806), pp. 89-90. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 3, April 1998 Q X H m m Z H SC O m ? H G ? H O Z Pine/ Freeing the Insane. Engraving from a mural by Tony Robert-Fleury (1887), Charcot Library, La Saltpêtrière, Paris. Reproduced by permission of Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Clements C. Fry Print Collection. MADNESS AND BURNEY'S THE WANDERER 327 Revolution is represented within the novel both as lunacy—Coleridge's "Giant Frenzy"—and, paradoxically, as a cure for lunacy, a new system of rationality with the therapeutic power to heal all of society's ills. In the novel, this conflict is reprised in the stormy relationship between two central characters, Elinor Joddrel and Albert Harleigh, who each strive to educate the other out of belief systems which are perceived as irrational. In this essay I suggest that an understanding of this conceit of madness and its therapy is central to the interpretation of those ideological debates which form an important part of The Wanderer. Burney explores a suggestive confluence in the language of madness and its therapy with the discourses of political revolution and feminist doctrine, investigating the value and implications of the new Jacobin and feminist ideologiesideologies which simultaneously attracted and repelled her.2 Burney's evaluation of these ideologies has its most significant expression in the debates between Harleigh and Elinor, debates which are underwritten by contemporary medical and therapeutic theorizations. The madness of George m in 1788-89 made lunacy something of a cause célèbre. Burney had more reason than most to take an interest in contemporary debates on the origins, implications, and treatments of madness, since she was at that time resident at Court, employed as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. Her journal for this period records her intense concern for the King's health and her commitment to his recovery. In particular, she entered into the wranglings of the King's physicians, being a determined partisan of the Reverend Dr Francis Willis, a clergyman turned mad-doctor who ran a high-class private 2 The earliest modern critics of Burney's work, such as Joyce Hemlow, interpreted it as socially conservative. See "Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Novels," PMLA 65 (1950), 732-61. An increasing number of feminist critics, however, led by Rose-Marie Cutting, produce readings of Burney's novels as serious accounts of problems specific to women. See "A Wreath for Fanny Burney's Last Novel," College Language Association Journal 20 (1976), 57-67; "Defiant Women: The Growth of Feminism in Fanny Burney's Novels," Studies in English Literature 17 (1977), 519-30. Other critics argue convincingly for a feminist intent on Burney's part: Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen...