- The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb
The Mary Lamb who was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” has not received much purchase in the Lamb biographies or literary criticism to date. That this should be so is understandable. The silence that surrounded the facts of Lamb’s madness until after she died in 1847 was partially grounded in what Katherine Anthony calls a “conspiracy” by the Lamb family and literary friends to repress, for Lamb’s sake, the gruesome events of that afternoon of 22 September 1796 when she stabbed her mother Elizabeth to death with a carving knife. Anthony says that the silence held for so long that “it almost causes one a shock to find John Hollingshead saying in his Memoirs in 1895 that Mary murdered her mother.” 1 Out of this silence developed the idealized portrait of Lamb as the most reasonable of women who by a “temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene” than her brother’s, guided him and protected him with her almost legendary “practical mind.” 2
Henry Fuseli may have broken this silence with his sketch of a woman, arm raised, stiletto poised in her right hand, a leg of a deer in her left. Her face wears a dark expression of frenzied delight as it looks out past the frame of the picture; behind her a male face gasps in apparent horror. Visible sketches of previous positions of the woman’s hand holding the knife give the picture an eerie quality of movement, as though we can see the hand with the knife move across the woman’s chest toward her victim. At the top of the sketch, close to the head of the woman, an inscription in an unknown hand reads “Mary Anne Lamb.” 3 In Mad Women and Romantic Writing, Philip Martin notes that if Lamb’s violent figure haunts the Romantic period in the way that Fuseli’s sketch suggests it did, then this terrifying figure not only breaches early-nineteenth-century decorum, but also [End Page 659] stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of the madwoman as a vulnerable Ophelia-like character, a representation that, according to Martin, depends on a “submerged concept of the woman’s body, its functions and needs.” 4
The focus of this study is the submerged or silenced body of Mary Lamb. As anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, the body is a symbolic surface on which are inscribed the rules, hierarchies, and even the metaphysical commitments of a culture. 5 Susan Bordo supplements Douglas’s position with her contention that the body is both a text of culture and a practical, direct locus of social control. 6 The situation with Lamb is made even more complex by the fact that she had two bodies collapsed in one, the mad and dangerous body and the docile body, which Barry Cornwall observed as being that “rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet and mob-cap.” 7
The problem then becomes how to reconstruct the submerged, silenced, mad body in light of the symbolic surface of the docile body on which the rules and hierarchies of Georgian and Regency culture are inscribed. Michel Foucault contends that a history of the subject requires an account of those strategies of the subjection of the body that give rise to the subject and signification. 8 In early-nineteenth-century Britain, those strategies of subjection took the form of political, economic, and cultural changes that created the context in which the public and private roles of women were contested through questions about the nature of the woman’s body. According to Vieda Skultans in English Madness, the psychic vulnerability of women is a continuous thread in medical literature from the Renaissance onward. 9 The common view was that women’s peculiar nature was marked by emotional and reproductive vulnerability which made them acutely susceptible to physical illness and insanity. Their emotional vulnerability was thought to put them on par with children, a view that by the mid-nineteenth century had become so commonplace that Thomas Laycock, in A Treatise on Nervous Diseases of Women...