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M A D N E S S A N D T H E RO M A N T I C P O E T
Madness and the

Romantic Poet
A Critical History
JAMES WHITEHEAD
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© James Whitehead 2017
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First Edition published in 2017
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Acknowledgements
My first thanks must be to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for granting
the doctoral award that led to this book, via a PhD undertaken at King’s College
London from 2006 to 2010. (The thesis was entitled ‘Poetic Madness and the
Reception of British Romanticism 1800–1870’.) Thanks also to the AHRC for
a conference grant to travel to the North American Society for the Study of
Romanticism meeting in Toronto in August 2008, to present an early version
of Chapter 3 there. Thanks to NASSR, ACUME-2, and the School of Arts and
Humanities at King’s for other travel and research grants. Thanks are also due
to the Wellcome Trust for the postdoctoral grant which I held while beginning to
revise and expand this book, among other things, in the Centre for the Humanities
and Health and English department at King’s from 2010 to 2014.
By far the greatest individual thanks are owed to Neil Vickers, for his unfailing
patience, support, and guidance as a supervisor and mentor. In addition to other
colleagues in the English department at King’s generally, I would also like to thank
in particular Jo McDonagh, Clare Pettitt, John Stokes, and Brian Hurwitz, all of
whom have provided assistance, advice, or useful discussion (or a combination of
these three) before and after the completion of the thesis. Many thanks also to my
PhD examiners Michael O’Neill and Seamus Perry for their kind and helpful com-
ments during the examination process, and for a memorable snowbound viva.
There are several instances in this book where I have taken up suggestions that were
made then without more specific acknowledgement than these thanks. Thanks are
also due to support staff in the English department, the Centre for Humanities and
Health, and the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s. Among my fellow post-
graduate students I owe Jane Darcy the biggest debt of gratitude; thanks also to
Laurence Scott, Hope Wolf, Richard Maguire, Ali Wood, and Brian Murray, and
to all my fellow researchers, medical humanists, and colleagues in the CHH, and
more recently at Liverpool John Moores University, where the book was completed.
Thanks especially to Glenda Norquay for the final necessary impetus.
Chapter 5 incorporates material previously published as ‘Biopower: Bodies,
Minds and Biographical Subjection in Victorian Lives of the Poets’, in Victorian
Network, 6.1 (Summer, 2015), 7–31. My thanks to the editors of the journal for
permitting me to reproduce that material here, and particularly to Pamela K.
Gilbert. Papers based on Chapter 2 were presented at the eighteenth-century and
Romanticism seminar at the University of York in 2009, and on ‘The Romantic
Precipice Poem’ at the NASSR conference at the Université de Neuchâtel in 2012;
a talk based on Chapter 3 was given to the Literature and Medicine seminar in
Oxford in 2011; a paper drawn from Chapter 4 was presented at the NASSR con-
ference at Berkeley in 2016; papers drawn from Chapter 5 were also presented at a
conference on literature and science at the Università degli studi di Urbino in 2008
vi
vi
Acknowledgements
and to a conference on Victorian life-writing at Keele University in the same year;

a paper drawing on Chapter 6 was presented at the ‘Romanticism at the Fin de
Siècle’ conference at Trinity College, Oxford, in 2013; Chapters 4, 5, and 6 gave
rise to papers presented at various internal seminars and conferences within King’s
and the University of London. I am also very grateful to Dr Stephen Ginn and the
Art of Psychiatry group of clinicians at the Institute of Psychiatry for inviting me
to give a talk to them outlining the book and ‘romantic myths of madness’ in
2014. Thanks to the organizers of all these events, and other participants and audi-
ence members, too numerous to mention individually, for the many suggestions
and questions which have contributed to the development of this book at different
stages of its conceptualization, completion, and revision. More specific thanks for
particular contributions to the project are due to Laurie Maguire, for her long-
standing interest in and support of my work, and for the invitation to the Oxford
seminar; Martin Willis, Keir Waddington, and Anthony Mandal, for an invitation
to Cardiff and an extremely useful set of responses to a paper on psychiatry and the
Gothic; Simon Kövesi; David Duff; Jonathan Andrews; Ludmilla Jordanova, on
images; and Michael Rossington, for further information relating to Thomases
Hogg and Medwin.
Thanks are due to the staff who have assisted my research at the Maughan
Library, King’s College London, especially the Foyle Special Collections librarians;
the Wellcome Library, London; the library of the Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark
Hill; the Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford; the English Faculty Library, Oxford;
the Bodleian Library; and the British Library. Thanks also to the Wellcome, the
Bodleian, the William Blake Archive, the Huntington Library, and the University
of Bristol Library for permission to use the images reproduced in this book, and for
their swift and helpful responses to related queries. Thanks to the editorial staff at
Oxford University Press, principally Jacqueline Baker, but also to Rachel Platt,
Lucy McClune, Ellie Collins, and Sarah Rouse, and Jayasri Janarthanan and Elakkia
Bharathi in production. Thanks also to Anne Stiles and another anonymous OUP
reviewer for their generous and useful comments during the peer review process,
and to Donald Watt for his copy-editing and Stephen York for his proof-reading.
Any errors or misstatements that remain in the book are, of course, my own.
Many more personal thanks are due to my friends and family, without whose
support and accommodation I would not have been able to complete this project:
to Emma-Louise, of course, and all our family and friends; to Liz; to my father and
family; to Hannah and Peter; and for making it possible at all, to my mother, to
Sue, and to Ken Whitehead, in memoriam.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. ‘A Precarious Gift’: Classical Traditions and Their Romantic Reception 29
2. ‘On the Giddy Brink’: Eighteenth-Century Prospects 51
3. Alienism: Mad-Doctoring and the Mad Poet 72
4. Balaam and Bedlam: Romantic Reviewers and the Rhetoric of Insanity 98
5. Cases of Poetry: Romantic Biographers and the Origins
of Psychobiography 127
6. Creativity, Genius, and Madness: A Scientific Debate and
its Romantic Origins 155
7. Madness Writing Poetry/Poetry Writing Madness 178
8. Conclusion: Madness, Modernity, and Romanticism 204
Notes 213
Bibliography 263
Index 293
List of Illustrations
2.1. Thomas Stothard (artist) and William Sharp (engraver), after Caius Gabriel
Cibber (c.1680), ‘Statues of “raving” and “melancholy” madness, each
reclining on one half of a broken segmental pediment, formerly crowning
the gates at Bethlem Hospital’ (London, 1783). Wellcome Library, London. 55
2.2. Richard Corbould (artist) and James Heath (engraver), plate
illustrating Sonnet LXX, in Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, new edn,
2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797), II, intra pp. 10–11.
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Vet. A5 f.3454. 64
2.3. Francisco Goya, ‘El sueño de la razón produce monstruos’
(c.1797–9), Los caprichos (Madrid: s. n., 1799), plate 43.
Wellcome Library, London. 67
2.4. Charles Monnet (artist) and Jean-Baptiste-Michel Dupréel (engraver),
frontispiece to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosophie, new edn, 2 vols
(Paris: Poinçot, 1793) II. Courtesy of the University of Bristol Library,
Special Collections. 68
2.5. William Blake, illustrations to Edward Young, Night Thoughts,
new edn (London: Edwards, 1796). Blake Archive Copy 2, object 12
(Bentley number 515.12). Courtesy of the William Blake Archive
and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 70
5.1. Alfred Soord (artist) and Henry Dixon and Son (photogravure),
frontispiece to Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed.
by H. Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913).
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2796 d.103, frontispiece. 145
8.1. James Tilly Matthews (drawing) and John Hawksworth
(engraver), diagram of ‘The Air-Loom’ (c.1809), folding plate in
John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness (London: Hayden, 1810).
Wellcome Library, London. 205
List of Abbreviations
DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005–)
OED Oxford English Dictionary, online 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000–)
Wellesley The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, online edn (2006–10)
Introduction
A century ago poets deranged themselves with opium or alcohol so that from
the brink of madness they could issue reports on their visionary experiences . . . In
the Romantic era artists went mad on an extravagant scale. Madness poured
out of them in reams of delirious verse or great gouts of paint. That era is over.1
This book examines nineteenth-century writing that linked poetry and poets to
madness, and charts how the idea of this supposed connection was debated,
developed, and disseminated across a longer period from the eighteenth century
to the twentieth century. More specifically, it offers an account of how a group of
associated ideas about poetic ‘genius’, creativity, the imagination, and mental
disorder gathered around the British writers who came to be canonized as ‘the
Romantic poets’, crystallizing into an image that I shall call ‘the Romantic mad
poet’. This is an image that is still immediately and easily identifiable in contem-
porary culture, not only in relation to historical literature but also visible in the
representation of other creative artists and celebrities. The Romantic mad poet
has had an enduring and recurrent appeal. Peter Ackroyd, trailing his BBC televi-
sion series The Romantics, broadcast in early 2006, deploys the image as the
clinching part of an argument that ‘writers are different. They must exist in
isolation . . . They must be allowed to create their own morality, indeed their own
reality.’ Ackroyd continues:
These poets were in every respect solitaries. It was understood, by their example, that
genius would never be understood. That is why the Romantics and their successors
were preoccupied with melancholy, madness, isolation.2
Ackroyd’s article immediately suggests some of the ways in which the image of the
Romantic mad poet overlaps with broader received ideas about Romanticism. In
this narrative, Romanticism was (and still is) a revolt against Enlightenment ration-
alism, and takes madness as one of its natural allies; in P. M. S. Dawson’s summary,
‘Romantic poetry is so often concerned with childhood, madness, the socially
inferior, myth, and superstition—with everything that was marginalized by the
dominant philosophy of progress and utility.’3 Romanticism is taken to be the lit-
erature of feeling, and madness represents sensibility in poetic bodies and minds
pushed to its furthest extent; Romantic poetry is endowed with supernatural
potency, and releases its large creative energies in mental fission; Romantic poets
chose therefore to reanimate or reinvent older notions of originality, genius, and
2 Madness and the Romantic Poet
inspiration in their most extreme forms. Other ideas frequently identified as

Romantic ‘myths’, although perhaps only fully developed in the twentieth century
and its avant-gardes, include the notion that madness can be a vehicle for radical
difference from, or opposition to, social, moral, and political norms, and also the
characterization of madness as a kind of primitive state—a primitivism of the
mind rather than of national or racial character. Finally, there has been a long
association of the Romantic poet with extreme solitude, an inward turn precluding
popular comprehension or acceptance, or anything other than flight from the
social universe. In this received version of events, Romanticism saw the first expres-
sion of the solitary individualism of the avant-garde artist, and so madness, as the
most solitary of afflictions, was therefore its natural preoccupation.
I would like to suggest in this book that the relation of the figure of the Romantic
mad poet and the proximate concept of poetic madness to these broad cultural
tropes is complex and fraught. Inasmuch as madness could represent the extreme
extent and furthest expression of these aspects of Romanticism, it also marked the
point at which they might fail or fall into contradiction, impossibility, or opposite
states—a conceptual testing to destruction, as it were. The Romantic mad poet is
therefore an image marked by fundamental double-sidedness or ambivalence. In
the culture of sensibility, images of madness as intense feeling also expressed
anxiety about the collapse and exhaustion attendant on sustained reliance on the
sympathies of the nervous body, or the apparently contagious ease with which
affective disturbance spread through social words and private bodies. Madness
might represent opposition to ‘normalcy’, but it could also be an object lesson
in the control and confinement of political and social deviance, a particularly
important point in relation to changes in the care of the insane and the institutions
developing around them from the Romantic period forward. The attachment of
early medical ideas about collective psychopathology to revolution denoted a deep
ambivalence about the consequences of political upheaval. The increasing association
of madness with the primitive could suggest a regression to an atavistic state rather
than the fons et origo of human creativity; the creative forces released by madness
could be dangerous, themselves repressive, or merely useless sound and fury. When
originality, the sublime, genius, and inspiration were invested in the divisive and
stigmatized figure of the madman, those terms became suspect by association, and
subject to popular incredulity and satirical invective; or worse, to automatic hostility,
and the association of all creative activity with mental disintegration and incapacity
generally, as was to happen with increasing force through the nineteenth century.
‘Mad genius’ implicitly critiques ‘genius’. Finally, images of isolation could represent
both the triumph of individual sovereignty, and also the atomized or alienated victim
of modernity. The madman, as the Romantic isolate par excellence, encompasses
both possibilities.
These are some of the paradoxes which are captured in the figuration of madness
in the Romantic period, then. However, the image of the mad poet is clearly not
the product of the Romantic period alone, nor of its major authors. The reception and
reputation of Romantic poetry are important, even central elements of the problem.
The Romantic mad poet primarily emerged or was constructed in the nineteenth
Introduction 3
century, I will argue, from criticism, biography, and other discourse built around
and over the remains of Romantic writers, and much of the accumulated meaning
of the image developed after and on top of—with the occlusion and suppression
this implies—authors’ own intentions and literary productions, which cannot in
any case be straightforwardly equated or seen outside the social process of creating
and publishing texts. Peter Ackroyd’s hyperbole would make most modern critics and
scholars of Romanticism uncomfortable, in the wake of more than a quarter-century
of rejections or revisions of the ‘Romantic ideology’ or the ‘myth of solitary genius’.
This is apparent not only in the positions of Jerome McGann and Jack Stillinger
associated with these phrases respectively, but in the contemporary prevalence of
historicist Romantic studies. That is to say, more attempts have been made to
refute such ideologies and myths through an expanded canon, or new contexts and
disciplinary approaches, than to discuss how and why they emerged and developed
in the first place. As Christopher R. Miller has suggested in a recent account
of the overlapping idea of the ‘misunderstood genius’ in Romanticism, which
traces the figure through influential critics such as M. H. Abrams, Walter Jackson
Bate, and Harold Bloom to the present, contemporary critics have largely ‘been
interested in demystifying or problematizing the archetype of Romantic genius
rather than in inquiring into its continued relevance’.4 The Romantic mad poet
is indeed bound up with ideology, and is indeed sometimes a product of pure
mythologization and mystification, in the different shades of meaning these
cognate words suggest, i.e. expressed in the literary mythology developed in the
body of a writer’s work, or attached to the writer’s persona in the form of biographical
and biographical-critical myths. Nevertheless, as an enduring and influential cultural
fantasy at the very least, ‘its continued relevance’ demands more than the blunt
dismissal or plain debunking that is often the initial response of informed readers
or critics.
A further analogy for the ironies and complexities surrounding the image of the
Romantic mad poet may be seen in the quotation above from Youth (2002), the
delicately merciless exposure of personal and aesthetic lost illusions that constitutes
the middle volume of J. M. Coetzee’s ‘autre-biography’. The protagonist ‘John’,
struggling hopelessly with his dutiful modernism, his study of Ford Madox Ford
and his sterile pseudo-Eliotic poetry, wonders if madness might be the answer, the
key needed to transform his ‘exhaustion and misery’ into the stuff of real poetic
inspiration. Despite his self-defining hostility to Romantic writing (‘How he could
once have been so infatuated with Keats as to write Keatsian sonnets he cannot
comprehend . . . Reading half a dozen pages of Keats is like yielding to seduction’),
John cannot help but invoke and place his hope in this old belief, even as it is
caught in historical self-consciousness (‘That era is over’) and dismissed as person-
ally incongruous or, even worse, unfashionable (‘Surely absinthe and tattered
clothes are old-fashioned by now . . . anyway?’). ‘His own madness,’ he decides, ‘if
it is to be his lot to suffer madness, will be otherwise—quiet, discreet.’5 The latter
part of Coetzee’s book, in which the protagonist finds himself mired in his emblem-
atically rational job as a computer programmer, both traces the fulfilment of this
pose and, with increasingly devastating irony, coolly exposes its hollowness. It is
possible to be deluded about delusion, then; to pronounce the belief in poetic

madness and the mad poet dead and buried, and yet subscribe to it still. Both as
Romantic ideology and romantic myth, it may be dangerous to handle.
With these dangers in mind, it may be useful to emphasize or expand upon
what this book is not. It is not—and this should already be apparent—in any sense
a straightforward endorsement of poetic madness or the Romantic mad poet as
emblems of rebellious, illimitable genius, struggling heroically against the oppres-
sions of sanity and convention with the liberating primal force of madness. My
concern with this idea, recurrent and possibly ineradicable as it may be, at least in
popular culture and popular conceptions of the Romantic, is to provide a geneal-
ogy of its development in the nineteenth century. This concern emerged from
earlier research undertaken into twentieth-century attempts, in the writing of the
modernist or postmodernist avant-garde, and subsequently in popular fiction, to
imitate schizophrenia; or rather, those features widely and often inaccurately
thought to characterize the ‘schizophrenic’. It became clear that many of the atti-
tudes underlying this questionable yet productive enterprise (for example, the role
of primitivism and a primitivist aesthetic) required tracing back through the previ-
ous century.6 Given this rich and contentious subject, it is surprising that there has
been no sustained account dealing with the development of the image of the
Romantic mad poet, and the possibilities and pitfalls of the role. In most second-
ary references to the subject, this troublesome inheritance is either endorsed
with merry hyperbole, on which more presently, or in older scholarly writing
dismissed as nothing more than an embarrassing fiction to be stepped past or
preferably ignored.
For the latter tendency, one might observe how rapidly Frank Kermode, in the
chapter on ‘The Artist in Isolation’ and ‘the evolution of assumptions relating to
the image of poetry’ in his book Romantic Image (1957), moves to ‘distinguish, in
passing, between this opinion [sc. that “artists are different, isolated”] as a serious
belief held by and about artists, and the vulgarized bohemian tradition . . . really a
confused echo from the Paris of Mürger and Huysmans and the poètes maudits,
with a few collateral English rumours’. Kermode is careful to mark off both of
these ‘ubiquitous’ topics as nevertheless only ‘a subsidiary theme’, and ‘rumours’ of
madness are quickly subsumed into ‘the paradox that the artist is magnificently
sane’.7 For individual poets, Northrop Frye’s terse judgement that ‘the question of
Blake’s “madness”, of course, is now recognized to be not a question of fact at all,
but a pseudo-problem’ is also representative of scholarly touchiness on the subject.8
Yet Frye’s labours, in Fearful Symmetry (1947) and elsewhere, to fix Blake as a thor-
oughly, even ruthlessly systematic poetic thinker, were arguably a response to the
earlier tradition of his supposed anti-rational mysticism and vagueness, a tradition
built out of the elements of contemporary critical and later biographical character-
izations of Blake as a madman or abstracted man-child, incapable of practicality or
coherence, especially in his later poetry. The case of Shelley is complementary:
continued attempts either to position him within a frame of idealism or irrational-
ity, or to rescue him from that frame—from Matthew Arnold, via T. S. Eliot, and
F. R. Leavis’s notorious judgement on ‘a recognized essential trait of Shelley’s: his
Introduction 5
weak grasp upon the actual’, through to the psychoanalysed and then thoroughly
historicized and political author—both echoed and sought to repudiate earlier
versions of ‘Mad Shelley’ from contemporary responses and subsequent criticism
and biography.9 Even ‘pseudo-problems’ can have significant and lasting after-
effects on the way in which an author, their works, or indeed an entire literary
movement, are read and conceptualized.
As for hyperbole, a problematic reiteration and endorsement of post-Romantic
prejudices about the liberating effect of insanity is clear in general critical writing
on madness and literature. Even the title of Dionysus in Literature (1994), one the-
matic collection of essays, suggests the slide from historical assessment into partici-
pation in such rhetoric—here a version of Nietzsche’s arguments on the Apollonian
and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy (1871). And indeed the collection’s com-
mentary does set a vaguely Nietzschean model of rebellion and freedom against an
equally vague repressive ‘sanity’, scare quotes included. This oppositional relation-
ship is taken to be culturally and historically universal, and madness is used as a
reversible concept that reflects a supposed ‘insanity of daily existence and of absurd
situations’ yet captures a higher ground of moral or spiritual sanity and righteous-
ness.10 As Shoshana Felman has suggested, there is often an ‘inflation of discourses’
about madness and literature.11 Critical material less caught up in the rhetoric of
opposition also sometimes resorts to emotive or promotional hyperbole. For
example, in a more varied and grounded collection of essays on the subject, a
vocabulary of mysterious allure and fascination still intrudes: literary madness is ‘a
seductive, a compelling subject . . . like a drug’.12
Part of the picture here is the diffused influence, whether acknowledged or not,
of the anti-psychiatry movement and its role in the 1960s counterculture. The
visibility and reputation of R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Thomas Szasz, and other
such thinkers may have declined towards the end of the century, especially among
those professionally concerned with thinking about and treating mental illness.
However, it is not unusual in critical and literary writing on madness to encounter
what are essentially uncritical endorsements of Laing’s notorious statement from
the height of the late 1960s: ‘Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be
break-through. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and
existential death.’13 Of course, the 1960s counterculture saw its version of liberation
as Romanticism’s legacy, to some extent. Figures such as Blake were ubiquitous touch-
stones in the sixties, especially in his contrarian aspect from The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell. But Blake was also cited as a specifically anti-psychiatric authority. Laing
quotes him repeatedly, even before his radical phase and The Politics of Experience,
alongside the case histories in his earlier and less explicitly polemical work, The
Divided Self (1960). Indeed Blake is credited with a better understanding of Laing’s
idea of schizophrenia than any other writer.14 Other Romantic poets also appeared
as anti-psychiatric icons. Edward Bond’s play about John Clare, The Fool (1975),
was produced at the home of modern British theatrical radicalism, the Royal
Court, with Tom Courtenay, an established idol of the awkward squad, as Clare.
As Rebecca Nesvet has noted, Bond’s Clare is the mad poet as doomed rebel,
‘fighting vainly with his circumstances, the class system, reality’, reflecting a more
pessimistic note about madness from those leaden years after the dialectics of
liberation had fallen somewhat flat, also to be found in plays of the Royal Court
era such as Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973) and David Edgar’s Mary Barnes (1979).15
One needs to be careful about following this intuitive entanglement of radical
cultures and revolutionary historical moments.
The appeal of ‘madness as breakthrough’ is obvious for an initial appraisal of the
Romantic mad poet. It allows the reader to celebrate and endorse the value of
misunderstood madness, or writers apparently neglected or unfairly maligned by
philistine and reductively diagnostic predecessors—but still somehow within the
canon. It gives the opportunity for the enlightened radical to himself or herself
play Philippe Pinel, releasing the unfortunates from their chains. It also provides
an open analogy for artistic progression, a framework for critical commentary on
life and works, and ultimately a blank canvas, an unclaimed terra nullius into
which one ‘breaks through’ with an interpretation, or a mirror in which our own
ideas can be reflected and amplified. Such an approach can be seen in Jeremy
Reed’s Madness: The Price of Poetry (1989), in which madness stands for ‘a stream
that not even long drought could extinguish’, an undefined, unlimited, and abso-
lute plenitude of creation, and interpretation and exegesis.16 But it is important to
resist, or at least to attempt to circumscribe, this sort of approach from the start.
This is not to confine the cultural meanings and metaphors attached to madness,
which even in a rigorous historical frame can be enormously divergent, nor merely
to avoid common platitudes. Rather, the core problem is a spiral of unacknow-
ledged repetition and reiteration. To use mid-twentieth-century enthusiasm or
late twentieth-century theories about creative or liberating madness to examine
nineteenth-century instances of the same is problematic as it ignores a line of trans-
mission in which those instances, in various disciplinary, ideological, and institu-
tional contexts, took key parts in forming apparently distant or distinct modern
habits of thinking about madness. Romantic or post-Romantic (in the sense of
reception and reputation) formulations of literary unreason have been so pervasive
that it is hard to say that we have gone altogether beyond them, or can claim a
neutral position from which to comment on these formulations.
So, as this book is not Nietzschean, nor Laingian, neither is it written in the
spirit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, nor any other similar critical theorists.
Even more than for Laing, the stance taken here towards anachronism, retrospect,
and genealogy precludes the use of a frame of ideas drawn from the two works
these authors wrote together on madness, capitalism, schizophrenia, and psy-
choanalysis, L’Anti-Œdipe (1972) and Mille plateaux (1980). These works are
the clearest manifestations of Deleuze’s place in the soixante-huitard generation
alongside anti-psychiatry, or anti-psychoanalysis; they draw on a sense of madness,
specifically schizophrenia, as release and liberation in a way that aligns them
very much with that movement, although Deleuze and Guattari use their terms
in complex and idiosyncratic ways. Deleuze, in his thinking on madness, also
drew from his background as a Nietzschean, developed in Nietzsche et la philosophie
(1962). More profoundly, however, the concern of this book is the patterns in
the representation of Romanticism that historically underpinned the possibility
Introduction 7
of articulating modern positions essentially predicated on ideas of the oppositional

purity and supernatural creative capacity of madness, such as those evident in the
anti-Oedipal project.
This book is also not itself psychoanalytic in the tradition of Freud, Jung, or any
other similar thinker, or in their widespread and somewhat diluted literary influ-
ence. These demurrals are not motivated by any particular antagonism or indiffer-
ence to psychoanalytic views of the mind, but by several further qualifications.
Romanticism, like many areas of the literary canon, and probably more than most,
is hardly lacking in interpretation from psychoanalytic perspectives of one sort or
another.17 Following this closely, it should be becoming increasingly clear that I am
also less interested here in using any theory of psychology to interpret Romantic
poetry than in tracing the history of this interpretative habit itself; that is to say, the
history of how a psychopathological or even simply a psychological approach to
poetry emerged in the first place, and how this basic orientation, a version of what
Paul Ricœur defined as the hermeneutics of suspicion, or what Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, following Ricœur, has called ‘paranoid reading’, is rooted in the recep-
tion of literature in the nineteenth century.18 The idea that this general approach
or attitude is a post-Romantic problem is certainly not an entirely original conceit.
Lionel Trilling articulated it as long ago as 1945, in ‘Art and Neurosis’, his response
to Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow (1941) as an exemplar of early
psychoanalytic criticism:
The question of the mental health of the artist has engaged the attention of our culture
since the beginning of the Romantic Movement. Before that time it was commonly said
that the poet was ‘mad’, but this was only a manner of speaking, a way of saying that
the mind of the poet worked in a different fashion from the mind of the philosopher;
it had no real reference to the mental hygiene of the man who was the poet. But in the
early nineteenth century, with the development of a more elaborate psychology and a
stricter and more literal view of mental and emotional normality, the statement was
more strictly and literally intended.19
Trilling suggests that there was a historical turn in social and individual attitudes
towards artists, specifically towards poets, a turn in which a negative association
between artistic creativity and mental suffering, especially through pathology, was
either initiated or radically amplified, and in which a first step was made towards
the Freudian view of the mind generally, and the poet as neurotic or otherwise
mentally abnormal in particular. Other writers on the same theme have followed
Trilling on locating this shift in or resulting from Romanticism, often explicitly
so.20 One major aim here is to fill out the exact details of the historical turn towards
which Trilling only gestures, and also to expand on the suggestion he makes only
in passing (as his target is Freud) about ‘the development of a more elaborate
psychology and a stricter and more literal view of mental and emotional normality’
in the early nineteenth century.
On another level, the lines of connection and influence between Romantic art
and literature (German Romantic art and literature especially) and psychoanalysis
are generally well known, if only via Freud’s own references to Hoffmann and other
Romantic writers as his precursors.21 Moreover, from the perspective of the history
of psychology, and especially the scholarship that has followed in the wake of
Henri Ellenberger’s seminal The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), it has also
become increasingly difficult to see in Freud the great conceptual and cultural
break with the earlier nineteenth century he was once thought to embody.22 The
connection can seem frail in other respects: Freud’s explicit theorizing on those
great Romantic themes, creativity and the imagination, as laid out in ‘Creative
Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) for example, is often disappointingly reduc-
tive. As readers from Roger Fry on have complained, he reduces the esemplastic
force to mere wish fulfilment.23 Nevertheless, much general writing on madness
and literature retains a somewhat vague or unexamined Freudian orientation,
among the other primarily modern or contemporary concerns I have suggested.
Lillian Feder’s Madness in Literature (1980), with its conceptual frame of the con-
scious mind forming unconscious impulses into symbolic patterns, the dissolution
of ego-boundaries and so on, provides good examples of such underlying assump-
tions. It is more instructive, however, to turn to a canonical example of literary
criticism, born under the climate of Freud in its focus on the libido and erotic
deviance, if not itself explicitly Freudian, to suggest how critical tradition has spe-
cifically reiterated constructions of the psychopathology of the poet contemporary
with Romantic writing.
Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (first published in 1930) states a not entirely
sympathetic intent to map out ‘certain states of mind and peculiarities of behav-
iour, which are given a definite direction by various types and themes that recur as
insistently as myths engendered in the ferment of the blood’.24 It is difficult in this
last phrase, particularly in its odd archaic circulatory humoralism, not to hear an
echo of William Hazlitt’s sketch and other early biographical images of Shelley as
having ‘a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain’.25 (I discuss Hazlitt’s sketch at
further length in Chapter 5, on biography, in the section ‘Shelley’s Eccentricities’.)
Praz, although Shelley is central to his book, does not refer to Hazlitt at all. Here
one can see a major pattern in miniature. Later verdicts on Romantic writing, espe-
cially psychoanalytic or psychobiographical readings, reflect the transmitted influ-
ence of earlier, polemical constructions of authors’ works, minds, and bodies as
medically deviant, but discard or even disguise them in order to claim the position
of modern critical authority. This pattern emerges even in relation to more appar-
ently scientific, less obviously culturally and ideologically determined forms of
knowledge. Hazlitt’s language is also echoed in modern writing on madness and
creativity, including in the rhetoric of the authors of the most widely read works of
popular science and psychology on the topic: see, for example, Daniel Nettle’s
Strong Imagination (2001), as discussed in the first section of Chapter 6, or Kay
Redfield Jamison’s claim that ‘mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a
fire in the blood’.26
Another mode of analysis this book tries to avoid is the use of the nosology or
diagnostic tools of contemporary medical-model psychology and psychiatry, as
recorded for example in the ‘psychiatrist’s bible’, the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ), published by the American Psychiatric
Introduction 9
Association and now in its fifth major iteration. ‘Retrospective diagnosis’, no mat-
ter how advanced the clinical understanding of any given illness or syndrome may
be, has a justifiably poor reputation among historians of medicine. Peter Elmer, for
example, calls it ‘little more than a game’; he also notes suggestively that many of
its practitioners ‘subscribed to the “great man” approach’ to history.27 The diagnos-
tic ‘Life’ is another pattern traceable back to Romantic posterity, as the underside
of Carlyle’s biographical hero worship; again, the later chapters of this book on
biographical writing and anecdote, Chapters 5 and 6, examine this connection.
More obvious, common-sense objections to retrospective diagnosis include the wide
historical and cultural variance of knowledge about disease, and that in some areas
of medicine the accuracy of modern diagnostic categories (especially in psychiatry)
is still highly contested. More fatally, there is the absence of the foundation of
almost all medical diagnosis, the living body of the patient and its assayable data.
When one diagnoses from historic textual evidence, not only in the case of fictional
characters, but also from personal letters, autobiographical self-presentation, or
contemporary medical opinion, one examines not disease itself, but historic ideas
about disease; it is not necessary to be a social constructivist of the Bruno Latour
school to identify the factitious and porous nature of these ideas.
A final caveat: there are many good reasons to argue for the fundamental thera-
peutic importance of creative activity, including poetry, in work with contempor-
ary psychiatric service users and patients, or in arts therapy, community health
work, and the medical humanities more widely. These areas are outside the scope
of this book and there is no intent to deprecate them here. Although some service
users find the historical connection between creativity and mental illness to be a
useful corrective to a contemporary mental health system which may show little
interest in individual human qualities, it seems equally likely that it can be a dan-
gerous or unhelpful assumption in the broader public discourse about mental
health. Mental health organizations in the UK such as Mind, Rethink, and SANE
tend to disclaim such ideas in their public information and campaign literature as
myths which obscure or even glamorize the day-to-day realities of mental illness
for sufferers; this is likely to be the soundest and most sensible approach in terms
of mental health advocacy and policy. As a critical and broadly sceptical investiga-
tion into ‘madness and genius’ as that idea has been encoded historically and in
literary culture, debunking is one goal of this book, and I hope that it does
contribute to the public discourse in those terms. It may sit here alongside other
perspectives from critical medical humanities and disability studies, especially
recent calls for a radical ‘mad studies’, which seek to challenge and confront long-
recycled cultural assumptions and norms, although obviously this book is not
primarily about the contemporary moment. It is also not fundamentally hostile to
more nuanced work on the complex connections that might be shown to exist
between mental health and illness and creative aspects of human life and intelli-
gence, such as the summary of psychological investigations into this area by Daniel
Nettle. It would be more accurate to characterize this study as agnostic on such
claims, or primarily concerned with pointing out their place, often occluded or
obscured, in a long-running historical conversation. Here the goal is not so much
to debunk as to understand the forces behind the formation of the ‘myth’, and to
move beyond a cycle of endorsement and denial; or, in a famous phrase, to show
the fly the way out of the fly bottle.
S O C I O L O G Y A N D S T E R E OT Y P E
What this book is, then, is a cultural history of a set of ideas attached to poetry and
poets, and an exercise of sorts in the sociology of literary identity. But this is not a
straightforward exercise. It is important to preclude a sociological account built
only from a simple reading of authorial statements about madness found in
nineteenth-century writing, an account which ignores how these statements were
embedded within a subtle variety of literary, critical, and biographical discourses,
or which is oblivious to genre, character, narrative, irony, performance, or lyric
role. This is the problem with the sociologist George Becker’s The Mad Genius
Controversy (1978), the one book-length treatment of this trend in nineteenth-
century writing. Becker’s thesis is more crisply summarized in the preface by Lewis
Coser than in the main text of the book itself:
Becker shows that it would be simplistic to see this process as an imposition of negative
labels on passive victims. He documents that during the Romantic period intellectuals
and artists developed idiosyncratic types of behavior that were meant to distinguish
them from the common herd. But at a later stage, these deviant behavioral styles in
turn provided the basis and the raw materials for the stereotyped labels of those who
had a vested interest in their own construction of the image of the ‘mad genius’. Hence
many a Romantic ‘genius’, actuated by the need for an affirmed identity that stressed
his otherness, helped initiate a process in which others took him more seriously than
he perhaps wished, and assigned him to the status of a madman. Their own assump-
tion of a deviant life-style rendered the Romantic writers and artists and their descend-
ants defenseless against the label of madness. Those who did the labeling . . . were able
to do so because their victims had largely prepared the ground for them.28
The development of distinction and alterity and their markers within mass culture
is a key part of this subject, and the irony proposed, that Romantic writers them-
selves ‘prepared the ground’ for their own pathologization, is superficially obvious.
Becker is also strong on the ‘vested interest’ of the nineteenth century mad-genius
and degeneration polemicists who provide the main sample for his work, and
whom I discuss in Chapter 6, in the section ‘Romantic Genius, Insanity, and
Degeneration’ (he has a good bibliography of such works). He points out, for
example, that many were medical doctors seeking to expand the social role of their
profession. But when it comes to the responsibility of writers and artists for
self-labelling, problems emerge. Most glaringly, Becker draws his representative
Romantic statements from the same places as the degeneration polemics, and all
too often from the polemicists themselves. Discussing genius and the development
of Genielehre from the Enlightenment into the Romantic period in a thin few para-
graphs, Becker uses a quote from the brothers Schlegel on the suspension of ration-
ality in inspiration—cited not from an original edition but from Max Nordau.
Introduction 11
There are many similar examples. Consequently, his sense of the Romantic is
skewed by the ‘examples’ put forward in the very writing he critiques. This is not
counterbalanced by more detailed reading. General ideas on genius or Romantic
individualism are entirely referenced via early twentieth-century German writers
such as Edgar Zilsel, Jacob Cahan, Ernst Kretschmer, and Wilhelm Lange-
Eichbaum, the last two of a psychopathological inclination.
Actual Romantic writers appear only fleetingly, in quotes from suspect second-
ary sources. Coleridge is quoted twice, both times via Kate Sanborn’s The Vanity
and Insanity of Genius (1886), a work from the gossipy, belletristic end of mad-
genius lit; ‘Shelly’ appears in passing.29 Becker’s textual evidence is also under-
examined. For example, he comments on how ‘the theme of the “blessedness” of
madness is clearly reflected in Poe’s “Eleonora”: [quoting] “I am come of a race
noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the
question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence;
whether much that is glorious, whether all that is profound, does not spring from
some disease of thought.”’30 No further comment is made on this passage, which
is taken as a plain statement of the author’s opinion. But this is the narrator of a
story speaking, an unreliable narrator (‘a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mis-
trust the perfect sanity of the record’) in the highest and most delicately warped
Gothic mode. There is nothing ‘clear’ and much that is troubled about this reflec-
tion.31 Poe was indeed fascinated by hallucination and delusion, and has few peers
in the depiction of madness, a skill that has since endeared him to many gener-
ations of the avant-garde. But he was also developing a specific generic tradition in
Romanticism, the hallucinatory fable in which the supernatural, mythical, or out-
landish is smuggled into the textual universe of modernity via the justificatory
cloak of a mentally unbalanced narrator. Ludwig Tieck, in stories such as ‘Der
blonde Eckbert’ and ‘Der Runenberg’, which pushed traditional folkloric plots to
the point of utter perceptual collapse, was his great precursor here.32 And if one
looks at what Poe wrote about writers and writing—crucially, outside the frames of
his fiction—a very different story is told, of hard work and attention to detail, and
the author as skilled and self-conscious professional:
Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a
species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting
the public take a peep behind the scenes . . . at the cautious selections and rejections—
at the painful erasures and interpolations . . . which, in ninety-nine cases out of the
hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.33
(The extended metaphor of theatrical performance and stage machinery in this

passage is significant.) In order to analyse literary madness, then, it is necessary
to pay attention to literary qualities and contexts, including prevailing generic
traditions and modes. On this front both older anecdotal discussions and more
complex sociological approaches fail alike; by ignoring context, Becker reinforces
the hostile and literal-minded misreading he seeks to correct.
More interesting methodological considerations may also be drawn from
historical sociology. Becker refers to Erving Goffman’s concepts of ‘discrediting’
and stigma in stereotypical representation.34 These are certainly relevant to the

rhetoric of pathology in political attacks on Romanticism, and the object of inves-
tigation here is the very definition of a cultural stereotype. But a nuanced model of
what stereotypes are and do is needed, since the Romantic mad poet is such an
ambivalent and potentially complicated instance of a stereotypical idea. The his-
torian Sander Gilman has developed such a model. In his early work, Gilman
wrote of the stereotype as ‘the product of the application of existing paradigms to
those aspects of the universe which a culture has defined as inherently inexplic-
able’.35 The sense of what is ‘inexplicable’ is left, for want of a better word, unex-
plained. Gilman suggests that madness is just one example of those universal
binaries by which the outsider and the Other are excluded: you are mad; we are
sane. In Gilman’s Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness
(1985), a rather more complex and sophisticated model emerges.36 Two aspects
of this are especially important.
The first is that the meaning of ‘stereotype’ is historically situated. The broad
modern use of the word is usually credited to Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion
(1922), but at the beginning of his argument, Gilman presents the tantalizing fact
that the word stereotype, in its original sense in printing, was introduced into
English in 1798. So, although he does not make the connection, it is exactly
contemporary with Lyrical Ballads and the traditional start date for the cultural
movement so often hitched to it in phrases—the ‘romantic stereotype’—which are
themselves now clichés, another term from the mass production of text passing
into general use in the nineteenth century. Not only do ‘romantic stereotypes’ such
as the Romantic mad poet exist, then, but perhaps the nature of stereotype itself
has some fundamental link with Romanticism, or the historical context surround-
ing it. This assertion requires further unpacking. That the connection is more than
a nicety or coincidence can be seen from the brief but crucial discussion of stereo-
type printing in Lee Erickson’s Economy of Literary Form (1996), where it is a key
part of Erickson’s analysis of ‘the great technological revolution that occurred in
printing and the effects it had upon publishing and the reading public’ in the early
nineteenth century.37 The new technology of cheap presses (from 1804) and the
falling cost of paper (from 1807), Erickson argues, were essential in the poetry
boom of the first quarter of the century, but also in the rise of a mass periodical
press, which leeched much of the readership from poetry publishing, as the market
for whole books of poetry, but not for the selected offerings and choice morsels
presented in periodicals or annuals, faltered during the bank crises of the mid-
1820s. Erickson remarks ‘that the terms stereotype and cliché . . . have become syn-
onymous with the conformity created by mass reproduction’. In relation to the
image of madness, there are further complications. As Chapter 4 of this book
demonstrates, the periodical press played a major role in creating and repeating a
dogma of the insanity of Romantic poetry; this was a self-defining polemic in
which the persona of the sane, balanced reviewer was created in distinction to the
mentally unbalanced, dangerously pathological poet. The economic eclipse of
poetry via technical stereotype printing was mirrored by the form of cultural
stereotyping that the periodicals produced. In the Romantic period, not only was
Introduction 13
cultural conformity created by the mass press (as Jon Klancher and others have
argued), but deviation from conformity was given a mass image.
This paradox—that a figure predicated on non-conformity, rejection of social
norms, isolation, or inwardness emerges in mass literary reproduction and an
aggressively conformist discourse—suggests that the popularity of the idea of the
Romantic mad poet is not only based on smears, invective, or excommunication.
The idea’s ambivalence consists of how madness becomes both a negative other, the
feared darkening of culture into unreason and chaos, and an ideal other, a position
of uncompromised individuality against mass homogeneity and mechanical ration-
alism. This may be why it is promoted as it is damned in even the most hostile
attacks. Nor are the fear and desire encapsulated in the stereotype necessarily sep-
arable. This is Gilman’s second innovation on stereotypes, which he characterizes
as their place in the ‘fantasy life of the culture’ as protean, shifting, and essentially
inventive; how ‘stereotypes can assume a life of their own, rooted not in reality but
in . . . myth-making’. Gilman is keen to give a psychoanalytic account of the ‘deep
structure of stereotype’, which he thinks is based in anxiety about the adequacy of
representation in a complex world.38 But one need not subscribe to the psychoana-
lytic aspect of the model to see how any understanding of the stereotype in this
respect is potentially sympathetic to Romantic literary mythopoeia as well as illus-
trative of its dangers. The literary work of art, Gilman writes, is often irreducible
to ‘mere stereotype’, but nevertheless:
such systems are incorporated within the work of art, high or low, and shape the fic-
tions that these works present. This crafting of language may be quite conscious, for
example in parody of the stereotypical presuppositions of the time, or it may be quite
naïve, or it may be both simultaneously . . . More complicated texts provide more com-
plicated representations of difference. These texts may be complicated because they
consciously form a fiction of the world . . . Within the closed world they create, stereo-
types can be studied as an idealized definition of the different.39
A stereotype of creative madness is not just a negative slur, then, nor a weak con-
soling fiction, but a complex ‘idealized definition of the different’—a better prelim-
inary description of the Romantic mad poet is hard to find—closer to the centre
of larger problems of meaning and identity, and a reflection of the conditions for
the production of the work of art in modernity.
F O U C AU LT A N D T H E H I S TO RY O F M A D N E S S
I have left one major intellectual influence on this book unnamed, or only briefly
alluded to, which is Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, originally published in
1961. This is hardly a work that has been neglected or ignored: there are volumes
of secondary material devoted to it.40 But it has only been translated into English
in full relatively recently, and it remains perhaps an underappreciated and certainly
a widely misunderstood work. This was apparent in the public reaction to a scath-
ing review of the new translation by the historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull,
which appeared in 2007 during the early stages of research for this book. A general
sympathy with Scull’s dismissal of Foucault as obsolete, factually careless, and
(more polemically) ‘cynical and shameless’ was evident in the satisfaction which
many readers took in seeing a French theoretical oracle brought to heel as a char-
latan, both in comments under the online article and subsequently on a number of
blogs.41 In the online debate this satisfaction led to a curious (and one might say
credulous) willingness to take Scull’s main contentions on trust. In fact, the review
was a repetition with variations of a longer piece Scull had published fifteen years
earlier, when it had prompted a strong rebuttal from Colin Gordon.42 Gordon also
replied to the TLS review, exchanging blows with Scull on the letters page, and
providing a longer online refutation which claims some pointed examples where
more ‘cynical and shameless’ appeals, misrepresentations, and shaky claims might
be found in Scull’s review than in Foucault’s work; readers who consult the exchange
may judge the results for themselves.43 Nevertheless, the episode makes some
justification of Foucault’s continued relevance necessary.
Foucault’s History of Madness has a rather complicated history: in brief, it
began as his thèse d’état, and was then published as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de
la folie à l’âge classique (1961); Foucault then abridged it for a French paperback
edition, which formed the basis of a British and American translation with the
seductively misleading title Madness and Civilization (1967), in a series edited by
R. D. Laing. This was the version that was widely read as Foucault’s fame grew
outside France, particularly through its association with the anti-psychiatric
movement. For various reasons the full text was not translated until it finally
appeared in 2006, as History of Madness; Foucault’s later misgivings about the
book and its popular reception played a role in this delay.44 While I do not rely
materially on the arguments about treatment and institutions Foucault uses in
either of these versions, especially as these arguments have been subject to repeated
and sometimes acrimonious debate by historians of psychiatry, and in any case
relate mostly to an earlier period and a specifically French history, I discuss some
of the main contentions of his argument at greater length in Chapter 3 (pp. 75–6
and 84–6). Here I would like only to make a case for the continued need for a
Foucauldian intellectual inheritance and methodology in the analysis of the
Romantic mad poet, and related subjects. It is Foucault’s model of internaliza-
tion and alienation via intellectual and mental confinement which remains com-
pelling and necessary, and which has indeed been foundational for this project,
no matter how statistically valid his institutional and physical ‘great confinement’
is or isn’t.
The most common demurral from the latter argument, that the Age of Reason
saw a deliberate mass suppression of its opposite through a ‘great confinement’ and
the medical codification of madness alongside other forms of social deviance, is
probably represented by Roy Porter’s observation that a great Enlightenment con-
finement of the insane simply did not take place, at least not in eighteenth-century
Britain. But as Porter concedes, there was a great confinement in the nineteenth
century, when the numbers of people committed to more or less secure institutions
rose from a few thousand in 1800 to something like 100,000 by the end of the
Introduction 15
century.45 So one can at least justify taking Foucault’s ideas forward into the period
under discussion, as Foucault later did himself, in his 1970s lectures at the Collège
de France.46 (These lectures have been much less widely read.) More importantly,
even in the areas of the History of Madness where he has been most ridiculed (where
it is claimed, for instance, that that he took late medieval folkloric or literary
devices like the stultifera navis and the Narrentürme as realities), it is clear that
Foucault’s emphasis is on the move from physical to mental and symbolic confine-
ment; how and where ‘what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become
the castle of our conscience’. Likewise, the remarks on the freedom of the mad in
the Middle Ages which led many to accuse Foucault of absurd historical naïvety are
very clearly situated in a ‘half-real, half-imaginary geography’, as ‘that imaginary
freedom which still allowed it [sc. madness] to flourish on the Renaissance
horizon’.47 Foucault’s exploration through ‘moral insanity’ and ‘moral manage-
ment’ of modernity’s internalized systems of catechism and self-control in ‘the
castle of our conscience’, which has ramifications far beyond the actual treatment
of the insane, is the really significant element here, rather than physical confine-
ment and custodial medical control.
This more intellectual and ‘imaginary’ subject cries out for extension beyond
Foucault’s extremely elliptical reference to modern literature, which consists almost
entirely of brief mentions of ‘the lightning flash of works such as those of ’ Nerval,
Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Artaud, but nothing in the way of close reading; the
mentions are ‘lightning flash’ themselves.48 There is a very oblique discussion of
lyricism and Romantic consciousness near the conclusion of the History of Madness
(not in the abridgement), but the word ‘Romantic’ occurs more times in the edi-
torial apparatus of the 2006 translation than in the text itself. Otherwise, the only
literary content past the medieval section, even in the full translation, is a discus-
sion of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau (not in the abridgement) and again some
difficult and oblique concluding remarks, on Goya and Sade. Consequently, the
literary reception of Foucault’s work on madness has been much more limited than
one would perhaps expect.49 But the textual and cultural sphere must be the space
for testing possible manifestations and effects of such ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. (On
that note, Foucault does not mention Blake, apart from a quotation used in pass-
ing and not in the abridgement, nor any other British literary writer in the History
of Madness.) The reasons why this has not been fully pursued are complicated.
Firstly, there is Foucault’s apparent lack of interest in the data of social history and
individual experience as found in literature, or elsewhere; literary references are
used largely to illustrate the logical development of his scheme. Then there are
Foucault’s proclamations on the intransigence of madness and art: ‘The frequency
in the modern world of works of art [2006: œuvres] that explode out of madness
no doubt proves nothing about the reason of that world, about the meaning of such
works, or even about the relations formed and broken between the real world and
the artists who produced such works.’50 Madness is, in Foucault’s phrase, ‘the absence
of the work of art’ [l’absence de l’œuvre], ‘the very annihilation of the work of art,
the point where it becomes impossible and must fall silent’; but this relies on a
questionable opposition between madness and ordered or consummate Art (the
greater oeuvre) which was central only to Foucault’s earliest work, and which
even here he immediately qualified. ‘We must be wary’, he also writes, ‘of the
emotional appeal of the accursed artist, or the inverse and symmetrical danger of
psychoanalysis.’51
Nevertheless, this sort of point would go on to cause him significant trouble. In
the preface to the 1961 edition, subsequently omitted, Foucault had mentioned ‘a
history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its vivacity, before it is captured
by knowledge’.52 It was on this point that Jacques Derrida famously pounced, in a
1963 lecture that accused Foucault of repeating in an equally rigid shape the
attempt to capture madness itself in a monologue of reason about unreason.53
However, Derrida’s move depended on his ignoring, or misleadingly and partially
quoting, Foucault’s statement in the original preface to much the same effect:
But it is, no doubt, a doubly impossible task [to write the history of ‘madness
itself ’] . . . Any perception that aims to apprehend them [sc. insane words] in their wild
state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already. The liberty of madness
can only be heard from the heights of the fortress in which it is imprisoned . . . To write the
history of madness will therefore mean making a structural study of the historical
ensemble—notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts—which
hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted.54
Either way, Foucault must still have felt something to be wrong with the preface,
for he instructed for it to be dropped in 1972 and in all later editions, even as he
added appendices attempting to repudiate other parts of Derrida’s critique. One
can infer what the problem might have been from Foucault’s later thinking and
shifts in methodology, and his occasional remarks on a piece of work he later
repeatedly qualified as only the beginning of his intellectual project.55
Even as he forestalled the possibility of writing the history of ‘madness itself ’, it
is obvious that Foucault was in 1961 still enormously attracted to the prospect,
and the terms he uses make emotional and aesthetic appeals to the reader which
tend to pull against his dutiful demurrals: ‘vivacity’, ‘the liberty of madness’, ‘wild
state’, ‘primitive purity’, the ‘lightning flash’; elsewhere the ‘lyricism of protest’.56
There is again a buried allegiance to, and inheritance of, core Romantic ideas here,
problematic as a partly voiced, half-acknowledged appeal: an appeal to silence, not
to words. Ian Hacking makes an acute and surprisingly rare connection when he
writes that the History of Madness ‘was a somewhat Romantic work. It seems to
have started with the hesitant belief, never stated, that there is a pure thing, mad-
ness, perhaps a good in itself, which is not something we can capture in concepts.
It is certainly not what the sciences of the insane call madness.’ The book, Hacking
suggests, possibly thinking of the accompaniment to the Histoire as Foucault’s thèse
d’état, a commentary on Kant’s Anthropology, ‘hints at an almost Kantian story in
which our experience of the mad is a mere phenomenon conditioned by our
thought and our history, but [where] there is also a thing-in-itself which can be
called madness and which is incorruptible’.57 If this ‘Romanticism’ were all that he
offered, Foucault would be disqualified as a possible theoretical model on similar
grounds to Deleuze and Guattari.
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luonnollisesti kertoa Callahanin taposta ja Brannon vaivasi aivojaan
kysymyksellä, pysyisikö Josephine kertomuksessaan, jonka hän oli
Meederille laatinut, varoen itse tulemasta syytettyjen penkille ja
vierittäen syyn taposta Brannonin niskoille.
Hän ei tuntenut paljoakaan halua puhutella Josephineä. Hänen

sydämessään kyti pahanilkinen mielijohde antaa Josephinen
valehdella niin paljon kuin halusi, koska hänen valehtelemisensa ei
voinut saada aikaan muuta harmia kuin sen, että Brannon saisi sen
häpeän kannettavakseen, että häntä mainittaisiin miehenä, joka oli
ampunut vihamiehensä takaapäin. Mutta hän aikoi kantaa häpeän
suojellakseen Josephineä, ellei tämä omasta ehdostaan tunnustaisi.
Hän seisoi aitauksen portilla kun Murray pysäytti väsyneet

hevosensa ja hän auttoi Murrayta kantamaan Bettyn ostokset taloon.
Brannon oli päättänyt antaa Josephinelle ensin tilaisuuden puhua.

Kun hän sitten oli kahden kesken Bettyn kanssa ajoneuvojen luona
ja tämä huomautti, että hän oli luullut Brannonin lähteneen muitten
miesten kanssa etelään, vastasi hän lyhyesti, hymyn kirkastaessa
hänen silmiään:
"Muistui mieleeni, että minulla oli muutamia laskuja pantava

kirjoihin.
Lähden heidän luokseen huomenna."
Myöhemmin, kantaessaan sylen täyden ostoksia Bettyn perässä,

oli hän vähällä törmätä yhteen Josephinen kanssa, joka oli tulossa
keittiön poikki. Monta kertaa käydessään ajoneuvojen ja talon väliä
oli hän kuullut Bettyn puhuvan Josephinen kanssa, mutta nyt näki
hän tytön ensi kerran sitten edellisen yön. Ja nyt, kun hän melkein
hipoi hänen vaatteitaan, käänsi Josephine päänsä poispäin ja meni
ohi katsahtamattakaan Brannoniin.
Ajoneuvot olivat nyt tyhjennetyt ja Brannon seisoi

ruokailurakennuksen ovella, jutellen Lin Murrayn kanssa, kun Betty
lähestyi häntä.
Hänen silmänsä olivat vakavat, kysyvät ja niissä oli hieman

hämmästynyt ilme kun hän tuli aivan Brannonin luo. Hänen
poskensa olivat hieman punaiset ja huulet sotaisesti
yhteenpuserretut.
"Brannon", sanoi hän, "missä Chong on? Kysyin Josephineltä

asiaa, mutta hän käski minun kysyä sitä sinulta. Nyt teen sen. Missä
on Chong?"
"Lähetin Chongin Willetiin hakemaan lääkäriä Mrs Whitmanille.
"Oh", sanoi Betty, "en ymmärrä, miten Chongin lähettäminen

Willetiin välttämättömästi pitää tehdä Josephinen niin salaperäiseksi.
Ymmärrätkö sinä?"
"En."
"Brannon, mikä ihme teitä vaivaa, sekä sinua että Jota. Jo

käyttäytyy peloittavan kummallisesti ja minä en pidä siitä, että sinä
tuolla tavalla venyttelet sanojasi puhuessasi minun kanssani. Miten
sinä tulit lähettäneeksi Chongin Willetiin? Kuka kertoi, että Mrs
Whitman on sairas?"
"Tim Callahan ratsasti tästä ohi. Hän oli käynyt Laskarissa ja

poikennut Whitmanilla takaisin tullessaan."
"Sinä olet siis ollut kahden täällä Jon kanssa?" Väri hänen
poskillaan tummeni hänen tehdessään kysymyksensä. Hän piti
Brannonista eikä vannaankaan ollut mustasukkainen Josephinelle,
mutta hän tunsi sisässään jonkinlaista kummallista jännittyneisyyttä
ajatellessaan, että Brannon ja Josephine olivat ainoat oliot
karjatalolla hänen poissaollessaan.
Brannon vilkaisi häneen syrjäsilmin.
"Denver oli täällä aikaiseen aamuun saakka tänäpäivänä", sanoi

hän.
"Eikö hän nyt sitten ole täällä?"
"Ei."
"Missä hän on?"
"Maksoin hänelle palkan tänä aamuna. Hän lähti etelään päin."
"Miksi sinä erotit hänet, Brannon?"
"Me jouduimme riitaan."
Tavallisuudessa olisi Betty tyytynyt tähän selitykseen, sillä miehiä

tuli ja meni eikä se herättänyt sanottavampaa huomiota. Mutta hän
oli huomannut Brannonin käytöksessä jotakin pakotettua, joka pani
hänet epäilemään, ettei Brannon tahtonut puhua ja Betty taas oli
päättänyt saada hänet puhumaan suunsa puhtaaksi.
"Mistä teille tuli erimielisyyttä, Brannon?"
"Eipä juuri mistään."

"Ei juuri mistään", sanoi Betty ivallisesti matkien hänen ääntään.
"Sepä merkillistä. Sinä riitaannut jonkun miehen kanssa 'ei juuri
mistään' ja erotat hänet toimesta."
Murray käänsi päätään ja nauroi partaansa. Brannon katsahti

Bettyyn, jonka silmät loistivat päättäväisyyttä ja ankaruutta. Tytön
posket hehkuivat punaisina; hän nosti leukaansa katsoessaan
Brannoniin sellaisella suorasukaisuudella, että se olisi tehnyt
levottomaksi minkä miehen hyvänsä, mutta Brannonin sydämeen se
toi sen äkillisen huomion, että Betty oli sievempi kuin hän oli
ajatellutkaan sekä että hän oli paljon inhimillisempi ja terveempi
vihassaan kuin Josephine. Myöskin huomasi Brannon Bettyn
hurmaavan leuan ja sievän suun.
Hän hämmästyi sitä outoa ajatusta, ettei hän koskaan ollut

huomannut Bettyn kauneutta. Ja jos hän oli sen tehnyt, niin oli se
ollut tiedotonta, tuskin puoleksi arvioitua. Hän yritti tuumia välttelevää
vastausta, kun hän näki Bettyn silmissä syvän hämmingin ja
silmäluomien painuvan alas. Ihmetellen katseli hän kuinka hänen
poskiensa puna levisi nopeasti yli kaulan ja otsan.
Hämmästyneenä katsahti hän Murrayhin, ajatellen että hän ehkä

oli aiheuttanut punastumisen. Mutta Murray seisoi selin heihin.
Brannon katsoi uudelleen Bettyä, jolloin hän näki hänen silmissään
syvää pilkkaa ja ylenkatsetta sekä huomasi, että hänen leukansa oli
uhmaavasti työntynyt eteenpäin ja huulensa olivat päättävästi
yhteenpuristetut.
Ja sitten, kun Brannonin hämmästyneet silmät kohtasivat hänen

silmänsä, naurahti Betty lyhyesti, kiusoittelevasti ja hänen
naurussaan oli merkillisen ylpeä sävy. Sillä vaikka Betty oli odottanut
sitä kauan, tapahtui se nyt ensikerran heidän tuttavuutensa aikana,
että Brannon katsoi häneen ihailevin silmin.
"Eipä juuri mitään" kertasi Betty, äänessään vain rippeitä

äskeisestä naurusta. "Sinä et näy haluavan puhua, Brannon, vai
mitä? Ja minun kysymykseni näkyvät vaivaavan sinua. Etkä sinä
tahdo, että koetan saada sinua puhumaan?"
Hän käännähti äkkiä ympäri ja lähti päärakennusta kohti, jättäen

Brannonin tuijottamaan jälkeensä vielä entistäänkin
hämmästyneempänä.
"Hän teki sinusta pilaa, Brannon", nauroi Murray.
Ei mitään vastausta Brannonin puolelta.
"En välitä tietää niistä syystä hän sen teki", jatkoi Murray, "mutta
pilaa hän teki sinusta, Brannon. Peijakas vie tekikin. Mutta kyllähän
minä arvaan syyn siihen. 'Eipä juuri mitään', kiusoitteli Murray,
matkien Bettyn ääntä,'eipä juuri mitään', sanoi hän. 'Eipä juuri
mitään.' Ja sillä hän tarkoitti että se on tarpeeksi paljon, vaikka sinä
et näy sitä ymmärtävän."
Brannon vapautti itsensä Murrayn leikinlaskusta yksinkertaisesti

menemällä joen rantaan, jossa hän seisoi pitkän aikaa koettaen
selvittää Bettyn arvoituksellista käytöstä. Vihdoin hän jätti yrityksen
sikseen ja palasi asunnolleen, jossa hän istui jonkun aikaa porstuan
kynnyksellä.
Kuullessaan asuntonsa nurkan takana liikettä, nosti hän päätään

ja näki
Bettyn tulevan. Hänen kasvonsa olivat nyt kalpeat ja silmänsä
vakavat.
"Brannon", sanoi hän tultuaan aivan hänen luokseen, "miksi et

puhunut minulle mitään Callahanista?"
"Arvelin, että saisit kuulla siitä jonkun ajan kuluttua."
"Miksi et kertonut minulle sitä, Brannon? Eihän sinun ole tapanasi

vetäytyä edesvastuusta. Sinä puhuit kanssani muutama minuutti
sitten. Miksi et silloin kertonut sitä minulle, vaan odotit kunnes Jo
olisi tehnyt sen?"
"Kertoiko hän sen sinulle, kysyi Brannon venytellen. Hän koetti

arvata oliko Josephine kertonut jutun samalla tavalla kuin hän oli sen
kertonut Meederille.
"Oli suorastaan häpeä antaa hänen kertoa se, Brannon. Hän oli
melkein hysteerinen. Mahtoi hänestä olla kauheata nähdä tapaus."
"Eipä siinä tainnut muukaan auttaa", virkkoi Brannon.
Hän arvasi Bettyn sanoista, että Josephine oli kertonut

tapahtuman samalla tavalla kuin Meederille, nimittäin, että Brannon
oli ampunut Callahanin Josephinen nähden. Hän oli päättänyt
vahvistaa todeksi kaiken, mitä Josephine sanoisi, mutta kun hän ei
ollut oikein varma siitä, oliko hän maininnut, että Callahan oli
ahdistellut häntä, ei hän rohjennut puhua enempää.
Bettyn seuraavat sanat osoittivat kuitenkin, että Josephine oli

toistanut kertomuksensa kokonaan.
"En voi uskoa, että Callahan saattoi tehdä sellaista."

Betty kohdisti kirkkaat, kysyvät silmänsä Brannoniin ja jotta tyttö ei
huomaisi epärehellisyyttä hänen katseessaan käänsi tämä päätään
avaralle alangolle päin. Bettyn silmät olivat aina panneet Brannonin
tuntemaan itsensä hieman levottomaksi, varsinkin milloin Betty
katsoi häneen sillä tavalla kuin hän nyt teki.
"Brannon", sanoi Betty lujasti, "katso minuun." Brannon noudatti

käskyä.
"Brannon", jatkoi hän, "Callahania oli ammuttu selkään. Ammuitko

sinä hänet?"
Hän olisi voinut valehdella, mutta hän tiesi, ettei hän olisi voinut
pettää Bettyä.
"Sinähän sanoit, että Miss Hamilton kertoi niin", väitteli Brannon.
"Minä vaadin sinua sanomaan sen, Brannon!"
"Minä en puhu mitään siihen asiaan."
"Brannon, minä tahdon vastauksen."
Betty näki, että hänen silmänsä nauroivat ja rauhallinen hymy

karehti hänen huulillaan. Hän tiesi, että ne olivat merkkejä Brannonin
taipumattomasta luonteesta, joka juuri oli antanut hänelle liikanimen
"Teräs." Vakavimpina vaaran hetkinä, jolloin ainoastaan rohkeus
saattoi pelastaa hänet, oli Betty nähnyt tuon saman ilmeen, joka
hänen silmissään nytkin oli, ja hän tiesi, että oli turha yrittääkään
häntä taivutella.
Huolimatta Brannonin kieltäytymisestä vastaamasta, pysyi Betty

rauhallisena. Brannon ei ollut "terästä" hänelle. Hän saattoi hyvin
muistaa sen päivän, jona Brannon tuli Triangle L:ään, monta vuotta
sitten ja hänen ihanteellinen ensivaikutelmansa hänestä oli vain
lujittunut vuosien vieriessä. Hänelle oli Brannon ollut uros, joka oli
ratsastanut esille hänen lukemistaan romaaneista, ja vaikka hänen
luonteessaan olikin ilmennyt puolia, jotka eivät vastanneet
mielikuvituksen sankaria, oli Brannon yhä jäänyt hänen tyttöikänsä
ritariksi.
Tämä ei millään muotoa ollut estänyt Bettyä arvioimasta häntä

samojen mittojen mukaan kuin muitakin miehiä. Hänen
käytännöllinen järkensä ja ihmeellinen vaistonsa oli päinvastoin
asettanut Brannonin usein sellaisten koetusten alaiseksi, jollaisia
hän toisiin miehiin nähden ei olisi tullut ajatelleeksikaan. Hän oli
pitänyt Brannonia silmällä, tutkinut häntä ja koetellut häntä
tilaisuuden sattuessa, todetakseen sen metallin lujuutta, josta hän oli
rakennettu ja samalla saadakseen pienen silmäyksen hänen
luonteensa sisimpään. Hän oli etsinyt ja penkonut, koetellut ja
punninnut, ja ainoassakaan tärkeässä puolessa hänen luonteessaan
ei hän ollut havainnut puutteellisuutta.
Betty tunsi hänet. Aines, josta hän oli kokoonpantu, oli tervettä.
Hänessä ei ollut mitään pinnallista, kiiltävää siloa, joka olisi peittänyt
vähemmän miellyttäviä puutteita.
Mutta Brannon ei koskaan näyttänyt ajattelevan häntä muuna kuin

Betty Lawsonina, isäntänsä tyttärenä. Ja ennenkuin hän siinä
suhteessa muuttaisi ajatustapaansa, ei Betty luonnollisestikaan
antaisi hänen ymmärtää, että hän vuosikausia salaisesti oli toivonut
ja odottanut näkevänsä hänen silmissään ilmettä, joka kertoisi
hänelle, että hän oli tavoiteltavan arvoinen. Tänään oli Betty nähnyt
tuon ilmeen, ihailun aamunkoiton — ihailun, joka ei vielä ollut varma
itsestään, hapuileva, ihmetyksen sekainen. Ja sitten oli tuon kauan
odotetun tapauksen kanssa yhtaikaa tullut Josephinen kertomus
Callahanin murhasta.
Mutta hänen luottamuksensa Brannoniin ei ollut horjunut.

Senpävuoksi seisoessaan nyt Brannonin edessä, hän tunsi itsensä
niin rauhalliseksi, että se kokonaan taittoi kärjen katkeruudelta, jonka
Brannonin kieltäytyminen vastaamasta oli aiheuttanut.
"Otan takaisin sanani, Brannon", sanoi hän tyynesti hymyillen. "Se

Brannon, jonka minä tunnen, ei ammu ihmisiä takaapäin. Hän ei
tappanut
Callahania. Luuletko, että eteläisellä syöttöalueella on tarpeeksi
heinää karjalle?"
Brannonin silmät hehkuivat. Betty näki hänen molempien käsiensä

puristuvan nyrkkiin, näki hänen huultensa jäykistyvän suoraksi
viivaksi ja poskien vahvan ruskettuman alta kuulsi selvästi kalpeus.
Ensi kerran elämässään näki hän Brannonin syvän liikutuksen
vallassa.
Mutta sitä kesti vain hetkisen. Ellei Betty olisi pitänyt häntä niin
tarkasti silmällä, ei hän olisi huomannut sitä ensinkään.
"Luulen, että siellä on tarpeeksi", vastasi Brannon ja taas näki

Betty hänen silmissään tuon saman ilmeen, jota hän niin oli toivonut.
Ja taas seisoi Brannon hämmästyneenä punastuvan ja ujon Bettyn
edessä.
Mutta vain hetkisen, sillä Betty lähti nopeasti päärakennusta kohti.

Kuudestoista luku.
Ollen itse vakuutettu siitä, että Brannon oli ampunut sen kuulan,
joka oli tappanut Callahanin, oli Josephine, kertoessaan tapahtuman
Bettylle, päättänyt puhua totuuden. Lieventävänä asianhaarana oli
hän uudistanut sen mahdollisuuden, johon Cole Meeder oli viitannut
tutkiessaan häntä, että nimittäin Brannon oli erehtynyt luulemaan
Callahania Denveriksi. Tällä koetti hän lievittää sitä kauhua, jonka
hän arvasi kertomuksensa Bettyssä herättävän.
Betty ei kuitenkaan antanut ystävänsä huomata, miten

voimakkaasti murha-uutinen hänen mieltään kuohutti, ja palatessaan
uudelleen puhuttelemasta Brannonia ei hän enää puuttunut asiaan.
Pitäessään salaa silmällä Bettyä illan kuluessa, tuli Josephine

siihen päätökseen, ettei murha paljoakaan ollut vaikuttanut hänen
mielenrauhaansa ja tuon piittamattomuuden arveli hän johtuvan siitä,
että Betty oli syntynyt ja kasvanut seudulla, jossa jokainen suhtautui
rauhallisen välinpitämättömästi väkivallan tekoihin yleensä.
Josephine ei luonnollisesti tiennyt kuinka hyvin Betty tunsi

Brannonin luonteen, sillä muutoin olisi hän tullut sangen levottomaksi
nähdessään Bettyn hämmentyneen ilmeen joka kerta katsoessaan
häneen. Betty ihmetteli kuinka paljon hänen ystävänsä
todellisuudessa oli kertonut Callahanin kuoleman yhteydessä
olevista seikoista ja hän tunsi luonnollista halveksumista Josephinen
salaperäisyyden vuoksi. Ja vaikka hän sydämessään kielsikin
olevansa mustasukkainen, oli hän kuitenkin vakuutettu siitä, että
murha oli jollakin tavoin yhteydessä sen seikan kanssa, että
Josephine oli sinä iltana ollut yhdessä Brannonin kanssa
päärakennuksessa.
Josephine oli yhtä kaikki Bettyn vieras ja emäntänä hänen
uteliaisuutensa ystävänsä asioihin nähden täytyi rajoittua
kohteliaisuuden vaatimuksiin, joten hän hienosti kieltäytyi kyselyistä.
Hänen täytyi todella ponnistaa pysyäkseen kohteliaana, ja niinpian
kuin hän vain sopivaisuutta loukkaamatta pääsi, meni hän levolle,
syyttäen Willetin matkan aiheuttamaa väsymystä.
Josephine ei seurannut Bettyä yläkertaan. Betty oli kertonut

tavanneensa Chongin kaupungissa aikaisin aamulla ja sanonut
lähettäneensä hänet Whitmanien talolle tiedustelemaan Mrs
Whitmanin tilaa lääkärin käynnin jälkeen.
Chongin piti, Bettyn sanojen mukaan, tulla kotiin ennen puoliyötä

ja
Josephine tahtoi halusta tietää miten sairaan laita oli.
Bettyn mentyä vetäytyi hän taas kuistille ja istahti keinutuoliin.
Oli täysikuu, sen pehmeässä, himmeässä valossa häämötti avara

alanko kauniina. Mutta Josephine tapasi itsensä silmälläpitämästä
Brannonin asumusta, jonka akkunasta virtasi valoa. Hän ajatteli
Brannonia. Brannonin täytyi tietää, että Josephine oli valehdellut
hänen hyväkseen eikä hän sittenkään ollut edes yrittänytkään kiittää
nähdessään hänet keittiössä.
Ja kuitenkin tuntui hänestä vaikealta ajatella Brannonia

murhaajaksi. Brannonin käytöksessä oli edellisenä iltana ollut
jotakin, joka saattoi Josephinen ymmälle. Hänessä oli varmasti
huomattavissa myötätuntoa sinä hetkenä kun hän oli katsellut
Josephineä, tämän istuessa suuren pöydän ääressä ja koettaessa
tukahuttaa tihutyön aiheuttamaa kauhuaan. Miksi tuo säälivä
myötätunto? Jos kukaan, niin Brannon itse oli myötätunnon
tarpeessa!
Ja sittenkin näytti hän siltä kuin ei olisi tarvinnut sitä. Hänen

silmissään, hänen siinä seistessään, oli ollut tuo arvoituksellinen
loiste, joka oli niin kokonaan toisenlainen kuin hänen tavallinen
katseensa Josephinen mielestä oli ollut. Ja sittenkin oli tuon loisteen
takana ollut sama vanha itsekylläisyys ja tietoisuus voimasta ja
vallasta, joka aina oli Josephineä kiusannut. Brannon veti häntä
puoleensa nytkin ja hän punastui muistaessaan, kuinka hänen
kätensä kosketus oli värisyttänyt häntä ja kuinka hän oli vapissut
kuullessaan Brannonin äänen, tämän laskiessa Denverin pistoolin
aivan hänen viereensä pöydälle.
Jos Brannon olisi ollut Idän miehiä, jos hän olisi ollut sen
kohteliaan seurapiirin jäseniä, joihin Josephine oli tottunut ja jos hän
olisi ollut vähemmän kömpelö eikä niin kokonaan eläytynyt seudun
karkeaan ja ylivoimaisen ankaraan ilmapiiriin, olisi Josephine luullut
voivansa häntä rakastaa. Kuitenkin tiesi hän, että tämä selvittely oli
vain hänen aivojensa tuotetta, sillä hänen sydämensä huusi kaiken
aikaa: "Minä kaipaan häntä, kaipaan häntä."
Hän nousi pystyyn, halveksien itseään syvästi, kun oli oikein
tulkinnut sisintä ääntään ja meni rappuja alas. Hän kulki
päärakennuksen itäiselle puolelle ja jäi sinne seisomaan,
mietteissään katsellen kuun valaisemaan etäisyyteen, tuntien
poskensa hehkuvan siitä omituisesta kaipauksesta, joka hänet oli
vallannut. Brannonin vetovoimaa ei voinut järkeilemällä poistaa.
Tasainen nurmikenttä eteläpuolella rakennusta herätti hänen

huomiotaan ja hän lähti sinne, nauttien täysin siemauksin yön
ihanuudesta ja täyttäen keuhkonsa ihmeellisen suloisella ilmalla,
jonka tuon ihmemaan mittaamattomista etäisyyksistä puhaltavat
tuulen henkäykset monien tuoksujen kyllästämänä toivat häntä kohti.
Päästäkseen nurmikentälle täytyi hänen mennä aivan tallin ohi ja

kuullessaan sieltä ääntä, joka tuntui tulevan aivan rakennuksen
sisältä, pysähtyi hän epäröiden ja oli jo kääntyä takaisin.
Seisoessaan siinä hän kuuli äänen uudelleen ja kääntyi

pelokkaana isoon oveen päin, jossa vaara tuntui väijyvän.
Ovi oli puoleksi auki. Nojaten heikkona ovenpieleen, heiluen eteen

ja taaksepäin epävarmoilla jaloillaan ja pää painuneena rintaa vasten
seisoi siinä mies.
Josephine kääntyi kauhun valtaamana, tukahuttaen huudon, joka

jo oli hänen huulillaan. Samassa kuului miehen ääni, surkeasti
pyytävänä:
"Älkää toki ma'am. Olen haavoittunut!"
Josephine pysähtyi epäröiden. Miehen sanat "olen haavoittunut"

sisälsivät vaikuttavan, toivottoman pyynnön. Sitäpaitsi kuulosti ääni
tutulta.
Josephine kääntyi taas oveen päin ja katsoi miestä tarkkaan ja

näki, että hän oli oudon kalpea, miltei aavemainen. Sitten hän veti
syvään henkeä ja kuiskasi terävästi, äänettömästi.
"Les Artwell!"
"Niin olen, ma'am", tuli vastaus, kuiskaten. "Olen vaikeasti

haavoittunut — ampuma-ase —. Älkää jumalan tähden panko
toimeen hälyytystä! Älkää menkö luotani, ma'am!" Hän horjahteli ja
vaipui kynnykselle polvilleen. Silmänräpäyksessä oli Josephine
hänen luonaan, mielettömän innokkaana auttamaan häntä, vaikka oli
yhtä avuton kiihkossaan kuin mieskin heikkoudessaan.
Mies oli todellakin Les Artwell. Hänen poikamaiset kasvonsa olivat

likaiset ja tuskan vääntämät, mutta hänen sieraimensa kuulsivat
liankin läpi valkoisina, hänen koettaessaan tukahuttaa esille pyrkivää
kärsimystään. Hänen silmänsä, jotka Josephine silloin radanvarrella
oli huomannut niin synkiksi, olivat lasimaiset heikkoudesta ja
katsoivat häneen mykkinä, rukoilevina.
"Mitä minä teen, mitä minä teen"? valitti Josephine mielettömänä.

"Oh, Jumalani, sehän on verta", läähätti hän, kun hän pannessaan
kätensä Artwellin rintaa vastaan, estääkseen häntä kaatumasta,
tunsi koskettavansa jotakin kosteaa. Hän vetääntyi kauhusta
taaksepäin ja näki kuun valossa sormenpäänsä verisinä.
"Älkää panko toimeen hälyytystä", pyysi Artwell heikolla äänellä.

"He saavat minut käsiinsä, jos sen teette — Brannon ja Murray.
Ammuin itseäni vahingossa tänä aamuna. Ratsastin tänne,
saadakseni apua ja toivoin jaksavani Whitmanille asti. Menetin
varmaankin tajuni. Hevoseni heitti minut selästään ja meni
menojaan." Hän pysähtyi hengittääkseen käheästi ja raskaasti.
Sitten hän jatkoi. "Brannon —hän hirttäisi minut. Jos te voisitte
auttaa minua pääsemään Lattimerin talolle — sinne on viisitoista
mailia — etelään — niin saisin apua. Lattimer on ystäväni." Hän
pysähtyi ja nojasi leukaansa rintaa vasten, mutisten jotakin
kuulumatonta.
"Lattimer!"
Josephine lausui nimen ääneen. Sehän oli sama mies, josta Betty
oli sanonut, ettei hän häikäilisi, vaikka veisi naisen väkisin
vuoristoon.
Ja Brannon oli sanonut, että Denver ja Artwell olivat ystäviä.

Merkitsivätkö nämä kaksi huomautusta sitä, että tämä kolmikko oli
henkipattoja, vai oliko Betty sanonut sen vain ollakseen
maalauksellinen? Ja oliko Brannon liittänyt Denverin nimen Artwellin
nimeen vain peloittaakseen Josephineä?
Huoli omasta turvallisuudestaan oli Josephinessä tällä hetkellä

voimakas. Lattimer asui etelään Triangle L:stä. Denver oli edellisenä
iltana ratsastanut etelään ja nyt pyysi Artwell häntä viemään itseään
Lattimerin karjatalolle. Viimeksimainittu teko veisi Josephinen ainakin
yhden miehen luo, joka oli yrittänyt rikollista tekoa häntä vastaan.
Betty oli Lattimerista sanonut: "Hän on mies — todellinen mies", tai
jotakin siihen suuntaan. Todellinen mies ei varmaankaan saattaisi
tehdä hänelle mitään pahaa.
Hänen täytyi kuitenkin koettaa. Hän ei voinut jättää Artwellia talliin

kuolemaan eikä hän myöskään voinut jättää häntä Brannonin käsiin
hirtettäväksi, ja oli todennäköistä ettei Artwell pystyisi ratsastamaan
viittätoista mailia ilman apua.
Eri asia on omistaa kauniita aatteita, mutta toinen on panna ne

täytäntöön, oman turvallisuutensa uhalla. Josephine ajatteli tuota
eroa, seisoessaan tallin ovella Artwellia katsellen. Hänen
vastahakoisuutensa toimia tässä tapauksessa oli suuri. Hän suoraan
sanoen pelkäsi.
Mutta kun hän näki Artwellin kääntyvän hitaasti ja koettaen

pysyttää tasapainoaan, lähtevän kävelemään pimeään talliin, seurasi
Josephine häntä, kuullen hänen puhuvan horjuessaan eteenpäin.
"Sain erään hevosen satuloiduksi ja suitset päähän. Siihen meni

minulta melkein koko päivä. Mutta en päässyt sen selkään millään
tavalla. Liian heikko. Jos te auttaisitte hieman, niin ehkä voisin
onnistua. Ja, jos pelkäätte tai ette tahdo, että joudutte kiinni siitä, niin
ehkäpä voisitte saattaa minua vähän matkaa, sen verran, että
pääsen alkuun. Luulen, että suoriutuisin lopusta."
Kuu valoi loistettaan avonaisesta tallin ovesta ja sen himmeässä

valossa onnistui Josephinen jollakin tavalla auttaa Artwell satulaan.
Hevonen seisoi suuressa tallissa, mutta käyttäen hyväkseen
kaukaloa ja erästä viereisen tallin alempaa osastoa, kävi satulaan
nousu jollakin tavalla päinsä.
Mutta päästyään satulaan näytti Artwell lysähtävän aivan kokoon.

Hän vaipui satulannuppia vasten voimattomana ja avuttomana.
Sääli Artwellia kohtaan kannusti Josephineä ripeään päätökseen.

Talli oli laaja ja jossakin siellä oli Chesterfield. Hän löysi sen vihdoin
eräässä nurkassa olevasta pilttuusta, jossa se tylsänä seisoi ja
vaikka hänen kokemattomuutensa ja ratsasvälineitten
tuntemattomuutensa tekivätkin hänen työnsä hitaaksi ja toivottoman
vaikeaksi, sai hän vihdoin satulan hevosen selkään ja suitset sen
suuhun. Samoin pääsi hän satulaan ja ohjasi Chesterfieldin Artwellin
hevosen viereen.
Sitten talutti hän Artwellin hevosen tallista ulos ja lähti

ratsastamaan etelään, aina vähä väliä katsahtaen olkansa yli
karjatalolle. Täysin tietoisena uhkapelistä, johon hän antautui,
lähtiessään Artwellin kanssa, ryhtyi hän siihen kuitenkin rohkealla
mielellä ja tuntien outoa riemua teostaan.
Seitsemästoista luku.
Ensi sarastuksen heikossa valaistuksessa näki Josephine

rakennusryhmän hämärät ääriviivat metsän laidassa olevalla
tasaisella kentällä. Heikko sumu, joka oli peittänyt alangon, teki
hitaasti nousuaan, laskien taas siellä täällä ikäänkuin
vastenmielisesti irtautuen maasta, yhtyäkseen hajanaisiin pilviin sen
yläpuolella.
Hoputtaen Chesterfieldiä eteenpäin, vaikkakin niin hitaasti, että

mies olisi kävellyt nopeammin, katsahti Josephine taakseen
Artwelliin.
Tämä oli menettänyt tajuntansa, mutta Josephinellä ei ollut

rohkeutta päättää, johtuiko se väsymyksestä vaiko haavasta
vuotaneen veren menetyksen vuoksi. Riitti hänen mielestään, kun
hän oli tuonut Artwellin Lattimerin karjatalon näkyville, ilman että hän
oli pudonnut satulasta. Josephine tiesi, ettei hän enää saattaisi
koskea Artwelliin ja sen vuoksi oli hän ajanut niin hitaasti, vaikka se
olikin koskenut hänen jännittyneeseen hermostoonsa. Sillä ei ollut
epäilystäkään, että Josephine hitaasti kulkemalla oli pelastunut siitä
kauhistuttavasta mahdollisuudesta, että Artwell olisi pudonnut
hevosen selästä.
Hän oli vakuutettu siitä, ettei hän enää olisi pystynyt auttamaan
miestä takaisin satulaan, sillä hän ei olisi voinut sormin koskea
häneen. Miten Artwell yleensä oli tuon viidentoista mailin matkan
onnistunut pysymään satulassa, ei Josephine käsittänyt, vaan arveli
sen tapahtuneen aivan vaistomaisesti, tottumuksesta.
Josephine itse oli kuoleman väsynyt. Aaveitten ja kyöpelien

aikana, jolloin ei yö vielä ollut loppunut eikä päivä alkanut, oli hän
ratsastanut eteenpäin tietämättä suunnasta mitään. Mutta ensi
valolla huomasi hän epäselvän polun, jota Chesterfieldin oli täytynyt
seurata joko sitten vaistonsa tai tuntemuksensa mukaan. Nythän
sillä ei enää ollut väliä, miten se oli tapahtunut, sillä hän oli miltei
perillä.
Ohjatessaan Chesterfieldiä pientä alamäkeä, joka vei sille

kentälle, jossa rakennukset nyt olivat aivan lähellä, huomasi hän,
ettei Artwell enää ollut tiedoton, sillä hän mutisi sanoja, jotka alussa
olivat käsittämättömiä, mutta joista Josephine lopulla pääsi
selvyyteen.
"Selväjärkinen — hänellä on oikea suunta — en olisi pystynyt

yksin — arvatenkin olin tiedoton — en koskaan ole tehnyt näin pitkää
matkaa, mitä — ei kukaan nainen —"
Sitten sanat taas hukkuivat kuulumattomiin ja Josephine kirkaisi
kauhusta, nähdessään hänen, juuri heidän saapuessaan kentälle,
horjahtavan sivulle ja putoavan raskaasti pitkään heinään hevosen
viereen.
Taas hän kirkaisi ja jäi avuttomana istumaan satulaan,

nähdessään Artwellin hervottomana ja kädet levällään makaavan
maassa. Artwellista ei enää ollut matkan jatkajaksi.
Josephine hyppäsi satulasta ja epätoivoisesti koettaen hillitä

kiihtyneitä hermojaan, hän päätti mennä Artwellin luo, huolimatta
hirvittävästä pelostaan, joka hänet oli vallannut. Silloin kuuli hän
huudon ja näki hevosmiehen ratsastavan rakennusryhmältä päin.
Josephinen oli täytynyt silloin pyörtyä, sillä kun hän taas heräsi
tietoisuuteen siitä, mitä hänen ympärillään tapahtui, huomasi hän
istuvansa suuressa nojatuolissa kuistilla ja näki kookkaan miehen
seisovan kymmenen askeleen päässä, ja katselevan häntä
äänettömänä.
Artwell ja hevoset oli kadonneet näkyvistä. Tuuli puhalsi suoraan

Josephinen kasvoihin, tuoden tervetullutta virkistystä hänen kuumille
poskilleen. Hänen tukkansa oli pelottavassa epäjärjestyksessä, sillä
muutamat hajanaiset, itsepäiset kutrit heilahtelivat hänen silmiensä
edessä. Ja hän tunsi, että hänen täytyi tukkia ne paikoilleen
ollakseen esiintymiskelpoinen, sillä kookas mies, joka häntä katseli,
oli kaunis ja Josephine ei tahtonut, että hän olisi pitänyt häntä
minään tuhkimuksena. Hän asetti tukkansa järjestykseen parilla
näppärällä sormen liikkeellä, veti pari vilvottavalle tuulelle kiitollista
henkäystä ja hymyili kookkaalle miehelle. Mutta ollen sangen
väsynyt ja tuntien nojatuolin erittäin mukavaksi, ei hän yrittänytkään
nousta pystyyn. Pian hänen kuitenkin täytyisi nousta, sillä hänellä oli
kiire takaisin Triangle L:ään.
"Tuntuu paremmalle?" kysyi kookas mies.
"Miten hän voi?" kysyi Josephine, vastaamatta kysymykseen.
"Artwell voi hyvin", sanoi kookas mies. "Hän ei ole vaarallisesti

haavoittunut. Hän on sisällä ja nukkuu pahimmat pois ensin." Hänen
katseensa oli terävä, kirkas ja kiinnostunut. "Kuka olette?" kysyi hän
sitten.
"Olen Josephine Hamilton."
"Aivan oikein. Betty Lawsonin vieras. Idästä. Kävit koulua Bettyn

kanssa. Näette, että olen kuullut teistä."
"Ilmeisesti", hymyili Josephine. "Ja te olette tietysti Mr Lattimer?"
"Miksi niin tietysti?" kysyi hän.
Hän oli vähällä vastata, että hän oli tuntenut hänet Betty Lawsonin
kuvauksesta, kun hän oli sanonut häntä "hirvittävän, tumman
kauniiksi." Sen sijaan Josephine punastui ja kertoi hänelle, kuinka
hän oli tavannut Artwellin tallin ovella, sekä teki selvää koko
seikkailusta lopettaen siihen, että Artwell oli sanonut Lattimerin
karjatalon olevan etelään päin.
Josephine ei ollut koskaan nähnyt Lattimerin kaltaista miestä. Kun

hän seisoi siinä katsellen Josephineä, hajasäärin, käsivarret ristissä
rinnalla ja kasvot sen verran alaspäin, että hän vaivatta saattoi
katsoa hänen silmiinsä, muisti Josephine toisen kuvaavan palan
Bettyn selvityksessä hänen ominaisuuksistaan. "Jos hän olisi elänyt

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MADNESS AND THE ROMANTIC POET :

a critical history 1st Edition James

Critical Writings James Joyce

The Qur ■n A Form critical History Karim Samji

Transparency In Postwar France A Critical History Of

The Harms of Hate for Gypsies and Travellers A Critical

The prospect of global history 1st Edition James Belich

Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States

Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States

Language Capitalism Colonialism Toward A Critical

Madness and the

and to a conference on Victorian life-writing at Keele University in the same year;

2 Madness and the Romantic Poet

inspiration in their most extreme forms. Other ideas frequently identified as

4 Madness and the Romantic Poet

possible to be deluded about delusion, then; to pronounce the belief in poetic

6 Madness and the Romantic Poet

of articulating ­modern positions essentially predicated on ideas of the oppositional

8 Madness and the Romantic Poet

10 Madness and the Romantic Poet

(The extended metaphor of theatrical performance and stage machinery in this

12 Madness and the Romantic Poet

and stigma in stereotypical representation.34 These are certainly relevant to the

14 Madness and the Romantic Poet

16 Madness and the Romantic Poet

Hän ei tuntenut paljoakaan halua puhutella Josephineä. Hänen

Hän seisoi aitauksen portilla kun Murray pysäytti väsyneet

Brannon oli päättänyt antaa Josephinelle ensin tilaisuuden puhua.

"Muistui mieleeni, että minulla oli muutamia laskuja pantava

Myöhemmin, kantaessaan sylen täyden ostoksia Bettyn perässä,

Ajoneuvot olivat nyt tyhjennetyt ja Brannon seisoi

Hänen silmänsä olivat vakavat, kysyvät ja niissä oli hieman

"Brannon", sanoi hän, "missä Chong on? Kysyin Josephineltä

"Lähetin Chongin Willetiin hakemaan lääkäriä Mrs Whitmanille.

"Oh", sanoi Betty, "en ymmärrä, miten Chongin lähettäminen

"Brannon, mikä ihme teitä vaivaa, sekä sinua että Jota. Jo

"Tim Callahan ratsasti tästä ohi. Hän oli käynyt Laskarissa ja

Brannon vilkaisi häneen syrjäsilmin.

"Denver oli täällä aikaiseen aamuun saakka tänäpäivänä", sanoi

"Eikö hän nyt sitten ole täällä?"

"Missä hän on?"

"Maksoin hänelle palkan tänä aamuna. Hän lähti etelään päin."

"Miksi sinä erotit hänet, Brannon?"

"Me jouduimme riitaan."

Tavallisuudessa olisi Betty tyytynyt tähän selitykseen, sillä miehiä

"Mistä teille tuli erimielisyyttä, Brannon?"

"Eipä juuri mistään."

Murray käänsi päätään ja nauroi partaansa. Brannon katsahti

Hän hämmästyi sitä outoa ajatusta, ettei hän koskaan ollut

Hämmästyneenä katsahti hän Murrayhin, ajatellen että hän ehkä

Ja sitten, kun Brannonin hämmästyneet silmät kohtasivat hänen

"Eipä juuri mitään" kertasi Betty, äänessään vain rippeitä

Hän käännähti äkkiä ympäri ja lähti päärakennusta kohti, jättäen

"Hän teki sinusta pilaa, Brannon", nauroi Murray.

Ei mitään vastausta Brannonin puolelta.

Brannon vapautti itsensä Murrayn leikinlaskusta yksinkertaisesti

Kuullessaan asuntonsa nurkan takana liikettä, nosti hän päätään

"Brannon", sanoi hän tultuaan aivan hänen luokseen, "miksi et

"Arvelin, että saisit kuulla siitä jonkun ajan kuluttua."

"Miksi et kertonut minulle sitä, Brannon? Eihän sinun ole tapanasi

"Kertoiko hän sen sinulle, kysyi Brannon venytellen. Hän koetti

"Eipä siinä tainnut muukaan auttaa", virkkoi Brannon.

Hän arvasi Bettyn sanoista, että Josephine oli kertonut

of articulating modern positions essentially predicated on ideas of the oppositional