Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds: Mental Health in Victorian Literature (Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities)

Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia, and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity―in its excess or lack―could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Sensation, Home, and Health Health Humanities: Literature’s Influence On Understandings of Health and Well-Being Sensation Fiction and the Medical Context Mental Health and Home in Sensation Novels General Outline Notes 1 ‘And We Will Pass Hours and Hours Every Day With These Four Friendly Walls Round Us’: Domesticated Idleness in Sensation Novels Home, a Shelter Against All Injury, Terror, and Doubt? Home, a Shelter Against Divisions? Sensational Idleness A Gendered Perception of Idleness Notes 2 ‘I Am Nothing But a Bundle of Nerves Dressed Up to Look Like a Man’: Nervous Disorders and Domestic Life Purchasing the ‘Luxury of Illness’ One Who Has No Faith in Himself The Lesions of the Imagination The Narration of Their Own Sufferings Notes 3 ‘Our Quiet Life Here Maddens Me; I Can Bear It No Longer; I Must Go’: Public Industriousness and Obsession The Experience of Modernity The Promise of Property Domestic Apathy and Public Activity Acting in One’s Own Character Notes 4 ‘Mad To-Day and Sane To-Morrow, Mad Yesterday and Sane To-Day’: Partial Insanity Or Deviant Behaviours A Break in an Otherwise Sane Mind A Disease of the Reason Or the Emotions The Hand That Is Stronger Than Them Motives and Responsibility Notes 5 ‘If this State of Depression Continues, Very Distressing Mental Consequences May Follow’: Melancholy Extremes in Sensation Novels Fits of Melancholia Near-Fatal Mischief Notes Conclusion: Sensational Excesses Notes Bibliography Index Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and well-being from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia, and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.