Cooper, Andrew M. "Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out ." ELH 57 (1990), 585-642.

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This article endeavors to use an examination of William Blake's mental state as means toward encouraging the reintroduction of subjectivity into historical analysis. Via systematical contextualization, Cooper presents his work as a concerted effort toward finding and animating the individual and social overlap between Blake's "paranoid tendencies to experience the social-political upheavals of his time as personal crises" and his tendencies "to project his personal crises outward as grandiose cosmic ones" (586). Cooper also engages Blake's illustrations and those by other artisans in his discussion of eighteenth-century madness portrayals.

In the first section, Cooper examines the different cultural and ideological spheres of Blake's lifetime to "clarify the basic intersubjectivity of Blake's mythology" (587). He incorporates numerous philosophers and psychoanalytic thinkers, including Adam Smith, Thomas Locke, Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg. Blake, Cooper says, did not see opposites--including notions of 'self' and 'other'--as absolute divisions but rather as interdependents. Cooper also discusses how the French Revolution confounded popular beliefs concerning perception, apperception, and representation, e.g. how propogandic figures and political cartoons like John Bull, a patriotic stereotype, also led to new aspects of the British 'self.' Cooper then examines other contemporary authors and non-fiction works about mental illness. He places special emphasis upon portraits and engravings concerning James Matthews, a documented hospital patient, and notes that politics often infused the diagnosis of paranoia in patients. He concludes that "the madman, not unlike the Painite of the early 1790s, could secure a social role only by collaborating with the very stereotypes that served to justify his confinement" (600).

The second section traces the trajectory of Blake's involvement with cultural stereotyping trends. Introduced to the time period by Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, science of the face strongly influenced Blake’s work and throughout this section Cooper pays particular attention to Blake's problems with visual rendering. In the third section, Cooper examines the debate concerning the supposed mutual exclusivity of reason and madness. Theories from Locke, Hume, and Spurzheim frame the continued contextualizations, as we learn that "late eighteenth-century medical books ... begin to distinguish a peculiarly subtle patient whose illness lies in a faulty assumption about reality--a delusion--but whose reasoning powers remain intact or even heightened, inasmuch as they are enlisted to invent ingenious rationalizations of whatever might expose the delusion" (610). Blake, writes Cooper, complicates such standard iconographic depictions. Cooper continues to delineate the various veers and turns of popular and medical opinion concerning mental illness. Exploring further Blake's religious surroundings and examining various Blakean texts, Cooper finally argues that Blake recognized the contradiction between his self-annihilation and transcendental idealism: this realization, Cooper argues, is what allowed the author to "open ... himself to a new identity" (634) beyond self-representation.

Entered by Elisa on 30 July 2004 at 11:49 AM.