Ingram, Allan. The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1991.

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This book deals with overlaps among discourse by the supposed insane and discourse concerning insanity by the supposed sane. Its discussion supports Ingram’s claim that “the language that is the natural medium for the one offers itself, the promise and security of its structures, the shape and colour of its richness, equally to the other” (13). Specifically, Ingram wishes to show how “the eighteenth century’s obsession with madness was not, in fact, simply the desire to silence the alternative discourses of unreason. Behind the impulse to restrain was a very real fear of the terrifying proximity of insanity … The novelists’ interests in narrative and character are attempts to find meaning and consistency in human consciousness and identity” (12).

Throughout the book’s seven chapters, Ingram examines prose, poetry, pamphlets, plays, science theory and research, and medical transcripts. He provides substantial biographical information of important eighteenth-century figures as well as analysis of both fictive and non-fictive works. For instance, chapter four (“Borrowed Robes”) has several pages concerning William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. Ingram focuses on the novel’s language of obsession and its narrative manifestations of various obsessive characteristics. This book also contains historical information about madhouses’ pragmatic developments and changing trends. “The ‘house’ of madness,” Ingram writes, “is the structure afforded by language, and especially by the language of literary form, in which madness can retrieve itself, or retrieve something that is nearly itself, for, as John Perceval, who spent several years in asylums in the 1830s, remarked, words acquired slightly different meanings in madness” (13).

Entered by Elisa on 27 July 2004 at 3:13 PM.