MDMD 18th Century Madness & Gothic

[Terrance]

The term "Gothic" has three main connotations: barbarous, like the
Gothic tribes of the Middle Ages—which is what the Renaissance meant by
the word; medieval, with all the associations of castles, knights in
armor, and chivalry; and the supernatural, with the associations of the
fearful, the unknown, and the mysterious. 

On the TV program I heard that the word gothic was used in the
derogatory to describe certain architecture during the 17th and 18th
century--the Goths being the Germanic tribes that invaded Rome. 

The Gothic novel was one aspect of a general movement away from
classical order in the literature of the eighteenth century, and toward
imagination and feeling, a development that ran parallel to the romantic
movement and presents many points of contact with it. 

Pynchon notes some of these parallels in his Luddite essay--Shelley's
Frankenstein and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. 

The Gothic novel, in satisfying the hunger for mystery to replace the
certainties of the eighteenth century, for awe and fear to replace
rationalism, plundered the Middle Ages for its settings, content, and
machinery. The characters, though they may look medieval, are generally
contemporary in thought and speech. Gothic architecture, though in a
vague rather than a realistic way, was part of most novelists'
settings—in the form of a half-ruined castle or abbey—and was used to
create "Gothic gloom" and sublimity, 
attributes that evoked awe. 

Pointman... the gothic architecture...in GR.  

Such buildings displayed all the paraphernalia of fear: dark corridors,
secret underground passages, huge clanging doors, dungeons with grilled
windows. Nature was picturesque—ivy growing over the ruins and wild
flowers in the cracks—and turbulently romantic—dense forests on
mountainsides, thunderstorms.

Various manifestations of the supernatural and of witchcraft recall
those found in the ancient classics and in the Icelandic sagas. The
Iliad has ghosts, and the Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth century
contain many supernatural elements; the medieval romances, Dante, and
Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485) also exerted a powerful influence.
But the immediate sources for the supernatural content, elements, and
machinery of the Gothic novel are to be found in Elizabethan literature,
from Edmund Spenser's fairyland to the portentous visitations depicted
in Shakespeare. During the Gothic period the Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama was revived, and the more
bloodcurdling the better...

CL49...

Terror and horror as main ingredients had been plentiful in poetry and
drama since the Oedipus of Sophocles, but not in the novel. Though
terror is used effectively in Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753),
it provides only one or two episodes among many. Witchcraft had been
prominent in much literature since Apuleius' The Golden Ass (about A.D.
170), and there were many  Elizabethan books on the subject, as well as
a treatise on demonology written by James I. 

THE GOTHIC NOVEL by Brendan Hennessy






Medical Terms of the Late 18th Century

CANINE MADNESS: hydrophobia (recall this is what our LED threatens to
infect the Fop with)
FRENCH POX: venereal disease
MANIA: insanity


 Melancholy was foremost a disorder of the imagination. Samuel Johnson
defined it in A Dictionary of the English Language as a "kind of madness
in which the mind is always fixed on one object" prone to "sundry
contemplation" resulting in a "most humorous sadness." This was the
result of one who becomes separated
from his fulfillments.

http://caxton.stockton.edu/pom/stories/storyReader$7


excerpts from the most interesting interdiction files.

http://www.mindspring.com/~lcartayrade/doc_en.htm





 Michel Foucault marked out new boundaries for a French philosophical
tradition moving away from Sartre and  structuralism into
post-modernism. His writing synthesized history, psychology and
philosophy into 'archaeologies' of the human subject that examined the
impact of concepts upon the world rather than their origin and meaning.
Drawing on Nietzsche, Foucault considered the interaction of power,
knowledge and the subject. Philosophers have long studied the
individual, the subject and the mind to uncover the meaning of 'self'.
This discourse, building through Descartes' cogito through Kant, Hegel
and Freud to structuralism and linguistics was, for Foucault, a 
pointless philosophical quest. The use of the concept of 'self' and 'the
individual' was far more important.  Foucault took the issue of reason
and madness to explore how the language of reason developed to control
the concept of 'madness' and use it to re-define reason. Foucault saw
reason as oppressive, not liberating as Descartes and the positivists
suggested. In Madness and Civilization (1960) he examined the 'great
incarceration' of the insane into asylums in 17th and 18th century
France and England. This was physical and moral incarceration, a
stigmatization of madness to replace the old stigma of leprosy. The
madhouse isolated unreason, substituting 'for the free terror of 
madness the stifling anguish of responsibility. This systemization and
categorization of madness as social failure led to the asylum becoming a
tool of accusation, judgement and condemnation. Madness became the
antithesis of reason, and the dialogue of reason and unreason - as with
the fool in King Lear - was ended. Reason had triumphed at the expense
of the unusual, the non-conformist and, ultimately, what was truly
individual.

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_may2001.htm


Foucault, Michel. 1981 [1961]. Madness and Civilization: A History of
    Insanity in the Age of Reason.


Venetia Murray's new book documents the absurd
   excesses of 18th-century England.

http://weeklywire.com/ww/04-19-99/boston_books_2.html