Madness in Literature by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-17T05:35:43+00:00

Oft in the Passions' wild rotation tost,

Our spring of action to ourselves is lost:

Tir'd, not determin'd, to the last we yield,

And what comes then is master of the field.

As the last image of that troubled heap,

When Sense subsides, and Fancy sports in sleep,

(Tho' past the recollection of the thought)

Becomes the stuff of which our dream is wrought:

Something as dim to our internal view,

Is thus, perhaps, the cause of most we do.

(11. 41-50)

But even in the Moral Essays, it is not in Pope's poetic character to explore what is "dim," the realm of "dream" and fantasy. He soon announces his "clue" to human nature, the "Ruling Passion," which, "once found, unravels all the rest" (11. 174-78), a notion as mechanical as the humors or the "Passions of the Heart," to both of which it is surely related. Furthermore, in most of Pope's poetry, and certainly in The Dundad, the products of "Fancy" and of "dream" are hardly treated with the sympathetic acceptance of the lines quoted from the "Epistle to Cobham." Pope generally assumes that if human motivation originates in such unconscious sources, it can only produce arrogance and thus evil. The irrational is finally indistinguishable from the mad.

The most justly celebrated of Pope's depictions of madness are products of the satiric genius that exposes the manifestations of human self-deception and pride but avoids revelation of their roots in psychic conflict for which there is no implicit moral resolution. The Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock is often cited as evidence of Pope's interest in libidinous drives and blind compulsions, but it should be observed that this is a special kind of interest. The melancholy attitudes and bizarre conduct of the inhabitants of the Cave reveal as little regarding psychic reality as do contemporary medical descriptions to which they bear a strong resemblance. The proponent of one of the most mechanistic theories of the period, Nicholas Robinson,³¹ who concluded that all mental illness was determined by the improper elasticity of the nerve fibers, describes the symptoms of the spleen in language similar to Pope's. He emphasizes its melancholy and "pensive" phases (p. 171), and in analyzing the role of the "Fancy," says that "under a Fit of the Spleen," this faculty can no longer "see thro' all these Mists that. . . cloud her Actions, and would persuade us, that these Bodies of ours are chang'd into Tea Pots, Glasses, Goose Pyes, and the like odd and ridiculous Transformations" (p. 190). Robinson's A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy appeared in 1729, some years after The Rape of the Lock, but the closeness of his description to Pope's suggests not that the physician echoes the poet, but that both report the symptoms of psychopathology common to medical literature and drawing-room gossip of the day. Pope's note to IV, 52, in fact, informs us that the "Goose-pye" that "talks" in the Cave "Alludes to a real fact, a Lady of distinction imagin'd herself in this condition."

In

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