Madness Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John R. Reed

Critical Essay by John R. Reed

SOURCE: "Madness," in Victorian Conventions, Ohio University Press, 1975, pp. 193-215.

In the following essay, Reed traces the connection between the growth of the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century and the changing opinions among the medical community and the public regarding madness.

Insanity: an Overview

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault described the signal transformation that occurred in Western civilization's conception of madness as a shift from a philosophical to a pathological outlook; "that is, the reduction of the classical experience of unreason to a strictly moral perception of madness, which would secretly serve as a nucleus for all the concepts that the nineteenth century would subsequently vindicate as scientific, positive, and experimental."¹ In Foucault's view, the eighteenth-century attitude toward madness depended upon the assumption that it was "the negation of reason." It is a philosophical paradox which itself would be agreeable to the classical taste for order and balance:

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