PAN Symposium 3

Anne-Marie Beller, Loughborough University

Two major developments in Victorian Britain worked to promote a dialogue between fiction and medical science: an unprecedented boom in print culture and access to information; and the rise of psychiatry as a defined profession in the midst of a perceived substantial increase in cases of lunacy. In the second half of the nineteenth century, readers had unprecedented access to a phenomenal range of information, which led to knowledge exchange between distinct groups. Popular authors accessed medical texts, often through articles published in both specialist and mainstream periodicals. Through their reading and their networks, writers engaged with the emerging psychiatric culture in broad ways. The relationship between popular novels and contemporary medical thinking about insanity was frequently a symbiotic one, and there were significant networks between authors and lunacy doctors.

Mathilde Vialard, Université de Dijon

The important reshaping of the medical, political, and cultural understanding of mental health that took place in Britain in the nineteenth century was partly due to a “two-way” traffic that existed between science and the arts, not least in terms of literature, as Gillian Beer has explained in her exploration of evolutionary narratives. Not only did nineteenth-century physicians use examples from literary canons to illustrate or even explain their latest theories on the workings of the mind, but writers also drew their inspiration for some of their mentally ill characters from contemporary medical publications. This is particularly true of writers of sensation novels, a genre which often depicted characters suffering from a wide array of mental disorders commonly diagnosed at the time.

Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, two of the most prominent writers of sensation novels, used their art to familiarize their readers with the popular diagnoses of monomania, hysteria, melancholia, or even hypochondria. In this paper, I wish to explore the fictional representation of psychiatry in the genre of sensation fiction, with a particular interest in the issue of home confinement and its impact on the character’s mental health. This issue, and its literary depiction, is of timely interest considering the weight home confinement bore on our mental health during the Covid 19 pandemic.

Kathleen Eck Thorman, Saint Louis University

This short paper analyses research gathered for a dissertation on mental illness, language, and literature in Victorian England. In particular, it is concerned with the narrative representations of “madwomen” in sensation fiction and in London’s Hanwell Asylum records from the 1860s-1890s. The paper traces the medical and ideological shift from moral management (1820s–1880s) back to the containment model (1880+), focusing on language and the biopsychosocial model of disability theory. Unlike the majority of research available on this topic, this project aims to address a gap in research by focusing on an often-overlooked archival subject: lower- and middle-class women. To address the gap, the paper centers these women in both the archival and literary realms to scrutinize their medical and cultural treatment–both real, through the historical documents, and imagined, through examples of sensation fiction literature (ex: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White).

Angela Chudley/ Flo and Jo Gomersall/ Doll, Outside In

Exploring the intrinsic but often overlooked narratives that lived experience provide when researching mental health and the arts. Artists Flo (Angela C ) and Doll (Jo G) discuss creatively responding to the artefacts of the West Yorkshire Pauper Lunatic Asylum as part of the Outside In Patient Artworks Project.

The presentation may touch on difficult topics in relation to living with mental illness; and we gently advise that delegates are mindful to take pause if needed.

View Angela's work via the Outside In website.

View Jo's work via the Outside In website.

Valentin Maier, University of Bucharest

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (”analog roleplaying games”) are a type of games and a form of entertainment that in the last decade has started to attract more interest from players and also academics around the world. This trend does not only come from the cultural and entertainment values that these games possess, but also from the increased attention and recognition from among specialists from the education and medical fields. Tabletop Role-Playing Games are credited with improving social skills of players beyond the ”realm of play”, and were also applied as a useful therapeutic tool, in order to achieve goals that are unrelated to the game.

There are many types of tabletop roleplaying games from fantasy to science fiction and with varied themes presenting in many books and creating an interesting literature. In my presentation I want to analyze how mental conditions are presented in games inspired by the Nineteenth-Century Britain. Some of these games are trying to recreate the atmosphere of the period, while others are using it as a pretext to tell a different story. No matter the situation, games with this theme are popular around the world, and their importance as cultural products is more and more acknowledged.

Anna Jamieson, University of Birmingham

On Christmas day in 1841, a female patient at Lancaster asylum started a new diary. Written in neat handwriting and covered in newspaper, Elizabeth Hitchcock’s diary describes her incarceration at Lancaster asylum in illuminating detail. Documenting her feelings about her confinement, fellow patients and asylum life, Hitchcock’s diary also describes her near daily material practice: making wristbands and sleeves, straps and collars, bedgowns, button holes, pincushions and even dolls with their own miniature outfits.

Historians of nineteenth-century women and material culture are increasingly preoccupied with exploring how material practices informed female strategies of identity, agency, negotiation and creativity. Interrogating the ways in which patients engaged in meaning making through material artifacts, this paper combines these arguments with ongoing debates in the medical humanities and material culture. It examines Hitchcock’s rich material practice, exploring the therapeutic potential that Hitchcock gleaned from her material world, and the ways that these material processes spoke to creativity, craft and care. Arguing that agency had an important part to play in her creative practice, the paper’s analysis of an unfamiliar source within the history of psychiatry makes an important contribution to the field.