Of Monsters and Madness

The most striking correlation in our semester of reading was the introduction and development of both monsters and the corresponding madness. Several of the main characters of our texts are easily categorized as monsters, two fathers, a creator, and a creature. In this course, we also read works by two men whose madness created within them a personal monster, which for one also appeared in their work. 

Regarded as the first gothic novel, and the first text we read in our course, The Castle of Otranto by Walpole is the first time we see a character defined both by his madness and his monstrosity. As Karoc mentioned in his post “Names”, the name Manfred traditionally comes from words meaning peace or strength, and his name can be interpreted as “man of peace”. Manfred’s life is entirely consumed by a prophecy, which states, “the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.”  Manfred interprets the prophecy as a sign that his lineage will be brought to an end, an obsession which turns him both mad and into a monster. The prophecy consumes Manfred, and after his son is killed at the onset of the novel, he eventually kills his daughter, affectively ending his line and fulfilling the prophecy. While the picture below is a disturbing and disgustingly literal interpretation of a father’s filicide, it captures the panicked and crazed act of Manfred monstrously killing his daughter, driven by madness.

              A more troublingly mad example of a monster is the character of Francesco Cenci in “The Cenci”. An interesting connection can be made between the first piece and the last piece we read in our course, but the similarities between the two fathers end with their shared madness and being monsters. While Manfred is prophecy consumed and madness ridden, Francesco is a sociopathic terror, evil and brute, committing physical, mental, and emotional terrors against his family. Francesco commits the most monstrous act possible against his own daughter, a monstrous act that ruins her body and soul. When revealing her father’s crime against her, she proclaims,

“I am choked! There creeps a clinging, black contaminating mist about me … ’tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues my fingers and my limbs to one another, and eats into my sinews, and dissolves my flesh to a pollution, poisoning the subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life! My God! I never knew what the mad felt before; for I am mad beyond all doubt!” (line 20-29)

The most monstrous act of Francesco is creation of his daughter’s madness, while he remains entirely un-self-aware of his own. It is compellingly both entirely understandable due to the crimes committed against her and yet entirely to blame upon her madness that she desires to kill him. Francesco is such a monster that even patricide does not bring him any sympathy. If anything it bring more fury because it results in Beatrice’s death as well.

            Unlike The Castle of Otranto and “The Cenci”, Frankenstein is a story of two monsters, a man and his creature, and both of their turns into madness.  The titular character, Victor Frankenstein, is introduced first, and we see him first delve into madness in his creating his “monster”. By invoking the power of creation, it does not make Victor godlike as he first imagined, it makes him a monster both in his unnatural desires and his eventual abandonment of the creature. Victor’s later madness, created by the creature’s actions against him, is a direct result to his abandonment of his creation. Only a monster could be so cruel.

           

            The creature in Frankenstein however remains unsullied for part of the novel, entirely immune to man’s questionably inherent wickedness. His development as a monster only begins after his encounters with the outside world, as he realizes, “‘and what was I?  Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant… hideously deformed and loathsome… I was not even of the same nature as man.  I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge…’” His enforced solitude is one of the most maddening actions committed against him, as solitude is, “the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, (which) is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived” (Burke). His negative interactions with humans create madness within him, a madness that combined with his resentment for his creator, result in his monstrous acts.

            The topic of madness and its monstrous effects on people cannot be discussed without mentioning John Clare. Clare, a man who was entirely consumed by both pain and creativity, was by all reasons of the time, considered mad. Wordsworth commented, “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.” (Wordsworth 48-49) In 1837, Clare was entered into an asylum after suffering a mental breakdown largely because of his sudden fame and fortune. His “diagnosis of madness further endangered his status. Though it allowed him the privilege to enter the tradition of inspired genius, yet clinical madness was a different order of difficulty.” (Chatterjee 433) (more about Clare’s madness here) Madness, especially madness that was perceived as a mark of shame by both reviewers and contemporary society, created within Clare a monster. Inner-turmoil became his biggest demon, his biggest monster.

           

          Another author who suffered from a sense of madness and the turmoil it created within him was Coleridge. Coleridge suffered from both anxiety and depression and perhaps bipolar disorder, all contemporary perceptions of madness. He was in poor health, somewhat unstable, and opium addicted. Coleridge wrote of his addiction in a letter,

“I was seduced into the accursed Habit ignorantly – I had been almost bed ridden for many months with swelling in my knees – in a medical journal I happily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case … by rubbing in of Laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally – it acted like a charm, like a miracle! … At length, the unusual stimulus subsided – the complaint returned – the supposed remedy was recurred to – but I cannot go thro’ the dreary history – Suffice to say, that effects were produced, which acted on me by Terror & Cowardice of pain and sudden death.”

Coleridge’s addiction serves as his monster, the more reliant he became on the drug, the more his work suffered, and the more his relationships were strained.  

       It is interesting to look at Coleridge as a man who suffered from both madness and a monster of an addiction, but what is also compelling is his depiction of a monster in one of his poems. In Christabel, monstrosity is seen as a questionable parallel to Coleridge’s madness. The titular character stumbles upon Geraldine, a beautiful woman, who perhaps to Coleridge is similar to the deceptively intoxicating initial affects of opium, but is later revealed to be of a monstrous nature, similar to the eventual evils of addiction.

Both monsters and madness have their place in Romanticism. The two cannot be separated, madness is found in all monsters, perhaps because madness creates monsters. 

WORKS CITED

Chatterjee, Anindita. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

(ISSN 0975—2935), Vol.3 No.4, 2011.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters in 6 volumes, ed. E. L. Griggs, Clarendon Press:      Oxford (1956–1971)

Wordsworth, William. Resolution and Independence London: Macmillan and Co., 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/145/. May 7, 2013