The Asylum

Abstract

A space crafted out of images of oppression and neglect but fed by curiosity and voyeurism, the madhouse is a prominent and feared physical structure that has survived throughout the Gothic mode, from the eighteenth century to its current form. This chapter provides a survey of asylums throughout this literary tradition, including texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Captive, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the more recent Gothic texts, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” and Arkham Asylum. Kremmel argues that the consistency of the asylum as a Gothic setting is dependent on a depiction of antiquated and obsolete medical practices, even in the midst of modern times. These arguments are shown through extended analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Maria and Patrick McGrath’s Asylum. As well as demonstrating an emphasis on women as victims of madness, these novels, along with many other examples, also support Kremmel’s second argument, that Gothic asylums continually conflate treatment of the mad with treatment of the dead. Characters describe experiences of mental hospitals as strikingly akin to how other characters describe the experience of the grave, a similarity articulated from Wollstonecraft to McGrath and beyond. Suspending the mad between life and death, a supernatural position, creates a complex, liminal, timeless alternate state that arrests growth but not decay, making the asylum a space haunted by figures denied not corporality but their very minds.