Keynote Lecture: “Till Silence Finds a Tongue”: Madness and Silence in Romantic Britain

Abstract

In a letter to James Boswell, dated April 8 1780, Samuel Johnson writes: ‘Make it an invariable and obligatory law to yourself, never to mention your own mental diseases; if you are never to speak of them you will think on them but little, and if you think little of them, they will molest you rarely.’ Johnson’s observation illuminates a fundamental tension or paradox between writers’ repression of madness and their compulsion to communicate overwhelming emotional experiences. The necessity and benefit that Johnson finds in the evasion of distressing thoughts and the silencing of the voice that gives shape and form to madness turn, in some finest Romantic writings in Britain, linguistic disavowal and dissociation into a possible remedy for mental illnesses. 

In this lecture, I examine how silence, as an ambiguous language forged in the most profound moments of isolation, despair, and abandonment, permeates the discourse on cognitive or mental disorder during the late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Attending to the intersection between medical and poetic connotations of madness and silence, my lecture takes into consideration the critical discussion of Romantic creativity and madness (Saunders and Macnaughton, 2005; Whitehead, 2017; Crawford, 2019) to focus more specifically on the condition of melancholia. By tracing the history of the deployment of silence in medical institutions and lunatic asylums, I investigate the coercive role of silence and its corresponding problems in the treatment and diagnosis of mental illnesses that Allan Ingram (1991) proposed in his historical study of linguistic representation and misrepresentation of madness. Deviating from Ingram’s dated work on madness and history of silence, which asserts institutional system of silence as ‘an absolute negation of language’, I contend that silence is a conflicting language in its own rights by revealing the communicative or expressive potential of the unspeakable qualities of madness in Romantic poetry.