MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Since Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, works of the American gothic have incorporated madness as a major theme, often driving their villains or heightening the atmosphere of dread. This interest continues today in horror cinema such as The Visit and Split, and the continued popularity of the Psycho franchise, which even inspired a prequel TV series, Bates Motel. How do such depictions shape or reflect social attitudes about mental disability? Do they reinforce fears of mentally ill people as violent? Or do they allow for more complicated explorations of what it means to be “mad”?

This paper investigates such questions by looking at historical examples of madness in gothic American literature, arguing that at least some representations of madness in the gothic can destabilize our notion that madness and sanity are viable categories. The writings of Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard play upon ambiguities in their mad characters, shifting reader sympathies and ultimately questioning whether it is possible for others to know and label them as mad. Works such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and The Quaker City were inspired by public trials involving the insanity defense, which stirred up public debate about whether psychiatrists could diagnose those who committed violent crimes with mental disorders, and whether such diagnoses should guide legal action against them. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” ironically pleads his case as not being mad, a move that has almost universally been read as allowing readers the pleasure of discovering clues that prove he is mad. But if we keep in mind David Punter’s claim that the gothic accentuates physical and mental differences in order to show their “supreme value of non-translatability,” then perhaps we might read Poe’s and other gothic works as asking, “Do we really know what madness is?”