John Webster - The Duchess of Malfi

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John Webster -  The Duchess of Malfi

Introduction:

John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. First performed in 1613-14, this play is a cornerstone of Jacobean drama—the theatre of the reign of King James I (1603-1625). It is a work that masterfully blends intense poetry, psychological depth, and grotesque horror to explore themes of power, corruption, gender, and mortality.

This newsletter will serve as a comprehensive guide, breaking down the play's plot, themes, and characters, while also introducing and explaining key literary and technical terms you will encounter in your studies. Whether you're an undergraduate just beginning to explore Renaissance drama or a postgraduate conducting deeper research, this resource is designed for you.

Summary of The Duchess of Malfi

Set in the Italian courts of Malfi, Rome, and Ancona, the play tells the tragic story of a young widow’s defiance and its brutal consequences.

1. Acts I-III: The Duchess of Malfi, a young and powerful widow, is warned by her twin brother, Ferdinand, and her other brother, the Cardinal, not to remarry. Defying them, she secretly marries her steward, Antonio, a man of lower social rank. They have three children together. The Duchess's henchman, Bosola, hired by Ferdinand to spy on her, eventually uncovers her secret. Enraged by her defiance and the perceived stain on their family's honour, her brothers begin a ruthless campaign of persecution. They torment the Duchess, force her into exile, and ultimately imprison her.
2. Acts IV-V: The psychological torture intensifies. Ferdinand subjects the Duchess to a series of horrific tricks, including presenting her with a dead man's hand and wax figures of her dead family. Despite her remarkable courage and stoicism, she is finally murdered on Ferdinand's orders by Bosola, who also kills her children and maid, Cariola. The final act descends into a chaotic bloodbath of revenge and madness. Bosola, remorseful, turns against his masters. In the dark, he accidentally kills Antonio, then deliberately kills the Cardinal and Ferdinand, and is himself killed in the process. The play ends with almost the entire principal cast dead, leaving a young son of Antonio and the Duchess as the sole heir to the tragedy.

Critical Appreciation

The Duchess of Malfi is not merely a horror show; it is a profound philosophical exploration of the human condition within a corrupt world.

1. Beyond Revenge Tragedy: While it shares elements with the revenge tragedy genre (popularised by plays like The Spanish Tragedy), its horrors are more psychological than sensational. The true villain is not an external avenger but a deep-seated corruption within the family and the state.
2. Moral Ambiguity: Webster creates a world where good and evil are not clear-cut. The Duchess's defiance is noble but politically naive. Bosola is a villainous tool who develops a conscience too late. This moral complexity is a hallmark of sophisticated Jacobean drama.
3. Poetic Power: The play is renowned for its dense, metaphorical language and unforgettable lines that mix beauty with brutality. The dialogue elevates the sordid events into a powerful poetic meditation on death, power, and identity.
4. Enduring Relevance: Its themes of toxic masculinity, the policing of female sexuality, political corruption, and the search for integrity in a flawed world continue to resonate powerfully with modern audiences.

Major Themes Explored

1. Corruption and Power: The Italian court setting is a microcosm (a small world representing a larger one) of a corrupt society. Ferdinand and the Cardinal abuse their power to control their sister, seeing her body and choices as their property. Their authority is devoid of morality, based solely on bloodline and ruthlessness.
2. Gender and Agency: The Duchess is one of literature's most compelling examples of female agency—the capacity to act independently and make her own free choices. In a patriarchal society, her decision to marry for love is a radical act of self-assertion that her brothers interpret as a threat to be violently crushed. The play explores the extreme dangers faced by women who defy social conventions.
3. Madness and Obsession: Ferdinand's rage transcends rational anger, spiralling into a profound and obsessive madness (diagnosed in the play as lycanthropy—the delusion that one is a wolf). His obsession with his sister's sexuality suggests deeply repressed incestuous desires, making him a psychologically complex and terrifying villain.
4. Class and Social Mobility: The marriage between the aristocratic Duchess and the commoner Antonio breaks rigid class barriers. This social transgression is as shocking to her brothers as the sexual one. The character of Bosola, an intelligent man bitter about his lack of status, further illustrates the period's acute class anxieties.
5. Death and Memento Mori: The play is saturated with images of death and decay, acting as a memento mori (a reminder of the inevitability of death). From the macabre tricks with dead bodies to the philosophical musings of the characters, Webster forces both his characters and the audience to confront their own mortality.

Character Sketches

1. The Duchess: She is defined by her courage, passion, and resilience. She is not a passive victim but an active agent in her own story, proposing to Antonio and facing her tormentors with defiant dignity. Her strength makes her downfall all the more tragic.
2. Bosola: The most complex character. A cynical and intelligent malcontent, he is hired as a spy and murderer. His internal conflict is the play's moral core; he is painfully aware of his own corruption and grows to admire the Duchess, leading to his futile attempt at redemption through revenge.
3. Ferdinand: The Duchess's twin brother. His violent, incestuous obsession with his sister's purity drives the plot. He represents the most toxic and unhinged aspects of patriarchal power. His descent into lycanthropy is a physical manifestation of his inner beastliness.
4. The Cardinal: The colder, more calculating of the brothers. His corruption is intellectual and political. As a high-ranking church official, he represents the hypocrisy of a religious institution intertwined with corrupt state power.
5. Antonio: The virtuous, honourable steward. He represents a different, more compassionate model of masculinity. However, his passivity and idealism make him no match for the Machiavellian politics of the court, leading to his tragic end.

John Webster as a Dramatist

John Webster (c. 1580-1634) was a contemporary of Shakespeare, though his work possesses a uniquely dark vision that has earned him the reputation as the foremost Jacobean tragedian.

1. Collaborator and Innovator: He began his career collaborating with writers like Thomas Dekker on city comedies before finding his voice in the darker realm of tragedy.
2. The "White Devil" and the "Duchess": His two great masterpieces are The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614). Both are set in corrupt Italian courts and feature strong, tragic heroines.
3. A Websterian Worldview: His plays present a world where evil is pervasive and often triumphant, and where redemption is fragile and hard-won. His focus is on the psychological states of characters trapped in extreme situations.
4. The "Tragedian of Blood": Webster is often grouped with other Jacobean writers like Cyril Tourneur as a "tragedian of blood" due to the visceral and violent nature of his plots. However, his use of violence is never gratuitous; it is always in service of a larger philosophical point about the human condition.

Literary Techniques

Webster employs several sophisticated techniques to create his dark vision:

1. Symbolism: Objects that carry a deeper meaning.

·  The Ring: Symbolises the Duchess's marriage and agency. The Cardinal's act of removing it from her finger is a violent symbol of his attempt to nullify her identity and choices.

·  Lycanthropy (The Wolf): A symbol of Ferdinand's base, animalistic nature taking over his humanity.

· Echo: In Act V, an echo from the Duchess's grave repeats key words ("death," "never see her more"). This is a powerful aural symbol of her lingering presence and a portent (an omen) of the coming bloodshed.

2. Imagery: Vivid descriptive language that appeals to the senses. Webster is a master of macabre imagery—descriptions of death, decay, and disease—which creates the play's oppressive, morbid atmosphere.

3. Blank Verse and Prose: The play switches between blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, the elevated style of nobles) and prose (the more realistic style of commoners or madmen). This shift often signals a change in tone or class perspective. Bosola's early speeches are in choppy prose, reflecting his bitterness, while the Duchess often speaks in flowing blank verse, highlighting her nobility.

4. The Masque: Ferdinand torments the Duchess with a masque of madmen. A masque was a lavish courtly entertainment. Webster perverts this form for horrific effect, using it to represent the world's madness closing in on the Duchess.

5. Stoicism: The philosophy that teaches virtue and rationality as the highest good and that one should be free from passion and indifferent to pleasure or pain. The Duchess's calm acceptance of her fate is a powerful example of Stoic resolve, making her a tragic heroine of immense dignity.

Important Key Points

• Jacobean Tragedy: The genre of dark, cynical, and violent plays that flourished during the reign of James I.
• Revenge Tragedy: A sub-genre focusing on a protagonist's quest for vengeance, featuring ghosts, madness, and graphic violence.
• Italianate Setting: The use of Italian settings in Elizabethan/Jacobean drama to explore themes of Machiavellian politics, corruption, and passion at a safe distance from English censorship.
• Female Agency: A critical term for a character's ability to make independent choices and act on their own will. The Duchess is a key study in this.
• Patriarchy: A social system where men hold primary power. The play is a searing critique of a toxic patriarchy embodied by Ferdinand and the Cardinal.
• Incestuous Desire: A Freudian reading of Ferdinand's motives, which adds a layer of psychological complexity to his actions.
• Memento Mori: The medieval and Renaissance artistic theme reminding people of their mortality.
• The Macabre: Having a quality that combines a ghastly or grim atmosphere with death and decay. Webster's signature tone.
• Stoicism: The classical philosophy that profoundly influences the portrayal of the Duchess's character.
• Moral Ambiguity: The lack of clear-cut good and evil, making characters and situations complex and realistically flawed.

Psychoanalytical Criticism- Julia Kristeva

 

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Psychoanalytical Criticism- Julia Kristeva

Welcome to the New edition of Psychoanalytical Criticism. As we navigate the complex landscapes of modern literary theory, certain figures stand as towering beacons, challenging how we think about language, identity, and the very fabric of our being. Following our deep dive into the foundational works of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, it feels only fitting to turn our attention to a revolutionary thinker who built upon, and radically departed from, their ideas: Julia Kristeva.

This newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism- Julia Kristeva will serve as your primer to Kristeva’s world, where psychoanalysis, linguistics, and feminism collide. We’ll be untangling her complex ideas about how literature interacts with discourses of insanity, and how the act of writing is fundamentally tied to the formation—and sometimes the fragmentation—of our identity.

Introduction

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, and novelist. She moved to Paris in the 1960s and quickly became a central figure in the influential Tel Quel group of intellectuals. Drawing from (and debating with) giants like Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, Kristeva’s work is a unique synthesis of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and political theory.

Her central project explores the interconnection between language and the speaking subject—that is, how we, as individuals, come to be through language. She is particularly fascinated by the margins of identity: the points where the self threatens to dissolve into madness, ecstasy, or poetic revolution.

Key Concepts:

To understand Kristeva’s contribution to discourses on insanity and literature, we must first get to grips with her unique vocabulary.

1. The Semiotic and The Symbolic

This is perhaps Kristeva’s most crucial contribution, a direct development from Lacan’s ideas.

• The Symbolic Order: Borrowed from Lacan, this is the realm of language, law, order, and social structure. It is the world of grammar, syntax, and shared meaning—the ‘dictionary definition’ of things. To enter the Symbolic is to accept societal rules (especially the Law of the Father) and to communicate in a way that others can understand. It’s the domain of conscious, rational thought.
• The Semiotic Chora: This is Kristeva’s groundbreaking concept. The Semiotic (from the Greek semeion, meaning ‘sign’) is a pre-linguistic, primal realm of experience. It is associated with the maternal body and the pre-Oedipal phase (before the child enters the language-based Symbolic order). It’s not language itself, but the rhythms, tones, pulses, and drives that underlie it. Think of the babbling of a baby, the cadence of poetry, or the raw, uncontrolled sounds of anguish or joy. It is the raw energy of communication before it is shaped into logical sense.

Why it matters for madness and literature: Kristeva argues that a healthy subject exists in a constant, dynamic dance between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. The Semiotic drives constantly disrupt and challenge the rigid order of the Symbolic, infusing language with desire, rhythm, and emotion. Literature, especially poetry, is a controlled space where this disruption can happen safely. Madness, in Kristevan terms, can be seen as a catastrophic collapse of this balance—where the powerful, chaotic forces of the Semiotic overwhelm the structuring capacity of the Symbolic, threatening the individual’s sense of a coherent self.

2. Abjection

A concept that has become incredibly influential in gender studies and theories of horror.

• What it is: Abjection is the violent, visceral reaction of horror and revulsion we feel towards something that profoundly disturbs our sense of identity, system, and order. It is not about something being evil or dirty in a simple sense, but about something that blurs the lines between self and other, subject and object, life and death.
• Common examples: A corpse (it shows us our own materiality and death), bodily fluids like blood or pus (they remind us that the body’s boundaries are permeable), spoiled food (something that was once nourishing becomes revolting). The abject is what we must jettison or ‘ab-ject’ from ourselves to maintain a clean and proper self.

Why it matters for madness and literature: The process of abjection is fundamental to forming an identity. By rejecting what is ‘not us’, we define what ‘us’ is. Kristeva links this powerfully to the maternal body—the original source of nourishment and comfort that must be rejected for the child to become a separate individual. Literature, particularly Gothic and horror genres, is a stage for exploring the abject. Think of Frankenstein’s monster (a blurred line between life and death) or the pervasive bodily horror in much modern writing. Furthermore, societal discourses often label madness as ‘abject’—something to be hidden away because it disturbs our rational, symbolic order.

3. Intertextuality

A term Kristeva coined that is now a cornerstone of literary studies.

• What it is: Kristeva argued that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” This means that no text exists in a vacuum. Every novel, poem, or play is in dialogue with every text that came before it. It absorbs, references, contradicts, and reworks them.

Why it matters for madness and literature: If identity is formed in language, and language is inherently intertextual, then our very selfhood is a mosaic of the voices, stories, and discourses we have absorbed. This challenges the romantic idea of the ‘lone genius’ author or the completely autonomous self. When a character’s identity fractures into madness (e.g., in works like The Yellow Wallpaper or Hamlet), we can often read this as a failure to successfully manage the multitude of conflicting internalised ‘texts’ and voices—be they social expectations, familial demands, or traumatic memories.

4. The Subject-in-Process / On Trial

Kristeva directly challenges the idea of a fixed, unchanging, unified identity.

• What it is: For Kristeva, the subject is never a finished product. We are perpetually ‘in-process/on trial’ (sujet en procès—a brilliant pun meaning both ‘in process’ and ‘on trial’). Our identity is constantly being formed, challenged, and re-formed through the never-ending tension between the Semiotic (drives, desires) and the Symbolic (law, language).

Why it matters for madness and literature: This view makes madness not a static state but a potential within all subjectivity. The ‘trial’ of being a self can sometimes break down. Literature is the ultimate record of this trial. The stream-of-consciousness novel (e.g., Virginia Woolf), which captures the pre-Symbolic flow of thought, is a perfect example of writing that explores the ‘subject-in-process’. It shows the self not as a solid thing, but as a continuous, and often precarious, event.

Literature, Madness, and Identity Formation

So, how do these complex ideas help us examine the relationship between writing and identity, particularly through the lens of madness?

1. Writing as a Cathartic Rehearsal of Selfhood: The act of writing is a symbolic practice (it uses language) but it is fuelled by semiotic drives (emotion, rhythm, unconscious desire). In putting words to experience, an author—and by extension, a reader—is actively engaged in the process of forging an identity. For characters on the brink of madness, writing can be a desperate attempt to impose Symbolic order on Semiotic chaos. Think of the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper whose journal is her only outlet as her sense of self unravels under the weight of patriarchal medical discourse.

2. Social and Medical Discourses as Symbolic Law: The ways a society defines ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’ are powerful Symbolic forces. These definitions are not neutral; they are historically constructed and often serve to police boundaries (e.g., the Victorian-era medicalisation of female ‘hysteria’, which pathologised women’s discontent). Literature frequently exposes the violence of these discourses by giving voice to the ‘abject’ figures they exclude.

3. Gender and Madness: Kristeva’s work is deeply feminist. The association of the Semiotic with the maternal and the pre-Oedipal creates a powerful link between femininity and that which threatens the patriarchal Symbolic order. Historically, therefore, women’s speech and expression have more easily been labelled ‘irrational’ or ‘hysterical’—a way of policing the Semiotic disruption they represent. Literature by female authors often explores this tension directly, wrestling with the need to speak within the Symbolic order while also expressing semiotic drives that order devalues.

4. Modernism and the Fractured Self: Kristeva’s theory is a superb key for understanding Modernist and Postmodernist literature. These movements, with their fragmented narratives, stream-of-consciousness techniques, and rejection of linear plots, formally replicate the breakdown of a unified self. They allow the Semiotic to erupt into the Symbolic structure of the novel itself, mirroring the modern experience of alienation and psychological fragmentation.

Conclusion:

In an age where we are constantly curating our identities online, where discourses of mental health are both more prevalent and more contested, and where the boundaries of the self feel perpetually under threat, Kristeva’s work is not just academic—it is profoundly urgent.

She teaches us that the self is not a fortress to be defended, but a continuous, often messy, negotiation. She shows us that literature is not an escape from this reality but its most powerful rehearsal room. And she insists that what society calls ‘madness’ is often just the visible, terrifying, and ultimately human struggle of the ‘subject-on-trial’, a struggle that art has always sought to document and understand.

Julia Kristeva's Key Works 

1. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974): The essential text. This is where she first fully elaborates her seminal concepts of the Semiotic and the Symbolic and their dynamic interaction in avant-garde poetic language.
2. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980): A more focused and gripping read. She develops her theory of abjection through analyses of biblical law, Céline's literature, and art. Excellent for understanding the horror of blurred boundaries.
3. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987): Explores depression not as a lack of meaning but as an unnameable grief, linking it to artistic creation. Analyzes works by Holbein, Dostoevsky, and Marguerite Duras.
4. Tales of Love (1983): Examines the history of "love" as a discourse and its role in the construction of the subject. Complements her work on identity formation.

Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan

 

Jacques Lacan

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Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan

Following our research on Freudian basics, we now turn to a thinker who at the same time revolutionized and shocked the world of psychoanalysis: the French master, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Where Freud delved into the hidden chambers of the mind, Lacan insisted that the key to these chambers was not buried deep within, but was in fact all around us—woven into the web of language itself.

This Newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan delves into Lacan’s complex and inspiringly disruptive ideas. We will unpack his central claim—that the unconscious is structured like a language—and explore its deep implications for literature, identity, and the very notion of selfhood. Our investigation will focus on the intricate interplay between writing and the formation of identity, scrutinising how social, medical, and historical constructions of insanity are not just reflected in, but are produced by, the language we use to describe ourselves and our world.

Introduction:

To understand Lacan is to understand a fundamental shift. While Freud used language as a tool to access the unconscious (through free association, dream interpretation), Lacan argued that language is the very structure of the unconscious itself. For Lacan, we do not use language; we inhabit it. Our desires, our fears, and our very sense of self are constituted within its networks and constraints.

This perspective makes Lacanian theory exceptionally powerful for literary studies. If the unconscious and literature both operate under the same linguistic rules, then a literary text becomes a privileged object for analysis—not as a symptom of an author’s neurosis, but as a direct manifestation of the unconscious processes of language.

Key Concepts: A Lexicon for the Modern Analyst

Navigating Lacan requires a new vocabulary. Here are the essential terms, decoded.

• The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language

Ø  This is Lacan’s most famous and foundational axiom. He rejected the idea of the unconscious as a seething, chaotic cauldron of primal urges. Instead, he proposed it is orderly, logical, and follows the rules of linguistic systems. We can analyse dreams, slips of the tongue, and literary texts using the same tools we use to analyse poetry or prose—specifically, the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy.

• Signifier and Signified

Ø  Lacan draws from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. A signifier is the sound-image or written word (e.g., the letters T-R-E-E). The signified is the mental concept it evokes (the idea of a tall, woody plant). For Saussure, the two were inseparable. Lacan, however, radically pried them apart. He argued the relationship between signifier and signified is never stable or guaranteed. The signified is perpetually slipping under the chain of signifiers. We never finally grasp meaning; we endlessly move from one signifier to another in a never-ending quest for a fullness of meaning that is always deferred.

• The Mirror Stage

Ø This is Lacan's theory of how the ego is formed. Between 6-18 months, an infant recognises its own reflection in a mirror (or similar reflective surface, like the affirming gaze of a parent). This image is a misrecognition (méconnaissance)—it provides an illusion of coherence, mastery, and totality that the infant, who still experiences its body as uncoordinated and fragmented, does not truly feel. This idealised, external image becomes the core of the ego, which Lacan therefore saw as fundamentally built on a fantasy. The ego is not the seat of autonomy but a constructed entity, born from identification with an external image.

• The Three Orders: The Real, The Imaginary, The Symbolic

Ø  Lacan described human experience as structured by three intertwined registers:

§  The Real: Not everyday reality, but that which is beyond language, unrepresentable, and impossible to articulate. It is the traumatic, pre-linguistic stuff of experience, always outside symbolisation. We encounter it in moments of shock, trauma, or overwhelming jouissance.

§  The Imaginary: The realm of images, identification, and illusion. It is dominated by dyadic relationships (like mother-child) and is the seat of the ego. It is the order of misrecognition and deception, where the self feels whole and unified. It is associated with the maternal.

§  The Symbolic Order: The most crucial order for Lacan. This is the realm of language, law, culture, and social structures. It is the "big Other" that governs our lives with its rules, prohibitions, and norms. Entering the Symbolic Order through language is what socialises us but also introduces lack and separation from the immediate, dyadic world of the Imaginary. It is associated with the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic law that breaks the primordial bond with the mother.

• Desire and Lack

Ø For Lacan, desire is not a biological drive towards a specific object (like hunger). It is a constant state of lack (manque). We are born into lack upon entering the Symbolic Order, which separates us from the (imagined) plenitude of the maternal body. We then spend our lives seeking objects (objets petit a) that we believe will fill this void. But these objects always fail. Desire is always the desire for something else, and it is this endless movement of desire, not its satisfaction, that defines the human condition. Literature is a profound record of this endless pursuit.

• Jouissance

Ø A term notoriously difficult to translate, often rendered as "enjoyment" but meaning something far more intense and paradoxical. It is a form of extreme pleasure that is so intense it tips over into pain. It is the forbidden enjoyment that exists beyond the pleasure principle, linked to the Real. Society, through the Symbolic Order, limits jouissance for its own stability. The pursuit of jouissance is often associated with self-destructive behaviour and forms of "madness" that defy social logic.

Writing the Fractured Self: Literature and Identity Formation

For Lacan, there is no essential, core self waiting to be expressed. The self is a fiction constructed in the Imaginary and structured by the Symbolic Order of language. Therefore, the act of writing is not an expression of a pre-formed identity but an attempt to constitute one through the signifier.

The author does not master language; language speaks through the author. The text, therefore, is riddled with the traces of the unconscious—not the author’s personal history per se, but the slips, gaps, and contradictions inherent in language itself. A Lacanian critic does not ask, "What does the author mean?" but rather, "How does the text function? Where does meaning break down? What is being repressed by the text’s narrative?"

The Discourse of Insanity: A Linguistic Construction

Lacan’s work forces us to question what we call "madness." If our sanity is predicated on our successful insertion into the Symbolic Order (accepting its laws, its language, its norms), then insanity can be seen as a different relationship to this order.

• Social & Historical Construction: What a society defines as "mad" is what falls outside its dominant symbolic framework. The hysteric’s symptoms, for instance, are a language of the body (corporalised speech) that emerges when direct speech is impossible within the constraints of their social (e.g., patriarchal) Symbolic Order.
• Medical Construction: Lacan was fiercely critical of a medical model that sought to quickly "cure" symptoms without listening to their truth. The symptom is a message from the unconscious; it is a formation of desire. To simply suppress it pharmacologically is to ignore the subject’s truth. The analyst’s role is to help the subject traverse the fantasy structuring their desire, not to impose a normative idea of "health."

Gender, Language, and the Madness of the Feminine

Lacan’s work on gender is among his most controversial and searched-for topics. He stated, "The Woman does not exist" (La femme n'existe pas). This is not a misogynistic dismissal but a radical claim about identity and the Symbolic Order.

He argued that while sexual difference is a fundamental symbolic opposition (having/being the phallus as a signifier of lack), the category "Woman" is not a fixed essence. It is an unattainable ideal, a fantasy constructed within a phallocentric Symbolic Order that defines woman as man’s negative other. Therefore, female identity is even more profoundly constituted by lack and otherness than male identity.

This has dire consequences. If a woman’s desire and jouissance have no adequate representation in the dominant Symbolic Order, her expression may be forced into the realm of the symptom. The "madness" of literary heroines—from Ophelia to Bertha Mason—can be read not as a biological flaw but as the only available language to express a desire that has no other sanctioned means of articulation. Their "hysteria" is a silent protest against a symbolic order that offers them no valid subject position. Writing, therefore, becomes a critical act of forging a new language, of finding a voice from within the gaps of the existing Symbolic Order.

Case Study: Lacan Reads Poe's "The Purloined Letter"

Lacan’s famous seminar on this story is a masterclass in his method. The plot involves a stolen letter whose contents are never revealed, yet it exerts immense power over all who possess it.

• The Letter as Signifier: For Lacan, the letter’s content is irrelevant. What matters is its position within a symbolic circuit. The letter is a pure signifier—its meaning is entirely determined by its place in a triadic structure of looks (the king who doesn’t see, the queen who tries to hide, the minister who sees her hiding).
• The Subject is Determined by the Signifier: Each character who possesses the letter (the Queen, the Minister, Dupin) has their identity and actions dictated by their position relative to this signifier. They do not control the letter; it controls them.
• The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other: The letter represents the unconscious itself—its content is hidden, but its effects are visible everywhere in the behaviour it generates. We can never "open" the unconscious to see its secrets, just as we never learn the letter’s contents. We can only interpret its effects. This mirrors how we must read a text: not for a hidden meaning, but for how its signifiers structure its narrative and its characters.

Conclusion: 

Lacan provides a sophisticated toolkit for moving beyond simplistic psycho-biographical readings. He teaches us to see the literary text as a dynamic field where the structures of the human psyche—desire, lack, misrecognition, and the relentless pursuit of the unattainable—play out in the medium of language itself.

Further Reading 

• Lacan, J. Écrits (1966) - The key primary text.

• Lacan, J. The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

• Lacan mirror stage explained

• Lacan real symbolic imaginary

• Lacan desire and lack

• Lacan femme n'existe pas

• Lacan purloined letter summary

• Fink, B. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995) - An excellent guide.

• Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996) - Invaluable.

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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Michel Foucault

In this Newsletter, we turn our attention to one of the most formidable and influential thinkers of the twentieth century: Michel Foucault (1926-1984). A French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, Foucault’s work relentlessly questioned the very foundations of our society—our institutions, our knowledge, and our identities.

Our specific focus will be on his seminal work, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (History of Madness), first published in 1961. We will use this text as a keystone to explore the profound and often unsettling interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We will examine how writing becomes a site for identity formation and dissolution, and how what we call ‘madness’ is not a timeless medical fact but a construct woven from social, medical, and historical threads. We will pay particular attention to the intricate dance between selfhood, language, and gender.

This research will necessitate a deep dive into Foucault’s unique terminology. Fear not; we shall unpack each concept with care, illuminating the path through this challenging but rewarding intellectual landscape.

The Foucauldian Foundation – Key Concepts

To understand Foucault's approach to madness, one must first be equipped with his philosophical set of tools. His methods give a radical new way of seeing the world.

• Archaeology (of Knowledge):

Ø  Explanation: This is Foucault’s method of historical analysis. Unlike a traditional historian who might seek a continuous narrative of progress, Foucault acts as an archaeologist of ideas. He digs down through layers of historical epochs to uncover the unspoken rules that governed what could be said, thought, and known in a particular period. He is less interested in what people thought and more interested in the underlying system that made certain thoughts possible and others unthinkable. He calls this underlying system the épistème.

• Épistème:

Ø  Explanation: A French term meaning a "historical a priori" or the fundamental stratum of knowledge peculiar to a specific time and place. It is the unconscious, foundational structure that defines the conditions of possibility for knowledge. It determines what is accepted as a valid scientific statement, a philosophical proposition, or even a rational thought. The épistème of the Renaissance (c. 15th-16th centuries) was different from that of the Classical Age (c. 17th-18th centuries), which was, in turn, ruptured by the modern épistème. Madness, according to Foucault, was experienced and constituted differently within each.

• Discourse:

Ø  Explanation: This is a crucial term. For Foucault, a discourse is not just a conversation or a speech. It is a socially constructed body of language and practice that systematically forms the objects of which it speaks. Discourse is a form of power. For example, the medical discourse on insanity doesn't just describe madness; it actively creates it as a category of illness, complete with symptoms, treatments, and experts (doctors) who have the authority to diagnose and manage it. Literature is itself a powerful discursive field, one that can reinforce or challenge dominant discourses.

• Power/Knowledge (Pouvoir/Savoir):

Ø  Explanation: Foucault famously argued that power and knowledge are inextricably linked. He condensed this into the term pouvoir/savoir. It is not that knowledge is power in a simple sense. Rather, the exercise of power creates new objects of knowledge (e.g., the "hysterical woman," the "sexual deviant"), while the accumulation of knowledge (e.g., clinical studies, case files) inevitably creates new mechanisms of power and control. There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, and no knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations.

• Genealogy:

Ø  Explanation: A method Foucault adopted later, complementing archaeology. If archaeology examines the conditions of knowledge, genealogy examines its effects and its murky, contested, and often violent origins. It is a history of the present, seeking to show that what we accept as natural, inevitable, or objectively true (like our concepts of justice, madness, or sexuality) is actually the result of historical struggles, accidents, and the will to power. It "greyifies" what was seen as pure history.

A History of Madness -

Foucault’s History of Madness is a genealogical project par excellence. He traces a dramatic shift in how European society perceived and treated the mad.

• The Renaissance (c. 15th-16th Centuries): The Dialogue with Unreason

Ø  The Discourse: In this period, madness (folly) was not yet fully separated from reason. It held an ambiguous, even sacred place. The figure of the Fool could speak truths to power that no sane person would dare utter. Madness was seen as a part of the human condition, a tragic wisdom, a window into the divine or the apocalyptic. It featured prominently in art (e.g., Hieronymus Bosch) and literature (e.g., Shakespeare’s fools in King Lear or Twelfth Night), where it served as a critical commentary on society's follies.

• The Classical Age (c. 17th-18th Centuries): The Great Confinement

Ø  The Discourse: Foucault identifies a profound rupture in the mid-17th century. This was the age of Reason (Le Grand Siècle), and with it came a powerful need to silence what it defined as its opposite: Unreason (déraison). The founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris in 1656 was a seminal event. It was not a medical establishment but a quasi-judicial structure of authority. The mad, along with the poor, the vagrant, the unemployed, and the debauched, were interned—locked away not to be cured, but to be morally condemned and excluded from the social order. Madness was silenced. It was no longer a dialogue with reason but its absolute negation, its shameful secret.

• The Modern Age (c. 19th Century onwards): The Birth of the Asylum & the Medical Gaze

Ø  The Discourse: The figure of Philippe Pinel in France and William Tuke in England are traditionally hailed as humanitarians who "liberated the insane from their chains." Foucault offers a radical reinterpretation. He argues that this was not a liberation but a transformation of power. The chains became psychological. The asylum was born, and with it, the medicalisation of madness. The mad were now constituted as "mental patients" to be studied, classified, and normalised under the "medical gaze"—the authoritative eye of the doctor who objectifies the patient. The key mechanism of control was no longer physical restraint but constant moral judgment and the internalisation of guilt. The patient had to confess their madness and submit to the figure of the Doctor, who became a "father" and a "judge."

Literature, Writing, and the Madness of Selfhood

This historical framing allows us to see literature not merely as reflecting attitudes to madness but as a primary site of discursive struggle.

• Literature as a Counter-Discourse:

Ø  Where the medical and social discourses of the Classical and Modern ages sought to confine and silence unreason, literature became one of the few spaces where the voice of madness could still be heard. From the inside of characters like Ophelia (whose fragmented, floral songs signify a world beyond masculine, political rationality) to the narrators of works like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (a direct critique of the 19th-century "rest cure" for women), literature gives form to the experience of being labelled ‘mad’. It challenges the official story.

• Writing and Identity-Formation:

Ø  Foucault forces us to ask: is the self a stable, coherent entity we discover, or is it constructed through the discourses available to us? The act of writing, particularly confessional writing (diaries, autobiographies, certain forms of fiction), is a key technology of the self. We use language to tell ourselves into being. But what happens when the available discourses are limiting or pathological? A woman in the 19th century, for instance, might only have been able to articulate deep anguish or rebellion through the discourse of "hysteria" or "nervous exhaustion"—the very labels used to control her. Her identity is formed in the tense space between her experience and the limited, often damaging, language society gives her to express it.

• The Inter-relationship of Constructions:

Ø  Foucault shows that you cannot separate the social (poverty idleness as moral failings), the medical (the diagnosis of madness), and the historical (the rise of the work ethic and capitalism). The "Great Confinement" was an economic and social policy as much as a medical one. The "lazy" poor and the "unreasonable" mad were lumped together because both were seen as unproductive and disruptive to the new social order. Their construction was intertwined.

 Gender and Madness – A Foucauldian Perspective

The construction of madness is deeply gendered. Foucault’s work, particularly his History of Sexuality, provides a framework for understanding this.

• Hysteria: The Archetypal Female Malady:

Ø  Explanation: The very term hysteria (from the Greek hystera for womb) pathologises the female body. For centuries, a vast array of women's emotions, desires, and rebellions were diagnosed as symptoms of a "wandering womb." This is a prime example of pouvoir/savoir: the medical profession gained power and authority by creating this category of knowledge, while women were subjected to its controlling effects (from rest cures to forced institutionalisation).

• The Pathologisation of Female Identity:

Ø  Traits associated with femininity—passivity, emotionality, sensitivity—were often medicalised as signs of inherent weakness and a predisposition to nervous disorders. Conversely, traits that deviated from prescribed gender roles—ambition, sexual desire, intellectualism—were also seen as symptoms of madness. The discourse of madness became a powerful tool for policing gender boundaries. A woman’s struggle to form an identity outside of the narrow roles of wife and mother was often interpreted not as a political or social struggle, but as a psychological pathology to be treated.

• Writing as Resistance:

Ø  Many female authors used writing to fight back against this pathologisation. Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a stark narrative of a woman driven mad by the very "cure" imposed upon her. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar explores the suffocating pressure of 1950s feminine ideals and the intimate connection between creative expression and mental fracture. These works do not just describe madness; they perform a counter-discourse, using the master’s tools (language and narrative) to dismantle the master’s house (the patriarchal medical establishment).

Conclusion:

Michel Foucault teaches us that our most cherished concepts—sanity, reason, the self—are not solid, timeless truths. They are historical artefacts, built upon the silent exclusion of their opposites. The mad were not always ‘sick’; they were first made ‘other’, then ‘patient’.

For the student of literature, this is transformative. A text is no longer a simple mirror but a battleground of discourses. When we read a character like Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic" in Jane Eyre, we must ask: who is truly mad? The enslaved colonial subject screaming in rebellion, or the colonial order that locked her away? Foucault gives us the tools to hear the voices from the archive that history has tried to silence.

To study the interconnection of literature and madness is to understand that writing is always an act of identity-formation, always political, and always engaged in a struggle over who gets to define what is real, what is rational, and what it means to be human. 

Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin