The inoperative community of Romantic psychiatry
This paper reads Mary Shelley’s Matilda within the context of the rise of psychiatry, or what was termed “moral management,” in England in the Romantic period. The paper traces some of historical and social parameters of this Romantic psychiatry in terms of the desire for community and communal well‐being. On one hand, this desire reflects early psychiatry’s democratic and empathic spirit. On the other, it reflects a way of foisting well‐being upon populations in order better to manage their unwieldy psychological life. Romantic literature stages these two poles as a psychiatric consciousness whose two halves are at once in conflict with and uncannily related to one another. The paper briefly examines Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as an early case history of how this divided consciousness plays itself out in the 1790s, commensurate with the first emergence of psychiatry. It then ends with a reading of Shelley’s novella as a response to the kind of social efficiencies psychiatry had come to represent by ...