Blog Series on Romanticism #6: Madness

The present blog series on Romanticism has explored several manifestations of the cultural movement of Romanticism by now, including Romantic literature in various nations and Romanticism within the context of European music. A theme that has recurred over all of these posts, though, consists of what could be called the dark side of Romanticism. The present post of this series will focus specifically on this dark side—or, more specifically, the relationship between Romanticism and madness. The essay will have four main parts. The first part will consist of an overview of how this theme has emerged thus far in the present blog series. The second part will then take a sociological perspective on Romanticism and madness, and the third part will take a psychological perspective. Finally, the fourth part will critically reflect on the significance of the relationship between madness and Romanticism for the enduring value of Romanticism as a whole. 

Overview of Manifestations

One of the most important manifestations of madness in Romanticism that has been discussed in this series has consisted of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther. In this novel, the protagonist is an exemplar of the Romantic ethos, to the point that many young men of the day consciously modeled him in their every day lives. However, the protagonist also ends up committing suicide at the end of the novel. It is also worth noting, moreover, that Goethe himself did not really see Werther as a role model of any kind; rather, he considered the writing of Werther to be a kind of psychological exorcism that he needed to perform on himself before he could get on with the business of being a mature man. 

Then there is Lord Byron, whom many contemporaries probably considered quite mad, not only because of the themes of his poetry but also because of the way that he conducted his own life. From the perspective of the contemporaries, Byron would have probably seemed like a man who was quite out of touch with the social and moral order of reality; and this would have perhaps brought down upon him the judgment of madness. After all, when one person calls another person "crazy," what is generally meant is that the target of the comment seems to exist in a fantasy world all of his or her own, and that he/she has little regard for what others understand to be reality. Not only did Byron generally manifest such a disregard in his own life, he also quite consciously sought to repudiate his society's consensus idea of reality over the course of his works.

Moreover, the theme of madness and Romanticism has also emerged in the present blog series in the consideration of what has been called Dark Romanticism within the nation of America. Poe, for example, deliberately sought to represent abnormal, even insane, states of mind: the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is clearly a very unstable man, and the entire story is completely distorted by the fact that it is told from his own subjective perspective. It would seem that writers such as Poe did not do this on a whim. Rather, the aesthetic decision was fully congruent with the basic ethos of Romanticism itself. More specifically, Romanticism explicitly rejected the primacy of reason as a means for apprehending the real truths about oneself and the world. The opposite of reason, though, would be irrationality; and although one could argue that there are higher and lower forms of irrationality, in practice they would seem to be experienced almost as one total irrational soup. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example, may have been getting close to deep non-rational truths about his own nature; but this does not really change the fact that he was in actuality quite mad. 

Sociological Perspective

From a sociological perspective, to call someone "mad" is simply to make the normative evaluation that the person's thoughts and behaviors are not congruent with the dominant culture and society's idea of reality. As Szasz has made clear through his lucid conceptual analysis of this matter, this would suggest that "madness" is not really an illness at all in any formal medical sense of the word. Rather, the judgment being made is more moral than it is medical in nature. Essentially, one sees a person behaving strangely; from this perception, the observer extrapolates a picture of the mental state of the person; one compares that mental state with a projected ordinary mental state; and then one finds the person to be insane on the basis of the result of this comparison. An important point, though, is that the default itself is arbitrary here: it is not based on true objective standards of any kind, but rather just a society and culture's collective consensus of what is and is not normal and acceptable behavior. 

From the perspective, the Romantics could have been called insane almost by definition, in the sense that they actively sought out modes of consciousness and behavior that ran against the grain of the standards and expectations of the dominant social and cultural order. As Updike has pointed out, for example: in the eyes of most people, there would seem to be something almost inherently insane in Thoreau's decision to remove himself from society and live by himself in a cabin in the woods. Thoreau, on the hand, would himself have believed that this was the only sane thing to do, insofar as society itself was crazy and would have prevented him from ever truly knowing himself. There is a basic relativity at play, then, when it comes to the sociological definition of madness. Society calls insane behaviors that deviate from its own standards; but by the same token, many of the Romantics probably thought of society as insane due to its deviance from their own standards. 

Psychological Perspective

In order to understand the nature of the connection between madness and Romanticism in a deeper way, it is necessary to turn to a more psychological (as opposed to sociological) perspective on the phenomenon. In this context, it is worth turning to Deleuze and Guattari's formulation regarding the nature of psychosis. According to these authors, the human mind can be structured in three main ways: the first is the cancerous way, in which people act out the same rote patterns of behavior, irrespective of if such patterns make them truly fulfilled; the second is the empty way, which is reflective of a complete lack of all cognitive structure whatever; and the third is the full way, which is reflective of a structure that is nevertheless open to channeling the more authentic and creative depths of the human soul (161). If the full structure is reflective of real health, the cancerous structure could be called reflective of neurosis, whereas the empty structure could be called reflective of psychosis. 

Now, from the Romantic perspective, most of society would have been organized according to the cancerous structure: that is, any Romantic worthy of the name would have perceived that the dominant society consisted of people acting out conditioned social roles, with little awareness (or even interest) in who they truly are or what they truly want. From this point, to achieve a deeper Romantic awareness of reality would require a loosening (or what Deleuze and Guattari have called destratification) of the normative mental structures that have been programmed into people by the dominant society. In other words, the three structures discussed above could be arranged along a spectrum, running from cancerous to full to empty. In order to make the cancerous structure into a full structure, it would thus be necessary to drift in the direction of the empty structure; it would be necessary to loosen up the neurotic controls that exist within one's own mind.

This could, however, easily go too far: after all, if one gets into the business of loosening up mental controls, then this could set an unexpected chain reaction, through which controls that perhaps should have remained in place also end up getting loosened. If the process were to go too far, then the result would be the obliteration of all mental structure or a slide into the empty structure; that is, the result would be psychosis, by any other name. If it is reason and dominant societal norms that hold most mental structures in place, then it becomes easy to understand why there may be a close relationship between madness and Romanticism. In principle, Romanticism is all about challenging dominant norms and the hegemony of reason, in the name of a deeper vision of the human soul; in principle, it is about overcoming neurosis. But the drive to overcome neurosis almost inevitably leaves the Romantic open to the risk of psychosis, insofar as in attempting to override bad mental structures, the Romantic may also inadvertently end up destroying the good ones. 

Critical Reflection on Value

On the basis of the above discussion, an important point that can be made is that Romanticism is highly ambivalent in nature. On the one hand, the Romantic may be able to delve more deeply into the mysteries of the human soul than his contemporaries; but on the other, the Romantic may also be at far greater risk to go insane than his contemporaries. Iyer has formulated this ambivalence with the conceptual pair of the lucid romantic and the muddled romantic, and has in fact suggested that insofar as one cannot do Romanticism right, it may be better off for one to simply remain a "philistine"—that is, a normatively conditioned person—instead (293). That is, it would be better to be sane in the normative sense of the dominant cultural and social order than to become actually psychotic—though of course, truly sane depth and insane would be the best alternative of all. 

In this context, it becomes difficult to parse out the real enduring value of Romanticism as such, insofar as the value significantly hinges on how the Romantic project is actually carried out in practice. If the Romantic is able to avoid psychosis and actually channel those deeper insights and energies in a productive way, then it is clear enough that Romanticism is an indispensable vehicle for carrying out the ancient philosophical injunction to know oneself. On the other hand, there is always the temptation for the Romantic to romanticize madness as such, and to begin thinking of psychosis itself as inherently good or value-positive. This kind of Romanticism is rightly frowned upon by dominant society, because dominant society correctly perceives itself to be superior to actual psychosis. Romanticism correctly done, though, would be free of both psychosis and neurosis—and as such, it would actually be superior to the dominant society, in terms of providing a way for human beings to develop themselves and fully realize their own existential potentials. 

Conclusion

 In summary, the present essay has consisted of a discussion of the relationship between madness and Romanticism. After considering the ways in which this theme has emerged thus far over the course of the present blog series, the essay considered the matter first from a sociological and then from the psychological perspective, and finally reflected on the implications of this discussion for the value of Romanticism as such. An important conclusion that has been reached here is that Romanticism is deeply ambivalent when considered in terms of its effects on the minds of real human beings: on the one hand, it promises a liberation from neurosis; but on the other, if it is carried out incorrectly, it also threatens the danger of psychosis. The suggestion can thus be made that if one wants to live as a Romantic, one better have a very clear idea of what one is actually doing.

Works Cited

Byron, Lord. Don Juan. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print. 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of the Young Werther. New York: Oxford , 2012. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Essential Tales and Poems. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. Print. 

Szasz, Thomas. "The Myth of Mental Illness." The American Psychologist 15.2 (1960): 113-118. Web. 27 Jun. 2016. <www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/terrace/w1001/readings/szasz.pdf>.

Updike, John. "A Sage for All Seasons." Guardian. 25 Jun. 2004. Web. 21 Jun. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jun/26/classics>.