This post in another thread cites a Snopes article debunking a fictional account of some poor innocent woman driven mad by a college prank gone bad.
Which got me to thinking, a dangerous thing indeed.
Has anyone else noticed how often in stuff written in the 1800s and maybe even into the very early 1900s, some otherwise ordinary and stable person could be irretrievably “driven mad” by a single shocking event? An event that in reality wasn’t all that shocking; alarming and unexpected sure, but not rock-your-world stuff.
Seemed to happen every day and twice on Tuesdays if the literature from that era is to be believed.
IMO human nature is pretty fixed and eternal, and certainly so over a mere couple hundred years. So the difference, if any, must be social rather than innate.
If anything I’d expect actual folks from that era to be more mentally stable than the flighty weak-minded idiots who comprise our era. It was a tough world then that bred tough people used to adapting and overcoming hardships as they came. You’ve had your last 3 children each die around age 2 from some disease or another? Suck it up and soldier on. etc.
So much for the intro. Now the discusssion …
So where does this “driven mad at a stroke” trope come from? Why was it popular then? What does it say about the culture of the time? When and why did it arise? When and why did it fade?
Or did the term “driven mad” not mean then what it means now? They liked the term “melancholy” for what we now call “clinical depression”. So “driven mad” probably wasn’t meant to mean the same thing as “melacholy”. Even as we recognize today that great life tragedies often provoke depression.
Or am I all wet? Maybe this trope was teeny back in the day and is still used today, maybe with different terminology but with the same dramatic intent.
I disagree with this. The fact that it was a tough world, with children constantly dying, means that the population is even more prone to mental challenges than today’s population.
“Suck it up and soldier on” is about as worthwhile a piece of mental health advice as was “here, let’s get good and drunk”, which was probably prescribed just as often.
Will say, I was thinking about starting a similar thread - “why don’t ‘crazy’ people think they’re Napoleon any more?”
In comic books especially, facial disfigurement often leads to madness, and sometimes super villainy. I was a DC kid so I remember Two-face and the Joker. In some stories young Lex Luthor was driven crazy by the mere loss of his hair, which he blamed on Superboy. I almost said the Phantom of the Opera, but I believe in the original book he was born that way.
In literature, I think it was romantic and a device to explain some characters bizarre behavior. Rather than listing a hundred small things that might’ve caused the problem. Instead, one big whammy and that “Josephine was prone to smothering kittens and she’s too nuts to be left alone with her own baby”.
Easier to write, shorter for novels of the day.
As for greater literature or modern literature it’s still a device.
Now find me a biography with this and I’d like to read it.
OTOH…my great-grandmother was said to turn completely white haired overnight when two of her sons were killed the same day. She may have been crazy, from what I heard.
Wasn’t that mainly limited to the upper classes in fiction of that era? Perhaps it was just a depiction of the idealized notion of the better people, those so fragile, intelligent, artistic, and understanding of the world’s troubles that they were prone to the vapors and needed fainting couches.
The working classes were too dumb to be driven mad.
Batman himself is driven to fight crime because he had one bad day as a child.
If I were to hazard a guess, the our idea of madness, and mental health in general, is likely very different from what it has been in centuries past throughout different cultural groups. But let’s face it, some people do grow irrational and harm themselves or others when confronted with something stressful. So I don’t know if the idea that someone can go mad, however it’s defined, is that much of a stretch.
But your thought suggests to me that the trope might be applied to female characters (much?) more often than male characters for much the same reasons.
Those delicate female people just collapse under stress … poor things.
BS, but perhaps culturally dominant BS at the time.
Tropes wax and wane in popularity, but few seem to disappear completely.
A fairly recent example of this trope was Dexter. Witnessing his mom’s chainsaw murder at age 3 turned him into a serial killer for life.
Seems like a pretty straightforward idea in any case. No matter what the culture, we’ve got normal people and a few crazy ones. What causes this? No one knows. But it’s a small leap to guess that there might be some kind of switch.
Somewhat related is the zombie trope. A different kind of switch turns people into mindless horrors. The details don’t matter much: supernatural occurrences, radiation, chemicals, drugs, whatever. The end result is the same.
The triggers tell us more about the fears of the active culture than anything else.
Yes, no question that the Law applies to all creative media. I’ve also said that you can learn more about the deeper issues in society by examining the humor of the day than, say, through old newspapers, because humor has to have wide-spread familiarity to work.
Going back to your OP, at the turn of the 20th century the would-be psychologists - a word that didn’t get its modern usage until the 1890s - conveniently were united in believing that the brain - or mind - was a fragile, delicate thing that was as subject to injury as arms or legs. This was the era in which the wealthy were told to go away and relax in Europe for several months to get over their neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. This diagnosis, also conveniently, applied in the 19th century to a wide variety of problems, with many symptoms, and little specificity. I think of it as the masculine equivalent to hysteria, a nervous condition that, conveniently, could be found affecting only those with a uterus (credit to Ada McVean).
The fragility of the mind was the medical consensus of the times, even before Freud dropped his bomb. Wasn’t much of a mental leap to assume, for dramatic purposes (which includes basic everyday gossip), that a single trauma could lead to madness. Freud said as much, in longer German. That explains so much with so little. Perfect for fiction, and much more.
A lot of now illegal drugs classified as “recreational” were legal and freely prescribed by doctors. My late mother whispered about other wives having “nervous breakdowns.” I later learned that some of these involved alcohol and/or prescription drugs.
Mom herself never touched alcohol, but had problems with amphetamines, taking them for weight control.
IMO people back then put too much trust in pill-peddling doctors. And maybe, psychologists,
No one can actually write about the future, because all the material in their brain is from the past, being processed in the present. Extrapolation may be applied in great profusion, but the attitudes, issues, and depiction cannot include anything outside of the writer’s current environment and past experiences. That’s a reason why the Campbellian writers of the 1940s, however much lauded, are subject to scorn about their vision of what a/the Future would be like. No doubt that 80 years from now, all of today’s writers will be scrutinized by minds shaped by history that none of today’s books can possibly have contained.
If you want to nitpick my absolutarianism, you’d be better off attacking the second sentence. For all too many writers, the Today they assume is actually some remembered Past that no longer actually represents the world others see. But It Is Always About Yesterday doesn’t work as well.
Egan’s stuff (much of it, that is) isn’t about the future. It’s not even about our universe! The creatures are not human and have qualities like not being able to turn more than 45 degrees left or right because the metric signature of their universe has a sign flipped on one of the coordinates and so it would be the equivalent of traveling faster than light for us.
Oh sure, the books actually do have some sideplots that are grounded in modern western culture. But it’s window dressing, just there so the books don’t turn into a pure mathematical treatise, and could be substituted out for anything else. You could figure out when the books were written with a little deduction, but those details aren’t what the books are about.
By merest coincidence I just finished re-reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which a chsaracter is not exactly “driven mad” by a terrible experience, but has his nerves “shattered” and his health ruined.
Young Sir Henry Baskerville was not of the upper classes, until his surprise inheritance. He was in farming and was described as hale and hearty. Spoiler alert: (if any is needed for such a well known tale) he found himself pursued and expecting to be horribly killed any second. After being rescued, he passed the night delirious with a high fever, and his health was destroyed for a period of months or years.
We would expect PTSD certainly, with a wide range of possible psychological symptoms. But does anyone in modern times get a high fever from a traumatic experience and suddenly deteriorate physically?
