Kathleen Rogers

Moving to the present, this chapter briefly considers the DSM V definition of OCD before arguing that vestiges of Romantic obsession remain in our popular media like television, films, and print. I briefly consider the role of storytelling in Tim Burton’s Big Fish and obsession with the military in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, ending with a close reading of A. S. Byatt’s novel, in which a desire for knowledge, curiosity, and also erotic desire “possess” the main characters. In the conclusion, I point to the importance of looking to the Romantics to remind us of the constructed nature of obsession, mental illness, and other markers of the “norm.”

This chapter pairs Benjamin Rush’s notion of “revolutiana,” enthusiasm for battle, with Burke’s theories of the sublime. War can also result in trauma, what Thomas Weiskel terms the negative sublime. The chapter first examines the importance of distance in Thomas DeQuincey’s “On War” and “The English Stage-Coach” to set the stage for Byron’s Siege of Corinth, which capitalizes on the distance of Muslim culture. George Gleig’s Subaltern also features sublime moments, mostly looking from afar at the events of the battlefield; this feeling will be replicated in Robert Ker Porter’s incredibly successful panorama, Conquest at Seringapatam. Spectatorship is also crucial to Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil, featuring a character whose obsession with conquest begins in the military and ends with a woman.

In their phrenological studies, Gall and Spurzheim named the “organ of ideality” that, when enlarged, reduced the distinction between perception and reality. This chapter argues that ideas come to obsess characters in Romantic works like “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Poe’s titular short stories. In “Rime,” the negatively sublime feelings precipitated by the storm and the mariner’s isolation become contained in the figure of the albatross. In this way, the idea itself occasions horrors and apparitions. This idea becomes a reality, as does the notion of the eye in “Tell Tale Heart” or, in “Beatrice,” teeth. These texts posit that the “compulsion” to write, to tell stories, comes from just this type of ideation.

This chapter argues that Keats and Dacre engage with medical notions of nymphomania and erotomania to explore how gender affects diagnosis. The chapter begins by defining nymphomania, mostly through M. D. T. Bienville’s 1775 treatise, which identifies the condition as beginning in the uterus and caused by excessive sexual desire or masturbation, especially during menarche or menopause. Dacre subverts this description by classifying Darlowitz, a male character, with De Bienville’s nymphomaniacal symptoms. While both women and men experience nymphomania, it is the man in Dacre’s text who ultimately loses agency. Keats’s text deals with erotomania, and I argue that Keats’s medical and apothecary training influence his depiction of Isabella and the pot of basil, linked, by Dioscorides, to “scorpions in the brain.”

Etienne Esquirol, working with inhabitants of French mental asylums, was especially interested in the intersection between study and obsession. This chapter argues that while intellectual monomania in male characters engages with the discourse of genius, female characters become even more emptied of thought by virtue of their indiscriminate reading. In both cases, however, intellectual monomania is linked with the notion of enthusiasm, one both religious and, increasingly, tied to a diseased brain and, especially in women, a diseased body. Readers can delineate the stages of intellectual monomania in the characters of Victor Frankenstein and Emma Courtney, for both of whom the repeated idea (whether of creation, the creature himself, or Augustus Harley) have physically destructive effects.

After introducing the figure of the scorpion ringed by fire, chasing its own tail and killing itself, as a Romantic metaphor for obsession, this chapter sets up the book’s argument: that obsession became pathologized during the Romantic era. It details the history of obsession, beginning with earlier notions of demonic possession, then moving into Romantic-era proto-psychology, a field characterized by an interest in materialism: the brain as mind. The chapter details many of the thinkers and ideologies featured throughout the book, namely David Hartley’s theory of association, Spurzheim and Gall’s phrenological theories, and Etienne Esquirol’s categories of lypemania, demonic possession, and, most importantly for this book, monomania, a term coined during the Romantic era.

This chapter focuses on “vigilia,” which Erasmus Darwin characterized as an excessive watchfulness, to argue that it is this very watchfulness, the desire to read and know a subject, that characterized Romantic-era proto-psychology. It begins with the religiously charged notion of keeping vigil and moves into the Romantic interest in curiosity, exemplified by “curiosity cabinets” in theatrical performances; these cabinets have their literary parallels in the chests of secrets featured in both Edgar Huntly and Caleb Williams. While Caleb Williams has been read politically, I argue that Godwin also critiques excessive curiosity and a scientific tyranny: a desire to intrude upon others’ minds. Brockden Brown makes a similar move, tying excessive curiosity to an eventual lack of control, one exemplified by his Quaker upbringing.

... Like sympathy powder, the tear mixes with the material representation of Smith's suffering, helping to alleviate it ... his own book of sonnets and odes, writes the following: Sonnet VII. To Mrs. CharlotteSmith. ... And to return no more; Should the gay Muse thy troubles sooth awhile. Or ...

This essay examines the sociological works of Harriet Martineau, particularly 1838’s How to Observe Manners and Morals, through the lens of disability studies and Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto.” The authors argue that Martineau depended, due to her perceived “disabilities” of deafness, illnesses and gender, on objects such as the ear trumpet, the telescope, and various theoretical constructs to mediate her access to the outside world. In doing so, she created a “cyborg self” whose tools allowed her to re-write traditionally masculine concepts such as scientific objectivity. These tools were both actual – the ear trumpet and telescope allowed the detachment and control necessary for the nineteenth-century scientist – and metaphorical – Martineau stressed that her disability forced method, a concept that grew ever more important to scientists as the century progressed. Martineau's disabilities reshaped her into a “cyborg self” who was able to approach questions of scientific objectivity from an un-gendered perspective.