Moira Fogarty

Prof. Carol Percy

ENG 442Y

February 21st, 2000.

Female Madness in the Eighteenth Century as Represented in

Ann Yearsley's "Clifton Hill" and William Cowper's "The Task: Book One"

Representation of the sentimentalized mad female figure varies widely in eighteenth century poetry. There has been little work done on this subject, despite the preponderance of criticism and research on female insanity (both literary and actual) in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, so it is fresh territory waiting to be explored. After a great deal of research on the topic in a very general sense, and reading of several poems involving madwomen from the period, I decided to narrow my field of focus to two poems. Ann Yearsley's "Clifton Hill" with it's tragic figure Louisa makes a good foil for William Cowper's Crazy Kate in "The Task: Book One".

I hope to use the figures in these two poems to explore some larger issues regarding poetic interpretations of  madness in the eighteenth century. Louisa is presented as a love-lorn woman with internal problems and the descriptive focus of the poem is on her mental anguish. Crazy Kate's character is constructed around her external symptoms and physical degradation.

These essential differences in depiction arouse questions about how men and women perceive the character of the mad woman, and how they use her image to further their own devices and desires. Does Yearsley align herself with Louisa? Does her psychological examination of the mad woman intend to draw the reader into a sympathetic position, so that Louisa becomes a political rallying point, much like Wollestonecraft's Maria, for throwing off the oppression of men? Or does the fact that Yearsley makes the internal tumultuous state of her character so explicit serve to distance the reader, making the character of the madwoman repulsive rather than attractive? How does the allusion to Hannah More's charitable involvement figure into this? How do Cowper's personal experiences with mental instability affect his writing? Does he aim to create distance or sympathy between the madwoman and the reader? Why write about a woman instead of a man? Is it because he is distanced from the female experience? Is one depiction of the mad woman more 'false' or more 'true' than the other? Why should the characters be made silent? What about the gothic settings?

These are all difficult questions to be answered, and my conclusions will have to be reached based on a thorough grounding in historical attitudes towards madness and an in-depth study of the primary texts, as criticism on Cowper is widely available, but there appear to be only two relevant sources on Yearsley, a book by Mary Waldron and some criticism by Moira Ferguson.