Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Personal Writing ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Mental Pathology ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Both the literary program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and his personal letters dating from the year of the work's composition are suffused with the rhetoric of illness, detailing a maladie morale characterized by melancholy, nervous "exultation," black presentiments, and a malignant idee fixe.. Often mistakenly identified as a term new to the 1830s, the idee fixe has a considerably longer history, dating from the first decade of the nineteenth century when it appeared in the writings of French psychiatrists Etienne Esquirol and Jean-Etienne Georget. Both Esquirol's early writings on insanity and his seminal 1838 treatise identify mental "fixation" as the primary symptom of monomania, the most contentious and well-known mental disease of the period, and one with far-reaching implications not only for medicine but for Romantic literature, philosophy, and autobiography. Examination of the disease's early reception reveals that, well before Berlioz, the psychiatric terminology surrounding monomania had been absorbed into popular discourse. Malignant and humorous idee fixes appeared in cartoons, diaries, and newspaper articles from the 1810s onward, and in fictional works by Hoffmann, Duras, Scribe, Balzac, and others. Here, and in essays published in musical and literary journals of the period, monomania emerged as an increasingly aestheticized malady, and the idee fixe itself as a signal, not of mental debilitation, but of creative absorption and artistic inspiration. When Berlioz figured himself as a monomaniac, both in his personal writing and his symphonic program, he was responding to a discourse of "creative aberration" permeating Romantic literary and medical culture, and to a fashionable fascination with mental pathology. Berlioz was by no means the only artist of the period to diagnose himself with the symptoms of mental fixation. Musset, Janin, and Georges Sand also described themselves in monomaniacal terms in autobiographical "confessions" permeated with references to hallucination, fixation, and emotional pathology. Indeed, we can draw clear parallels between the veiled self-referentiality of the Fantastique and the autobiographical strategies of the Romantic Confession. Berlioz's "self-sounding" resonates with a host of other confessional autobiographies of the period and reflects the collapse between inspiration and insanity, between anatomy and aesthetics, underpinning early-nineteenth-century theories of genius.

scholarly journals The Scientific Foundation of Disordered Mood

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
Åsa Jansson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Physiological Psychology ◽  
Brain Tissue ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reflex Action ◽  
Scientific Foundation ◽  
Biological Foundation

Abstract This chapter maps how early nineteenth-century experimental physiology provided a biological foundation for mental disorders in which no visible changes to brain tissue could be found. It charts the emergence of ‘psychological reflex action’, a key concept that facilitated a view of emotion as automated and involuntary, and thus prone to malfunction. The chapter follows the trajectory of psychological reflexion from internal scientific medicine to what became known as ‘physiological psychology’, where it provided mid-century British writers with the tools to create a biomedical framework for the phenomenon of disordered mood. The chapter ends by looking at how physiological psychology was gradually taken up by mid-century asylum physicians writing on mental disease.

Healthcare for the Poor

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-127
Author(s):  
Gabriel J. Loiacono
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early American ◽  
Native Woman ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Early American poor relief included extensive healthcare. Doctors’ visits, nurses’ care, and medicine could all be covered by poor relief. One nurse, called “One-Eyed” Sarah, healed poor residents of Providence, Rhode Island, in the very early nineteenth century. One of thousands of women, nationwide, who did the hard work of physically tending to their needy neighbors, Sarah’s work was highlighted in newspaper articles in 1811. Sarah was “Indian,” and her impoverished patients requested her by name. While her actual identity remains mysterious, this chapter explores what we can learn about a Native woman who nursed the poor back to health, while being paid by poor relief funds. Sarah’s life shows evidence of being controlled by overseers of the poor, as Cuff Roberts’s was. It also shows how she could use her experience to find income from overseers of the poor like William Larned.

Identity Crises

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Esterhammer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Media ◽  
Travel And Tourism ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
European Dimension ◽  
Identity Crises

This chapter addresses the European dimension of nineteenth-century celebrity culture, the extent to which it involves international media networks and figures who, in person and by reputation, crossed borders to engage with multiple publics. Fame on an international scale was facilitated by the reopening of the continent to travel and tourism after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815—but the post-Napoleonic era also altered the conditions of fame, and as the effects of celebrity culture made themselves felt, so did some ironic counter-currents. In the wake of the personality-driven poetry of Byron or the novels and essays of Mme de Staël, late Romantic literature manifests certain anti-celebrity impulses. All of this brings the issue of personal identity to the forefront in the literature and culture of the early nineteenth century, a moment when Romanticism’s recently awakened concern with unique subjectivity confronts the spectre of externalized, commodified, reproducible selves.

scholarly journals COMMUNICATION IN AND AROUND MESMERISM. CONTROVERSIES, CASE HISTORIES AND THE CULTURAL IMAGINATION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Barkhoff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Therapy ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Animal Magnetism

Mesmerism or animal magnetism was the most controversial and most spectacular medical concept of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. It was also conceptualised and practiced as a medical therapy based entirely on communication; a communication that worked on many levels: between magnetiser and patient, between body and mind and – in its theoretical explanations – between human beings and the cosmos. This paper will first briefly look at theories of mesmerism from this perspective and then discuss some of the scandalous and provocative communicative phenomena of the so-called magnetic rapport between magnetiser and patient in the somnambulist trance. It will also briefly review the controversies between supporters and sceptics of the magnetic cure around the communicative experience in the rapport. The final part of this paper will turn to Romantic literature, as its rich aesthetic representations of mesmerism transcend enlightenment controversies and offer more complex, nuanced and insightful negotiations of the forms of communication prevalent and observable in the mesmerist phenomena. In mesmerism we can thus observe that around 1800 literature seems to know and understand more about psychodynamic and psychophysical communication than medical science.

The Floral Poetics of Schumann's Blumenstück, Op. 19

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Women Consumers ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Kittler

Abstract Robert Schumann's Blumenstück, op. 19, a short piano piece dating from 1839, is generally not included among the composer's more poetically inspired or formally adventurous pieces. Thanks in part to Schumann's own disparaging remarks about the piece, Blumenstück, like the stylistically similar Arabeske, op. 18, has been viewed as a fairly straightforward effort to appeal to amateur consumers—especially women consumers—of domestic piano music. Rather than recuperate Schumann's piece through a revelation of its structural achievements, this article links the piece's mixed aesthetic status to the similar standing of flowers (and the genre of flower painting to which Schumann's title alludes) in early-nineteenth-century German culture. Emblematic of women and the expression of conventional sentiments, flowers nonetheless constituted a remarkably evocative symbol in Romantic literature. Sentimental and Romantic discourses of the flower converged in the trope of Blumensprache (the language of flowers), an idea that found expression in both popular manuals cataloguing the meanings of flowers and the more esoteric environments of Schumann's criticism, E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales, and Heinrich Heine's poetry. In each of these venues, flowers served as imaginary conduits joining mundane and transcendent realms. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Kittler, I argue that Schumann's Blumenstück, with its conflicting imperatives of pleasure and instruction, congenial melody and motivic intertwining, conflates aesthetic and reception-based categories in a related manner and, as a result, undermines traditional means of generic classification.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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