Victorian Women’s Hysteria and Neo-Victorian Women’s Madness

From a modern perspective, most Victorians seemed to have been obsessed about controlling women, subjugating the animal within men, and adjudicating immorality, convinced that conformity was the very pillar of civilisation. The by-product of such strict regulation must surely have been mental illness on a pandemic scale. Neo-Victorian works are fascinated with why and how so many Victorians suffered mental illness, regardless of what it was called, how it was manifested, and how it was treated or dealt with. Bodies of Water (2016) by V. H. Leslie and Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters offer manifestations of mental illness in unique ways that reveal useful insights into the Victorians as well as into human nature that characterises humanity regardless of any historical era. The major difference between Victorian vs. neo-Victorian narratives is that in the latter, the people who committed women to the madhouse strike us as being just as mentally ill if not more so than were the inmates. Further, modern writers often depict men as the villains who drive women to insanity inside or outside lunatic asylums. Another major difference has to do with the way a Victorian work might have exhibited female hysteria, as it was then called, and the way a neo-Victorian work might deal with the same is that in the former: unhappy or rebellious women often ended up in the madhouse or in the river; in the latter, they simply ended up mad, and they made their way against the tide.