Armed with Madness

Increased attention to psychology in the modern novel afforded expanded thematic access to aberrant states of consciousness. In a way, this returned the novel to its prototype in Don Quixote, and rejuvenated awareness of depicted mania in realist novels. Eight novels are profiled here (by Fowles, Fitzgerald, Lowry, Dostoyevsky, Canetti, Mann, Conrad, and Woolf) in order to examine narrative strategies for exploring madness, and implicating the reader’s consciousness as a participatory component of mental aberration. This approach counters Georg Lukács’s contention that depictions of mental aberration violated the novel’s obligation to depict normality. Modernism, he claimed, privileged distortion, but the novelists examined here suggest that the historical pressures of modernity provided distortions exceeding any particular imaginative license. These pressures are acutely rendered in portraits of domesticity in The Secret Agent by Conrad and Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, two among many such reckonings with geo-political trauma casting a shadow over private life.