Madness and Romanticism in Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs âJulian and Maddaloâ

Cian Duffy

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Chapter 5 Madness and Romanticism in Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs âJulian and Maddaloâ

In: The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

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Cian Duffy

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 91â112

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745247_007

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Abstract

There is now a widespread scholarly consensus that we can see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a close but complex discursive and institutional relationship between mental illness and the set of cultural assumptions and practices which we call âRomanticismâ. My purpose in this essay is to explore how that relationship is both manifested in and challenged by the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem âJulian and Maddalo: A Conversation.â Shelleyâs poem has been curiously peripheral to academic histories of the engagement with mental illness in Romantic-period cultural texts: it is often identified in such histories as significant but then only actually considered in passing. At the centre of âJulian and Maddaloâ is a psychiatric situation. The two titular characters, based in part on Shelley and Byron, visit the cell of a âManiacâ, on an island in Laguna di Venezia, in the hope that studying his âwild languageâ â finding âan entrance to the caverns of his mindâ (line 573), as Julian puts it â will help to resolve their own difficult âconversationâ about human nature and destiny. My essay examines two aspects of the engagement with contemporary ideas about madness in the poem: the representation of the âmadhouseâ (line 107), which Maddalo describes as âthe emblem and the signâ (line 121) of the human condition, and the characterisation of the Maniac. I illustrate the extent to which âJulian and Maddaloâ is both informed by and responds to contemporary psychiatric discourse concerning the origins, nature, and prognosis, of mental illness, and the possibility of a cure through âmoral management.â Specifically, I argue that âJulian and Maddaloâ interrogates the nosological description of mania and melancholia, by figures like Erasmus Darwin, Nathan Drake, and Philippe Pinel, as dysfunctions of the imagination which are triggered by emotional trauma â and for which poetry can be both, potentially, a symptom and a cure.

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

Series:Â Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 4

Cover The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004745247

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 13 Nov 2025

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Chapter 5 Madness and Romanticism in Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs âJulian and Maddaloâ

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

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Chapter 5 Madness and Romanticism in Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs âJulian and Maddaloâ