The geography of melancholy: Depression and healing in the works of British women writers, 1785--1845

In this study, I argue that Romantic women writers such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley disrupted the category of masculine melancholic genius by representing their depression in terms of the masculine discourse of melancholy rather than the feminized discourse of hysteria. In the 1790s melancholia became associated exclusively with extreme rational thought and masculinity. Concurrently, medical and literary discourse reinforced an oppositional category for women's perception that was associated with sensibility and pathologized as hysteria. Women writers represented melancholia and therapies for melancholia---spa treatments, salutary landscapes, and botany---in order to claim the illness and its association with literary production for women and members of the working class. I argue that in their depictions of three therapies for melancholia, women authors constructed a more utilitarian and rationally based relationship with nature than commonly has been attributed to Romantic writers. First, I demonstrate that in their representations of spa therapy, Smith and Austen focus on the gender and class dynamics that affected the ill person's control over her illness and healing, while Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley express this concern with the patient's agency as a critique of physician authority. Second, I argue that conventions of picturesque aesthetics such as variety, novelty, and balance paralleled the characteristics of health travel extolled by medical writers. Both Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley embrace the picturesque landscape as a means of healing, while William Wordsworth rejects it as an "unhealthy" way of seeing, suggesting instead a less systematic interaction with nature. Finally, I argue that in her praise for the therapeutic value of botanizing, Smith calls for an accurate language to describe melancholia in all its complexity, including its roots in social structures.;The resonances and disjunctions between medical theory and literature that I map in the dissertation revise familiar conceptions of Romantic period topics such as the melancholic poet, the spa, and landscape aesthetics. As a whole, the study demonstrates that the stakes of an investment in a literary tradition based in rationality were quite different for women writers than for their male counterparts.