Was Miss Havisham's madness a choice? (From Dickens' Great Expectations))

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An Analysis of Miss Havisham 's Madness

This will attempt to explore the atypical behavior of Miss Havisham , arguably the most memorable character in Charles Dicken 's novel , Great Expectations . The analysis shall be done in the context of the society she was part of and the events she had been through

MADNESS DURING THE VICTORIAN ERA

During the eighteen hundreds , a common belief was that those who had mental illness suffered because they had a "disease

of the soul (Goldberg , 24 . Their strange behavior was attributed to inherent malevolence and they were treated apathetically in asylums by napve caretakers who have insufficient understanding of mental illness . They were treated as animals . Patients in these early asylums were kept in cages , given small amounts of often unclean food , had little or no clothing , wore no shoes , and slept in dirt . Because the patients could often live many years in such conditions , the caretakers became more confident that these human beings were in actuality closer to animals and thus deserving of such abuse (Ussher , 65 . Moreover , effective treatments for mental diss were unavailable , with the only measures being such procedures as , drugging , bleeding , or purging , which produced few objective results (Carson et al . 47

Bleeding , also known as phlebotomy or bloodletting , was utilized to release bad blood . This was usually the initial treatment . It seemed like a logical solution to restore health based upon the...