Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss

Whereas the prominent American colonial view was that mental "disturbances" and "distractions" were inevitable and largely unthreatening imbalances in the social order and that incarceration should be a last resort, the new breed of post-revolutionary mental health experts came to view madness as a dangerous disease, whose diagnosis and treatment required the medical training used to combat other illnesses.(16) By the nineteenth century, as psychiatry had gained a large degree of autonomy from other medical specialties, treatment was most often performed in asylums, where "medical superintendents" practiced their profession in isolation from the community. Despite growing concerns about the dangers of untreated insanity, an enlightenment-style democratic optimism characterized the early days of the asylum. In the 1820s and '30s, the most progressive new mental health experts like Thomas Kirkbride, Isaac Ray, Edward Jarvis, and Pliny Earle--who were the prominent theorists and developers of mental institutions--saw their task as radically egalitarian and activist. The asylum-builders acted on a faith that mental health was a universally attainable condition. In the words of Kirkbride: "Every individual, who has a brain is liable to insanity, precisely as everyone with a stomach runs the risk at some period of being a martyr to dyspepsia";(17) and the cure for each should be equally attainable. Strangely enough, though, early psychiatrists found that many of the causes of this somatic insanity rested with disturbances of the social body, rather than the individual one. True, some insanity was thought to result from such physical forces as blows to the head, but many of the disturbing forces were not physical in nature(18)--among them were emotional or mental excess, revolutions, and exposure to religious fanaticism.(19) More generally, as Earle wrote, "there was a constant parallelism between the progress of society and the increase of mental disorders"; and increased opportunities in the Jacksonian period created an increase in "ambition," which Jarvis claimed led many "to aim at that which they cannot reach, to strive for more than they can grasp.... Their mental powers are [thus] strained to their utmost tension."(20)

If the centrifugal forces of antebellum society threatened to undo the minds of individuals, the asylum was there to mend them. As historian David Rothman has it, these isolated communities of the mad and their wardens grew in response to an increasing need in the Jacksonian period for control of loose particles among the population at a time when the country was expanding its frontiers and population dramatically--by settling the West and by a huge increase in immigration--and experiencing drastic changes in the kinds of roles its citizens were expected to play. Rothman's convincing conclusion is that the primary thrust of the early development of the asylum was as a corrective, rather than an alternative, to the increased fluidity of social roles encouraged in the Jacksonian period. The primary task of the asylum was to combat the negative effects of this rapidly accelerating change by restoring the brain to its proper balance through an inculcation of proper work habits and moral values.