MAX BYRD
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century, whenever one writer or another wishes to point to a moral like
Hogarth or to underscore the awareness so widespread in the period of
the difference between reasonable men and brutal, impulsive animals.
The whorehouse works as the same kind of repository for failed human
beings: a punishment for imprudence, but also a place of secret
transaction between outwardly virtuous men and the women who both
serve and represent their animal passions. In apparent contrast, con–
vents are intended to stand as retreats from such passion, or at the very
least as places where the pulsations of irrationality can be controlled.
But the convents that crowd the Gothic and sentimental novels of the
last quarter of the century subvert this pious image time and again,
with massive revelations of hypocrisy and with outbursts of sensuality
that are somehow intensified by isolation. ("Madam," Samuel John–
son pointedly remarked
to
an abbess, "you are here, not for the love of
virtue, but the fear of vice.") We may even come to feel along with
Diderot and the Marquis de Sade that dissolute monks and nuns lash
their charges, literally, in an effort to make manifest human wicked–
ness, to bring it out, as much as to thwart it. To the outward eye, then,
the winds of Aeolus himself are not more securely confined in their
mountainous cave than the violent irrationalities of these three pris–
ons. But what we see paradoxically in every case is constant traffic,
unflagging and often obsessive, between the great world of Enlighten–
ment society and the smaller, darker world of unreason that society
denounces and yet secretly visits.
"It
may suffice to tell you for the present," Daniel Defoe writes in
the
Review
of a young heiress abducted to a private madhouse:
they kept her bound Hand and Foot in her Bed, such a one as it was,
and ty'd
to
the Bed Post for several Days, reduc'd
to
strange Extrem–
ity, beat and pinch'd her by cruel and barbarous wretches called
Nurses, and forc'd nauseous Draughts down her Throat, which they
call'd
Physick,
and which she, being apprehensive they design 'd her
Destruction, and might poyson her,
refus'd;
but they forc'd her
Mouth open with Iron Instruments, and pour'd into her, what they
thought fit, wounding her very much with their Violence and
Inhumanities.
Even the most casual reader will respond
to
the titillations in Defoe's
account, the erotic overtones of Beauty and the Beast that make it
sound like an eighteenth-century version of
The Story of
O. Defoe, of
course, would describe it as journalism, a plea for reform of a wide–
spread social evil in contemporary London; but as so often happens in
