ENGL 292H, "Brontës", Southeastern Louisiana University, Summer 2024

This painting is called Pinel, médecin en chef de La Salpêtrière, délivrant des aliénés de leurs chaînes. It depicts Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) releasing female inmates of the Salpêtrière asylum from their chains in 1795. Pinel was a reformer who advocated for more humane treatment of the insane. Showalter’s main aim in “The Female Malady” was to depict the unfair treatment of women in the nineteenth century and to show that patriarchal standards of how a woman should act resulted in a large percentage of women being locked away for being “insane.” The left side of this…

This is a portrait called Charles Lloyd, named after the English poet from the Romantic period. Although he was quite mentally unstable and spent years of his life in and out of insane asylums, poets of the period still considered him a poetic genius, according to Burwick in Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Lloyd became productive as a poet when he “entered on a period of relative health” which he “attributed . . .  to the healing effect of a performance by W. C. Macready in a stage…