Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900

Project Information

MadLand

Grant agreement ID: 101025123

DOI

10.3030/101025123

Project closed

EC signature date 22 March 2021

Start date 15 October 2021

End date 14 October 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 269 002,56

EU contribution

€ 269 002,56

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MadLand (Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900)

Reporting period: 2023-10-15 to 2024-10-14

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The MadLand project investigates literature’s creative reaction to the rigid dividing lines between (hetero)normativity and deviance as established by early psychiatry, then incorporated into the dominant cultural discourse, and still very much debated today. In its transatlantic and interdisciplinary exploration of 19th-century British, French, and US medicine and literature, MadLand demonstrates that in Europe and North America fairy-tale and medical discourses on deviance and abnormality similarly intersected, influencing each other and exchanging knowledge and visual representations.
In the 19th century, writers reworked canonised fairy tales or experimented with fairy-tale settings, characters, motifs, and topoi to represent contemporaneous mental pathologies, psychological abnormalities, and sexual perversions. Focusing on the representation of deviance in fairy-tale narratives as a transnational, transcultural, and translinguistic motif that challenged nationally codified barriers, the overall objectives of MadLand are to expand our understanding of the fairy-tale traditions in 19th-century Britain, France, and the US from a comparative perspective, and to demonstrate how fairy tales contributed to the cultural – and influenced the medical – discourse on abnormality in Europe and North America.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PUBLICATIONS
- Alessandro Cabiati, "Ogresses of Crime Narratives" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), under contract, forthcoming 2025
- Alessandro Cabiati and Lewis Seifert (Eds.), "Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition", a Special Issue of "Marvels & Tales", 39.1 2025 (in print)
- Alessandro Cabiati and Lewis Seifert, ‘Norms and Limits of Fairy-Tale Transgression’, in "Marvels & Tales", 39.1 2025 (in print), pp. 3-10
- Laura Tosi and Alessandro Cabiati (Eds.), "Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present", a Special Issue of "Literature", vols. 3-4, 2024
- Laura Tosi and Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors’, in "Literature", vol. 4, 2024, pp. 22-30
- Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Blue Chambers, Bluebooks, and Contes Bleus: Gothic Terror and Female Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Adaptations of “Bluebeard”', in "Humanities", vol. 12(4), 60, 2023, pp. 1-14
- Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Dreaming (and) Insanity: "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" Through the Looking-Glass of Victorian Psychology’. Under peer review at "Victorian Literature and Culture"

CONFERENCES ORGANIZED
- 06/2023: Alessandro Cabiati and Lewis Seifert, "Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings", Brown University. Keynote Speakers: Maria Tatar, Cristina Bacchilega, Anne E. Duggan, Laura Tosi
- 11/2023: Alessandro Cabiati and Laura Tosi, "Adaptation and the Fairy Tale: Alice Before and After", Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE ADDRESS
- 03/2023: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Marvellous Abnormalities: Fairy Tales, Decadence, and Deviance in the Late Nineteenth Century’, "Decadence and the Fairy Tale", Goldsmiths, University of London

CONFERENCE PAPERS
- 12/2022: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘"We’re all mad here”: l’adattamento di Alice nell’ambito medico-psichiatrico a cavallo tra due secoli (1865-1940)’, "In the Mirror of Alice: The Self and the Other", Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa
- 01/2023: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Gothic Terror and Female Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Adaptations of “Bluebeard”', "Gothic Networks: Webs, Traps, and Global Trends", Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia
- 03/2023: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Magical Maladies: (Dis)Enchanting Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales’, "Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment", Christ Church, University of Oxford
- 10/2023: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘La fiaba al tempo della psichiatria: Approcci metodologici per due discipline (apparentemente) inconciliabili’, "Érase una vez… / …E vissero per sempre", Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
- 11/2023: Alessandro Cabiati, ‘Alice and the Rise of Psychiatry, Before and After’, "Adaptation and the Fairy Tale: Alice Before and After", Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
- Cafoscarinews interviewed the researcher about the MadLand project.
- The international conference "Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition" was enthusiastically reviewed by the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic on their website.
- At Ca’ Foscari the researcher organized, in collaboration with Laura Tosi, a series of 3 methodological seminars for undergraduate students entitled "Rewriting the Fairy Tale: Paths of a Genre between Tradition and Adaptation".
- The recording of the researcher’s keynote talk at Goldsmiths is freely available on the website of the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS).
- The researcher explained the opportunities offered by MSCA at a presentation given at Ca’ Foscari to doctoral students, entitled ‘Postdoctoral Opportunities in Europe’.
- The researcher is currently preparing 5 episodes of a podcast series entitled "Ogresses: from the fairy tale to the serial killer", which will be freely available to download.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PROGRESS BEYOND STATE OF THE ART
The relation between psychology and the fairy tale has almost exclusively been studied from a contemporary psychoanalytic approach, which has attempted to unravel the meanings of fairy-tale imagery and symbols but has largely neglected the historical connections between psychiatric and fairy-tale discourses in Europe and North America. MadLand examines madness and deviance in their 19th-century medical and fairy-tale contexts, breaking new ground on the inter-reactive interplay between psychology and literature that can inform current mono-cultural and mono-disciplinary blind-spots in both fairy-tale research and the history of psychiatry.

EXPECTED RESULTS
MadLand provides the first analysis of the crucial role of early psychiatry in shaping 19th-century literary fairy tales, determining to what extent the conception of medical deviance has been interpreted, adapted, represented, and ultimately subverted in 19th-century fairy tales. This project also analyses the impact of the fairy-tale representation of monstrosity on 19th-century psychology, studying how various forms of abnormality throughout the fairy-tale tradition served as reference for the interpretation and subsequent classification of mental disorders.

POTENTIAL IMPACTS
The cultural and medical debate on what constitutes deviance is as relevant in present times as it was in the 19th century. In its exploration of the emergence of psychological deviance and its representation in 19th-century culture from a comparative viewpoint, MadLand contributes to current discussions on perceived norms and deviations of sexual orientation and gender expression. Specific focus has been given to the following issues: the representation of nonconforming and nonbinary gender identities and expressions, and the questioning of normative notions of masculinity and femininity; gender-specific mental conditions, such as female hysteria, and gender similarities and differences in descriptions of sexual deviations, monstrosity, and abnormality; the construction of female identity in 19th-century culture, and the subversion of expected gender roles and stereotypes in fairy-tale narratives.

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