Goodman, H (2015) 'A dream of demon heads and savage eyes': traumatic violence and the body in Dickens's 'Barnaby Rudge'. In: Postgraduate Medical Humanities Conference 2015, 20 - 21 July 2015, University of Exeter, UK.
Abstract
Informed by nineteenth-century developments in psychiatric theory and intense debates about lunacy and criminal responsibility, this paper investigates the trauma which violence inflicts on minds and bodies in Charles Dickens's relatively unpopular early novel, "Barnaby Rudge" (1841), published in the wake of a regicide attempt. In particular, this paper focuses on the embodiment of trauma in heads and eyes, arguing that Dickens uses these body parts to pinpoint sites of psychological damage. During the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 the streets of London bore witness to unprecedented scenes of violence, with chapels and houses ripped apart and burned, and tangled human bodies torn 'limb from limb' like wooden sticks by a furious, often drunk, and sometimes psychopathically violent raging mob under the leadership of a diminutive, hereditarily insane Scottish aristocrat. Dickens draws on historical reports of these events to represent crowd scenes with heavy use of barbaric imagery - 'coarse faces,' 'demon heads and savage eyes' drenched in dirt and blood. This paper uses three characters as case studies to investigate Dickens's representation of psychiatric conditions...
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