The female malady women madness and engl 45

Domesticating Insanity

33

of the successful application of nonrestraint. 29 In the 1830s and 1840s,
the nonrestraint system
well,

was put

which housed nearly

made

it

a

into practice

by John Conolly at Hanit was Conolly who

thousand patients, and

"a world-known success." 30 By 1854, twenty-seven of the thirty

county asylums had adopted the new method, and nonrestraint became
the symbol of Victorian psychiatric leadership.
straint," Sir
first

among

"The

Benjamin Ward Richardson proclaimed,
all

abolition of re.

has placed us

.

the nations as physicians of mental disease." 31

Ultimately, the goal of moral
the prospect of cure

was

management was

to cure insanity,

new asylum

the major attraction of the

niques. Conolly's vision of the reformed asylum
tribute to the

".

power of moral management

was

to bring

the

and

tech-

most eloquent

about general social

peace:

Calmness

will

come; hope

will revive; satisfaction will prevail.

unmanageable tempers, some violent or

sullen patients, there

Some
must

always be; but much of the violence, much of the ill-humour, almost
all

the disposition to meditate mischievous or fatal revenge, or self-

destruction, will disappear.

.

.

.

Cleanliness and decency will be main-

tained or restored; and despair itself will sometimes be found to give

place to cheerfulness or secure tranquillity.

This therapeutic optimism had clear

32

affinities

with the mid- Victorian

and expansion, no

belief in progress; in a period of British prosperity

conquest seemed impossible.
All of the promises and expectations of Victorian psychiatry centered

on the asylum. By controlling the lunatic's environment down to the
last detail, doctors and administrators hoped to make the new public
asylums instruments as well as places of therapy; the building itself was
a "special apparatus for the cure of lunacy." Reformers

asylums that would

reflect

also those domestic values celebrated in Victorian fiction
"fitting receptacles"

would

The concept of moral

dreamed of

not only the best of Victorian medicine but

truly be refuge, retreat,

and

art;

these

and home. 33

architecture shaped the vast

new

enterprise of

asylum construction. Victorian psychiatrists gave endless thought to
asylum location, interior design, and decor. Conolly's book The Construction

and Government of Lunatic Asylums (1847) missed no

might be relevant to the patients' comfort and

detail that

care, describing not

only

the dimensions, materials, and organization of the model asylum but