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The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb

The Mary Lamb who was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" has not received much purchase in the Lamb biographies or literary criticism to date. That this should be so is understandable. The silence that surrounded the facts of Lamb's madness until after she died in 1847was partiallygrounded in what Katherine Anthony calls a "conspiracy" by the Lamb family and literary friends to repress, for Lamb's sake, the gruesome events of that afternoon of 22 September 1796 when she stabbed her mother Elizabeth to death with a carving knife. Anthony says that the silence held for so long that "it almost causes one a shock to findJohn Hollingshead saying in his Memoirs in 1895 that Mary murdered her mother."1 Out of this silence developed the idealized portrait of Lamb as the most reasonable of women who by a "temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene" than her brother's, guided him and protected him with her almost legendary "practical mind."2 Henry Fuseli may have broken this silence with his sketch of a woman, arm raised, stiletto poised in her right hand, a leg of a deer in her left. Her face wears a dark expression of frenzied delight as it looks out past the frame of the picture; behind her a male face gasps in apparent horror. Visible sketches of previous positions of the woman's hand holding the knife give the picture an eerie quality of movement, as though we can see the hand with the knife move across the woman's chest toward her victim. At the top of the sketch, close to the head of the woman, an inscription in an unknown hand reads "Mary Anne Lamb."3 In Mad Women and Romantic Writing, Philip Martin notes that if Lamb's violent figure haunts the Romantic period in the way that Fuseli's sketch suggests it did, then this terrifying figure not only breaches early-nineteenth-century decorum, but also