© 2001 by Oxford University Press
The Labyrinth and the Pit
1 University of East London, London
The image of the wandering mind in the seventeenth century is literalized in the association of madness with aimless wandering from place to place: the mad and the melancholy are seen as dislocated from geographical as from social frames, driven to wander about without goal or purpose. The figure of the labyrinth, in which one can wander indefinitely without ever reaching an end, is significant here. Alongside this horizontal axis of wandering along the world's surface, madness is also figured as a downward plunge into the pit of despair. Suicidal urges and religious despair, the sense that one is abject before God, take the language of depth. Looking down into the pit of the self, one sees abasement and monstrosity. This discussion explores the articulation of these images of madness in three autobiographical narrarives of the seventeenth century, all of which are concerned with issues of madness and sanity. The familiar trope of the journey as metaphor for spiritual development is given added force in these narratives by its association with the characteristic behaviour of the mad; similarly the assertion of absolute unworthiness before God, familiar in much spiritual writing of this period and others, appears in extreme form, as an urge to obliterate – to bury – the abject self altogether. An exploration of these motifs raises questions about the history of madness and the ways in which it may be experienced and interpreted in a given culture.