Diana Peschier.  Lost Souls: Women, Religion and Mental Illness in
the Victorian Asylum.  London  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.  233 pp. 
$115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78831-807-5.

Reviewed by Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College)
Published on H-Disability (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

Elaine Showalter's _The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English
Culture, 1830-1980 _(1985) inaugurated an enduring legacy of feminist
inquiry into the gendering of mental illness since the Victorian era.
Linking the history of medicine with approaches in cultural studies
and gender studies, Showalter and other scholars such as Nancy
Theriot, Roy Porter, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Jane Ussher
have traced the development of the madwoman figure in relation to
developing medical discourses attempting to frame womanhood in terms
of pathology, as well as the institutionalization of women on the
basis of mental illness. Diana Peschier's _Lost Souls: Women,
Religion, and Mental Illness _contributes to this critical tradition
by turning to case histories of "mad" Victorian women incarcerated in
major British asylums such as Colney Hatch Asylum and the City of
London Lunatic Asylum. In her analysis of extensive archival
resources, she attends specifically to religious discourse as not
only the clinical language of medical practitioners but also the
vocabulary by which women described their intimate experiences of
mental illness.

Peschier's study challenges more reductive historical narratives of
the Victorian period as witnessing the secular rise of professional
medicine and the advancement of medical theory and practice. On the
contrary, Peschier emphasizes the centrality of spirituality and
faith discourses in the debates over madness and women's mental
health that would culminate in the development of psychology and
psychiatry as specialized fields. Rather than strictly used by
patients to make sense of their symptoms, the language of religion
was equally used by physicians, who diagnosed conditions like
"religious excitement" alongside other gendered illnesses like
hysteria or frigidity. Religion did not totally give way to secular
modernity as it filtered through to scientific thinking as the means
of understanding and policing women's bodies in conjunction with
conduct manuals and Sunday school education for children. As Peschier
argues through her close readings of casebooks, children's
literature, novels, and medical treatises, the intertwining of gender
and madness was enmeshed in Christian evangelicalism that coexisted
with wider cultural fascinations with the occult.

Importantly, the archival research that Peschier offers recenters the
lived experience of Victorian madwomen rather than focusing solely on
their representations or metaphorization in popular fiction. Peschier
reads a moving set of personal accounts by women that document their
harrowing experiences of asylum life and their difficult navigation
through social and medical structures meant to control their
behaviors. Their loss of autonomy and agency, Peschier suggests, cuts
across class as medical men consistently attempted to naturalize
mental illness as inherent to womanhood. Yet surprisingly absent in
Peschier's discussion is a more nuanced discussion of gender; the
study takes for granted "female," "woman," "male," and "man" as
stable categories in this period when the very sources Peschier
explores raise provocative questions about the contested
constructions of gender vis-à-vis medical and religious discourses.
Given significant turns in Victorian scholarship toward queer and
trans studies, the absence of such a reflection feels all the more
glaring. The consequences of this absence become particularly clear
in the book's brief final chapter, on male asylum patients, which
felt disconnected from the book's purported emphasis on women's
experience. Without stronger framing and connections with her
previous claims, this chapter felt like a significant missed
opportunity to theorize the substantial differences between these two
archival resources that demonstrate how madness becomes gendered.
Here, Peschier fails to grapple with the ethical implications of how
and why men's experiences of madness and institutionalization differ
so greatly from women's experiences, especially along the lines of
race, privilege, power, and access during the height of British
Empire.

Peschier prefaces her study with a brief reflection on the politics
surrounding the use of "madness" or "madwoman," labels which may read
as anachronistic or pejorative to contemporary audiences. While she
offers a historicist justification for using "madness" as the term
widely used in the Victorian period, she entirely bypasses robust
scholarly conversations focused on mental disability and cognitive
difference ongoing in the fields of disability studies and mad
studies. The feminist recovery project of _Lost Souls _resonates
powerfully with the activist impetus of recent disability
scholarship. This work attends more closely to the lived experiences
of mentally disabled people in history. By refusing narratives that
tend to reduce disabled people to their bodyminds, such work
depathologizes madness and cognitive difference. The diverse texts
Peschier examines in _Lost Souls _compose a rich, understudied
resource that will continue to yield valuable insights into
religion's formative role in historical frameworks of cognitive
difference in Western contexts and prehistories of what disability
scholars and activists have called neurodiversity.

Citation: Travis Chi Wing Lau. Review of Peschier, Diana, _Lost
Souls: Women, Religion and Mental Illness in the Victorian Asylum_.
H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55318

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