Redheaded Women, Victorian Psychiatry and Hypnotism (Part 2): Facts and Popular Fiction

By Gordon Bates, Historian in Residence, Royal College of Psychiatrists and Janette Leaf, Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck College, University of London

Redheaded women experience some of the stereotypes attributed to redheaded men that we described in the last blog. They too can be fearsome warriors or tempestuous leaders like Boudicca or Queen Elizabeth I. Where the women differ from their male counterparts is that their hot-headedness is frequently imagined to be mirrored by an overheated sexuality and irresistible allure. In the nineteenth century, this manifests itself in semi-clad paintings of Mary Magdalen or in Pre-Raphaelite art filled with convention-defying women sporting loosened fiery locks. Other good indicators of how redheaded women were viewed at that time can be found in its popular fiction.

Jules Lefebvre, Mary Magdalen in the Cave. (1876) Oil on canvas. Public domain. Hermitage Museum. St. Peterburg.

Late-Victorian authors who create a female protagonist with red hair, particularly one with blue eyes, are drawing on perceived stereotypical behaviour patterns, hinting at Celtic heritage, and signalling difference. As we previously discussed in relation to red-headed men, fewer than 0.17% possess this hair and eye colour combination. It is virtually non-existent in Africa and Asia, but present in significant numbers in countries such as Scotland and Ireland. When all eye colours are included in the statistics, the incidence of redheads rises to approximately 3% of the global population, again with an uneven geographical distribution. A nineteenth-century writer is not of course anticipating the recent genome-wide study of recessive traits. What they are doing is drawing on contemporaneous scientific knowledge diffused into general knowledge and blending this with long-held cultural associations about redheads being rare, hot-headed, and untameable.

Given their supposed rebelliousness and innate defiance, redheads might be thought to be impervious to mesmerism and hypnotism, the nineteenth-century’s mystical preoccupation. However, some medical writers like Arthur Conan Doyle believed that Celtic blood carried with it increased psychic sensitivity and vulnerability to hypnotism (Wynne, 2009). Richard Marsh incorporates these conflicting positions into his 1898 novel The House of Mystery, written at a time when hypnotism and particularly medical hypnotism was in vogue. In 1895, the British Medical Journal was referring to the use of hypnotism even in a psychiatric context as “the new witchcraft”. Many spiritualist mediums who used hypnotism to access and give voice to the spirits of the dead were redheads. The most famous early text on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum (1487) identifies practitioners as having red hair and green eyes.

John Everett Millais. The Bridesmaid (1851) Fitzwilliam, Cambridge. Oil on panel. Public domain. Jean Veber, Les Sorcières ou Tandem (1900) Public domain.

Marsh’s The House of Mystery features Aaron Lazarus who uses his hypnotic skills against two redheaded doppelgangers, impoverished Madeleine Orme, and aristocratic Maud Dorrincourt. The women are identical in appearance yet display markedly different reactions to being hypnotised. Maud, naturally blessed with a marvellous singing voice, kicks against the prospect of an arranged marriage. Madeleine is inveigled into impersonating her to save a noble house from ruination. When Lazarus forces Maud under his psychic control, he silences her singing, parasitises her supreme vitality, and revels in his absolute dominion over this epitome of wilfulness. “I will soak you in the ocean of my will; I will impregnate you with my own personality; absorb you in myself. There will be left to you no individuality, no separate existence, no instincts of your own” (244). Compare this with the words of British medical hypnotist Sir Francis Cruise who advises physicians considering hypnotism: “You must learn to dominate by your will-power, those whom you treat.” He abuses Maud mentally and physically and renders her an automaton capable of attempted murder. Madeleine might initially present as more malleable than her double, but when Lazarus directs his “baleful orbs” (160) on her, they have no effect.

Marsh’s Maud and Madeleine are redheads against whom hypnotism is directed, but Wilkie Collins’s Lydia Gwilt, the redheaded anti-heroine of Armadale (1864-1866), is one who herself bewitches. Indeed, cultural historians Brenda Ayres and Sarah Maier suggest her magnetic power seems primarily to reside in her hair (Ayres and Maier, 84). Lydia, in accordance with female redhead tropes, is impetuous, forceful, and in possession of an intense sexual allure, which is why her mind control tends only to work on men inspiring an almost slavish obeisance.

Lydia ultimately meets her doom in a private mental asylum when she becomes imbricated in a plot involving a charlatan who has purchased medical qualifications and is now operating under the alias of Doctor Le Doux, a specialist in the treatment of “nervous invalids” (573). At his psychiatric practice cum residential “sanitarium” he awaits patients with his galvanic apparatus, laudanum, and locked rooms into which he has the facility to pump gaseous drugs: “we live in an age when nervous derangement (parent of insanity) is steadily on the increase; and in due time the sufferers will come” (576). Appearing to be on the verge of a breakdown, Lydia voluntarily becomes an inmate and, as Le Doux’s first patient, is paraded in front of his potential clients as an advertisement. When they have gone, he provides her with the impetus and the means to murder Armadale, the man who could expose both of their fraudulent activities, and whom they trick into spending the night on the premises. When Lydia discovers she has inadvertently misdirected poison gas at her beloved husband, she drags him to safety and commits suicide. Le Doux receives a testimonial from the medical community as to his integrity and his ability.

The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of licenced private madhouses, and Le Doux circumvents the laws governing them by claiming to run a sanitarium. He is careful not to fall foul of the “Commissioners in Lunacy” (602) or be quizzed too closely on who has been committed and why. Catherine Peters, the editor of the Oxford University Press edition suggests that Le Doux was loosely based on the renowned Doctor John Conolly, a respectable Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, who ran a small, private, ladies’ asylum for over twenty years and published on The Treatment of the Insane in 1856 (Peters, xv). As a writer of sensation fiction, Collins inevitably distorts for dramatic effect.

Both Collins and Marsh offer portrayals of the collision of female redheads with Victorian psychiatry or with hypnotism, the first form of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, in The House of Mystery and Armadale combined, only one of the three flame-haired women emerges with mind and body intact!

Bibliography

• Ayres, Brenda and Sarah E. Maier, A Vindication of the Redhead: The Typology of Red Hair throughout the Literary and Visual Arts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
• Collins, Wilkie, Armadale (Oxford UP, 1989).
  
• Conolly, John, The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856).
  
• Hart, Ernest, “Review of Trilby”, British Medical Journal (16 November 1895), reprinted in Hypnotism, Mesmerism and the New Witchcraft (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 206-10.
  
• Hughes, William, That Devils, Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2018). 
  
• Marsh, Richard, The House of Mystery (London: F. V White & Co., 1898).
  
• Parry-Jones, William The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1972).
  
• Peters, Catherine, “Introduction”, in Wilkie Collins, Armadale (Oxford UP, 1989), vii-xxii.
  
• Wynne, Catherine, “Introduction” in The Parasite and The Watter’s Mou. ed by Catherine Wynne (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2009), vii-xxxvii.

Dr Janette Leaf is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London who specialises in fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction and is currently researching representations of redheaded women in the late-nineteenth century and neo-Victorian imaginings of that period.