Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Madness” is associated with magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The term “madness” stigmatizes and denigrates people with psychological illnesses, so it is seldom used today. However, “madness” and “mad” appear 121 times total in the novel, a stylistic decision on Clarke’s part that reflects the importance of this term in the advancement of the novel’s primary themes. In the 18th-century literature and culture that inspired Clarke, “madness” means something beyond psychological illness. There are several figures labeled as “mad” in the book—George III, Jonathan Strange at one point, Emma Pole, and Stephen Black. In all three examples, what counts as “madness” is the disruption of the social order. Historically, George III did have periods in his life when he was unable to govern, likely because of a psychological illness. In the novel, his mental state is the result of the magic of the man with the thistle-down hair. Clarke relies on the “madness” of the king to show the disruption of the boundary between the magical and mundane worlds.

In a deeper continuation of the theme, Jonathan Strange willingly makes himself “mad” by experimenting with home-brewed psychedelics made from a tincture of ground-up mouse. His first experiments with the tincture make him fearful of everything, but subsequent doses make him “cooler, calmer, less troubled. […] Doors slammed in his mind and he went wandering off into rooms and hallways inside himself that he had not visited in years” (646). Clarke represents this altered state as one that helps Strange slough off unhelpful habits of thinking and acting. Because he is a magician, his internal states alter the world outside; his “madness” is therefore dangerous because it subverts the natural order.

The “madness” of Emma Pole and Stephen Black serves as a social critique. Before her “madness,” Emma Pole is a docile, ailing woman whose entire purpose is to cure Walter Pole’s indebtedness. When she dies before that can happen, Pole finally accepts Norrell’s help, proving that all of his objections to magic’s lack of respectability can be overcome by self-interest. When Lady Pole attempts to kill Norrell, her actions are also dismissed as “madness,” but there is an argument to be made that killing him is the surest way to free herself from the enchantment. Once freed, she is energized and vocal about men’s mistreatment of women. She includes Jonathan Strange as a target for her vengeance because “[b]y his negligence and cold, masculine magic he has betrayed the best of women, the most excellent of wives!” (789). Her “madness” thus becomes an avenue to empowerment.

Emma Pole and Stephen Black are under the same enchantment and deal with the same phenomenon, but no one notices Stephen’s difficulties because a “butler has his work and must do it. [….] Symptoms that were raised to the dignity of an illness in Lady Pole were dismissed as mere low spirits in Stephen” (182). Stephen’s “madness” while under the spell of the fairy also allows him to see just how greatly the Pole family has wronged him, starting with the death of his mother, an enslaved woman who perished in a “dark, fusty hold” (795) of a ship in which she was imprisoned en route from Jamaica to England. (Slavery ended in England just a year prior to the events of the novel but persisted in England’s colonies for decades more.) Stephen never leaves the magical world where Lost-hope is located, likely because ‘[h]e was not English; he was not African. He did not belong anywhere” (571). By staying “mad,” Stephen finds a liminal space where he can be fully himself. Thus, the fact of Stephen Black and Emma Pole’s “madness” allows Clarke to address issues of class, race, and gender in the 19th-century England she invents.