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Marina van Zuylen. Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 238 pp.
Monomania is a rich and compelling study of an often misunderstood condition. First named in early nineteenth-century psychiatric research, monomania was described as an unhealthy obsession that threw an otherwise healthy mind into disarray. Accounts of patients' strange devotion to an idée fixe sparked the popular imagination, which led to the emergence of numerous farfetched strains of the affliction, van Zuylen notes, including the "homicidal monomania" cited in a murder defense.
However, van Zuylen wishes neither to unearth monomania as an odd historical phenomenon, nor to debunk its implausible manifestations. Her interest lies in analyzing monomania as an all too common yearning for absolutes that transcends the nineteenth century and permeates literature, art, and life even today. Her book offers a fascinating philosophical and psychological consideration of the desire to organize one's existence around a stable ideal, and the corresponding anxiety that life is otherwise meaningless or empty. Drawing on various sources-case stuthes, letters, and biographies in addition to fiction, philosophy, and art-van Zuylen illuminates monomania's role in a range of practices and predilections. Myriad idées fixes coalesce around the drive to establish the coherence that life lived freely fails to provide. This desire unites the artist fleeing reality for abstraction, the nineteenth-century housewife seeking a master in her mate, the hypochondriac focusing ever inward on his or her body, and even the academic obsessed with productivity (those of us who have difficulty adhering to...