Mad Speculation and Mary Girard: Gender, Capitalism, and the Cultural Economy of Madness in the Revolutionary Atlantic

Mad Speculation and Mary GirardGender, Capitalism, and the Cultural Economy of Madness in the Revolutionary Atlantic Brenna Holland (bio) In early 1785, Stephen Girard wrote despairingly to his brother Jean, then in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, "Despite my efforts, if it is not a physical ailment, it is of the mind. I fear to have lost forever the peace which a certain success should procure for life in this world." Writing from Philadelphia, Stephen, a Franco–American merchant, was clearly troubled by limits on his success. But this was no commercial limitation. While many mercantile houses faced failure in the postwar depression of the mid-1780s, Stephen Girard's was not among them. As a merchant, Stephen's ships, and the correspondence and commodities they carried, knit together the ports of the revolutionary Atlantic. Not all of his ventures were successful, but he managed to keep business afloat. Yet, just as he often struggled to control cargoes that crisscrossed turbulent oceans, the tumult that Stephen experienced in the mid-1780s affected him at home. After eight years of marriage, Stephen and his wife Mary's union had begun to deteriorate. Indeed, his primary concern in this letter stemmed from his domestic troubles. Commercial failure was not disturbing Stephen's peace in 1785; the trouble was his wife. By the mid-1780s, Mary had gone mad.1 [End Page 647] From the mid-1780s, when Mary's madness began to creep into her husband's mercantile correspondence, and 1790, when Stephen eventually had Mary confined to Pennsylvania Hospital, Stephen and those around him wrote both directly and indirectly about Mary's affliction. Over these years, Stephen and his correspondents variously described Mary's illness as a "sickness," "ailment," and "discontent" of the mind. Physicians that Stephen consulted in the late 1780s as Mary's disease progressed described her "derangements." More frequently than explicitly mentioning Mary's madness, however, Stephen, his brother, and others discussed her "situation," and their letters expressed general frustration with her actions that they sometimes later attributed to her mental state. Stephen, following recommendations of both family and physicians, employed various treatments for Mary's madness from medications to escapes to the countryside. After half a decade, Stephen finally chose to send his wife to Pennsylvania Hospital, where she remained until her death in 1815. Embedded in this correspondence are the ups and downs, small hopes and great frustrations of how one family handled the mental illness of one of its members.2 This collection of letters also reveals that Stephen and others understood Mary's madness, in part, through concepts borrowed from the market and from the anxieties that the capitalist market generated. Indeed, the collection survives because Stephen would go on to become, according to one study, the fourth-richest man in the United States. Letters that discuss Mary make up a very small portion of this vast archive. As Stephen was an up-and-coming merchant, reporting on Mary's madness was rarely the primary purpose of these letters; most were intended to share news and information regarding mercantile ventures. Unfortunately, Mary's own words, like those of many early American women, do not survive in the historical record. We will never know [End Page 648] precisely what Mary thought about her condition. Nevertheless, despite the dearth of sources, telling Mary's story is both possible and important. Parsing Mary's experience from Stephen's correspondence requires finding the precious bits and pieces that can be gleaned about her illness, while also keeping in mind the original purpose of the letters as the working documents of a merchant. In the case especially of the correspondence between Stephen and his brother Jean in the mid-1780s, almost every letter between the two brothers mentioned Mary's "misfortune"—a telling word choice that cast Mary's mental illness in a term that alluded also to fiscal risk and loss. This mercantile mindset—the meticulous accounting of profits and losses, the chronic anxiety that accompanied placing wealth in ships that crossed oceans, the careful posturing of reputation and credit through correspondence—decisively shaped Stephen's actions toward his wife.3 Indeed, the anxiety that Stephen...