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VIII. The Madhouse

Essay 1: Hogarth’s Call Out on God

By Thomas McRae '25

William Hogarth was a print maker during the eighteenth century. He was known for being one of the first satirical artists. He would make a collection of prints that told a story to illuminate the sins of social standards in eighteenth century London, England. His collection “A Rake’s Progression” is no exception to his satirical tone. In this collection, we follow Tom Rakewell, the subject character who is “a man of loose morals or a womaniser”, from a life of excess, sex, and endulgence to a debters prison (khanacademy). This decadent fall happens over nine plates or prints, and its mass distribution to several economic classes made it a widely renowned sensation.  

Hogarth uses the first eight plates to satirically exposes the social issues of sex and endulgance through Thomas Rakewell’s bad tendencies. The series begins at Tom’s father’s funeral Many of these images show brothels reminiscent to the decadence showed in the late Roman Empire. Others down the line show newer social flaws such as gambling. In the ninth plate, we see Tom Rake’s demise at debtors prison. I will be focusing on the ninth plate and its relation to death, suffering, and Christianity through the context of Cathrine Malabou’s concept of plasticity.  

Catherine Malabou’s idea of plasticity describes how people deal with traumas, and more specifically the trauma of aging. Her work discusses several questions like “Do we die naturally or violently?”, is aging a process or does it happen through events (Ontology of the Accident, 42). Though there are ways to age in a process or in events, her work illuminates how not being afraid of aging will give more satisfaction in life. This print takes place in a debtors prison. Being in a prison evokes fear of aging and death because of a fear of squandering time. KhanAcademy says, “Tom’s fellow inmates are trying various schemes to get enough money to buy their freedom”, but there are also several inmates who are dealing with faith, specifically Chritianity. Because the debtors are experiencing an event in the concept of plasticity, they are scrambling to find any source of comfort; Hogarth uses this to make a satirical comment on the several missuses of Christianity. 

The first character I will talk about is the man in the cone hat on the right side of the painting. Having experienced an event of aging, he tries to atone for his sins through faith. Hogarth makes puts crosses on his hat and has him hold a cross with three cross beams for satirical purposes. All of his religious gear looks sudo-official because Hogarth is pointing out how people use sudo-Christianity. After a massive aging event, people often jump to Christianity to feel as if they are saved and exempt of sin. This goes against the fundemental concept in Christianity of devout faith, and normally provides the person with a false sense of comfort. We can see that false sense of comfort in the characters facial expression. 

The second character that I will discuss is the man in the room on the far left. He is cowering in fear looking at an illuminated cross. Hogarth satirically exposes another flaw with Christianity with this character. Having entered the debtors prision, this character has experienced a aging event of plasticity. To cope with this trauma, he fears God as if God put him there. Hogarth uses this to expose how people avoid self conviction during aging events by using Christianity and an all powerful God as a scape goat. For the character to get out of debtor’s prison and atone, he has to actually process the event and recover as a human being. By placing all of his blame on God, he will never actually heal himself. 

Though the past two paragraphs sound like a build up to a discussion of Nietzsche, looking at these subjects throught Malabou’s lens of plasticity gives us insight onto the source of decadence. In the fourth section of Malabou’s Onthology of the Accident, she discusses destructive placticity. These are events where people age faster than they should. Malabou discusses how women can age faster because of the social standard of connecting a woman’s beauty to her age. Institutions such as social norms or debtors prisons cause destructive plasticity. When you combine the institutional arisial of traumatic aging events with institutions such as Christianity that can be misinterperated to take away self awarness, decadance arises. This is a historically recurring event. When Rome started to crumble and people could see the end in the future, brothels and excessive drinking occured the most to forget present issues. Hogarth shows how debtor’s prisons and sudo-Christianity created decadence in eighteenth century England. Even now, we see this happening in so many ways. In politics, we live in one of the most divisive times in our history, and the way we deny this aging event is through the wide spread concept that our vote doesnt matter and we can do very little. We are living in a time of racial distress, and the way the majority of the population deals with this aging event is with silence because of their superficial lack of connection to the issue.  

I can say with no denial that as a populus we can all feel the encroachment of our decadent demise. There is so much distress in our nation and our institutions. By looking at Hogarth’s ninth print and understanding the view of destructive plasticity, we can find out how to stop our decadent fall that has taken other nations for all of history. 

Works Cited 

Harland, Sophie. "Hogarth, a Rake's Progression." KhanAcademy, www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/britain-18c/britain-ageof-revolution/a/hogarth-a-rakes-progress. Accessed 20 May 2022. 

Malabou, Catherine, and Carolyn P. T Shread. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. English ed., Cambridge, Polity, 2012. 

Essay 2: A Stagnant Rake in Bedlam 

By Frost Wood '23

In Hogarth’s series “A Rake’s Progress”, a young man’s fall from grace is depicted throughout an eight piece engraving series.  This man is meant to be an example of how the society Hogarth was living in had become decadent.  Hogarth’s depiction concludes with the young man in a mental asylum, surrounded by the symptoms of a stagnant society that put him there.   

William Hogarth lived from 1697-1764 in England as a well-known satirist and engraver.  He satirized the entirety of his society at the time.  He was “respected for his originality, his superb rendering of costume and setting, the accuracy of his vision, his humor, and the humanness of his characters” (Harris).  Due to many people copying his works early in his career, he helped push for the legal rights to works for artists for their own works in a 1734 legislative act, which became popularly known as the “Hogarth Act”.  Just after it came into law, Hogarth released a series called “A Rake’s Progress”, which is an eight piece series that follows a man, Tom Rakewell.  Tom gains a large inheritance and loses it all spectacularly with lavish spending falling into crippling decline.  He also loses his friends, his family, his girlfriend, and eventually his sanity throughout the series. 

The final scene of Hogarth’s series of the rake is titled “Rake in Bedlam”, and it displays Rakewell in the mental institution known as Bethlem hospital.  It is “the closest to an authentic picture that exists of the interior of the Bethlem hospital before the 19th century” (Harris).  Bedlam, also known as Bethlem Royal Hospital, was founded in 1247, and it is renowned as the first mental asylum in England.  Bethlem’s founders intended for it to be a charitable institution to support mentally ill people.  They allowed the public to pay money, and in turn donors could come stay with the patients (in a charitable sense).  In the late seventeenth century, however, it became an attraction for people to view the mentally disabled as “theater of sorts” (Jackson 12).  Records of both mentally ill patients and viewers began to surface.  At the time of Hogarth’s print, “Bethlem governors…struggled throughout the period to keep the practice from degenerating into ‘pure’ entertainment” (Jackson 14).  Hogarth likely saw how normal societal members were beginning to mock the mentally ill, or in his eyes the products of their decaying society.  They were not seeing the irony in their mockery: that they had created the very thing at which they were laughing.   

The philosophical framework of decadence that fits “Rake in Bedlam” is stagnation.  Stagnation’s basics come from having defined structures that decide what is going on in life.  It also means that society is coming to a stagnant position because it is not progressing in ways that it ought to, in the views of a prominent proponent of stagnation like Nietzsche.  Stagnation is a good choice for the eighth segment of Hogarth’s work, “Rake in Bedlam”, because many of the patients in the work are displaying many of the traits of a stagnant society.  In Nietzsche’s words, “to go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society” (Huddleston 92).  This perfectly aligns with the message Hogarth attempts to convey in “Rake in Bedlam”, as Tom has become someone in society who, even having started with so many options, no longer is providing anything to anyone.  In fact, he is relying on all others to even give his life meaning.   

Nietszche would clearly argue that Tom Rakewell’s fall from grace is a classic example of decadence under stagnation.  He argues that a non-decadent individual “guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger” (Huddleston 85).  With Tom, every incident throughout the series has dramatically made him worse off, and he has declined to the point of existing in a mental asylum in the final piece of the series.   

In “Rake in Bedlam”, Hogarth depicts many symptoms of a stagnant society.  One interesting subject that Hogarth has chosen to place dead center of the picture is the naked man in the crown admiring himself in the mirror.  He is in the middle room by himself, completely entranced in his own image that he does not realize is completely ridiculous.  His image, although in a prominent physical portion of the print, is darker than the rest of the image.  This colorization suggests that he is a sign of a society that is unaware of the dark side of their immobilized social structure.   

This man is clearly ridiculous, but he is also being viewed by another subject: two upper-class women visiting the madhouse.  They peer at him from the entrance of the room and appear to have paid to enter the madhouse to view the crazy people for their own amusement.  Here, Hogarth gives an image to the historical context of Bedlam at the time, as mentioned in the background section previously.  The fact that successful people in a society would pay money to make fun of the people that are crazy, like the man in the crown, adheres to the stagnant social structure.  Clearly, Hogarth tries to show people the irony in laughing at what their society has created.  It almost seems as if the man’s door frame is in the shape of a mirror, and Hogarth could be suggesting that the women really should be laughing at themselves.  It does so because the women’s unawareness of the man in the crown directly reflecting their own structures displays a form of decadence that stagnation would dictate.  They do not see that they are equal to the man inside. 

Another subject which displays the stain of stagnation is the man in the room on the far left.  He is entranced by the shimmering light coming through his window, and he simultaneously admires the cross leaning against his wall.  Hogarth means to show that his obsession with believing in God has helped put him in the mental asylum.  He lies on a tiny bed with a dog bowl at his feet, as if to suggest he too is unaware of the places his belief in God has brought him (Harris).  This also aligns with the stagnant framework of decadence, which strongly claims that any sort of system (like organized religion) is bound to make people blind followers and will be bad for them in the long run.  This individual has been blinded by the light of his God to become literally insane.  

Another man in the center who strikes the eye is the man looking through the empty roll behind Tom and the nurses.  He appears to be admiring the stars, although they are inside a building and he is looking towards the stairs.  This suggests, again, that the man has no idea of what is going on or the society that has made him so insane. 

VIII. The Madhouse