Crazy Jane Hats and Maria Medallions: Consuming, Collecting and Containing Love’s Madness

This chapter questions what it meant for women to buy, collect, wear, display or gift objects linked to ‘love’s madness’ in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. These years saw painters, printmakers, dramatists and musicians celebrate a roster of female characters driven mad by disappointed love. Subsequently, a multitude of fashionable accessories and domestic goods that depicted love-mad women became available to consumers. With women enthusiastically assimilating love-mad objects into their personal assemblages, it became fashionable to allude to, and be associated with, the emotional states and elite ideals that milder forms of madness came to evoke.

Connecting themes of health, fashion and art, this chapter explores this phenomenon by focusing on several material items in detail: including belt buckles and pieces of jewellery that depicted Laurence Sterne’s Maria of Moulines and the ‘Crazy Jane Hat’. Drawing upon a range of visual, literary and documentary evidence, it questions whether these objects served as public markers of sociability or of the wearer’s emotional expressivity. In characterising these items as containers for an array of feelings and fears connected to mental ill-health, the chapter demonstrates that the putatively harmless condition of ‘love’s madness’ had more powerful psychological effects than scholars have previously acknowledged.