ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the changing social responses to madness looked at in terms of the metaphor of domestication, comprehending the transition from efforts to tame the wildly asocial to attempts to transform the company of the deranged into at least a facsimile of bourgeois family life. It uses the term "domestic" and its cognates in at least two very different contexts. On the one hand, there is the contrast between the wild and the tame, the sense in which the chapter refers to animals as "domesticated." And on the other hand, there is the reference to the private familial sphere, the environment of the home and one's intimate circle: domestic as contrasted with public life. The chapter choice of the term "domestication" came to seem prescient, for it captured what it argued that the central shift in English views of madness from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.
