Edit: Thanks for your patience, everyone. I hope you will enjoy my answer: please scroll further down the page to find what became many hours of research for your amusement and edification.

Could you please give some examples of the texts you mean? For example, a lot of research has been done on the trope of the "madwoman in the attic" trope and hysteria, which was a medical diagnosis of the time primarily, but not exclusively, applied to women. This is the 19th century novel madness that I'm most familiar with. The classic study on this is the aptly titled The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from 1979. I actually just gave a presentation about Silas Weir Mitchell, the so-called "rest cure," and representations of female insanity in 19th century literature, but I'd like a confirmation that this is the sort of thing you're talking about before I delve in, for fear that I might be off-base. (Another possible contender for "madness" is the sudden shock that characters suffer that changes them completely in some books, such as what happens to Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House or Mr. Hale in North and South. You might also be thinking of the kind of "madness" that Ben Gunn suffers from in Treasure Island, or the insanity of characters in Edgar Allan Poe's stories.)

I should also note that our contemporary understanding of psychology really can't be read onto an artifact of the past. At most, we can say that today what was diagnosed/described one way might be diagnosed as a certain disorder. Also, the way that madness is represented in a fictional story is not necessarily reflecting actual medical understanding, but as a literary device is serving some other purpose.

(part 1 of 3)

We have to be very careful about making modern diagnoses of disorders of the past, and doubly so when dealing with fictional characters. The diseases the characters are depicted as suffering from are, after all, not drawn from medical observation but from the author’s understanding of mental health as it is represented by contemporary science and medicine. Therefore, the illnesses of the characters reveal more about how many Victorians imagined the female mind and body than they do about actual disorders. It is possible to make tentative links between what we see in the novels, Victorian medical science, and today’s understanding of the mind, and I will briefly try to do that, but we must keep in mind that these are fictional characters created by authors reproducing contemporary ideas about how proper and disordered female minds work.

As we usually do when starting to talk about the Victorian era, let’s talk about the cultural role of women. The shorthand we commonly use to talk about the separation of the sexes (the concepts of sex and gender were undivided in the Victorian imagination) is that, while men could move in the public or commercial sphere, women were limited to the domestic sphere, where the “Angel in the House” was expected to create a safe, peaceful, loving, and nurturing atmosphere for her husband and children. This home life was represented as a cure for the corrupting influence of work, since middle class Victorians rising up the social ladder had to contend with older notions that working for one’s money (as opposed to earning “rents” from one’s properties, as the gentry and aristocracy did) has a tendency to make one grasping, greedy, and vicious. As the middle class gained property and prestige in the course of the 18th and 19th century through trade, banking, industry, etc., they made an argument that they had more moral authority than the traditional elite. The middle class did this by increasingly representing work as ennobling and morally uplifting, while they depicted the aristocracy as lazy, decadent, and debauched. The infamous court of the Prince Regent, later George IV, who had several illegitimate children and ran up debts in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, was a favorite target. In this way, the idea of work was being transformed in the Victorian imagination, but it was still feared that contact with the world of commerce would cause one to turn into a—well, a Scrooge: a hard, cruel, heartless miser interested only in profit. In the contemporary imagination, the Victorian man’s best defense against this was his wife, in whose tender hands the peaceful home was an oasis of healing away from the dirty, greedy world of commerce. I write this to show the immense pressure on women to behave according to strict gender roles: to be dutiful, patient, passive, loving, self-sacrificing, and immaculate. To be all of these things was seen as not only good and proper but natural, the healthy state of a woman’s body and mind. To not be those was not only a personal failure but a disorder.

We will be awhile, since we haven’t even gotten to madness yet, so tell your servant to bring you up a cup of tea. Before we do get to madness, I have to touch on two factors related to this separation of spheres: female sexuality and female creativity. To the Victorian patriarchy, a woman’s active sexual enjoyment was a source of horror. Among other things, it suggested that a woman might desire sex outside of those occasions when her husband did, which might lead her into any number of scandalous pursuits. A common trope in 19th century pornography was that a meek and virtuous virgin, once raped, finds that she loves sex and wants to have it with any man she meets (see as an example 1828’s The Lustful Turk). While unmarried Victorian women and wives were expected to be beautiful sexual objects, for them to actually enjoy sex was thought to lead to infidelity and even abandoning marriage for a life as a kept mistress or prostitute (it was a common trope that prostitutes were morally degraded women whose love of sex led them to that profession). When it comes to writing, many Victorian men held that women simply could not create literature. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar quote Gerard Manley Hopkins equating the writer’s pen with a mighty penis, as well as Rufus Wilmot Griswold (today known chiefly as Poe’s frenemy and rival) writing that some men might be fooled into thinking that a woman has literary skill when she is just pouring her overflowing female emotions onto the page… and he wrote this in his intro to a book of poetry by female poets. Gilbert and Gubar extensively quote women writers grappling with being smothered and silenced, struggling with the pervasive notion that to write was to transgress what it supposedly meant to be a good woman, to enter a world where, they were told, they had no place and no skill. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1931 in her essay “The Angel of the House,” “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” Gilbert and Gubar phrase their summary of this so well that I will quote them at length:

Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy, however, she must come to terms with the image on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her ‘inconstancy’ and—by identifying her with the ‘eternal types’ they themselves have invented—to possess her more thoroughly. Specifically, as we will try to show here, a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her. … [T]he images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ have been so ubiquitous throughout literature by men that they have also pervaded women’s writing to such an extent that few women have definitely ‘killed’ either figure. Rather, the female imagination has perceived itself, as it were, through a glass darkly: until quite recently the woman writer has had (if only unconsciously) to define herself as a mysterious creature who resides behind the angel or monster or angel/monster image … (16-17)

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