Insanity in the Works of W.G. Wills

The chapter aims at a re-evaluation of the works of a once famous and now largely forgotten Victorian playwright, William Gorman Wills. Wills was once largely considered the most eminent poetic dramatist of the Victorian age, but the majority of his works are now forgotten, mostly due to the Ibsenist theatrical trends that came into full swing shortly after his death. His widely reported desultory working habits, his tendency to hoarding, and mood swings, which even his contemporaries struggled to define within the boundaries of the Victorian byword, “eccentricity”, clearly point to a constant struggle with crippling mental issues. The chapter focuses on Juanna and The Love That Kills to highlight how Wills explores, with deep sympathy and no trace of idealization or recurse to literary stereotypes, the dynamics of female and masculine mental disorders, the latter theme especially tabooed by the Victorian cult of masculinity and all-pervasive Carlylean anti-Werterism.