SOURCE: "The Aesthetics of Madness," in Madness in Literature, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 247-78.

In the following excerpt, Feder explicates Aurélia as a work depicting madness as a process of self-creation and discovery for Nerval

The Aesthetics of Madness

The extremes of Gérard de Nerval's individual transformation of certain Romantic modes, like Nietzsche's, make his work, especially his prose, anomalous within its literary and historical period. Except for this characteristic, which seems a peculiar modernism, the two writers are utterly different, even in their visionary grandiosity. Despite the narcissistic isolation to which Nietzsche considers himself consigned as the last adherent of instinctual release in a repressive and decadent society, his concept of Dionysiac frenzy is a social one, a reformer's vision. But the madness that Nerval describes as his own experience has little to do with social or psychic reformation; it is an interpretation of the...