Session 3: Women’s Madness Narratives
2nd Global Conference
Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Breaking the Boundaries of Madness ~ Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City
Shu-ming Hung
English Studies, Durham University, United Kingdom
In this essay, I analyze Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, to see how one experiences psychological breakdown and breakthrough, under the pressure of the outer world and conflict of the inner self. The Four-Gated City, backgrounded in the post-war period, in the atmosphere of cold-war, is about a female version of the modernist idea of the Flâneur. Leaving her family that settled in Africa, the female protagonist, Martha comes to London to look for a new world, free from racial and class prejudice in her mind. However, she still feels confined within this city.
At the first part, I adopt R.D. Laing’s idea about schizophrenia to discuss how Martha tries to be her real self in this new environment. Laing attempts to move away from the prevalent psychiatric model which understood schizophrenia as a brain dysfunction and towards a phenomenological approach. Martha develops a kind of “false self” to react against people around her. When she wanders around the city, she experiences physically “unembodied” to transcend the limitation of the outer world and reach spiritual freedom. However, she still cannot find a balance between her responsibility and freedom.
At the second part, by object-relations theory, I analyze how Martha explores her inner self through the help of others, especially Lynda. Accused of being mentally ill for years, Lynda also refuses to take her roles as a mother and a wife, like Martha. They realize people are under restrictions of different kinds of machinery. The hallucination diagnosed by doctors becomes their abilities to hear others’ minds and communicate with others without words. They find other ways to connect with people.
The prophetic ending provides a new vision which is beyond human’s recognition of a normal world. It gives people another way to cross the boundaries among self, body and the world.
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“The Perennial Other:” Eighteenth Century Women Writers and the Developing Discourse of Madness
Michelle Iwen
Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Historically, the long 18th century has been viewed as an age of reason propelled by Enlightenment values. In terms of the development of the psychiatric profession, the cusp of Foucault’s “Classical Age” saw the transition from religious fervor in the routing of witches and heretics to the more widely accepted belief in the witch as madperson. As the madhouse trade expanded, so too did the numbers of those confined within public and private madhouses. The beginning of this population explosion of lunacy can be illustrated with the number of confined patients: at the end of the 18th century there were only a few thousand people confined for madness, yet by 1900, the number was nearly 100,000. Thus it was the local community that drove the move to confine the mad, rather than the authorities, permanently altering the previously established familiar care system.
Another move behind the shift toward confinement during the classical age was the change in the image of madness itself. With the development of reason as the proper state of humanity, unreason became anathema. Until 1770, madhouses such as Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital were tourist attractions with many English families spending a day at the asylum to observe in close quarters the spectacle that was madness. The great move toward confinement began focusing more on the incarceration of women and the specific problem of their bodies as newly sexualized beings. Prior to the 18th century, the Galenic, one-sex model dominated both medical and social discourse. The idea of the woman as a flawed man was proven by woman’s inverted male genitals. As Laqeuer suggests, during the eighteenth century “as the natural body itself became the gold standard of social discourse, the bodies of women – the perennial other – thus became the battleground for redefining the ancient, intimate, fundamental social relation: that of woman to man.”
The problem with the study of the history of psychiatric confinement is not that lacks good scholarship but that the extant scholarship is focused too narrowly on its height during the 19th century neglecting the important and overlooked temporal beginning of the trend in the 18th century. It is in this period that the United Kingdom witnessed the steady yet exponential rise in the number of madhouses and those confined, culminating with the traumas of gender-biased confinement of the 19th century and leading inevitably to the reform movement. Even such influential feminist works as Phyllis Chessler’s Women and Madness focus primarily on the 19th century, neglecting the cultural and social conditions which prompted this trend in favor of the more sensational personal stories of women confined. My analysis is intended to rectify this issue while utilizing feminist and queer theory and Michel Foucault’s seminal works The History of Sexuality, Madness and Civilization, and Discipline and Punish as theoretical foundations.
Focusing on a selection of 18th century women writers, I place their writing-about-madness within the psychiatric and social discourse of the period.
Can Writing Help to Heal? Therapeutic Value of Women’s Madness Narratives
Katarzyna (Kasia) Szmigiero
University of Jan Kochanowski, Poland and Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz, Poland
Among all types of texts belonging to life-writing, illness narratives constitute a unique category. They compliment the evident lack of human element in contemporary biomedical discourse. Medicine focuses its attention on disease and its treatment neglecting how an individual’s life is changed as a result of the illness, how one’s professional and private activities, ambitions and social interactions are modified, what consequences it has on the quality of life and one’s self esteem. Since mental illness is probably the most stigmatizing of all medical complaints madness narratives stand out among other illness tales as their authors offer insight and attempt to reveal their inner suffering, justify their choices and seemingly incomprehensible actions, and reclaim their humanity. Numerous works of literature address the issue how it feels to lose one’s mind and what effort and courage it takes to try to win it back.
Madness narratives not only offer an insight glimpse into the experience of mental illness but clearly serve a therapeutic purpose. First of all, they provide a vent to one’s emotions, which helps to release tension. They are also a method of self-scrutiny and reflection offering needed insight into the meanders of one’s psyche – frequently, one is the perpetrator of one’s own misfortunes and writing can help to reveal it, raising awareness of one’s moods, feelings and responses. Second, the decision to put one’s story on paper is an act of healthy defiance. The insane are seldom treated as reliable, their words, seen as a symptom, are rarely interpreted for meaning. Thus, writing can contribute to the reconstruction of one’s lost dignity and independence offering a sense of fulfillment. Finally, giving a testimony is a method of connecting with other people, overcoming the isolation and shame caused by madness.
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