Inscribing Madness Another Reading of TH PDF

 

Chapter 14  Mental Health from a Gender Perspective Perspective   Edited by Bhargavi V. Davar New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001 pp 296-309

Inscribing Madness:  Another Reading of The Yellow Wallpaper  and  and The Bell Jar 1  Jayasree Kalathil  What is a paper attempting attempting yet another reading of two western western novels doing in a book on  women and mental health health in India? The question has been at the forefront as this this paper went through a considerable number of revisions. The paper attempts to examine the nexus created by three nodes: women, madness and writing. At the outset, I claim that literature can give us useful insights into the phenomenological experience experience of being mad in a way that psychiatry never can. The texts that I am concerned with are not just representations of madness; they are works written by women who have experienced some kind of mental illness and have written about it in an autobiographical mode. What then interests me is the act of writing itself, what it means to write about an experience which has resounding sociocultural implications in the ways in which female subjectivity itself is defined. The primary objective of this paper is to pose questions related to women and madness, to explore the connection, or the lack of it, between femininity and insanity. One way in which literature can provide insights into the understanding of madness is by de-pathologising it. Literature, especially especially the kind of texts that I am analysing in this paper, looks at the experience of being mad, raises questions of social and cultural significance about the state of being ‘mad’ as defined in terms oppositional to accepted definitions of ‘normalcy’. Apart from the male scientific discourse of normalcy and madness,  what do women have to to say about the experience experience of being mad in a ‘normal’ society? There is a vast body of literature written written by women on the theme of madness. These works come across as powerful readings of the creation of female madness as an institution. More than 1

 I thank Bhargavi Davar and Susie Tharu for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, which was

presentedtoatmy thefriends National Seminar on Indian Women and their Mental Health,with Hyderabad, I am deeply indebted at Sihaya Samooh, Pune, for sharing their experiences me, and1996. for clarifying many of my reluctant and hazy ideas.

 

trying to cope with the pain of being mad in a normal society, they read madness and the process of being institutionalised in terms of violation of human rights, making a critique of hospitals and mental asylums, the masculine character of these institutions, the role of psychiatrists and doctors, social reception of the mentally ill persons, and so on. More interestingly, they attempt attempt to arrive at a way in which madness can be relieved of its relation  with femininity femininity so that women can live live in a society having having complete claim over over their right to creativity and individual existence. In contrast to the abundance of women-authored texts on madness in western and European literature, there seems to be very little work done in the Indian context. During my research – admittedly limited – I have not come across many works which make a critique of madness as an institution in an autobiographical mode. There are a few works available  which deal with the theme of madness, madness, of which the works of Telugu writer Vasudhara Devi, Malayalam writers Sara Joseph and B. M. Zuhra, Kannada writer Triveni, and Marathi writer Santha Gokhale are worth mentioning. I do not believe that this silence is due to Indian  women’s lack of awareness awareness or sensitivity towards the state of being being mad. Personal experience, experien ce, experiences of friends and the discussions that came up in the seminar of  Women and Mental Mental Health held in Hyderabad Hyderabad – all tend to bring out the increasing interest interest in women’s mental health and the issues that are involved. Then what makes our women  writers remain remain by and large silent silent about the topic? Is it ssomething omething inherent inherent in the Indian Indian  women’s movement itself that has brought about this silence? My hunch is that the conflict  between ‘the personal’ and ‘the collective’, collective’, which which marks the Indian women’s movement movement  would provide the answer answer to this. The Indian women’s movement, movement, over the past two decades, has dealt with a wide range of issues arising from the societal oppression of women. Literacy, sexual and familial violence, harassment in the workplace, economic status, legal equality, etc. are a few examples of the issues that the Indian women’s movement has taken up. These are all of a collective nature. Mental health or issues of madness do not figure on the agenda perhaps because they are seen as individual problems rather than collective ones. Most  women are oppressed oppressed but not all of them go mad. Moreover, the the pathologising pathologising of mental

 

illness makes it easier to confine it to the realm of the personal rather than the collective. Feminism, which is based on collective change, and psychology, which is aimed at individual change, do not, at first glance, go hand in hand. Perhaps then one must look elsewhere for ‘disclosures’ of madness. I think, apart from the fictional works falling under what is called feminist writing, one might have to explore diaries, journals, personal correspondence, correspondence, prison accounts and so on to break the false silence that now seems to pervade women’s accounts of madness. I was partially successful in tracing down some such private accounts but will not be able to use them for this paper as the writers were not comfortable with the idea of making their writings public. Instead I shall draw from the insights that these writings have given me to read the two texts, The Yellow Wallpaper by Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1973) and The Bell Jar by Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963) (hereafter referred to as YWP  and BJ   and BJ  respectively). respectively). Both Gilman and Plath had been treated for mental illness and the novels are based on the experiences that they had. Written from a feminist point of view, YWP , which when it  was published for the first first time in 1920 was was received as a story to ‘freeze our young blood,’ heralded a new way of thinking about madness (Howels, (Howels, 1920: vii). Sylvia Plath has until recently been treated as a myth, a haunting figure whose poetry was more often read, especially by men critics, with a mixture of love and hate. BJ  hate.  BJ  was  was first published in 1963 and is the story of a woman caught up in what has been called called ‘the feminine mystique’ of the 1950s (Friedan, 1971). Friedan, talking about the idealisation of femininity, calls it a mystique by which American women are trapped into ‘the old image: “Occupation: Housewife”’. According to Friedan, the feminine mystique ‘simply makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence … into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity’ (Friedan, 1971: 38). The two novelists, Gilman and Plath, have one thing is common which is dealt with in the novels in a very significant way, and that is their existence as ‘women’ writers. Writing had always been considered a make art – the pen, a metaphoric penis, and the male author an all-powerful patriarch. Writing, attempting the pen, is in itself seen as a deviation from

 

femininity, hence unnatural, abnormal. This tension was more felt for Gilman as compared to Plath. For Plath, it was not so much her right to write that had to be asserted, but to prove herself ‘successful’ in terms of the male standards of success. The two novels raise important questions in connection to women, making links with the social, political and cultural worlds  within which each each protagonist is placed. placed. Re-reading madness: An overview The interdisciplinary scrutiny of madness has placed reason and knowledge within quotes, that is, it has caused a questioning of these concepts which are usually taken for granted.  What does it mean to know? know? What is reason and and what is non-reason? How does does one know  where reason ends ends and madness begins? begins? In In Madness  Madness and Civilization Civilization (1965),  (1965), Michel Foucault contends that knowledge systems are built upon a radical misunderstanding of the phenomenon of madness and a misapprehension, misapprehension, even an appropriation of its language. The acknowledgementt of a universal reason that characterized Enlightenment led to a acknowledgemen subjugation of certain kinds of non-reason non-reason which were then named ‘diseased’. This is where questions pertaining to women and madness become significant. Often, women’s understanding of values which went contrary to what was accepted as norm could be dealt  with only by terming terming it madness.  What would be the gender gender specificity specificity of normalcy? Living Living under a patriarchal patriarchal system of oppressions where preconceived notions of femininity, sexuali sexuality ty and ‘women’s role’ rule each of her action and behaviour, how would women experience madness defined as any deviance from ‘normal’ ‘feminine’ behaviour? These questions are important because an intrinsic link between femininity and madness has always be been en posited. The ‘hysteria’, as is  well known, was derived derived from the Greek Greek word for the the uterus and was understood understood as an exclusively feminine disease. Even today, statistics establishes a definite relation between  women and madness. Numbers Numbers tell us that more more women are involved involved in, to borrow borrow a phrase from Phyllis Chesler, ‘careers as psychiatric patients’ than men (Chesler, 1972). Even if one does not want to question the degree of ‘fact; in these data (although Cheslter remarks pointedly that around 1964 there were there were significantly significantly more women women being ‘helped’ ‘helped’ than their

 

existence in the population would allow us to predict), how would one go about analysing them? If one is to break the notion of an innate link between femininity and insanity, one  will have to look at madness madness as the product of the social con conditions ditions in which which women live, live, confined to the roles of daughters, wives and mothers, and examine the male-centredness male-centredness of the psychiatric profession as a whole. Chesler’s work  Women and Madness sees Madness sees the women confined to the mental asylums who are the subjects of her study, as failed but heroic rebels,  whose insanity is a punishment punishment for ‘being ‘being  “female” as well as for fo r desiring or daring not  to be’ (Chesler, 1972: 279). The masculine ethic of mental health requires her to keep failing. Chesler argues that it is this ‘double standard of sexual mental health, which exists side by side with a single and masculine standard of human human  mental health’ that is being enforced  both by society and the clinicians clinicians (68-69). (68-69).  The concept of madness as rebellion is pushed forward by the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1986). According to them, madness is the historical label applied to female protests and rebellion at any given point in history. They celebrate the ‘admirable hysterics’ as champions of a plot of subverting the linear logic of male rationality, choosing ‘to suffer spectacularly before an audience of men’ (10). But this view of seeing madness as rebellion is considered to be dangerous by critics like Soshanna Felman and Elaine Showalter. For madness, Felman notes, is ‘quite the opposite of rebellion. Madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation’ self-affirmation’ (Felman, 1975: 2). Showalter Showalter argues that such claims as Cixous and Clément are making ‘come dangerously close to romanticizing and endorsing madness as a desirable form of rebellion rather than seeing seeing it as the desperate communication communication of the powerless’ (Showalter, 1987: 5). Any serious study of the ‘female malady’, she argues, should, s hould, instead of romanticizing it, investigate how in a particular context notions of gender influence the definition and, consequently, the treatment of mental disorder. Showalter’s critique of the concept of madness as the ‘female malady’ needs a little little attention here. In an attempt to comprehend comprehend the origin of the link between femininity and insanity, Showalter points out that women, within our dualistic systems of language and

 

representation representati on are constantly situated on the side of irrationality while men place themselves on the side of reason. Thus, woman is is madness  madness and the female body is used to represent irrationality in general. To quote Showalter: [w]hile the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant. Thus madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady (Showalter, 1987: 4). Re-writing madness: From malady to therapy    As mentioned earlier, earlier, the act of writing writing was conceived conceived as primarily a male privilege. For  women, then, the the act of writing represented represented a fall fall from the norm of femininity, femininity, a madness. madness. It is in this context that writing about madness becomes interesting. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) were among the first to explore the link between madness and women’s  writing. The fictional character of the mad woman who haunts haunts Victorian literature literature is, for Gilbert and Gubar, the symbolic representation representation of the female author’s anger against a patriarchal tradition. The mad woman is the author’s double through whom ‘the female author enacts her own raging desires to escape male houses and male texts’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 85). For Gilbert and Gubar, every woman writer becomes the mad woman in the attic, playing out her madness. It is possible to see writing as therapy. It provides a textual space to confront the experience. experien ce. Writing gives language to madness. The act of writing is a public confession, an open protest. It makes one wonder that perhaps what women could not find in the confessional mode of psycho-analytic treatment they are trying to find in the confessional mode of autobiographical writing. The re-inscribing of madness in the textual space of literature would perhaps be, I want to suggest, an attempt at self-cure, self-cu re, for writing is also in a sense an admission, a facing of facts, and a self-evaluation. self-evaluation. Writing about one’s experience of madness then is a journey from malady to cure. I shall be dealing with some of these ideas in my analysis of the two texts.

 

The Yellow Wallpaper : Madness and survival Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860. By late teens, Gilman had begun to ponder upon ‘the injustices under which women suffered’ (Gilman, 1935: 61). She was aware was aware of the changes that were slowly becoming visible in the lives of women; sshe he herself was beginning to write poems and pursue her own independent thinking. The most disturbing question for her was the one involving marriage and career. She believed and argued that a woman ‘should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also’, but  was, like many nineteenth nineteenth century women, without a model model to emulate (Gilman, (Gilman, 1935: 83). She soon began to experience experience periods of depression when she s he felt that a ‘sort of o f green fog drifted across [her] mind, a cloud that grew and darkened’ (Gilman, 1935: 87-88). 87-88). She gave  birth to a daughter and and within a month was, was, as she puts it, a mental mental wreck.

Gilman was sent to the most eminent ‘nerve specialist’ of specialist’ of her time, Dr Weir Mitchell. It seems that what ultimately forced Gilman to write YWP  is Dr Mitchell’s treatment of her. Dr Mitchell had only one prescription for her illness and that was to devote herself completely to her domestic life, looking after her husband and child, and confining herself to, at the most, two hours of intellectual work . He exhorted her to ‘never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live’ (Gilman, 1935: 96). For three months, she tried tried to follow this advice and came so close to complete mental ruin that she considered herse herself lf lucky to have survived. In 1887, Gilman left her husband and fought a lonely battle to overcome periods of severe depression and lethargy, writing, travelling travelling and lecturing, seemingly with a full store of energy. In 1890, she began lecturing on the status of women, struggling for economic independence, independen ce, and at the same time, fighting f ighting a society hostile to the ideas that she propagated. It is in the midst of this difficult time that she wrote YWP . The narrator narrator of the story is a woman who has been brought to the country for ‘the rest cure’ prescribed for her post-partum post -partum depression by her doctor-husband. The most powerful critique that the novel makes is of this assumption of complete rest as remedy for  women’ss distress. She is housed in a nursery and, throughout the novel, the narrator tries to  women’

 

 bring out the contrast contrast between what what is needed od her her – being a comfort to her husband and child – and what she thinks she needs – intellectual stimulation and the time, space and energy to write. So here is a woman who, emblematic of the female insane character in nineteenth nineteen th century psychiatric imagination, is treated like a child, irrational, constantly made aware of her ‘duties’ and imprisoned by a loving and caring hu husband sband in a nursery. In a way, the novel questions the premise of madness as the other of rational  behaviour, and for a woman woman rational behaviour behaviour means adher adhering ing to norms of femininity femininity and domesticity, which do not include artistic pursuit. Hence, the protagonist of the story has to  be ‘taught’ to go back to her her essential femininity. femininity. All through through the narrative, narrative, there are admissions of guilt for not being able to fulfil her duty towards her husband and child. But this sense of guilt is interspersed interspersed with acts of rebellion.

 

  References Chesler, P. (1972) Women and Madness. Madness. New York: Doubleday. Cixous, H. and Clément, C. (1986) The Newly Born Woman. Woman. (Trans.) B. Wing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Felman, S. (1975) Women and madness: the critical phallacy. Diacritics phallacy. Diacritics,, 5. Foucault, M. (1965) Madness (1965) Madness and Civilization: Civilization: A History of Insanity Insanity in the Age of Reason Reason.. New York: Random House. Friedan, B. (1971) The Feminine Mystique. Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1979) The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the  Nineteenth Century Century Literary Imagination. Imagination. New York: Yale University University Press. Gilman, C. P. (1935) The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Autobiography. New York:  Appleton-Century. Gilman, C. P. (1973) The Yellow Wallpaper. Wallpaper. New York: Feminist Press. Howels, W. D. (1920) The Great Modern American Stories: An Anthology. Anthology . New York: Boni and Liveright. Plath, S. (1963) The Bell Jar. Jar. London: Faber. Showalter, E. (1987). The Female Malady: Women, Madness and the English Culture, 18301980.. London: Virago. 1980