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Trauma and survival in twentieth century women's asylum narratives

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Trauma and survival in twentieth century women's asylum narratives

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Content TRAUMA AND SURVIVAL IN TWENTIETH CENTURY WOMEN’S ASYLUM NARRATIVES by Giovanna Pompele A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2004 Copyright 2004 Giovanna Pompele R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. UMI Number: 3140538 Copyright 2004 by Pompele, Giovanna All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3140538 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the members of my original and final committees, in particular Leo Brandy, Tania Modleski, Gerald Davison, Ron Gottesman, and Joseph Dane. Thanks also for their comments to George Cotkin, Jennie Uleman, John Beusterien, Ed Erwin, and Pat Erwin. To Simon: thanks, man. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv Introduction: Psychiatry, Trauma, and Women’s Narratives 1 I. Pioneering a Genre: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf 60 II. Healing through Love: Janet Frame’s Autobiographies of the Asylum 104 III. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and the Trauma of Femininity 147 Works Cited 194 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. IV ABSTRACT This dissertation approaches four classic women’s autobiographical fictions, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Virginia W oolfs Mrs. Dalloway, Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as narratives focusing on the protagonist/author’s experience in the mental asylum. My analysis of these works utilizes three sets of theoretical tools: studies of female autobiography, classic and contemporary critiques of psychiatric discourse, and, most centrally, trauma theory. Bom as a response to the need to assign a theoretical space to the narratives of Holocaust survivors, trauma studies now draws upon a variety of testimonial texts relating both to historical tragedies and to everyday traumatic events. Although the trauma of forced and abusive psychiatric treatment has been documented by victims virtually since the inception of psychiatry, little attention has been given by scholars to these testimonies, and they have received no attention by those working in trauma studies. Reading these women’s asylum narratives as trauma narratives accomplishes several things. First, it legitimizes their stories and their pain, acknowledging their validity and situating them in a larger context of systemic abuse. Secondly, it provides another interpretive tool with which to read the fragmentation that literary scholars of women’s autobiography have long since eharaeterized as typical of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. female self-writing. As psychoanalytic and other investigations of trauma reveal, psychic division and loss of selfhood are characteristic of trauma victims. Finally, trauma theory allows us to read asylum narratives as acts of self-affirmation, healing gestures, and proclamations of survival. Asylum narratives amply show that women have experienced the asylum as the nightmarish realization of a state of subjection, personal violation, and even physical danger that similarly affects them in society, though less obviously and explicitly. This is particularly true of the writers I discuss here, all of whom lived in times when society’s repressive attitude to women on the one hand, and brutal psychiatric practices on the other, made the asylum a culmination of terror. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. INTRODUCTION: PSYCHIATRY, TRAUMA, AND WOMEN’S NARRATIVES This project focuses on four women’s asylum narratives and is inflected by the confluence of three theoretical discourses: the philosophical and clinical objections to the medicalization of mental illness and the employment of coercive practices in psychiatry raised in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists like Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and Erving Goffinan, and in particular the feminist appropriations of these themes; trauma theory; and feminist reflections on women’s autobiography. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is not exactly about an asylum but rather a sort of confined psychiatric space, was written in the United States in 1892; Virginia W oolfs Mrs. Dalloway was written in England in 1925; the New Zealander Janet Frame wrote Faces in the Water in England, where she was living at the time, in 1961; and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar appeared posthumously in England, where Plath had moved from her native America, in 1963.1 read these narratives—all fictionalized autobiographies—as testimonials to a trauma resulting from psychiatric commitment that their authors experienced as violent, punitive, and dehumanizing. The under-studied but by no means thin field of women’s asylum literature suggests that this experience is not uncommon. In novels, journals, letters, autobiographies, memoirs, and poems; in feature films and documentaries; and, in the last ten years, on web sites and chat R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. lines, women have bom and continue to bear witness to the trauma of psychiatric treatment (for the most part involving involuntary and lengthy hospitalizations) in which they expected care but received abuse, where their iimer pain was treated as something to be controlled rather than comprehended and relieved, and they perceived themselves to be the objects of mental reprogramming rather than constmctive and respectful help/ While I analyze these works for evidence of post-traumatic signifiers, I will not address here whether the writers I discuss suffered from the mental disorders with which they were diagnosed at the time of their treatment, or from other ones/ What lies at the origin of this project is a desire to unveil the great suffering caused to them by the treatment they received in psychiatric institutions, regardless of ’ It is a sign of the neglect accorded this literature that many psychiatric narratives by women have gone out of print. Apart from the works I mention in this introduction, most book-length autobiographical narratives in English by female asylum survivors are available only as excerpts in anthologies. The most historically complete of such anthologies is Women o f the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840-1945, edited by Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris and with a foreword by Phyllis Chesler (1994). Until this collection came out, the editors point out, these "frrst-person accounts of life in mental hospitals gathered dust in the attics of hospitals or university libraries or in the back rooms of secondhand bookstores” (xi). Twenty years earlier, Thomas Szasz edited an anthology containing a variety of psychiatry-indicting texts. The Age o f Madness (1973). Only a few of the texts included in Szasz’s anthology, however, are by female asylum survivors. More recently two anthologies have been published that contain testimonies by contemporary women survivors: Cry o f the Invisible: Writings from the Homeless and Survivors o f Psychiatric Hospitals, edited by Michael A. Susko (1991), and Beyond Bedlam: Contemporary Women Psychiatric Survivors Speak Out, edited by Jeanine Grobe (1995). Out o f Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness, edited by Rebecca Shaimonhouse (2000), contains a gallery of the usual suspects (Plath, Frame, etc.) and a few excerpts by contemporary authors. Also worthy of mention is the Faber Book o f Madness (1991), edited by Roy Porter, which contains selections on psychiatric incarceration and inhumane psychiatric treatments. For a study of women’s asylum narratives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Mary Elene Wood, The Writing on the Wall: Women’ s A utobiography and the Asylum ( 1994). ^ Other works have tried to render a diagnosis in contemporary psychiatric terms of mad writers of the past. See for instance Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors (1990), in which the authors investigate the insanity of, among others, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. whether they were sick or not, and to consider the representation of this suffering that appears in their asylum narratives. I focus on these four works for several reasons. One is their link to the history of the women’s movement and its intersection with women’s awareness of the way in which contemporary psychiatric beliefs and practices often led to great physical and psychological abuse of women. Gilman and Woolf lived at the beginning of modem feminism and at a time in the history of psychiatry when the reformist wave of the nineteenth century was giving way, in America and elsewhere, to the grim reality of asylum overcrowding and the return to bmtal and coercive methods in the treatment of the inmates. In England, also, Woolf was being exposed to the shell shock epidemic of World War I, which would very much affect her thought and her writing. Shell shock, first identified in 1914, is one of the most prominent factors in the introduction of the concept of trauma into contemporary psychological thought. Both Gilman and Virginia Woolf were actively involved in the women’s movement of their time on their respective sides of the Atlantic, and both wrote non- fictional works that addressed what they saw as the unjust plight of women in a male-controlled society. By contrast, neither Sylvia Plath’s nor Janet Frame’s work displays an explicit interest in feminist issues. Both authors, however, have been widely read as expressing serious feminist concerns. Faces in the Water and The Bell Jar alike raise questions as to the condition of women in society, and The Bell Jar in particular contains a devastating and passionate critique of men for their oppression R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of women. Just as Gilman and Woolf wrote at a time of great significance for the development of psychiatric thought, Frame and Plath wrote when Foucault and other critics of traditional psychiatry were bringing to awareness the connection of medicine and mental health to issues of power, disempowerment, and oppression, and the seeds of the movement towards deinstitutionalization were being planted. While there is no evidence that either writer was aware of this fledgling anti psychiatry trend, it is clear both were responding in a similar way to the same reality. Another important reason why I choose to analyze these four asylum narratives is that, unlike other feminist authors who deal with psychiatric institutionalization in their work, Gilman, Woolf, Frame, and Plath attack the predominant psychiatric practices of their times from the epistemologically privileged place of the victim. All four were diagnosed as suffering fi-om mental disorders, were treated by neurologists or psychiatrists, and spent time in mental asylums. The narratives I analyze in this dissertation contain feminist-driven indictments of psychiatric practices their authors experienced first-hand. Lastly, my selection is dictated by historical reasons. The work of Gilman, Woolf, Frame, and Plath has established itself in the history of Anglophone literature in a way in which, for better or worse, the work of authors like Elizabeth Packard {Modern Persecution: or Insane Asylum Unveiled), Joanne Greenberg (/ Never Promised You a Rose R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Garden), and Mary Jane Ward (The Snake Pit), to name the most famous among their contemporaries, have not. ^ That the writers I discuss (along with most of the women who have written about their experience as patients in mental asylums) portray their institutionalization as an experience of trauma is a key element of the present work. The expanding field of trauma studies needs to include the testimonials of those women who found their asylum experiences so traumatic that it took them years of great struggle finally to gather the emotional strength and the mental clarity to tell the story. The authors I discuss here describe the asylum as a place in which patients—themselves included—are brutalized by the treatment they receive. This treatment includes some or all of the following: electroshock, insulin, and drug therapies; the threat of brain surgery (lobotomy); use of physical restraints; protracted seclusion (the asylum equivalent of solitary confinement); withdrawal of “privileges” as punishment for having broken one or other of the asylum rules; demotion to wards where patients are more seriously ill; and inability to affect the time of their discharge. These supposedly therapeutic measures are invariably accompanied by psychological or physical (and sometimes sexual) abuse by the staff, extreme infantilization, and complete lack of autonomy in even the most basic aspects of existence. ^ In spite of the fact that the amount of (authorized) physical violence and degradation inflicted on mental patients has greatly diminished since the introduction of psychotropic medication and thanks to the patients’ rights movement, psychiatric institutions are still often perceived by women as places of torture. For a glimpse into the post-cold packs phase of psychiatric abuse on women, see Carolyn Weather’s Crazy (1989), Kate Millett’s The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), Daphne Scholinski’s The Last Time I Wore a Dress ( 1998), and the many voices contained in Beyond Bedlam. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 6 I would like to suggest that these authors interpret the trauma of their institutionalization as an extension and aggravation of the trauma they are subjected to as women in a male-dominated society. Awareness of this pre-existing, latent trauma comes to them after they undergo psychiatric treatment, so the trauma of the asylum gets compounded by that other trauma, the trauma that was always already there and that is linked to, even part of, their womanhood. The trauma of femininity is thus thrown into relief, so to speak, retroactively by the violent circumstances of asylum life. When these authors testify years later to their experience of the asylum, they place it within a framework of violent oppression that vastly exceeds the asylum and encompasses their existence in a world that is dismissive of, and not infrequently brutal to, women. In the view of these authors, I show, the asylum dehumanizes women in much the same way as life in male-controlled society does, only with a violence that is much more focused and direct. In other words, they perceive the asylum inmate’s condition as not substantially different from the condition of women in the outside world, that is, not different in quality but only in degree. It is as if the asylum stripped women of the privileges accorded to them in the outside world by the laws of decorum and civility, and plunged them into a nightmarish laboratory where the female condition is magnified in a such way that its brutality appears at its most naked. And although the walls of the asylum can be left behind. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the changes necessary to make society a place where femininity is not cause for trauma are daunting to the point, perhaps, of despair.'* While much has heen written on women and madness, little writing has been done on women and psychiatric incarceration, and none at all on women’s autobiographical asylum narratives in the light of trauma theory. A number of feminist authors have embraced the tenets of trauma theory and applied them to women’s issues, hut their studies address women’s trauma almost exclusively in the contexts of rape, incest, and battery. More than thirty years after Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness made male constructs of female madness a central feminist concern, it is crucial that the theoretical apparatus developed in recent years by trauma theory be applied to the psychiatric abuse of women. * * * * * One of the ways in which the history of psychiatry has been told is through the alternating patterns of abuse and reform in the treatment of the mentally ill. This is not to say that men have not been brutalized within the asylum’s wall (see Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies for a terrifying visual documentation of such bratalization). Like women, men also have felt the need to tell their stories of the asylum. Psychologist Gail Homstein’s online bibliography of first-person narratives of mental illness contains a vast number of works by men, some of which contain harrowing stories of involuntary and traumatic institutionalizations. A partial list of 20th century men’s asylum narratives includes James Scott’s Sane in Asylum Walls (1931), Marion Marie Woodson’s Beyond the Door o f Delusion, originally published under the pseudonym of Inmate, Ward Eight (1932), Arthur Wellon’s Five Years in Mental Hospitals: An Autobiographical Essay (1967), William Collins’s Out o f the Depths: The Story o f a Priest-Patient in a Mental Hospital (1971), Robert Goulet’s Madhouse (1971), Charles Steir’s compilation Blue Jolts: True Stories from the Cuckoo’ s Nest (1978), Bertrand Wilson’s A Quest for Justice: My Confinement in Two Institutions (1974), Bill Thomas’s The Shoe Leather Treatment: The Inspiring Story o f Bill Thomas’ s Nine-Year Fight fo r Survival in a State Hospital fo r the Criminally Insane (1980), and William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir o f Madness. Homstein teaches at Mount Holyoke College. Her “Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness’’ can be accessed at http://www.freedom- center.org/pdf7madnessbibliographyhomstein.pdf. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 8 While this historiographical mode became predominant in the 1960s and 1970s following the publication of the work of Foucault, Laing, Szasz, and Goffinan, a history of psychiatry defined by the way in which the insane were cared for appeared in America as early as 1937 with the publication of Albert Deutsch’s The Mentally III in America. In this work, the first large scale overview of the history of the care of the mentally ill in the US and probably the first comprehensive narrative on this subject ever written, Deutsch “conceptualizes the history of psychiatry almost entirely as the story of humanitarianism, marked by alternating periods of progress and regress, optimism and disillusionment” (Mora, 57). Reflecting the confidence that prevailed in the psychiatric milieu of the time, Deutsch wrote a “Whiggish” account of the vicissitudes of psychiatry, expressing clear enthusiasm for reformers like Benjamin Rush (“father of American psychiatry”), Philippe Pinel, William Tuke, and Dorothea Dix. Deutsch’s book is still considered a classic and its vision of American psychiatry informs contemporary works like Robert Whitaker’s 2002 self- conscious reprise and revision of it. Mad in America. Foucault’s history of the birth and early development of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization was instrumental in provoking what Micale and Porter call “the Great Revision” of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Unlike Deutsch, Foucault depicts a dark and frightening picture of mental health care, one that is characterized by institutionalized abuse, social cleansing, and, ultimately, a complete subservience of psychiatric discourse to the management of the power of the status quo. In broad R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. strokes, the history of psychiatry most historians agree with starts with what Foucault calls the “great confinement” of the 17th century, symbolized by the creation of the Hôpital Général in Paris in 1656. At the time of its foundation, the Hôpital Général was designed to house “the poor of Paris, ‘of both sexes, of all ages and from all localities, of whatever breeding and birth, in whatever state they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable’” (Foucault 1971, 39). Great hospitals rose all over Europe: in Germany as Zucht-hausern, in England as houses of correction, and similarly in Holland, Italy, and Spain. By the end of the following century, however, these institutions did not host only the poor, but also a population so varied that it included “those condemned by common law, young men who disturbed their families’ peace or who squandered their goods, people without profession, and the insane... In a hundred and fifty years, confinement had become the abusive amalgam of heterogeneous elements” (45). It is at this time that reformists alert to the particularly dire predicament of the mentally ill, who were kept in inhumane conditions and treated with procedures meant, to all effects, to beat the madness out of them, moved to create architectural spaces designated specifically for the humane care of the insane.^ It is also at the end of the 18th century, in 1793, that Philippe Pinel took over the Salpêtrière and the ^ Before the reforms that took place at the end of the 1700s, the insane were kept in chains, beaten, and treated with cures that included “bleeding to the point of fainting and the regular use of powerful purges, emetics, and nausea-inducing agents” (Whitaker 7). Along with these depleting remedies, it was believed useful to administer to patients treatments that causes great physical pain, to take their minds off the ravings of their diseased minds. These treatments included blistering, dunking the patients in water sometimes to the point of temporarily drowning them, and swinging them wildly so R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 10 Bicêtre (the buildings of the Hôpital Général that housed the insane) and introduced the traitement morale. In England, the moral treatment was introduced by the Quaker philanthropist William Tuke, who opened the York Retreat in 1796.® Moral treatment homes, which spread in England and then the United States and were operated for the most part by Quakers, were small facilities in which patients were offered quiet, regular meals, and gentle activities such as sewing, gardening, reading, and playing chess. Among the first moral-treatment asylums to operate in the United States were the Philadelphia asylum, opened in 1817, and the Boston asylum, which later became McLean Hospital. The gentle time of the moral treatment was followed by a return to large state-run facilities. Since moral-treatment homes were mostly run by laymen, doctors organized to return the direction of asylums to medical superintendents. In 1844 superintendents of thirteen asylums founded the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, or AMSAII. Psychiatric treatment was slowly but steadily returned into the hands of physicians, and psychiatric discourse was again dominated by the conception of madness as on organic disorder. AMSAII formally embraced the use of physical restraints, which had fallen into disfavor during the early days of moral treatment. In the 1840s and 1850s ex-mental patient Dorothea Dix lobbied legislatures all over the United States as to “induce in [them] ‘fatigue, exhaustion, pallor, horripilation [goose bumps], vertigo, etc,’ thereby producing ‘new associations and trains of thought’” (12). ® In the last chapter o f Madness o f Civilization Foucault sets out to debunk the “myths” of the benignity of Pinel and Tuke by invoking the ideas of surveillance and the internalization of control R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 11 to have the mentally ill housed in newly-built and humane insane asylums. A great wave of asylum building resulted from Dix’s work—a mixed outcome, since the second half of the 19th century is also a time when the number of the insane as counted by the U.S. census doubled and more and more people were committed: In response to [Dix’s] vivid appeals, twenty states built or enlarged mental hospitals. In 1840, only 2,561 mentally ill patients in the United States were being cared for in hospitals and asylums. Fifty years later, 74,000 patients were in state mental hospitals alone. The number of mental hospitals in the country, private and public, leaped from eighteen in 1840 to 139 in 1880. (34) The return of a conception of mental illness as a biological dysfunction led to a new series of therapeutic experiments. The first quarter of the 20th century was the time of the “cold packs,” much hated by patients, who would be left trussed up in this manner for hours and, at times, even for a day or two, abandoned in these extended treatments to wallow in their feces and urine. But that was the least of their discomfort. As the sheets dried, they would shrink tightly about the patients. With their bodily heat so snugly retained, they would experience an awful sensation of burning up, and of suffocation. Many struggled to escape, so much so that “cardiac collapse” was an admitted risk. (76-77) Joanna Greenberg describes the joys of the packs in her fictional memoir I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964): [Deborah’s] face was wooden as she walked to the pack and lay down that will find full expression in Discipline and Punish. ^ Various authors document how the rise in the incidence of insanity in the American population and the consequent rise in asylum commitments are correlated to the ever greater number of immigrants. See Whitaker 45-48, Rothman xxvi, McCandless 182, and Grob 62. Particularly targeted was the Irish population. American psychiatrist Edward Jarvis, a pioneer in the use of statistical analysis, wrote in 1855 that the habits and condition and character of the Irish poor in this country operate more unfavorably upon their mental health, and hence produce a larger number of the insane in ratio of their numbers than is found among the native poor. (Grob 62) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 12 on the cold sheet, but when the full punishment came, she was already under heavy restraints, fighting and thrashing in the bed that would not give an inch... When she came clear it was a long time later... The circulation in her feet had nearly stopped altogether, and her heels, where they had made the long hours of contact with the wet sheets, were beginning to bum... It had been longer than four hours; the attendants would come soon and take her from the now painful “fighting clothes.” But they did not come. The pain became intense. She could feel her ankles and knees swelling against the sheets and the downward pull of the restraints, but even their heavy ache did not neutralize the sharper, burning pain of the blood-starved feet. Pulling to relieve the weight of the bones inside the legs, Deborah succeeded only in striking hard cramps into both calves. When she found she could not ease the knotted muscles, she waited on, gritting her teeth, and still they did not come. She began to whimper. (154-5) At the same time, research was being done to connect mental illness to bio chemical reactions in the brain. With the progress of research in this field came a whole new gamut of treatments. Psychiatry started experimenting with the therapies that came to define many of the asylum testimonials of the second half of the 20th century: insulin coma, metrazol convulsive therapy, electroshock, and prefrontal lobotomy.^ Quite simply, the goal of these treatments was to cause brain damage, while various rationales were offered as to why brain damage of one kind or another would be beneficial to psychotic patients. Viennese psychiatrist Manfred Sakel Whitaker notes that although Freudian theories of the mind grabbed the imagination of American psychiatrists in the early 1900s, psychoanalysis was never seen as particularly useful or practical for treating institutionalized patients. The Freudian couch was seen as a method for treating netnotic patients in an office setting. Asylum psychiatry kept its sights set on finding somatic therapies that could be quickly applied and that would “work” in a quick manner as well. (74). Asylum narratives of this period where psychoanalytic treatment is present (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Bell Jar) portray it as concomitant with cold packs, insulin shock, electroshock, and, occasionally, even lobotomy. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 13 pioneered insulin shock treatment in the 1930s. Since autopsies had shown that hypoglycemia caused hrain damage, Sakel somehow reasoned that “[insulin] comas selectively killed or silenced ‘those [brain] cells which are already diseased beyond repair’” in schizophrenics (Whitaker 85-6). Once the malfunctioning cells had been destroyed, “the healthy ones could once again become active, leading to a ‘rebirth’ of the patient.” Insulin coma was used in the United States as late as the mid-50s. Metrazol convulsive therapy, also used for the treatment of schizophrenia, rested on the assumption that the epileptic seizures it caused were curative because, according to doctors of the time, “epilepsy and schizophrenia were antagonistic to each other” (92). Metrazol, a synthetic preparation of camphor (camphor-induced seizures as a treatment for madness had actually heen used since the 1700s), caused a seizure so violent that “it could fracture hones, tear muscles, and loosen teeth” (93). Patients were terrified of it and, after the first injection, needed to he coerced to take more. The same happened with electroshock, invented several years later.^ Electroshock is the invention of Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti and was meant to improve on metrazol therapy. Cerletti used electroshock on a human for the first time in 1939 and in 1940 the treatment was introduced in the United States. Electrodes would be applied to the patient’s temples, and current allowed to run through the temporal lobes ® Metrazol convulsive therapy was first used by Hungarian doctor Ladislas von Meduno in 1935. In this chapter and in the chapters that follow I will refer to electroshock also as EST (electroshock therapy) and ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), following the use of the author(s) I shall be discussing at the time. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 14 and other brain regions for processing memory. As patients spasmed into convulsions, they immediately lost consciousness, the brain waves in the cerebral cortex falling silent... When the patients came to, they would be dazed, often not quite sure of where they were, and at times sick with nausea and headaches... Even after a single treatment, it would take weeks for a patient’s brain-wave activity, as measured by an electroencephalograph, to return to normal. (99) Electroshock was easier, cheaper, and more practical than metrazol, and it soon became popular in asylums. Large numbers of patients could be treated in a small period of time, sometime, if small portable machines were available, without leaving their beds. The curative effect of electroshock consisted mainly in causing confusion and amnesia: “psychosis remitted because the patient was stripped of the higher cognitive processes and emotions that give rise to fantasies, delusions, and paranoia.” Patients would forget the painful events that had occasioned their pathologies, and even their pathologies themselves. Since, however, this improvement lasted only as long as the confusion and amnesia did, soon asylum doctors began to inflict whole courses of electroshock on their patients, a practice since believed to cause permanent brain damage. Because shocked patients would fall into a calm and benign state, and because they were terrified of it (even when it was administered with a sedative), electroshock began also to be used as a disciplinary or punitive measure. Although it was heralded in medical journals as safe, effective, and painless, patients found electroshock incredibly painful. When offered without muscle-paralyzing agents, it caused much the same effects as metrazol shock, breaking bones and inflicting other physical damage. Doctors R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 15 themselves admitted that electroshock “produced changes very similar to ‘severe head trauma.’ The alterations in the brain-wave activity were the same, and both produced similar bio-chemical changes in the spinal fluid” (102). Both The Bell Jar and Faces in the Water offer vivid accounts of the horror electroshock caused in patients. One of the most moving literary renditions of the brutal violence of electroshock appears in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’ s Nest (1962). In 1959 Kesey was a volunteer for several weeks in a government program that tested a variety of psychoactive drugs including LSD. One Flew over the Cuckoo’ s Nest emerged from this experience. In the novel, McMurphy, a con man who has managed to get himself transferred from a penal work farm to a psychiatric hospital in hope of finding an easier life, tries to improve things in the ward of the formidable Nurse Ratched, only to be finally forced to surrender. By the end of the book, the Big Nurse manages to have him moved to the Disturbed ward, drugged and, when he refuses to give in to her power, treated with electroshock: [McMurphy] climbs on the table without any help and spreads his arms out to fit the shadow. A stitch snaps the clasps on his wrists, ankles, clamping him into the shadow... He don’t look a bit scared. He keeps griiming at me. They put the graphite salve on his temples. “What is it?” he says. “Conductant,” the technician says. “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?” They smear it on, he’s singing to them, makes their hands shake... They try to hush his singing with a piece of rubber hose for him to bite on... Twist some dials, and the machine trembles, two robot arms pick up soldering irons and hunch down on him. He gives me the wink and speaks to me, muffled, tells me something, says something to me around that rubber hose just as those irons get close enough to the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 16 silver on his temples—light arcs across, stiffens him, bridges him up off the table till nothing is down but his wrists and ankles and out around that crimped black rubber hose a sound like hooeeeï and he’s frosted over completely with sparks. And out the window the sparrows drop smoking off the wire. They roll him out on a Gurney, still jerking, face frosted white. Corrosion. Battery acid. The technician turns to me. (237-38) Through the psychotic gaze of the narrator, made more frantic by the prospect of his own upcoming electroshock session, Kesey gives a highly romanticized version of the mental patient. In this and other scenes he uses explicit religious imagery to portray McMurphy as a Christ-frgure, who lovingly accepts to sacrifice himself in order to gain freedom for his friends. McMurphy’s Calvary will take him, through the coronation with thorns and the crucifixion of electroshock, to the last stop in the death-march of the mental patient, frontal lobotomy.'*^ Prefrontal or frontal lobotomy is the invention of Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who in 1935 applied it to a human for the first time and won a Nobel Prize as a result. The idea behind lobotomy is not dissimilar from the idea behind the Unlike the other treatments in the quartet of brain-damaging therapies, electroshock continued to be practiced In the States after the 60s and is administered to this day in this country and elsewhere. The most organized opposition to the use of electroshock in the United States comes from the Church of Scientology and its anti-psychiatry branch, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. CCHR employs Thomas Szasz as its psychiatric consultant and the two appear regularly together in publications and on websites. Ex-patients’ groups are also vocal in their opposition to the continued use of electroshock. In 1990 the American Psychiatric Association issued a report that spoke positively of electroshock: ‘“ECT is an effective treatment for all subtypes of unipolar major depression,’ for manic-depressive illness (now called bipolar disorder), mania, and psychotic schizophrenia” (Shorter 285). The application of electroshock is now legislated by the majority of the American States; however, “in all but one state electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) may be legally forced on nonconsenting individuals who are adjudicated mentally unqualified to give their consent” (Breeding 46). In England, government guidelines issued in 2003 prescribe that ECT be used “only to achieve rapid and short-term improvement of severe symptoms after other treatment options have failed and/or when the condition is considered to be potentially life-threatening” (NICE 1). This document was heralded as a major step forward by patients’ rights groups in the UK. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 17 other three shock therapies. It works on the assumption that a mentally ill person is better off with her mental capacities diminished than with them intact. As Walter Freeman, the greatest proponent of lobotomy in America, admitted, lobotomy therapy is nothing more than brain-damaging therapy. Studies conducted by researchers on animals and human survivors of severe head trauma in the first decades of the century had convinced the medical community that the fi-ontal lobes house the highest faculties of the human brain and are responsible for what distinguishes people from animals. Researchers had established that when this area is damaged, a subject becomes childish, dull, and often docile, and loses her ability to learn, plan, or think with complexity. Backed up by a eugenicist mentality that saw the insane as a waste of humanity and believed them better off dull than tortured, from the mid-30s till well into the 50s psychiatrists in Europe, America, and Australia lobotomized their patients. At first, such surgeries were performed sparingly, but after World War II, thanks to technical developments that made them quick and easy, psychiatrists used them with liberality on asylum inmates, private patients, and even children; “Prior to the end of World War II, prefrontal lobotomy had been performed on fewer than 1,000 people in the United States. But over the next decade, more than 20,000 underwent the operation” (Whitaker 132). The procedure evolved from a rather primitive drilling of the skull and chemical blasting away of the frontal lobes in the 30s, to a subsequent use of picklike instruments called leucotomes (from which the alternate name of leucotomy) that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 18 severed nerves in the frontal lobes, to the employment of surgical icepicks introduced in the patient’s brain through her eye sockets (transorbital lobotomy). Transorbital lobotomies took as little as 10 minutes, required no surgical expertise, and were performed without anesthetics. Freeman, the most prolific lobotomizer of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, “would knock patients out with electroshock before hammering the ice pick through their eye sockets” (133). Though lobotomies petered out in the 50s, Freeman continued to perform them throughout that decade. The discovery of chlorpromazine and the introduction of psychoactive drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia and other disorders effectively made lobotomy obsolete and closed this tragic chapter of modem psychiatry. In America, the idea of lobotomy is most powerfully linked to the story of Frances Farmer, an actress whose terrible adventures in mental asylums were portrayed by Jessica Lange in the 1982 film Frances. While this is not absolutely certain, it is likely that Farmer was lobotomized by Walter Freeman just before her final discharge. Her career and her life were destroyed. As a consequence of the brutality of these practices, of a greater outspokenness on the part of ex-patients, and of a greater awareness on the part of the public, a climate of criticism of psychiatry took shape in the 60s and 70s. This wave of opposition—spearheaded by intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences as well as by mental health professionals—was concomitant with a larger wave of rebellion against existing power structures. The work of Foucault, Laing, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 19 Szasz, and Goffinan was simultaneously a cause and a reflection of the questioning of social reality that energized communities in the 60s and 70s. In 1960 in England R. D. Laing, himself a practicing psychiatrist, published The Divided Self, in which he challenged traditional assumptions about the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. In 1961 in France Michel Foucault published Histoire de la folie (translated into English as Madness and Civilization in 1965), a sweeping critique of social norms of reason and madness. In the same year there appeared in the United States sociologist Erving Goffinan’s Asylums. Also in 1961, American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz published The Myth o f Mental Illness. Ten years later, in 1970, he came out with The Manufacture o f Madness, a strong indictment of what he calls “institutional psychiatry.” While it can he argued that these works fostered a certain romanticization of madness, such as may be seen in novels like One Flew over the Cuckoo’ s Nest, Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City (1969), and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), the insights contained in these works, and certainly their general critical thrust, have had a lasting influence and are reflected in various strands of contemporary thought.” In broad terms, and with some differences, these authors identify " For a passionate contemporary endorsement of Szasz’s view of mental illness see Roy Porter’s Madness. A Brief History (2002), especially the introduction. For a sympathetic contemporary appraisal of the 60s theorists of madness and psychiatry, see Robert A. Nye, “The Evolution of the Concept of Medicalization in the Late Twentieth Century” (2003). Since the late 80s, Foucault’s theories on power and knowledge, discipline, surveillance, etc., have exerted a noticeable influence on nursing theory. For an analysis of the history of this influence, see Denise Gastaldo and Dave Holmes’s “Foucault and Nursing: A History of the Present” (1999). A lot is written on Foucault and feminism: an analysis of Foucault and feminist psychiatry is conducted by Alisha Ali in “The Convergence of Foucault and Feminist Psychiatry: Exploring Emancipatory Knowledge-Building” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 20 psychiatry as the discipline that, bom of the Enlightenment, replaced theology and organized religion as the Western world’s instrument for the enforcement of order and conformity among its population. Following the demise of the faith-oriented society of the Middle Ages, modernity entrusted the scientific discipline whose goal it is to penetrate the intricacies of the human mind with the task of suppressing difference and silencing dissent. Psychiatry set out to fulfill this mission by focusing on the identification, isolation, correction, punishment, and possibly elimination of, to use Foucault’s phrase, “non-reason” as embodied in those it considered mentally deficient. This very classification, these theorists point out, is highly suspicious, as it is made by the same body of people whom society has entrusted with maintaining the status quo. According to these theorists, it is the very discipline of psychiatry, and not some particular way of practicing it, that needs serious philosophical rethinking and major clinical overhauling. Particularly under attack is the practice of psychiatric incarceration, that is, the practice of confining the mentally ill in institutions specifically designed to house them, institutions where, for the most part, the patients are treated in horribly inhumane ways. As Michel Foucault documents in Madness and Civilization, the confinement of the mad is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Western world, having started in Europe in the seventeenth century and spread (2002). Laing’s and Goffman’s work is still widely discussed. For a positive view of the influence on psychiatry of the former, see Nick Crossley’s “R. D. Laing and the British Anti-Psychiatry Movement; A Socio-Historical Analysis” (1998). A recent collection on Goffman is Goffman’ s Legacy, edited by A. Javier Trevino (2003). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 21 subsequently through North and South America and Australia. The postulate of Madness and Civilization is that during the Enlightenment, the beginning of the “Age of Reason” that according to Foucault continues to this day, a need was felt to define reason against non-reason, order against madness, and mental sanity against mental illness. This need took shape in the birth of specialized disciplines and in the creation of technical languages: In the serene world of mental illness, modem man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer, (xii) The “silence” into which the modem age confined the mentally ill—a silence created by the constitution of non-reason as a site of absence—forced them to adopt the language of psychiatry, i.e. the language of pathology, in order to communicate with the community of the sane. In the following chapters I will show how the very language in which Gilman, Woolf, Frame and Plath articulate their narratives resonates with their effort to make themselves heard by the others, the sane, in the latter’ s own terms. This emerges in their texts, for instance, in the adoption of a lucid, “reasonable,” at times even meek tone of voice. It also emerges in their deployment of strong authorial control over the stmcture of the narrative, which, even when experimental as in Mrs. Dalloway, or darkly Gothic as in ‘The Yellow R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 22 Wallpaper,” is never rambling in the way, for instance, in which the asylum narratives of Italian author Alda Merini are rambling, unworried by the presence of factual contradictions or nonsensicality.'^ Another way in which these authors endeavor to gain credibility with their audience is by legitimizing their language through the use of medical and psychiatric idioms. Finally, however, the most transparent expression of their effort to speak the language of the other is their attempt to assert their normality even as they struggle to defend their difference. In The Divided Self and successive works, R. D. Laing juxtaposes the socially acceptable, even desirable madness of consumeristic isolation, racism, institutional violence, and war to the socially and medically unacceptable madness of individuals affected by mental pathologies. Using an existential framework to “understand” schizophrenia, Laing claims that a whole-person approach to this pathology reveals uncanny correspondences between the inner split experienced by the schizophrenic and the schizoid nature of, as he calls it, today’s “being-in-the-world.” While advocating a psychiatric approach to schizophrenia that does not reify the patient by isolating him from the totality of human experience in society, and that picks up on and valorizes his bent towards transcendence, Laing also condemns psychiatry as “a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places,” Laing disapprovingly continues, “where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely forgone, these 12 See Alda Merini, L ’ altra verità. Diario di una diverse (1986). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 23 can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquilizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient” (12). Goffinan’s Asylums is a stark presentation of the social dynamics of power and oppression, control and dehumanization, that characterize life in what he calls total institutions. Total institutions are institutions of “encompassing or total character” in which the links to the outside world have been severed as thoroughly as possible (15). This severance is both enforced and symbolized by “the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors” (15-16). Total institutions are aimed at a variety of goals, and include establishments as diverse as prisons, concentration camps, POW camps, military barracks, monasteries, boarding schools, and mental asylums. Besides separating the inmates fi*om the outside world and forcing them to relinquish personal freedoms (at the very least, freedom of movement, but of course all sorts of other freedoms as well), total institutions enforce the physical and social conflation of the three main spheres of human life, sleep, play, and work: First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Third, all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution. (17) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 24 Goffman, who for the writing of this book studied closely the life of inmates in the federal mental institution of St. Elizabeth’s in Washington DC, which at the time hosted the grand number of 7,000 patients, describes in minute detail “the series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self’ perpetrated in total institutions (24). Such outrages, he elaims, are bound to change the inmate forever: “His self is systematically, if often unintentionally, mortified. He begins some radical shifts in his moral career, a career composed of the progressive changes that occur in the beliefs that he has concerning himself and significant others.” A particularly troublesome aspect of total institutions is that they do not offer cultural adjustments and enrichments but instead actively engage in a process of “disculturation” through which the inmate is made to lose skills, knowledge, and self-confidence: “They create and sustain a particular kind of tension between the home world and the institutional world and use this persistent tension as strategic leverage in the management of men” (23-4).*^ Thomas Szasz, who is still a voeal presenee in the denunciation of inhumane psychiatric practices in America, argues in The Myth o f Mental Illness that mental illness is not a disease but the fabrication of psychiatrists interested in their own professional advancement and willing to cooperate with society in isolating troublesome people. In The Manufacture o f Madness Szasz attacks the involuntary " Gofïman complements his own direct observations of the asylum with passages taken from Mary Jane Ward’s autobiographical asylum novel, The Snake Pit (1946). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 25 subjection of individuals to psychiatric treatment by what he calls Institutional Psychiatry: The most important economic characteristic of Institutional Psychiatry is that the institutional psychiatrist is a bureaucratic employee, paid for his services by a private or public organization (not by the individual who is his ostensible client); its most important social characteristic is the use of force and fraud. (Szasz 1970, xxiii) Institutional Psychiatry, Szasz claims, should be abandoned in favor of Contractual Psychiatry. Unlike the institutional psychiatrist, the contractual psychiatrist is “a private entrepreneur, paid for his services by his client” (xxiii). Contractual Psychiatry does not make use of force or fraud, and a society in which Contractual Psychiatry is the rule contemplates legal penalties for their use.’" ' In the 60s and 70s state laws in the US were passed that made commitment to state asylums harder to obtain. Following the exposes of ex-patients, journalists, documentarists, artists, and theorists in various fields, the state asylum had become an object of horror in many people’s minds, and a great movement towards deinstitutionalization overtook the United States. While freeing mental patients ‘‘ ‘ To this day, Szasz continues to be a highly vocal, immensely prolific proponent of the thesis that coercive psychiatry is profoundly wrong and should be completely and unqualifiedly abandoned. For the last 40 years, Szasz has consistently claimed that mental illness does not exist. There are organic diseases and strange or unwelcome behaviors, but neither of these is grounds for the diagnosis of mental illness. By the same token, Szasz also passionately opposes the so-called insanity defense and believes that all criminal offenders should pay the same penalty, whatever their state of mind, their past, or their other behavioral manifestations. Needless to say, these views are the object of great skepticism if not contempt on the part of most people working in mental health and the law. Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, a documentary about a Massachusetts state hospital for the criminally insane, came out in 1967. Its distribution was obstructed by court order until 1992 because of its stark portrayal of the barbaric way guards and doctors treated the inmates. The film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest came out in 1975. In fact, the unveiling of the appalling lives of asylum inmates had started earlier, with Albert Deutsch’s 1948 book The Shame o f the States, the first book-length depiction of the inhumanity of asylum life in America. Also in 1948, 20th Century Fox R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 26 from state asylums was advocated by many, deinstitutionalization was really made possible by the discovery of psychotropic drugs in the 50s, which made the “maintenance” of psychotic patients outside the asylum practical, cheaper, and, at least theoretically, more humane. Instead of being kept in state asylums, mentally ill patients were discharged into “the community,” that is into families, apartments of their own, board-and-care homes, halfway houses, and other locally-managed facilities, both public and private. This discharge was massive: In the United States, the number of patients in state and county mental hospitals declined from its historic high of 559,000 in 1955 to 338,000 in 1970, further to 107,000 in 1988, representing a decrease over the 30 year period of more than 80 percent... Amplifying the shift was a fivefold expansion in the total volume of care in mental- health organizations over that period, from 1.7 million episodes in 1955 to 8.6 million in 1990. This was a shift in the locus of care virtually without precedent in the history of medicine. (Shorter 280) It is one of the paradoxes of the last decades of the 20th century that the outcry against institutionalization and the push towards a recuperation of madness as, not a pathological state, but a normal if unorthodox manifestation of a person’s individuality have been accompanied by the simultaneous creation of what is sometimes referred to as the psychiatric society. It is almost as if, freed from the confines of the asylum walls, mental illness had spread to every comer of society, introducing pathology into the smallest comers of the human experience. Since the 80s there has been a veritable explosion in the number of acknowledged (or alleged) mental disorders and, consequently, in the number of mental patients in America. released the film version of Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 27 The Diagnostic and Statistic Manual o f Mental Disorders, since 1952 the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic handbook, has mushroomed: “DSM-II ran to 134 pages, DMS-III to almost 500; the later revision, DSM-IV-TR (2000) is a staggering 943 pages!” (Porter 2002, 215). This arguable normalization of mental illness has failed, however, to make life significantly easier for the mentally ill themselves. As the statistics above show, psychiatric episodes have not diminished but multiplied in the United States and elsewhere. Instead of being chained, strait-jacketed, or dunked in water, the mentally ill are now prescribed, and often forced to take, a variety of drugs, many of which have uncomfortable side-effects, and some of which are decidedly unsafe.'® While by and large state laws protect patients’ right to refuse medication, inmates of structured facilities such as state asylums, jails or prisons, locked psychiatric wards in general hospitals, and other locked community clinics have little choice in the matter. In a telling passage, a researcher says of a locked community hospital in California that “in the facility, psychotropic medications were prescribed for all the study patients, though in one case, the patient’ s knowledge o f martial arts prevented A recent advisory by the FDA has cautioned, for instance, that SSRI antidepressants (by far the most prescribed kind of antidepressants) are dangerous and could increase the risk of suicide in children under 18. A similar but stronger warning has been issued by the corresponding British authority. That antidepressants should be singled out for this warnings is significant, since as a class antidepressants are the second most-prescribed medication in the United States. According to IMS Health, which gathers information on dmg prescription patterns, “more than 136 million prescriptions for antidepressants were filled between mid-2002 and mid-2003, an increase of 13 percent from the previous year” (Kaufinan A2). The connection between antidepressants and violent behavior, both in children and adults, has been suggested for years, but pharmaceutical companies have little interest in advertising it, as the annual sales of antidepressants alone earn the pharmaceutical industry around 52 billion dollar a year in the US. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 28 the staff from administering them''' (Lamb 23; emphasis added). Most doctors, in fact, do not seem to find it necessary to circumvent their patients’ martial skills to make them take their medication: the skyrocketing rise in the sale of psychoactive medication suggests that the doctor’s word, together with the promise of quick well being, are incentive enough for the adoption of a drug or its administration to one’s children. Alongside this massive drugging lies a phenomenon that seems to be its very opposite, the abandonment of those who are severely or chronically ill to homelessness or criminal incarceration. While millions of people are prescribed psychoactive drugs at the drop of a hat, other millions of people—many of them severely ill—go about unmedicated and untreated. Studies suggest that half the homeless population in the United States suffers from serious psychiatric disorders that could be alleviated by treatment. A number of specialists in the field suggest that this mass phenomenon is the consequence, precisely, of deinstitutionalization.The closing of state hospitals has overburdened lightly or moderately structured community facilities and hospital wards with patients who would be much better cared for in long-term state institutions. This in a time in which the soaring price of health insurance and the shrinking of government and state funding for mental health For an analysis of the travails of deinstitutionalization in the United States, see Richard Lamb and Linda E. Weinberger, eds.. Deinstitutionalization: Promise and Problems (2001). As of the time of his writing. Lamb observes, the number of available state hospital beds in tiie country had shrunk to 21 for 100,000 population on any given day, with only 4 per 100,000 in California. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 29 make it extremely hard for such facilities to care for chronically or severely ill patients.'^ Paradoxically, a movement whose goal it was the free the insane from the chains and bars of the asylum may have helped steer them towards the chain and bars of jails and prisons. According to recent studies, between 10 and 15 percent of the state prison population in the United States suffers from serious mental illness. Prison is certainly not the best place in which to house the mentally ill, many of whom are guilty only of misdemeanors, and some of whom have committed felonies that could have been avoided had the perpetrator been properly treated. The presence of mentally ill inmates is also a problem for the correctional staff. As early as 1983, an analyst pointed out that “second to overcrowding, the presence of inmates with psychological problems was the most serious concern for correctional personnel” (Lamb and Weinberger 32). Once in prison, it is extremely unlikely that mentally ill people will receive proper treatment, and likely that they will not receive any treatment at all. Once released, the majority of these people will return to a transient or precarious lifestyle that will in turn lead them to further arrests, and so on in a continuous cycle of neglect, abuse, and offense.*^ For a close study of the burdening of small community facilities with severely ill patients they are ill-equipped to treat, see Lamb’s “The New State Hospitals in the Community.” A further, grave problem is the execution of the mentally ill. International legal standards prohibit the death penalty for the mentally ill, and the US constitution has aligned itself with such standards in Ford V. Wainwright (1986). Yet, as recently as January 21, 2000, Larry Keith Robison, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was executed by the state of Texas. On June 22, 2000, Thomas Provenzano, who suffered from severe delusional episodes and believed he was Jesus Christ, was executed by the state of Florida. On August 16, 2000, John Satterwhite, who suffered from both mental illness and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 30 Over- or under-medicated, neglected, imprisoned, electrocuted, abandoned to poverty and homelessness, or put to death, the mentally ill continue to be abused in America.^® While this problem does not appear to have an easy solution, the testimonials of ex-patients, psychiatric survivors (as many call themselves), current patients and a number of mental health professionals point to the need for the creation of a genuine collaborative enterprise between sufferers and healers, based on mutual respect and attentive listening. This dissertation is written as a small contribution to this enterprise. * * * * * The history of women’s protest against their mistreatment at the hands of neurologists and psychiatrists is probably as old as the history of psychiatry itself. Because of their isolation in the home, the weakness of their voices in the community, and their vulnerability to the wills and whims of fathers, brothers, husbands, or whatever male relatives happened to be at hand, women have been particularly exposed to unreasonable commitments and abusive treatments. The violation of women’s bodies and minds in the name of mental healing has rested for centuries on the idea that women are particularly prone to disorders of the mind because of their nature. Until well into the 19th century, physicians directly mental retardation, was executed by the state of Texas. Others with mental illness who have been executed in the U.S. in violation of international law include: Pemell Ford (Alabama); Bert Hunter (Missouri); and Juan Soria (Texas). (Amnesty International USA, par. 5). The continued mistreatment of the mentally ill is documented both in recent studies and in contemporary asylum narratives. For the former, see for instance Lamb’s and Weinberger’s Deinstitutionalization, Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, and Gerald Grob’s From Asylum to R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 31 connected women’s mental disorders with the functioning (or malfunctioning, as the case may be) of their sexual organs and appetites. Accordingly, the preeminent and paradigmatic female psychological complaint was hysteria, whose name comes from the Greek word hysteron, or uterus.^' At the bottom of the special relation between mental health and sexism lies an idea that physical and mental medicine have nourished for centuries, the idea that femininity itself is a kind of sickness. As early as 1973, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English noted that the medical view of women’s health... identified all female functions as inherently sick. Puberty was seen as a “crisis,” throwing the entire female organism into turmoil. Menstruation—or the lack of it—was regarded as pathological throughout a woman’s life... Similarly, a pregnant woman was “indisposed,” and doctors campaigned against the practice of midwifery on the grounds that pregnancy was a disease and demanded the care of a doctor. Menopause was the final, incurable ill, the “death of the woman in the woman.” (20-21) The sexual traits that made women so vulnerable physically made them equally vulnerable psychologically. Women’s psychological fragility led them to breakdowns, the manifestations of which ranged from melancholy and chronic exhaustion, to “fits,” “paroxysms,” and the classic manifestations of hysteria. Community, especially pages 239-304. For the latter, see the works listed in footnote 3 and the 1993 documentary Dialogues with Madwomen. According to Elaine Showalter, hysteria still plays a large part in society’s identification and classification of widespread female and male complaints, albeit under a number of different names. Psycho-medical phenomena like chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder. Gulf War syndrome, and recovered memory syndrome, she claims, are “individual hysterias cormecting with modem social movements to produce psychological epidemics” (1997, 3). It is worth noticing that, while the complaints listed by Showalter do not come exclusively from women, they are still for the most part associated with women, while the predominantly male Gulf War Syndrome acts as a contemporary version of shell shock, the illness of men feminized by their inability to handle the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 32 seizures and the globus hystericus, or the sensation of choking (Hemdl 117; Showalter 1985, 130). The theory that placed the root of female invalidism in women’s sexuality was strangely at odds with other, equally popular theories, according to which women fell ill when they resisted their womanly fate and devoted themselves to the pursuit of male interests. Woman, T. S. Clouston, the medical superintendent at Momingside Asylum in Edinburgh, proclaimed, is constituted hy nature to be “the helpmate and companion of man” (Showalter 123). Women’s “foreordained work” is to be “mothers and nurses of children.” Women like Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who defied their nature and did the things that were reserved for men, would inevitably suffer from mental breakdown. Whether in or outside their homes, women were apparently doomed to ill-being. Even worse, they were condemned to being treated by male doctors who thought of them in the terms I have just described.^^ Invasive and violent psychiatric treatments made explicit to women a traumatic condition they had endured since their puberty, if not sooner. Being a woman brought with itself a sense of physical and mental taintedness, extreme social and personal limitation, and sexual repression. All of these conditions were present manly job of war. ^ The chances that sick women would be treated by male physicians were very high. Hemdl reports that “by 1900, 6 percent of the practicing physicians in the United states were women” (Hemdl 116). The London County Council officially sanctioned the employment of women doctors in 1927. By that date, “forty women members of the Medico-Psychological Association were working in English hospitals” (Showalter 196). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 33 in, and magnified by, the asylum. Psychiatric institutionalization would confirm the female patient in her social and personal vulnerability, reinforcing her status as subject to both cultural biases and norms devised by men, and physical and psychological violence against which she had no recourse. The first systematic feminist reading of the mistreatment of women by the mental health community was Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (1971). Building on Foucault, Goffinan, Szasz, and especially proponents of anti-psychiatry such as Laing and David Cooper, Chesler made the study of madness and psychiatric incarceration a central concern of feminist thought in the United States. Significantly, she did not indict psychiatric practices in the abstract but appealed directly to the words of women asylum survivors. She opens her book with a brief summary of the psychiatric stories of writers Elizabeth Packard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Sylvia Plath. In 1860 Packard’s husband, a clergyman, had his wife committed to an insane asylum because she refused to obey his command not “to express her own opinion on theological matters” (Chesler 6). After an incarceration of three years at the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane, Packard became a fervent advocate of the rights of mental patients and married women. Her two most famous works are Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’ s Trial, published in 1866, snà Modern Persecution: or Insane Asylum Unveiled, published in 1868. Zelda Fitzgerald spent most of her adult life in mental institutions, repeatedly committed there by her famous husband, her mother, and herself. As Nancy Milford R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 34 documents in Zelda: A Biography, Scott felt threatened by Zelda’s writing and used the doctors to “halt her efforts to write fiction” (9). Zelda died in a fire at 48 when the asylum where she resided burned down. Unlike Elizabeth Paekard, Zelda Fitzgerald did not write about her psychiatric institutionalization: her story lives in her letters, in hospital records, in Milford’s carefully documented biography, and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night, one of whose main charaeters is based on her. By contrast, Sylvia Plath amply documented her bout with depression and her encounter with psychiatry in her poetry, her letters, her journal, and, most directly, in the novel The Bell Jar. Chesler’s book indicts the patriarchal society for driving women to insanity and then punishing them for it: “Most twentieth-century women who are psychiatrically labeled, privately treated, and publicly hospitalized are not mad... They may be deeply unhappy, self-destructive, economically powerless, and sexually impotent—but as women they’re supposed to be” (Chesler 25). Chesler minces no words in denouncing the appalling brutality with which women are treated in American state asylums: In general psychiatric wards and state hospitals, “therapy,” privacy, and self-determination are all either minimal or forbidden. Experimental or traditional medication, surgery, shock, and insulin coma treatment, isolation, physical and sexual violence, medical neglect, and slave labor are routinely enforced. Mental patients are somehow less “human” than either medical patients or criminals. They are, after all, “crazy;” they have been abandoned by (or have abandoned dialogue with) their “own” families. As such, they have no way—and no one—to “tell” what is happening to them. (35) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 35 The brutality of the asylum hits women in particular, Chesler claims, because it reproduces a pattern of brutality to which most women are constantly and systematically subjected in the outside world. Ultimately, therefore, the asylum punishes women first and foremost not for being crazy, but for being women: The mental asylum closely approximates the female rather than the male experience within the family. This is probably why Erving Goffman, in Asylums, considered psychiatric hospitalization more destructive of self than criminal incarceration. Like most people, he is primarily thinking of the debilitating effect—on men—of being treated like a woman (as helpless, dependent, sexless, unreasonable— as “crazy”). But what about the effect of being treated like a woman when you are a woman? And perhaps a woman who is already ambivalent or angry about just such treatment? (35) Chesler chillingly concludes: “Perhaps one of the reasons women embark and re- embark on ‘psychiatric careers’ more than men do is because they feel, quite horribly, at ‘home’ within them” (35). Alongside theoretical works, several variously autobiographical asylum narratives appeared in English in the 60s and 70s. Besides Frame’s Faces in the Water and Plath’s The Bell Jar, the best known are Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964, published under the pseudonym of Hannah Green), Frances Farmer’s Will There Really Be a Morning? (1972), and Lara Jefferson’s These Are My Sisters. An "Insandectomy” (1974). During this time the autobiographical narrative of madness and recovery, of which the asylum narrative is a variant, became quite popular among women readers and writers, and it continues to be so. Of such narratives, only a relatively small number contain stories of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 36 psychiatrie incarceration.^^ This is not surprising. Narratives by women asylum survivors are almost uniformly testimonials to deep trauma. The ones I discuss in this study all emphasize the psychic erosion their authors suffered as a consequence of their institutionalization. If one considers the powerful social stigma attached to the asylum survivor, and the fact that, as women, these writers were also victims of social, economic, and professional disadvantages, exponentially magnified by the stigma of the asylum, it is remarkable indeed that these women were able to write— and publish—their stories at all.^'* ^ A few of the most popular women’s first-person narratives of mental illness, published in the last four decades, that do not focus on psychiatric commitment are Martha Wiley Emmett’s I Love the Person You were Meant to Be (1962), Barbara Field Benziger’s The Prison o f My Mind (1969), Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil (1973), Tmddi Chase’s When Rabbit Howls (1987), Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (1994), Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. A Memoir o f Moods and Madness (1995), and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary (1998). Similarly, the fact that in the United States autobiographical female asylum narratives seem to be written exclusively by white authors points to the even greater social and literary marginalization experienced by women of color. While asylums are occasionally mentioned by women of color in their writing, I was not able to find a single autobiographical asylum narrative in English written by a non-white woman. South African writer Bessie Head’s A Question o f Power {\9Ti), a dizzying autobiographical portrayal of madness, does not address the issue of institutionalization even though its author wrote it after a severe breakdown as a consequence of which she was committed. In fact, there are few mentions of psychiatric hospitals in novels by women of color at all. Rosa Guy’s Bird at my Window (1966) begins with its protagonist’s finding himself briefly in a mental hospital to which he never returns. An aunt is sent to the asylum in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976). Sethe is crazed by grief and locks herself up in her own rambling house in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), avoided by the community and therefore as good as confined in her own mad space. And in the recent Po M an’ s Child (1999), Marci Blackman portrays a young African American lesbian who is addicted so badly to cutting as part of her SM lifestyle that she checks herself into a mental institution, fi-om which she emerges renewed. But in these and other appearances in works by women of color, especially African Americans, the asylum is not that same house of horrors it is in the representations given of it by white women. In Po M an’ s Child, in fact, it is a positively benign space. An analysis of why, in the Anglophone world, the female asylum narrative is a predominantly, if not exclusively, white genre also exceeds the scope of this project. I would just like to suggest that women of color have other powerful “captivity narratives’’ at their disposal to portray their marginalization and oppression in society. In fact, they have the captivity narrative par excellence. Both in Beloved and in Po M an’ s Child, the protagonists’ mental distress is connected to slavery. In an interview with the magazine Girlfriend, Marci Blackman says of her novel’s protagonist Po that the inspiration for her “cuttings came from a short article in the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 37 Besides autobiographical testimonials of life in the asylum, the 70s saw feminist investigations of psychiatric incarceration in the form of non- autobiographical novels. The two most significant to appear in this period are Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge o f Time, the first published in England in 1969, the second in the Unites States in 1976. Both novels present concrete strategies of resistance to the psychiatric abuse perpetrated upon women by a male-dominated psycho-medical establishment. Lessing leads Martha Quest, her appropriately named protagonist, on a journey into madness, from which she emerges stronger in her sense of self and her understanding of her place as a woman in society. A strong proponent of anti-psychiatry, Lessing presents the psychic phenomena and behaviors we typically associate with madness as an appropriate response to the dehumanization women suffer in society. Madness as defined by doctors and psychiatrists is, for Lessing, a political construct devised by the capitalistic and patriarchal society to enforce compliance, especially on the part of women. Forced to sacrifice her psychological and sexual integrity for the furthering of a leftist agenda whose rules are also set by men, Martha Quest (like many of Lessing’s anti-heroines) expresses her anguish by regressing, through madness, into an inchoate state of being. As in Margaret Atwood’s novel from about the same time. Surfacing, the protagonist’s regression into madness is an effort at self-preservation that enables her to gather herself and find new strength and clarity Examiner about teen sex workers in Brazil who were cutting themselves up in order to feel... I really wanted to bring up the whole sadomasochistic relationship of slavery” {FemmeNoir.net par 3). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 38 of purpose. In both novels, the woman’s madness gives her freedom to explore alternative paths and dimensions, a creative escape comparable to that achieved through the use of drugs but bom here of the woman’s inner resources and of her determination to achieve transformation. The woman’s choice of insanity puts her in real contact with the brokenness of our world and dissolves the mask of fake adjustment and contentedness people so willingly wear. Madness brings awareness, and through awareness it confers integrity and empowerment. While Martha experiments with madness, her friend Lynda, who has been a mental patient for a large part of her life, goes in and out of the asylum, trapped in a web of expectations, behaviors, and procedures from which she does not know how to escape. Eventually, though, even Lynda prevails against a system that drives women to distraction, not by embracing her madness and finding re-birth in it, but through the quiet subversion of the career mental patient who has learnt to work the system and manipulate it to serve her goals of survival.^^ In Woman on the Edge o f Time Pierey is more concerned with the issues of power and disempowerment that surround the psychiatric establishment than with exploring the nature of madness. Connie Ramos is committed to a state asylum because she tried to stop her cousin’s boyfriend and pimp from beating up the young woman, and now the man has convinced the doctors that Connie is insane. But The now-common usage, in psychiatric survivor literature, of “career” as a semi-humorous designation for the life of the long-term mental patient was coined by Chesler, who first talked about the “female ‘career’ as a psychiatric patient” in Women and Madness (see 114-132). See also above, p. 34. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 39 Connie of course is not insane, and her institutionalization is from the first connected to male abuse of women and the forceful silencing of women’s protest. Soon Connie realizes that there is no way out of the asylum for her. Some of the doctors in her hospital are experimenting with a machine that, once implanted in a person’s hrain, will give control over that person’s feelings to an outside operator. Mental patients, especially Black and Latino, are considered prime candidates for the experiment, and Connie is chosen. Once she realizes that the machine will effectively be the end of her, Connie decides to engage in an all-out war against the doctors and the hospital. Just before she is scheduled to come up for surgery, she laces the doctors’ coffee with a deadly poison. This murderous gesture is portrayed as a heroic guerrilla attack by a freedom fighter bound for death: She washed her hands in the bathroom, she washed them again and again. “I just killed six people,” she said to the mirror, but she washed her hands because she was terrified of the poison. “I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death. I killed them. Because it is war.” Her hands shook like a willow branch used by dowsers in Texas, a willow branch pulled by water deep in the ground. “I’m a dead woman now too. I know it. But I did fight them. I’m not ashamed. I tried.” (375) Piercy’s novel takes the psychiatric establishment to task in political terms, as an institution whose nature is fundamentally oppressive and whose goal is the elimination of dissent and anti-estahlishment potential. And in fact in Woman On the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 40 Edge o f Time psychiatric repression targets not only women, but all those who are different, whether because of gender, race, class, or sex/^ * * * * * The second strand in my theoretical approach is trauma theory. Trauma studies is a relatively recent field in literary criticism, originally bom of the wish to respond to the narrative urge of survivors of the Holocaust and the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those working in trauma theory utilize research in post- traumatic stress disorder going back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Post- traumatic stress disorder made its first appearance during World War I, under the name of shell shock or combat neurosis.^^ Subsequently it was applied not only to war veterans, but also to survivors of torture, terrorism, and a number of other types of violence.^^ Since PTSD had originally been identified in relation to war-like situations, its diagnosis was for quite some time applied mostly to men. In Trauma and Recovery, published in 1992, Judith Lewis Herman was one of the first in the field of mental health “to compare post-traumatic stress disorder precipitated by rape, sexual abuse, or battering with the symptoms of neurosis exhibited by war ^ Even though I use “sex” here to allude to psychiatry’s repression of homosexuality, it is in fact the case that, until the 90s, asylum narratives portrayed psychiatry’s repression of all sexuality, homo- and heterosexual. This repressiveness goes from proscribing sex altogether (as in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water), to controlling and legislating the modality of the patients’ exercise of their (hetero)sexuality (The Bell Jar). At first doctors diagnosed the large numbers of shell-shocked soldiers with hysteria. This was a great departure from traditional assumption about hysteria, which was believed to be a prevalently female disorder, and it contributed partly to its disappearance from official psychiatric jargon. The American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders in 1980 (DSM III). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 41 veterans and victims of terrorism,” that is, one of the first to turn her attention to trauma in women’s, as well as men’s, lives (Henke, xiii). Extending the incidence of PTSD beyond the war sphere opened the possibility of widening the definition of trauma survivor to include not only battered women, but a whole range of other groups whose experiences exceeded the boundaries of that which is predictable and bearable (two of the common diagnostic criteria for PTSD), like victims of incest and childhood abuse, victims of racism and genocide, survivors of substance addiction, cancer survivors, ex-prostitutes, people with AIDS—and asylum inmates. Though unpredictability appears in trauma literature as one of the criteria for experiencing an event as traumatic, 1 would like to suggest that it should be interpreted loosely. In her analysis of trauma in women’s lives, Laura Brown points out that many events that people experience as intensely traumatic are neither, as the now-obsolete DSM-111 claimed, “outside the range of normal experience,” nor, as psychoanalyst Dori Laub does, “outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time” (69).^^ In other words, she questions whether Cathy Caruth discusses the vicissitudes of PTSD at some length in the introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). ^ In the next-to-last edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistic Manual, DSM-III-R, an event was defined as traumatic if it was “outside the range of usual human experience” and if it was such that it “would be markedly distressing to almost anyone” (250). DSM-IV, die current edition, has reduced the characteristics required of the event itself, i.e. independently of the witness, in order to qualify as potentially traumatic, and placed more emphasis on the witness’s response, making the latter an integral part of the definition of traumatic event. In the diagnostic criteria for (the newly spelled) Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, DSM-IV states: The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following were present: (1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 42 they need be seen as genuinely unpredictable. Events like rape, incest, and war- related acts of cruelty are, unfortunately, all too common and predictable for very large groups of people, some of whom manage nonetheless to get profoundly traumatized by them. One can however keep the experience of unpredictability as constitutive of trauma if one imagines that our psyches defend us against horror by refusing the accept the likelihood that it will bit us, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. One can say, for instance, that while many women living in the United States know that they have a 1 in 4 chance of being raped at some point in their lives, many of us live as if this will not happen to us, as if for instance it is only women who put themselves in dangerous situations who get raped, etc. So, even as we know that rape is far from unlikely, to find ourselves raped may still come to us as an unprecedented and inconceivable horror, to which our psyches responds with trauma. Laura Brown in fact claims that girls and women are from a very early age in a state of latent post-traumatic stress disorder, because of the pervasively sexually threatening environment in which they are socialized, and of the stories of sexual abuse to which they are constantly exposed by other women and the mass media. For them. Brown claims, “insidious trauma is a way of life” (108). This “insidious” traumatization affects therefore not only women who have been abused, but all or most women, because of social mechanisms that allow trauma to be transmitted horizontally instead of, as in the case with, say, children of Holocaust survivors, (2) the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. (209) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 43 vertically, i.e. from generation to generation. In commenting on Laura Brown’s point, Shoshana Felman writes: Indeed I will suggest—in line with what has recently been claimed by feminist psychiatrists and psychotherapists—that every woman’s life contains, explicitly or in implicit ways, the story of a trauma... [A]ny feminine existence is in fact a traumatized existence. (1993,16) This is important because it helps explain the severity of post-traumatic reactions in cases in which the traumatic nature of the event is not immediately obvious. One such case is, in fact, psychiatric hospitalization, which it is not unusual for women to experience as incredibly traumatic even when they were not exposed to any overt violence in the course of it. The idea that there might be different levels of legitimacy among trauma sufferers is well entrenched in the literature. In academic disciplines like History and Critical Studies, the traumatic event has become in the last 25 years “the paradigm for the historical event,” and the experience of trauma a guarantee both of identity and social standing for the witness (Douglas and Vogel 5). This, scholars warn, may give rise to something akin to “trauma envy:” While individual trauma confers individual identity, the function of trauma as a “social glue” holds groups together on the basis of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, disease, or handicap. Hilene Flanzbaum has pointed out the increasing tendency in identity politics to assume “that learning about one’s heritage automatically entails the glorification of suffering, as if without proving the persistence of persecution you cannot legitimate your claim to minority, or ethnic, status.” Trauma has been so successful in this function, as both individual and group identities are increasingly based on historical instances of victimization, that we may eventually need a new R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 44 psychoanalytic term, “trauma envy,” to describe those left behind (12). The glamorization of trauma survivors who have been part of collective disasters recognized as milestones of human history may sometimes have the consequence of trivializing the somewhat more mundane experience of everyday trauma sufferers. This is of particular interest in connection to authors like Frame and Plath, who use images from the Holocaust to give a feeling of the quality of their sufferings. In the poem “Daddy,” Plath draws on her father’s German origin to equate masculinity with Fascism, while casting herself as a Jew. Plath’s appropriation of the Holocaust in her poetry has elicited protests from various critics.^® Jacqueline Rose quotes Leon Wieseltier: Auschwitz bequeathed to all subsequent art perhaps the most arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity, but its availability has been abused. For many it was Sylvia Plath who broke the ice... In perhaps her most famous poem, “Daddy,” she was explicit... There can be no disputing the genuineness of the pain here. But the Jews with whom she identifies were victims of something worse than “weird luck.” Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews. The metaphor is inappropriate... I do not mean to lift the Holocaust out of the reach of art. Adorno was wrong—poetry can be made after Auschwitz and out of it... But it cannot be done without hard work and rare resources of the spirit. Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed. My own feeling is that Sylvia Plath did not earn it, that she did not respect the real incommensurability to her own experience of what took place. (205) See Rose, 205-7. The whole last chapter of Rose’s book is about Plath’s representation of the Holocaust, with particular focus on the poem “Daddy.” Wieseltier’s article appeared in The New York Review o f Books in 1976. Rose qualifies her own mentioning of Wieseltier by saying that the latter’s importance to the debate about Plath and the Holocaust lies solely in “the clarity with which he lays out the terms of [his] critique” (205). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 45 Leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of using the Holocaust as a metaphor at all, and, if so, of the conditions that should regulate such use (Plath wrote after all before such questions had even started being asked), it is interesting that Wieseltier should consider Plath’s “pain” so obviously inferior to that suffered by the Jews, as to see a comparison between the two as ludicrous. Plath’s use of the Holocaust to represent her trauma (which Wieseltier unproblematically assumes relates to what her father “did to her”) strikes Wieseltier as so disproportionate that the issue of what really happened to her falls immediately into the background, ceases to warrant attention and investigation, is erased. Plath’s violation of the rules of propriety takes center stage, while her pain, whose genuineness, incidentally, Wieseltier does not dispute, disappears. Wieseltier’s attitude exemplifies a tradition that distinguishes between traumas that deserve to make the history books and traumas of a more personal nature, traumas one should keep private and talk about with proportion and humility. According to Wieseltier, the right to put one’s tragedies alongside great historical tragedies like the Holocaust must be “earned” (again, I will set aside here questions emerging from Holocaust Studies, such as whether the Holocaust should be considered unique). Familiarity with the “hellish subject” cannot be “presupposed” (whatever that means). What Plath (perhaps unconsciously) does in “Daddy” and other places, including The BellJar, is precisely to assert women’s right to commensurate their traumas—traumas having to do with gender oppression, sexual R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 46 abuse, and brutalization at the hands of individuals and society—with those whose legitimacy and seriousness no one questions. The point here is not to weigh one tragedy against another, but to use a tragedy of enormous and unquestionable proportions to highlight the seriousness of one’s traumatic experience. Plath’s move is to appropriate “the most arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity” to represent a traumatic condition that is also, though differently, extreme—in its pervasiveness, dehumanization, and psycho- and sociological impact, as well as in the neglect or dismissal with which it is frequently met. Furthermore, the experience of Holocaust survivors and by extension the Holocaust itself are emblematic of the perception, shared by trauma survivors of all stripes, that their experience is unsayable. Part of what Plath does in “Daddy” is to raise the question of what language can and cannot say—a question that is painfully central to post-World War II literature worldwide. Language, Plath suggests in “Daddy,” is an instrument in the hands of the oppressor, unavailable to those who do not control power. To her German “Daddy” she says: “I never could talk to you./ The tongue stuck in my jaw” (223). The oppressive nature of language is symbolized in “Daddy” through the repetition of German words, which function simultaneously as shorthand for the horror of Nazism: It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 47 And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I might well be a Jew. The great attention given to trauma survivors has engendered in recent decades a comparable interest in the literature of witness. Shoshana Felman writes; It has been suggested that testimony is the literary—or discursive— mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony. “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet,” writes Elie Wiesel, “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.” (1992, 6) One of the controversies that surrounds the literature of witness is the question of historical accuracy and the extent to which survivors’ testimonies can be trusted.In the pages to follow I will not concern myself with issues of historical veracity. It is not that I believe that the testimonies I discuss should not be taken seriously as historical documents, for what they say about the inhumanity of some psychiatric practices and for their denunciation of psychiatry as a tool for enforcing social conformity on the part of women. Even though these narratives are fictionalized, their authors clearly meant to testify to a truth they felt needed to be told. But where Cases in which historians or other relevant experts have impugned trauma testimonies abound. Some of the most famous are the controversy over recovered memory and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; the case of Rigoberta Menchu; and the Video Archives of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. For an insightful discussion of what is wrong with the skepticism surrounding recovered memory and the story of Rigoberta Menchu, see Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits o f Autobiography, pp. 28-30 and 3-6. For a discussion of the origin of the Yale Archives and of the controversy related to their historical value, see Dori Laub’s chapters in Felman and Laub’s Testimony. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 48 demands for a collectively acceptable account of historical events are less pressing, I suggest that one take survivors’ narratives seriously without questioning their truthfulness. In a cultural climate in which it is not unusual for the stories of women and the mentally ill to be still received with skepticism, and for their authors to be accused of deception, manipulation, self-victimization, and paranoia, 1 would like, quite simply, to take the women at their word, to believe what they say about their own stories.^^ Respect for the witness requires a validation of her testimony as conveying a psychic truth that may differ, and in a sense even exceed, the factual truth the recipients of the testimony may be looking for. The appropriate response to a traumatic testimony is dedicated and educated listening. Indeed, the very act of witnessing requires an open and unjudging audience. As Shoshana Felman, quoting Freud, says, “it takes two to witness the imconscious” (15). The difficulties for trauma testimony are often put in terms of speaking the unspeakable, of giving voice to the ineffable; experiences that stretch the boundaries of the humanly conceivable and bearable are thought to require a language that, also, pushes the boundaries of the normal, the traditional, even the compréhensible.^"* But the difficulty of witnessing, 1 suggest, has at least as much to I am thinking of the police and the medical and legal establishments, whose members do not always show empathy to victims of trauma and respect for their testimonies. In fact, trauma victims often find the experience of testifying to their trauma traumatic in itself, because of the ridicule, dismissiveness, and even accusatory attitude with which their testimonies are met by police officers, attorneys, judges, social workers, psychiatrists, reporters, and historians. ^ With a certain amount of sarcasm, Douglass and Vogler survey the literature of representational impossibility: “Representation seems to delight in ‘Speaking the Unspeakable’ (Leak and Paizis), ‘Bearing the Unbearable’ (Aaron), ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ (Gottlieb), and going ‘Beyond the Conceivable’ (Diner)’’ (32). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 49 do with another’s being willing to, so to speak, hear the mhearable, as it does with the witness’s willingness to embark upon the task of saying the unsayable. By this I mean that a testimony requires a listener who opens herself to the risk of listening to something that is so outside the confines of “what is talked about” that it may seem to her simply unacceptable. With trauma narratives, Dori Laub and others suggest, empathy can demand something extraordinary, almost heroic of the listener. As Laub points out, it is natural for all of us to shirk from stories of massive pain, where the horror of another becomes one’s own horror: The listener can no longer ignore the question of facing death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning and purpose of living; of the limits of one’s omnipotence; of losing the ones that are close to us; the great question of our ultimate aloneness; our otherness from any other; our responsibility to and for our destiny; the question of loving and its limits; of parents and children; and so on. (72) Psychiatrists call this extreme but unavoidable identification secondary trauma. Instinctively, one tends to protect oneself from secondary trauma by assuming attitudes that range from avoidance and withdrawal to positive hostility to the victim. One might then say that part of the reason why the traumatized subject believes that her trauma is unspeakable is that so few are willing to hear it. Trauma survivors learn quickly to either keep their stories to themselves, or to share them only with fellow survivors. And the proliferation of support groups composed of people who underwent the same ordeals is itself a testimony to the need of trauma survivors to create new communities of meaning and listening, in which their words do not feel empty or meaningless. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 50 In the case of written testimonies, the listener is the reader. Much of what has been said of listeners remains true of readers, but there are some differences between written and spoken testimony. When the witness writes, she writes alone. At the same time, putting the testimony into words requires that she postulate the existence of a sympathetic readership: “A surrogate transferential process can take place through the scene of writing that allows its author to envisage a sympathetic audience and to imagine a public validation of his or her life testimony” (Henke 1998, xii). Receiving a testimony in writing instead of orally creates different expectations for the reader. In the first place, the physical distance between reader and writer lessens the existential and psychological pressures of identification. Most importantly, though, if the testimony has been published and accepted by a community of readers, public acknowledgment acts as a disalienating and authorizing factor, which further removes the anxiety of the individual recipient. * * * * * One of main features of post-traumatic stress is psychic fi-agmentation.^^ It manifests itself in the cognitive split whereby trauma survivors are tortured by memories, dreams, and sometimes hallucinations, yet unable to control the narrative of their trauma. It shows in the sense of inner displacement that haunts the trauma survivor, in her inability to regain a meaningful place in the community, in her need to define herself primarily through the trauma. Freud interprets the psychic This theory originates with Freud, who explains it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and is embraced by Henke, Felman, and Caruth, among others. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 51 fragmentation that result from trauma through the phenomenon of repetition compulsion, which consists in the survivor’s unconscious drive endlessly to repeat the trauma in her thoughts and dreams as well as in her actions/^ In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud illustrates repetition compulsion and psychic fragmentation through the story of Tancred and Clorinda, the hero and heroine of Guglielmo Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. Freud recounts that Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armor of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest that strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.In commenting on this passage, Cathy Caruth observes that the actions of Tancred, wounding his beloved in a battle and then, unknowingly, seemingly by chance, wounding her again, significantly represent in Freud’s text the way in which the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will. (1996, 2) Tancred and Clorinda symbolize for Freud multiple aspects of the same person, who is at the same time the hand that inflicts the wound, the flesh that feels the pain, and the voice that testifies to the injury. Freud lost interest in childhood trauma when he abandoned his so-called “seduction theory.” His interest in trauma was reawakened by observations of combat neurosis during WWI. What specifically prompted Freud to discover, or rediscover, trauma neurosis was the clinical observation of repetition compulsion in WWI veterans. For a brief compendium of the vicissitudes of Freud and traumatic hysteria, see Herman, 10-20. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 293. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 52 In the psychiatric narratives analyzed in the chapters that follow, this post- traumatic split is apparent in the writers’ multiplication of their heroines’ alter egos. This is particularly striking in The Bell Jar, where Esther splits not only into a variety of other selves, but also, repeatedly, into mirror images of herself. Just like Tancred and Clorinda, Esther’s alter egos as well as her mirror images attack her and each other, and are attacked by her in return, in endless repetition of what is for Plath the original trauma, the female condition. Psychic fragmentation appears also in The Snake Pit, where the protagonist’s voices mixes and fuses with the narrator’s in seamless transitions from the first, second, and third person, even in the course of the same paragraph: She put her hands up to her eyes and her glasses were not there. “Is there any danger of her ever losing her sight?” Mother asked the doctor. You were ten then. “Well,” said the old coot of a doctor, “well, I don’t—think so.” For years you felt as if you were committing a crime when you read anything that was not Required. And reading was the only thing you cared much for. Well, softball. Yes. What ever became of all those kids, I wonder. Let me see... David is a priest, Fred runs a laundry, Kate teaches school... Did Edgar end up in jail? Mother said he would. He was a good ball player, though. So was I, in spite of the bum eyes. (7). In response to the pain that comes to the trauma survivor from psychic fragmentation, scholars of autobiography suggest writing as a regrouping technique. Henke, for instance, proposes scriptotherapy based on the subject’s achievement of a “salutary paradigm” of cohesive narrative: “The author recasts his or her life narrative in the shape of a salutary paradigm that offers both a myth of origins and an implicitly teleological model for future development” (xv). Women, she claims, can R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 53 particularly benefit from the use of this kind of self-writing, because through it they can access “the sense of mastery that aggregates around western notions of harmonious selfhood,” traditionally the province of male autohiographers (xii). Writing about her trauma, Henke suggests, allows the traumatized subject to recover control over the events that caused the trauma, organize memories that are often obsessive and relentless, and authorize cohesion and finality in her life-story. Some feminist scholars of autobiography, however, have taken a strong stance against a model of life-writing that postulates a unified author. They have emphasized how women’s life-writing differs from the traditional male autobiographical model precisely in that it is not driven by a unified sense of self, but, rather, is assertive of “the importance of the thoughtless, the loose, the unrestrained, the wnconscious” (Benstoek 1046). In an important essay on the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf, Shari Benstoek observes that after Freud’s discovery of the unconscious it is impossible to hold on to the idea of a stable “I” as the “center of narrative discourse” (1048). Thanks to poststructuralist insights into the nature of the self as always already split, the supposedly solid “I” of even the most respected autobiographies of “great men” reveals itself to be a fiction. Following Jacques Lacan, Benstoek claims that a psychic split is constitutive of the self, or that it is a necessary condition for the very notion of selfhood. Autobiographical fictions of unity are built over, thus hiding, the fragments of a “self’ that functions simultaneously as the subject and the object of the narration, the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 54 authorial voice that knows the story and the temporally dispersed, everchanging, pre narrative consciousness that enacts it. In traditionally conceived autobiography, these gaps in the temporal and spatial dimensions of the text are often successfully hidden from reader and writer, so that the fabric of the narrative appears seamless, spun of whole cloth. The effect is magical—the self appears organic, the present the sum total of the past, the past an accurate predictor of the future. (1047) This autobiographical model, Benstoek argues, is patriarchal in nature and therefore based on the erasure of difference: This conception of the autobiographical rests on a firm belief in the conscious control of the artist over subject matter; this view of the life history is grounded in authority. It is perhaps not surprising that those who cling to such a definition are those whose assignment under the Symbolic law is to represent authority, to represent the phallic power that drives inexorably toward unity, identity, sameness. And it is not surprising that those who question such authority are those who are expected to submit to it, those who line up on the other side of the sexual divide—that is, women. The self that would reside at the center of the text is decentered—or often is absent altogether—in women’s autobiographical texts. (1047) In women’s self-writing often the important story is not that which lies on the surface of the text, but that which emerges through what Benstoek calls “fissures of female discontinuity.” those can be located, Benstoek suggests, when there appear in the text “gaps in memory, dislocations in time and space, insecurities, hesitations, and blind spots” (1146). In other words, wherever the seemingly unified subject, the authorial “I,” is disrupted. Benstock’s take on women’s autobiography sounds more descriptive than normative, which is confusing here, and it makes us wonder whether Benstoek and Henke have indeed read the same texts. But of course there are many ways of reading a text, while the descriptive and the prescriptive alternate loosely in Benstock’s essay. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 55 If, however, the idea of the organic self is a magical fantasy, and self consciously organized autobiography a construct that is premised on the suppression of otherness, dissimilitude, and resistance to authority, then the healing achieved by life-writing as something “that offers both a myth of origins and an implicitly teleological model for fiiture development” is as fictional as the “I” that posits itself as the coherent Subject of its own story. Aware of the difficulties of advocating integrated selves and subjects, Henke and others suggest recourse to a “‘both/and’ strategy” (xiv). Henke claims that such strategy is in fact adopted by “the majority of scholars working in the field of autobiography today” (xiv). In this compromise approach, the scholar of autobiography agrees to engage with the coherent fictions autobiographers propose of themselves; at the same time, she looks carefully for the multiple ways in which the unconscious emerges at the seams of the text, revealing a broken subject and fragmented, multiple selves. The recognition of author’s representation of herself as a unified subject is particularly important, Henke claims, for women and members of other marginalized groups, the expression of whose voices is seldom authorized and thus seldom authoritative, even when it appears to carry the weight of authority. With an approach that recalls that of the psychotherapist, the literary critic listens simultaneously to the story that is being told and to the reticences that point to another story, or to other infinitely evolving, multiple stories. Life-writing that is coherently, teleologically constructed is seen as just another fiction, in this case a therapeutically and politically useful one. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 5 6 Henke and others focus on functionality, that is, on what life-writing can do more than on what it is. What life-writing does for the traumatized female writer, Henke claims, is to endow her with a sense of psychological unity and the moral integrity that comes from a functional authorial empowerment: The subject of enunciation theoretically restores a sense of agency to the hitherto fragmented self, now recast as the protagonist of his or her life drama. Through the artistic replication of a coherent subject- position, the life-writing project generates a healing narrative that temporarily restores the fragmented self to an empowered position of psychological agency, (xvi) The both/and approach is fraught with difficulties and must ultimately be rejected. If, after all, we take Benstock’s suggestion seriously, how can we accept Henke’s therapeutic compromise and read women’s trauma narratives as if they were written by a coherent self (even while paying attention to the emergence of fissures of discontinuity), without betraying a feminist project where personal risks are subsumed in the larger goal of making difference heard? And how do we know, how can we be sure that the empowerment women achieve in creating the fiction of their cohesive narratives is not a false empowerment that is in fact authored by someone else, a false sense of authority that reproduces women’s voicelessness and marginalization because it is bom of false consciousness, and acquiescence, and, finally, acceptance of that phallocentric “I” that is the signpost of female obliteration? What, finally, if healing comes to women from the acknowledgment of their psychic fragmentation, instead of from its concealment? R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 57 I suggest a solution that reprises, and carries into the 20th and 21st centuries, the insights into 19th century women’s writing offered by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in the now classic The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)/* In this book, Gilbert and Gubar introduce the theory that 19th century women’s novels are frequently characterized by multiple splits, which are effected by breaking up the female protagonists into a number of alter egos. This multiplication of female characters, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, is a feminist strategy of resistance to patriarchal representations of femininity. The splits employed by the writers Gilbert and Gubar analyze do not appear on the surface of the text in the form of linguistic, structural, or narrative discontinuities, but are buried within the plot. For every heroine there will be a number of aberrant and even monstrous female figures: these will be not only madwomen (like the original “madwoman in the attic,” Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason), but also meddlesome spinsters, mean-spirited stepmothers, selfish and loud aunts, etc. While apparently objectionable, these characters are in fact positive doubles of the well-behaved heroines, meant to express the feminist passions—rage, desire for independence, rejection of societal conventions, creativity, etc.—that it would be unthinkable for the heroines to convey in their own voices. Gilbert and Gubar’s reading allows for women’s texts that contain splits, discontinuities, and textual and cultural subversions even as they appear to reproduce Although the point made by Gilbert and Gubar has been widely reprised and enriched by scholars working on female subjectivity and self-representation in the last 20 years, I would like to close this chapter with these two pioneers in the study of literary representations of madness and social marginalization in women’s literature. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 58 traditional literary forms and sexist cultural paradigms. By embodying forbidden passions in characters they appeared to disapprove of, 19th century women writers could reproduce male fictions of femininity—fictions based on the stereotype of the angel of the house on the one hand and the wicked witch on the other—while subtly reinterpreting them from the inside. The genius of these writers, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, is to have been able to inhabit male genres and reproduce their literary conventions, while simultaneously voicing their intense discomfort with the images of femininity they presented. By introducing their misgivings into the subtext, moreover, these authors were able to circumvent their own sense of guilt and impropriety. I believe the model of sly subversion identified by Gilbert and Gubar may be useful in reading the women’s asylum narratives discussed in this dissertation, and most others too. With the exception of Mrs. Dalloway, which employs experimental narrative modes and is autobiographical only in a loose sense, the trauma narratives analyzed here conform to traditional models for women’s literature of their times: Gilman’s as a Gothic story. Frame’s as a linear autobiographical narrative that ends on a qualifiedly positive note, and Plath’s as a “pot-boiler” (Plath’s own word) that also, as such novels should, ends, at least on the surface, satisfactorily. The presence of split identities and alter egos points at the same time, though, not only to other, much less happy endings, but also to inexpressible feelings such as rage, rebellion, and lust. The possibility of distancing herself from such unacceptable feelings by R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 59 placing them in characters other than her protagonist has a double advantage for the writer. On the one hand it allows her to produce literature that will be accepted, bought, and read—something whose therapeutic value in trauma narratives has already been shown. On the other, it permits her to avoid confronting the trauma head on, because through her alter egos the author is allowed to disperse, so to speak, her contradictory feelings, to parcel out her painful memories. Like Gilbert and Gubar’s writers, the trauma witness creates multiple alter egos as a path to self- expression, protection from the judgment of others, and, last but not least, a shield from the demons that live inside herself. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 60 I. PIONEERING A GENRE: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND VIRGINIA WOOLF A study of twentieth-century women’s asylum narratives cannot but begin with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Virginia W oolfs Mrs. Dalloway. Both works have long been read as landmark feminist representations of women’s insanity in a patriarchal world. Their descriptions of madness are all the more poignant because both Gilman and Woolf suffered from mental illness in real life, battled with male psychiatrists’—and their own husbands’—interpretations of their illness and views about how to cure it, and ended their own lives.’ While readers have viewed these writers’ representations of women’s madness as large playing fields in which feminist themes like marriage, motherhood, authorship, women’s control of language and discourse, resistance to patriarchal power, sexuality, and psychiatric authority, to name a few, are addressed, no one has read these two works as direct representations of their authors’ traumatic experiences in the asylum. I will therefore approach “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Mrs. Dalloway as asylum trauma narratives in which their authors give witness to the personal horror of their own captivity in psychiatric spaces and the forced treatment they had to endure there. ‘ While Woolf committed suicide, Gilman’s death was a planned and announced euthanasia. Gilman suffered from breast cancer for three years, knowing all along that she would end her life when pain or infirmity made her no longer useful. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 61 Gilman and Woolf encountered psychiatry in the form of the rest cure, a then popular treatment for hysteria among well-to-do women on both sides of the Atlantic. Gilman was treated by the doctor who invented it, Silas Weir Mitchell, in his Philadelphia clinic. Woolf was put by her family under the care of another prominent nerve specialist of the time, Sir George Savage, who prescribed the rest cure for her, to be taken in a private rest home in Twickenham, England. Weir Mitchell’s original treatment consisted of bed rest, drinking lots of milk, massage, and the absolute avoidance of intellectual stimulation. Other doctors brought various changes, but the principle of bed rest, food, and lack of intellectual activity remained. While “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an explicit indictment of the rest cure, which Gilman abhorred and whieh affected her for life, Mrs. Dalloway is a more general critique of psychiatry and particularly of the trauma that results from a patient’s complete surrender of her autonomy to a physician who, in the very act of declaring that patient insane, acquires a fantastic power over her. Published in the United States in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was not well received. It was not reprinted until twenty-eight years later in William Dean Howells’s collection The Great American Short Stories (1920), gained some popularity for a time, and then faded out of public view with the rest of Gilman’s work while she was still alive. In 1973 it was reissued by the Feminist Press with a groundbreaking “Afterword” by Elaine Hedges and finally rediscovered as a pioneering masterpiece of feminist literature. As Annette Kolodny has shown, “The R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 62 Yellow Wallpaper” was certainly ahead of its time and thus belongs more properly to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century/ “The Yellow Wallpaper” is Gilman’s only autobiographical fiction; it is also her most famous and, nowadays, only widely read piece of writing. During her prolific career as a feminist and social reformist, Gilman spoke extensively throughout the country and abroad and published various books, countless articles and short stories, poems, plays, several novels, and even a monthly magazine. The Forerunner, which she wrote cover to cover between 1909 and 1916. Her autobiography. The Living o f Charlotte Perkins Gilman, appeared posthumously in 1935, the year of her death. Gilman was a reluctant autobiographer: her only two autobiographical works are “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Living o f Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Writing her autobiography was difficult for Gilman: “Gilman did not want anyone—a doctor, the public, or even herself probably—to delve into her dark places. To the extent to which this autobiography does do just that, it was a painful act of remembrance and disclosure” (Lane xvi). Perhaps Gilman’s reluctance to write autobiographical pieces can be read as a consequence of trauma. At the same time, the very act of putting pen to paper to write about painful experiences she was reluctant to share testifies to Gilman’s desire to unburden herself, to be a witness to her trauma, and to use her trauma to enlighten others. Gilman’s breakdown and her subsequent brush with psychiatry are described in her autobiography as the most harrowing and deeply ^ See “A Map for Rereading,” where Kolodny shows compellingly that it would have been difficult for contemporary audiences to understand “The Yellow Wallpaper” fully. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 63 affecting experiences of her life. A lot of text is devoted to the effort of making the reader understand precisely how devastating such an experience was. At 24, Gilman became terribly weak and depressed. From an exceptionally energetic, driven, and hard-working young woman, she turned into an invalid. This breakdown, which in her autobiography she attributes to her first marriage, was so severe that she never fully recovered. Even though, after her separation from Charles Walter Stetson, she went on to be what by any standard would be considered a very prolific writer and speaker, she still experienced recurring fatigue, depression, and cognitive disturbances. During the worst of her illness, when she was still married to Stetson and had just given birth to her daughter Katherine (whom she loved but was absolutely unable to care for), she saw Dr. Weir Mitchell in Philadelphia, “the greatest nerve specialist in the country” (Gilman 1991, 95). In Weir Mitchell’s clinic Gilman took the rest cure and “came perilously near to losing [her] mind.” The crisis that followed her interaction with Weir Mitchell finally led Gilman to see that the only solution to her miserable mental condition was to put an end to her four-year-long marriage. She still cared for her husband, as he did for her, and their divorce was amicable. Gilman’s decision to part from Stetson was dictated by pure self- preservation. Gilman claims that at the time of her marriage she was subject to two contradictory pulls, one towards social work and the improvement of the human R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 64 race, the other towards the obligations of marriage and motherhood. Of her two years of courtship (if it can he called that: Gilman was intensely tom and upset over the whole thing) with Stetson, she writes: My mind was not fully clear as to whether I should or should not marry. On the one hand I knew it was normal and right in general, and held that a woman should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also. On the other, I felt strongly that for me it was not right, that the nature of the life before me forbade it, that I ought to forego the more intimate personal happiness for complete devotion to my work. (83) As it turned out, marriage and motherhood took Gilman away from her work completely. The pages she devotes to the years of her first marriage are a record of absorbed domesticity on the one hand, and mental and physical decline on the other. Weir Mitchell exasperated this conflict by reinforcing Gilman’s sense that, for women, marriage was all about devotion to family and fulfillment of domestic duties. His parting words to her were: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time.” (Be it remarked that iff did but dress the baby it left me shaking and erying—certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to say nothing of the effect on me.) “Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” (96) “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written soon after Gilman’s separation from Stetson, indicts both the sexual politics that made it “normal and right in general” for a R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 65 woman to marry no matter what, and the psychiatric notions that supported and fed such a constricted model of femininity/ “The Yellow Wallpaper” is conceived as a supernatural gothic tale and it may not be immediately obvious that it does indeed contain an important autobiographical element. But Gilman is keen to anchor the story in reality. Weir Mitchell appears explicitly as the person to whom the narrator’s husband threatens to send her if she does not “pick up faster” (8). This does not appeal to her at all, because, she says, “I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (the narrator’s husband John and her brother are both physicians). In the autobiography, Gilman says that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is “a description of a case of nervous breakdown beginning something as mine did, and treated as Dr. S. Weir Mitchell treated me with what I considered the inevitable result, progressive insanity” (119). Notice that Gilman describes both herself and the story’s narrator as having gone from “nervous breakdown” to “progressive insanity” as a result of the treatment they received. Gilman makes no secret of the fact that she wrote the story “with a purpose” (121). Such purpose was “to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways.” To Gilman’s delight, she probably succeeded. She writes that many years later, I met some one who knew close friends of Dr. Mitchell’s who said he had told them that he had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ If this is fact, I have not lived in vain. ' This theme is also at the core of The Bell Jar. See chapter III. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 66 The autobiography, in fact, reveals that Gilman’s purpose in not only to convince Weir Mitchell, but also to educate doctors and patients alike about female insanity, the rest cure, and psychiatric treatment. She reports two cases in which the story received positive responses (she also mentions a couple of negative ones). One is the case of a doctor (male); the other, of the family of a patient (female). In both cases the story had a beneficial impact, in the case of the doctor because it gave him a clearer insight into “incipient insanity,” in the case of the woman patient because her family discontinued the rest cure (120). Gilman underlines how the decisive element both for the doctor and the patient’s family was to learn from her, whom they contacted personally, that the story was true. In reply to the doctor’s inquiry on this point, she replies “that I had been as far as one could go and get back” (121). Gilman reports these readers’ responses with great enthusiasm. Of the change of treatment for the woman patient she says, “This was triumph indeed.” If she is reluctant to open her dark places, Gilman is certainly also keen to tell the story of the insanity that came from her hospitalization and treatment. Briefly, the elements of the female asylum narrative that appear in "The Yellow Wallpaper” are the following, a) The heroine is confined to a prison-like space where she is denied control of her action and freedom of movement, b) This confinement is originated by a physician, who, as the person who has mandated imprisonment, is also the only person who can bestow freedom, c) The patient is subjected to a strict discipline that she finds extremely limiting and distressing. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 6 7 d) The psychiatric confinement, far fi'om producing psychic healing and wellness, becomes the occasion for a catastrophic psychic crisis. While critics such as Paula Treichler, Judith Fetterly, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny, and Janice Haney-Peritz have focused on the protagonist’s language, on the nature of her madness, and on the gender dynamics between her and her doctor-husband, I will pay specific attention to the fact of confinement and to the techniques Gilman uses to tell her story of psychiatric trauma through the fiction of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”'^ A woman writer suffering from some kind of illness (the interpretation of this illness’ nature is the crux of the story) is taken by her husband to spend three months in a large and isolated “colonial mansion,” which he has rented specifically for her to rest in. The husband, a doctor, believes that his wife, who is the nameless first- person narrator of the story, suffers from a nervous disorder, and that “phosphates or phosphites—whiehever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise,” and, especially, absolute abstention fi'om “work,” will cure her (Gilman 1989, 2). But the woman disagrees with both the diagnosis and the cure. As for the cure, she thinks that she would benefit from “congenial w ork,... excitement and change” rather than isolation and inactivity (2). But the will of the husband, who carries the multiple authoritative weight of the patriarchal head of the family and a physician, prevails. * Paula Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1984); Judith Fetterly, “Reading about Reading: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1986); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979); Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts” (1980); Janice Haney-Peritz, “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1986). Most of the articles R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 68 and rest in the deserted mansion it is for our heroine. With regards to the nature of her illness, the woman resists her husband’s psychological interpretation, according to which she suffers from “a temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (2). The reason for this resistance, it becomes quickly apparent, is not however that she has a better explanation, or even any alternative explanation at all, but that she correctly feels that her husband’s diagnosis (seconded by her brother, also a doctor) is really a dismissal of the pain that afflicts her: You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one hut temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency— what is one to do? My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing. (2) What is one to do indeed? The narrator needs an almost preternatural sense of the legitimacy of her illness if she is to counteract the formidable invalidation mounted by the two men who, together, stand so completely for men’s power to legislate over women’s minds and bodies. The husband’s diagnosis, thus, dismisses even as it validates, through the double action of making light of the woman’s condition that it itself has named, and denying the woman diagnostic and practical control over her illness and its cure.^ can be found in “The Yellow Wallpaper” edited by Thomas L. Erskine and Connie Richards (1993). ^ Paula Treichler makes this point when she identifies the diagnosis as part of official and sanctioned (male) language and contrasts it to women’s discourse, which is confined to a limited set of themes and practices, and in which free expression is proscribed. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Treichler writes, the narrator “suggests that the diagnosis itself, by undermining her own conviction that her R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 69 No wonder our heroine soon loses a sense of her original illness; the early protestations (“He does not believe I am sick”) fade out of the text and the issue of what is really the matter with her becomes secondary and recedes into the background. This is often the case in women’s narratives of the asylum; the “cure” the asylum imposes becomes the new and only focus of the patient’s mind, and in her desire for safety and wellness, she concentrates on getting out of the asylum rather than on finding a solution to what afflicted her in the first place. The fact that the original story, the story of the woman’s pain, is forced to the back of her consciousness (and consequently of the narrative) by her urgent need to cope with the insult perpetrated by the asylum is part of what makes the asylum a locus of trauma instead of a place of healing. But what is the matter with the narrator? Reflecting on her life prior to the seclusion in the country house, she complains: It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way! I meant to be of such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already! Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things. It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous. (5) ‘condition’ is serious and real, may indeed be one reason why she does not get well” (61). Treichler astutely points out that the apparent paradox of the simultaneous legitimization and delegitimization effected by the diagnosis is due to the power imbalance between male and female speech acts. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the medical diagnosis appears as a set of linguistic signs whose representational claims are authorized by society and whose power to control women’s fate, whether or not those claims are valid, is real. Representation has real, material consequences. In contrast, women’s power to originate signs is monitored; and, once produced, no legitimating social apparatus is available to give those signs substance in the real world. (74) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 70 Not long before lamenting her failure to perform her “duty” as a good wife and mother she has informed us indirectly of her hobby/main activity/profession: writing. Writing is precisely the “work”—she herself, tentatively, puts it in quotation marks—her husband has ordered her to avoid more than any other. But since, she confesses, she has been writing in spite of her husband’s prohibition both before and after her seclusion, she is failing once again to do her duty. In fact, she is failing at the performance of this particular duty at the very moment in which she laments that “it does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way.” Caught between the desire to pursue her personal vocation as a writer and the desire to conform to society’s norms of female domesticity, the narrator, like the real-life Gilman, becomes dangerously sick.® The confinement of the narrator in the colonial mansion gives concrete shape to an imprisonment to which she has been subjected for quite some time, possibly all of her life. It also increases it by several degrees, adding a new, shocking dimension to it. In the colonial mansion, the narrator’s social and psychological captivities—in her society’s notion of femininity, in her own forbidden creativity and writerly aspirations, in the illness she is incapable of diagnosing, understanding, or * The issue of gender roles is central to Herland, Gilman’s 1915 feminist utopia. At one point the male narrator offers to his Herlandian wife a rather chilling picture o f the relation between the sexes in American society: You see, with us, women are kept as different as possible and as feminine as possible. We men have our own world, with only men in it; we get tired of our ultra-maleness and turn gladly to the ultra-femaleness. Also, in keeping our women as feminine as possible, we see to it that when we turn to them we find the thing we want always in evidence... I see now clearly enough why a certain kind of man, like Sir Almroth Wright, resents the professional development of women. It gets in the way of the sex ideal; it temporarily covers and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 71 relieving—come to a nightmarish head. The medicalization of her distress and its appropriation by others end up erasing whatever fiction of fi'eedom and autonomy she had enjoyed until then. Shockingly, she finds herself in the position of serving a “sentence” of incarceration and torture.^ The colonial mansion, to which the narrator is brought under the pretense that it will allow her to rest and heal, turns out to be a psychiatric prison designed to punish her for her transgressions and force her back into the domain of female normality. As if aware that she has been trapped, the narrator makes clear fi’ om the start that she does not like the house her husband has rented for her. At the same time, she also indicates her understanding that leaving is beyond her control. The woman is so little mistress of her life that she cannot prevail upon her husband even to let her choose their (her) bedroom; “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it” (3). John of course is aware that in choosing the conjugal bedroom he is choosing his wife’s whole world for the next three months; He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. “Your exercise depends on your excludes femininity. (129-30) If we consider that this speech is being delivered in the middle of a protracted battle between husband and wife over sex (he wants it, she doesn’t—he loses), the narrator appears to be describing nothing less than domestic sex slavery. ^ Paula Treichler observes how the linguistic unit of the sentence—which she sees as the fundamental unit of male language—can be used as a tool for the “sentencing” of women: “Diagnosis is a ‘sentence’ in that is is simultaneously a linguistic entity, a declaration of judgement, and a plan for action in the real world whose clinical consequences may spell dullness, drama, or doom for the diagnosed” (Treichler, 70). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 72 strength, my dear,” said he, “and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time.” So we took the nursery at the top of the house. This room, which, as many critics have remarked, evokes the attic where Bertha Mason is held in squalid captivity in Jane Eyre, not only suggests the need to isolate and seclude the madwoman, but, as a nursery, it signals a major theme of "The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman’s infantilization by her husband.^ Infantilization is of particular significance in a reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as narrative of the asylum because the mental patient’s infantilization is a major tool in the erasure of her diagnostic and therapeutic autonomy. One of the most painful scenes of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a scene of extreme infantilization. Having found the wallpaper of the nursery repulsive, the narrator complains about it to her husband. At first John seems to understand and accommodate, hut then he changes his mind: At first he meant to repaper the room, hut afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then the gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. (5) ® For a cotiqjarison between the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre see Suzanne Owens, “The Ghostly Double Behind the Wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1991), Jeannette King and Pam Morris, “On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1989), Eleonora Rao, “Senso, nonsense, desiderio: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’di Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (1990), and Margaret Delashmit and Charles Long, “Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1991). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 73 John acts as if his wife’s request were the request of a spoiled child. In his reaction to it, he behaves as someone whose job it is to reform her character.^ The narrator’s imprisonment in the mansion is clearly aimed as much at punishing her for the purported weakness—or waywardness—of her character as at curing her nervous depression. Sure enough, the nursery is fitted out as nothing less than a prison cell: bars on the windows, a nailed-down bed, a gate at the top of the stairs, and “rings and things in the wall” (4). Not only does John infantilize the narrator, he does it precisely over her objections to the instruments of her imprisonment. The atrociousness of this sadistic scene resides in John’s willful use of infantilization to silence his wife’s resistance to her imprisonment. In this way, he effectively reduces her to complete impotence. The more she is infantilized, the more the narrator resorts to duplicity and sneakiness. But duplicity is built into the text from the start. Who is the author of the narration? As a first-person narrative by a woman writer bent on telling the story of her husband’s prohibition of her writing, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a highly self- referential work. The impact of its self-consciousness is even greater if one considers that the anonymous narrator is also telling the story of the author, to whom she refers as “a friend” she once had. I suggest that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is made up of two ® Lisa Kasmer points out that the medical profession’s view within the nineteenth century of woman [conceived her] as inferior and in need of moral training. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was attributed to a woman’s inability to exercise self-control or to curb her emotions and desires. (6) There is a sado-masochistic sexual element to the description of the nursery and John’s insistence that he and his wife sleep in it together that links it to the allusion to domestic sex slavery in Herland R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 74 distinct texts; the story Gilman wrote and meant for the public and the journal the narrator is, it seems, writing only for herself. These two texts differ at several levels: in temporality (one has been written, the other is being written), in technique and genre (one is a Gothic story, the other a diary), in authorship, and in audience. I will now address the issue of the audience, which is particularly important to an understanding of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a narrative of trauma. At the beginning of the story the narrator asserts that her writing has no audience: John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)— perhaps this is one reason I do not get well faster. (1-2) This assertion marks the point where the text of the narrator and the text of the author are at their most distant: the author writes a story that is destined for publication at the same time as the narrator writes ajournai no “living soul” is meant to read. But which of the two texts are we reading? Clearly, both. And yet one can also say that we are mostly reading the narrator’s secret journal in the first part of “The Yellow Wallpaper”—until, say, the narrator starts believing that there is an actual presence in the wallpaper—and the author’s published story in the second. The narrator’s text recedes into the background and the author’s text comes to the fore the moment the narrator is overtaken by delusion and, consequently, loses control over the production of her text. (see footnote 6). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 75 In the first part of the story the writing invites conspiratorial solidarity rather than critical distance. We, the readers, are inescapably made complicit in the narrator’s deception of her husband who, as she repeats several times, must not know that she is writing. We however do know, not only that the woman is writing against her husband’s orders, but also what she is writing, namely that he imprisons, infantilizes, and tortures her. We know and feel outrage at the fact that he deprives her of her physical and psychological autonomy, that he manipulates her into a state of subjugation. This knowledge, moreover, seems essential to the very existence of the text. This is so not only because the nature of a text is intrinsically connected to the presence of its consumers (readers, listeners, viewers, etc), but also because of the nature of traumatic experiences. As a first-person account by a traumatized subject, albeit in fictional form, “The Yellow Wallpaper” needs to be understood as a direct act o f communication, both on the part of the fictional narrator and on the part of its real author. As the recipients of a narrative of trauma, we, the readers, become witnesses to the trauma. This is true both for the trauma narrative constituted by “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a whole, and for the trauma narrative that consists of the journal entries by the nameless narrator. In the case of the latter, our role as witnesses seems particularly crucial. The conventions of journal writing create the fiction that the reader is witnessing the events, as it were, as they occur, with only whatever delay is necessary for the writer to get to her journal and write them down. The fiction of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 76 simultaneity is created not only by the present tense of the narrator’s voice but also by the intense feeling of intimacy the journal format evokes. Thus narrated, the perpetration of the abuse happens in an artificial but powerfully realistic present iime, fixed as present by the conventions of the narrative form. Since in “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman utilizes journal-writing as a fictional device, this powerful intimacy and connivance between narrator and reader is particularly noteworthy, because sought and deliberate. Each person who picks up the text and reads it is, for all intents and purposes, the only witness the woman has. The woman, like all those who pen the story of their tx2 L \xrm ., presupposes the existence of an audience of witnesses. Knowledge of the existence of the reader is indispensable for the woman to tell her story. As Paula Treichler observes, “we, her readers, are thus from the beginning her confidantes, implicated in forbidden discourse” (65). Is the narrator disingenuous then when she says that “this is dead paper,” and that she “would not say” some of these things “to a living soul?” I take it that she is, though her claims do contain a deep metaphorical truth, namely that the narrator may not survive the writing of her journals, the telling of the story. If the narrator does not survive, then the paper is dead to her, and so is the community of readers.” " The story forebodes the death of the narrator on several levels. First, in the sense that a serious psychotic breakdown is always a kind of death, being as it is a radical departure from the community of people, from the possibility of interacting and communicating meaningfully with others. Secondly, the narrator’s madness foreshadows future inqtrisonments and confinements, burials in dungeons much darker and more horrific than the haunted mansion and its sinister nursery/torture chamber. Finally, there is always at least social death in store for those who break patriarchal taboos and defy patriarchal laws. One caimot help wondering what will happen to the woman after the husband discovers the journals and thus the proof of her multiple acts of subversion (she wrote; she lied; she R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 77 As the narrator slips into madness our position as readers changes. Since, to borrow the words of Marta Caminero-Santangelo, “the madwoman can’t speak,” or cannot speak a language we are capable of understanding unmediatedly, the balance of the two texts—the text authored by Gilman and that authored by the narrator— shifts and Gilman’s becomes dominant. The text of the journal gives way to the text of a fictional narrative in which an anonymous first person narrator tells her own story in the form o f ajournai. Mimesis cedes the ground to rhetoric. Our former attitude of identification is replaced by one of critical distance. The reader watches the woman go mad while herself remaining sane. She, the reader, is no longer in on the narrator’s efforts to resist abuse, because resistance has moved to a place inside the woman’s mind to which there is no outside access. The witness thus withdraws and the therapist or the literary critic takes over: as the woman’s language becomes opaque and she stops making sense, the reader no longer listens empathetically and with appropriate indignation to the tale of perpetration of atrocity, but starts interpreting. The narrative of trauma has given way to a display of post-traumatic symptoms. Symptoms, typically, cannot be controlled by the person who has them: while words arranged in meaningful sentences display a measure of control, symptoms cannot be helped. So, while both a coherent narrative and irrational symptoms are signs that point to a story, a narrative displays authorial control over held on to her beliefs and “fancies;” she explicitly questioned her husband’s judgment and his understanding of the situation; etc.). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 7 8 the story, whereas symptoms betray a story the patient may not even know, or know fully. This change in authorship and text is clearly signaled. For instance, while the first two breaks in the thread of the narration are marked by the narrator’s announcement that someone is arriving, this soon ceases to be the case (in the first break the narrator writes, “There comes John, and I must put this away,” in the second, “There’s sister [John’s sister Jennie] on the stairs!” (4,7)). Other journal- writing conventions are abandoned as well. Whereas, for example, in the first part the narrator is careful to keep track of time by pointing out how much time has elapsed since the previous entry (“We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day”) or what day it is (“Well, the Fourth of July is over!”), as time goes on the narrative becomes more and more governed by the narrator’s mental states vis à vis the wallpaper and less and less by outside, verifiable circumstances (4, 8). The abandonment of journal conventions introduces a change in genre. If the first part of “The Yellow Wallpaper” employs predominantly the journal form, the second deploys the conventions of the Gothic story. As critics like Gilbert and Gubar and Juliann Fleenor have pointed out, women writers of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries turned to the Gothic because of its subversive potential. At the same time that it presented the writer with a finitful set of gender- related themes like female captivity, female sexuality and physiology, motherhood R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 79 and marriage, masculinity, and the institution of heterosexuality, the Gothic form disguised the woman author’s critical intentions with its trappings, its popular appeal, and its low-brow status, thus protecting her both from rejection by the public and the critics, and from her own anxiety of authorship.*^ “The Yellow Wallpaper” covers all this territory—from sexual and gender inequality to ambivalence towards marriage and motherhood, to society’s repression of women, to anxiety of female authorship—through its primary theme, the author’s fictionalized narrative of the trauma of her psychiatric incarceration. The Gothic screen worked so well for Gilman that the feminist, anti-psychiatry angle of her story took almost a century to come to the critics’ attention. It was in 1973 that Elaine Hedges famously observed that “no one seems to have made the connection between the insanity and the sex, or sexual role, of the victim” (Fetterly, 181). As a story of trauma, “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes full advantage of the genre disguise provided by its Gothic frame. Such disguise is aimed at protecting the witness, not only from the routine literary rejection to which independent women writers were, and to some degree still are, subjected, but also from invalidation of her trauma narrative through disbelief, ridicule, or blame. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” all the Gothic elements are present from the start. It is however only when the narrator starts seeing a woman, or various women, moving behind the wallpaper, and begins to relate to her/them, that the Gothic I take this list of Gothic themes from Juliann Fleenor’s introducion to The Female Gothic (1983). Women’s anxiety of authorship is discussed by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 80 elements laid out in the first part come to full Gothic fruition. The horror that the haunted mansion and its various contraptions evokes in the narrator is genderized from the first. The narrator’s husband is completely and consistently oblivious to it. Only the narrator seems alive to its influence. When the woman tries to communicate to John what she sees and how much the stay in the house is damaging her sanity, he is unable to hear. On occasion he is unwilling to do as much as even listen to her. In her autobiography, Gilman describes in the same terms of failed communication her encounter with Silas Weir Mitchell. When she went to him, she brought “a long letter giving ‘the history of the case’ in a way a modem psychologist would have appreciated” (95). Weir Mitchell did not appreciate the letter. He “only thought it proved self-conceit.” Weir Mitchell, apparently, could not understand women’s language when it employed the same rationality he supposedly cherished and valued, but proclaimed lacking in women. Paula Treichler observes that Weir Mitchell “wanted obedience from patients, not information. ‘Wise women,’ he wrote elsewhere, ‘choose their doctors and tmst them. The wisest ask the fewest questions’” (Treichler 68). In “The Yellow Wallpaper” John’s refusal to take seriously his wife’s statements about herself is probably as traumatic to her as her physical captivity. The woman’s physical captivity is as painful to her as the literal silencing of her voice through incomprehension of what she says or injunction not to speak at all. The narrator’s (1979). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 81 inability to communicate with her doctor/husband and her resulting irrelevance to the course of her own treatment is, in fact, another form of captivity. Imprisonment in the mansion goes hand in glove with imprisonment within the boundaries of male language, a language that judges and sentences the woman patient, but that she is neither allowed to replicate nor rebut with a language of her own. Eventually the narrator fulfils her husband’s prophecy and, alienated from the world of reason, crosses over to the world of ghosts, the world behind the wallpaper in which madwomen are kept in bi-dimensional silence. Paradoxically, it is precisely at the moment when she effects a radical departure from reason that the narrator becomes perfectly comprehensible to her husband. For the first time in the story John responds appropriately to the seriousness of her predicament and, in speechless acknowledgment of his wife’s derangement, faints. Critics like Janice Haney-Peritz and Lisa Kasmer have seen in this scene a loss for the narrator, since the price she pays for the temporary victory of successful communication is high indeed. But I would like to read it as a qualified victory of the madwoman over the conditions of her incarceration. In The Madwoman Can’ t Speak Marta Caminero-Santangelo claims that women’s insanity “is not subversive.” Against “French feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous [who] have advocated a language of non-reason for its disruption of oppressive patriarchal thinking and, thus, its enactment of a peculiarly feminine power,” she argues that the madwoman “offers the illusion of power, although she in R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 82 fact provides a symbolic resolution whose only outcome must be greater powerlessness” (1,3). According to Caminero-Santangelo, “insanity is the final surrender to [dominant discourses], precisely because it is characterized by the (dis)ability to produce meaning—that is, to produce representations recognizable as meaningful within society” (11). The relevance of this line of thought to “The Yellow Wallpaper” is clear; by going mad the heroine of “The Yellow Wallpaper” resigns her membership in a society based on language, reason, and the law of the father. But Caminero-Santangelo’s point about what is meaningful in “society” may not hold after all in the autocratic space of the asylum. Critics of “The Yellow Wallpaper” have taken as a given that John represents the patriarchal voice of reason which “credits only what is observable, scientific, or demonstrable through facts and figures” (Treichler 63). Even people who, like Treichler, find this voice arbitrary, constructed, and ideological, have nonetheless assumed that John is consistently (too consistently in fact) speaking the language of reason and science. On the other hand, the narrator’s language has been interpreted as doing one or more of these three things at any given time: a) fulfilling male expectations of femininity by being demure, hesistant, or tentative, or by confining itself to feminine issues such as decoration (the house and the wallpaper) and fanciful superstition (ghosts); b) trying, and failing, to appropriate male language by attemping self-diagnosis or interfering with her doctor/husband’s decisions concerning her treatment; and c) attemping to create itself as its own language, an R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 83 original woman’s language that defies patriarchy and dares to convey women’s values and thoughts. The narrator’s attemps to create a female language for herself would be seen mainly in the journal she writes on the sly, and in the wallpaper itself as the page on which she inscribes her own and all women’s rebellion to patriarchal norms. While many have observed that John seems completely deaf to his wife’s attempts to argue rationally against his decisions and beliefs, and able to "hear” her only when she abandons rationality and engages in deranged behavior, no one seems to have doubted his tenure in the world of reason. But John inhabits the asylum as firmly as the madwomen who crawl behind the wallpaper. Has he not chosen it for his wife, and does he not insist on keeping her there against all reasonl Is he not convinced that it is a good environment, deserving of much commendation? Does he not seem oblivious and immune to its horrors, as if they were the most natural thing in the world, not worth a second look? John’s language and behavior may appear to be dictated by science, but are in fact ruled by the laws of the asylum, in which patients and doctors engage in a game of fulfilment of one another’s expectations. John is a rightful denizen of the asylum: he inhabits it as a doctor who is conversant with the language of madness in a way in which the narrator, for instance, is not, at least until the very end of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” So, when the narrator speaks to John in the voice of reason, he does not hear her because it is not in this voice that he expects her to speak, nor is this the voice in which he really speaks. His scientific-sounding language hides a blind and irrational ideological R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 8 4 authoritarianism. In the name of reason, John enacts prejudice, sexism, and his scientifically sanctioned brand of superstition (evident, for instance, when he scolds the narrator for hinting at her deteriorating mental health, as if the very mention of madness could magically bring it about). When the narrator speaks with authentic reasonableness by invoking evidence, initiating free and equal exchanges of opinions, and employing logic, he systematically shuts her up. Interaction between John and the narrator is not ruled by the juxtaposition of reason and unreason, but of medical and psychiatric power, on the one side, and powerlessness on the other. In the space of the asylum power takes on the appearance of a monopoly on reason and meaning, which forces the patient into the space of meaninglessness and unreason. There is no linguistic space available other than the mumbo-jumbo of madness for the woman patient. The boundaries that separate the pretend science of doctors and the pretend madness of patients are not meant to be crossed, and acting otherwise has consequences ranging from miscommunication to punishment. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator descends into madness because that is the place that has been appointed for her from the moment she stepped inside the room at the top of the stairs. Being mad in the asylum is as much a fulfilment of her female duty as being a good wife and mother in her own home. In the world of the asylum, it is not by showing that she really belong outside that the woman can hope to regain freedom. Totalitarianism does not admit dissent. And it is certainly never the madwoman’s place to determine where she ought to be, or how she is. So, after R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 85 all, there is hope yet for the narrator. Now that she has finally learned the rules of the game, her husband and her brother, or maybe even Weir Mitchell himself, can apply all of their expertise to her, and she will get out. John’s hysterical fainting spell at the end may be caused by relief as much as horror: though a tough case, his wife is finally on the way to recovery. In the asylum, the madwoman’s only chance for victory is manipulation of the system from inside. We can only hope that our heroine has learned to do just that. * * * * * Thirty years after the first publication of “The Yellow Wallpaper” the asylum appears in women’s literature on the other side of the Atlantie through the eharacters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia W oolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1928). Shell-shocked from fighting in the Great War, where he saw his friend Evans blown up, Septimus suffers from hallucinations and paranoia. Realizing that the attentions of their regular physician are not enough, his wife Rezia takes him to see Sir William Bradshaw, a renowned nerve specialist who prescribes the rest cure, to take place in one of his homes in the country. Since Septimus is suicidal and therefore deemed by the psychiatrist to be a danger to himself, the doctor tells Rezia that he will be picked up from his house that same evening. Both Rezia and Septimus are dismayed. Later that night, upon hearing people at the door, Septimus, terrified, jumps from a window and finds death on the spikes of a railing below. Septimus’ story is one of a handful of juxtaposing stories that make up Mrs. Dalloway. It is also R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 86 the one story that stands out by failing to be connected to the others, all of which center around the personal and social life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel’s eponymous heroine. Septimus and Rezia glide in and out of the main frame of Mrs. Dalloway, marginal until the end to the events that surround Clarissa’s party, the novel’s explicit raison d ’ être, and unknown to the other characters. The only connection between Septimus and Rezia and Clarissa is, in fact, Sir William Bradshaw, whom all three wholeheartedly dislike. Mrs. Dalloway is a vehement indictment of the prevalent psychiatric practices of its time. Like Gilman, who was for a few weeks in Silas Weir Mitchell’s sanatorium but never in an asylum, Woolf spent several relatively brief periods of time in a rest home, but, thanks to her husband Leonard’s willingness to be her watchful nurse during a few major crises and more or less throughout her life, she managed to avoid the asylum.'^ Restrictions upon her writing (how much time she spent writing was always an issue between Virginia, Leonard, and the doctors), pressure over eating more and regularly and getting enough rest, a sense of herself as psychologically fragile and prone to fits of madness, Leonard’s and other people’s Stephen Trombley documents in detail W oolfs treatment at the hands of several doctors, the first of whom was the prominent Sir George Henry Savage, also a believer in, as Quentin Bell calls it, “the empirical method, which consisted of rest, food, calm, and the avoidance of intellectual stimulation” (Trombley 304). At some point in his career Savage was also Superintendent o f the now infamous Bethlehem Royal Hospital. On Savage’s orders, Woolf was sent to Burley, “a kind of polite madhouse for female lunatics” (Quentin Bell, quoted in Trombley 249). Savage made use of powerful sedatives and hypnotics like hyoscyamine, an alkaloid (a “plant-based dmg containing nitrogen”) and chloral hydrate, the first manufactured sedative (Shorter 197-8). As Trombley documents, these dmgs could have devastating side-effects and even cause manifestations and feelings of madness (139 ff.). While it is not known whether Virginia Woolf ever took hyoscyamine, there is strong evidence in some of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 8 7 concerned observation of her—all of this must have given Woolf a vivid enough sense of the way psychiatry impacted and altered a woman’s life. Her several stays at Jean Thomas’ Burley, on the other hand, gave her ample opportunity to appreciate the horrors of female psychiatric confinement. Woolf was at Burley on four occasions, and very much hated it (Trombley 249-65). The following is a letter she wrote to her sister Vanessa on the occasion of her first stay; it is dated 28 July 1910, more than two years before her marriage to Leonard; Having read your last letter at least 10 times... I cant find a word about my future... I really dont think I can stand much more of this... I shall soon have to jump out of a window. The ugliness of the house is almost inexplicable—having white, and mottled green and red. Then there is all the eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark. My God! What a mercy to be done with it! Now, my sweet Honey Bee, you know how you would feel if you had stayed in bed alone here for 4 weeks. (Trombley 255-6) Like later letters from Burley to Leonard, this one indicates not only W oolfs misery at being incarcerated in a place whose rules she neither understands nor finds at all helpful, but also her frustration over her impotence and lack of autonomy. The course of her life is being decided by Vanessa, Dr. Savage and Miss Thomas, but certainly not by herself.*"^ her and Leonard’s descriptions of her symptoms that she might have. A letter to Vita Sackville-West documents that she took chloral hydrate (Shorter 199). ''' In the letters to Leonard she becomes less feisty and more guilt-ridden, as if her alleged madness were a great disruption to his life and she wanted to make as little fuss as possible about being in a miserable place away from him. The mixture of apology and pleading contained in these letters makes for a rather painful read. Here is one example (dated 3 August 1913): R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 88 That Mrs. Dalloway is, among other things, an indictment of the psychiatric silencing and punishment o f women is not contradicted by the fact that its main psychiatric victim is a man. In the Modem Library introduction to Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf points out that Septimus is Clarissa’s alter ego: “In the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be [Clarissa’s] double, had no existence; and... Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” (Woolf 1928, vi). As Clarissa’s double, Septimus immediately reveals himself to be, if not feminine, then not manly either. As many critics have pointed out, Septimus’ gender identification defies normative masculinity in more ways than one: he suffers from combat neurosis (a syndrome many doctors and military personnel of the time saw as proving lack of virility), he is a hysteric, he is not in love with his wife nor is he attracted to her, he experiences homoerotic feelings towards Evans, and he kills him self.Septim us is certainly a victim rather than a representative of patriarchal structures. He is persecuted by “two bastions of masculine authority—the military and the medical profession” (Jensen 165). These two professions function in Are you well, are you resting, are you out of doors? Do you do your little tricks? Here it is all the same... I’ve not been very good I’m afraid—but do think it will be better when we’re together. Here its all so unreal. Have you written your review yet? How are you feeling? Is Asheham nice? I want you Mongoose, and I do love you, little beast, if only I weren’t so appallingly stupid a mandril. Can you really love me—yes I believe it, and we will make a happy life. You’re so loveable. Tell me exactly how you are. (Trombley 261-2) Clarissa’s gender identification is also non-traditional. Suzette Henke, just to name one of the many critics who have made this point, says that Clarissa is also a repressed homosexual character “who refuse[s] to conform to the stereotypical patterns ascribed to [her] sex” (1981, 134). According to Emily Jensen, both Septimus and Clarissa renounce their homosexual love objects, Evans and Sally Seton, respectively. As a consequence, they both commit suicidal, Septimus literally, Clarissa through the apparent respectability, in fact deadness, of her life. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 89 Septimus’ case as partners in a conspiracy of personal violation; destroyed by the war, which proved his unfitness as a man, Septimus is entrusted to a psychiatrist who will supposedly rebuild him as a true man. Twice denied his identity by a society that seeks to exploit him, Septimus has no other recourse than self-annihilation. Besides gender identification and sexuality, some critics have also located the bond between Septimus and Clarissa in their complementary manifestations of madness or post-traumatic symptoms, and in their antagonistic attitude to the demands of the status quo.’^ Scholars have remarked on the two characters’ similar attitudes towards the novel’s appointed enforcers of society’s standards of normal behavior, the bearers of authority: Septimus’ doctors. Holmes and Bradshaw (the For a reading of Septimus’ and Clarissa’s affinity in terms of madness and gender, see Nancy Toppin Bazin’s Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. Bazin describes Septimus and Clarissa as each representing one of the psychic moods of bipolar disorder—which, according to this critic, are genderized in the novel: “Although each shares to some extent the vision of the other, Clarissa’s is predominantly feminine and manic, whereas Septimus’ is predominantly masculine and depressive” (103). Susan Bennett Smith claims that Septimus and Clarissa are similar in that they are both mourning someone they have lost—Septimus, his dead comrade Evans, Clarissa, the friends of her youth Peter and Sally, who, though alive, “had been lost to her for many years” (316). Smith takes Mrs. Dalloway’% anti-psychiatry stance to be W oolfs protest against the medicalization and delegitimization of grief, the consequences of which Woolf herself had experienced after the deaths of her parents: One of the ways to interpret the Doppelgdnger theme is to see Septimus and Clarissa as mourners and potential patients for the rest cure... Clarissa’s uncanny empathy with Septimus is based, at least in part, on her familiarity with prescription rest. She understands the threat which Sir William Bradshaw’s moral medicine posed to his patients’ integrity. (313,315) In a departure from readings of Septimus and Clarissa that conceptualize their psychic pain in psychoanalytic terms as the result of sexual repression, Karen DeMeester situates Mrs. Dalloway within the genre of trauma literature and claims that the neuroses that afflict these characters “originate in a traumatic event rather than in sexual repression” (653). According to DeMeester, “Septimus suffers not from a psychological pathology but from a psychological injury, one inflicted by his culture through war and made septic by that same culture’s postwar treatment of veterans.” Analogously, Clarissa suffers from the traumatic repercussions of having witnessed her sister Sylvia’s violent death. Critics who ignore the post-traumatic nature of Septimus’ and Clarissa’s symptoms. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 90 latter of whom was also at some point Clarissa’s doctor and is an acquaintance of the Dalloways); Clarissa’s men, Richard, her husband, and Peter Welsh, her former suitor. Richard and Peter are authority figures in Clarissa’s life both in virtue of their personal relations to her and because of their politieal and administrative positions. Like Bradshaw and Holmes, they represent “the system;” Richard holds an influential political position in governmental circles (a fact of which we are reminded by repeated references to his having been asked to lunch by Lady Bruton without Clarissa, much to the latter’s chagrin and anxiety), while Peter is a functionary in the colonies. Of course, Richard holds a place of authority in Clarissa’s life just in virtue of heing her husband. That he happens to respect her autonomy confirms his authoritative position by reminding us of the very real possihility that he might not. Peter, whose love Clarissa rejected by marrying Richard, is portrayed as a possessive man.*’ Even before meeting Bradshaw, Septimus has already developed a dislike for and dread of his regular physician. Dr. Holmes, whom the novel describes as a cheerful and simple man, eoncemed about Septimus but also bent on shaking him DeMeester claims, perpetuate the misreading of hysteria as psychopathological instead of as a normal response to traumatic events. Richard in effect protects Clarissa precisely from what Peter represents, namely “the forces... that would destroy her ‘se lf” (Bazin 119). Henke puts this point powerfully. In deciding to marry Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Walsh, Clarissa chose privacy over passion... Peter’s chivalric ideal sanctioned a grasping, appropriative love, a “togetherness” that would have crushed Clarissa’s individuality. In the domestic sphere, Peter is an innocuous version of the male dictator “who believes that he had the right, whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live, what they shall do” (Three Guineas 53). In the end, a redemptive selfishness rescued Clarissa. Had she married Peter, she might, like Septimus, have gone mad. (133) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 91 out of whatever ails him with prodding and encouragement, rather than aware of the agony that besets him. As Dr. Holmes forces his way into his home on a daily basis to reassure him that “there was nothing whatsoever the matter with him” (Septimus does not want to see the doctor, but Rezia’s attempts to keep him away from her husband are regularly and easily shouldered aside by the well-meaning but “powerfully built” man), Septimus feels simultaneously persecuted and abandoned (92,149). While he perceives with horror that Dr. Holmes is “on him,” he also feels quite desperately beyond his reach: “But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world” (93). After Septimus and Rezia have their one consultation with Bradshaw, who immediately detects Holmes’ misdiagnosis and recognizes in Septimus “a case of complete breakdown” caused by shell shock, for the first time Rezia feels abandoned, too: “Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had asked for help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was not a nice man” (95, 98). Rezia’s judgment of Bradshaw as “not nice” is echoed by Clarissa when the Bradshaws arrive at her party, later that evening: There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked... and Sir William... why did the sight of him, talking to Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn. For think what cases came before him—people in the uttermost depth of misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet—what she felt was, one wouldn ’ t like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man. (182; emphasis added) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 92 Bradshaw fills Rezia and Clarissa with alarm. As Rezia cries desperately to herself that “she did not like that man” (even though he is the one who will supposedly make Septimus better), Clarissa remembers that “she had once gone with some one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible. But what a relief to get out to the street again!” (102, 183). While Rezia and Clarissa cannot articulate what exactly they dislike in the eminent doctor (Clarissa manages to put her finger on it, quite triumphantly, at the end of the novel, after having learned of Septimus’ suicide), who after all is very competent and, superficially at least, kind and concerned, the narrator can. From the moment of his appearance, Bradshaw is treated by the narrator with sarcasm and contempt. This is unusual in Mrs. Dalloway, which tends to be sympathetic and indulgent to its characters. In the scene in which the psychiatrist has the consultation with Septimus and Rezia, the narrator’s sarcasm targets his disregard of their individuality and autonomy. Such sarcasm is apparent, for instance, in the narrator’s insistence on Bradshaw’s dedication to his profession and patients; he “loved his profession,” had a reputation for “sympathy; tact; understanding of the human soul;” in talking to Septimus he “murmured discreetly;” to Rezia he explained the situation “shortly” but “kindly;” “he never hurried his patients;” etc. (95-97). At the same time, however, he clearly relates to Septimus and Rezia as cases rather than people: he does not listen to them, is condescending, reaches his conclusions with extreme haste (“in two or three minutes”), is unaware of and uninterested in their feelings and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 93 reactions, and dismisses them brusquely (95). Throughout the appointment, Septimus tries painfully to articulate his sense that he has committed a horrible crime, an act for which “human nature” (which he sees personified in Holmes and, later, Bradshaw himself) has put him to death. Repeatedly, the doctor cuts him off. At the end, just before dismissing them for good, he says to him: “Try to think as little about yourself as possible” (98). This injunction echoes Holmes’ repeated exhortations that Septimus stop wallowing in his fancies and start taking care of his wife.'^ While contemptuous of Holmes for having failed to appreciate the seriousness of Septimus’ condition, Bradshaw responds to it in the same way, in that neither listens to what Septimus says, and both refuse to find a cause for his distress other than that which they have predetermined must be the one. The narrator’s unsparing attack on Bradshaw comes down to the fact that, like Holmes, Bradshaw does not relate to Septimus as a real person. Unlike Holmes, however, the psychiatrist “[decides] questions of appalling difficulty,” like whether a broken- minded ex-soldier is better off in an asylum than in his own home, or whether it is all right to pluck a man from his life and impose on him a course of action over which neither he nor anyone close to him has any control: ultimately, as it turns out, whether this man is to live or die. * * Both doctors reinforce traditional expectations of men as strong and protective, Holmes by exhorting Septimus to stop frightening his wife with talks of suicide and be mindful of his duty towards her, Bradshaw by reassuring Rezia, with an implicit warning to Septimus, that “he was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he was the last man in the world to frighten his wife” (97). Septimus’ wellness is repeatedly connected to his obligations and responsibilities to Rezia. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 94 As soon as the scene with the Warren Smiths is concluded, the narrator launches on an excoriating description of Bradshaw’s mind set, in which sarcasm gives way progressively to one of the most enduring and powerful explanations of why women feel ignored and abused by their (male) psychiatrists. Bradshaw is guided by two sister goddesses: Proportion and Conversion. Proportion is the principle that rules the psychiatrist’s approach to insanity; it is, in fact, his measure of sanity and of health in general. It is however a far from harmless principle, for several reasons. First of all, it is a principle of exclusion: to the worshipper of Proportion, all those who are in any way disproportionate are unsettling and even dangerous. They must be cut back to size, reduced to proportion, and when this is not possible they must be removed from the human consortium: Worshipping proportion. Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women. (99) Sarcasm barely dissimulates the narrator’s fury: psychiatry penalizes despair. It controls reproduction.'^ It prevents the free circulation of ideas. It is not only a system of mental policing, of enforced cheerfulness, but also an instrument of societal censoring and disciplining. It is control of the powerless many on the part of a powerful few. Psychiatry, not disproportion, is dangerous! Woolf, who wanted very much to have children, was prohibited by doctors from doing so. Leonard sought medical advice the moment they were married, and was umnoveable ever after. For more on this see Trombley, 64. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 95 And yet this science of proportion according to the laws of which people are secluded, controlled, and unjustly punished, is not science at all, because, as it turns out, the proportion Sir William champions so resolutely is his sense of proportion, something that resembles more closely a bourgeois system of values (“family affection; honor; courage; and a brilliant career”) than a scientific discipline (102).^° Moreover, Sir William’s proportion, the one he embodies and which he considers normative in assessing and treating his patients, is characteristically male (in fact, it contains all the traits that Bradshaw and Holmes expect but cannot find in Septimus). Female proportion is embodied by his wife. Lady Bradshaw, whom, however, he himself has proudly molded into a model of femininity. Masculinity stamps out male deviance as well as female autonomy. This is how the molding of Lady Bradshaw took place: Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission... Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through. (100-01) In Three Guineas Woolf links proportion, real proportion instead of Bradshaw’s self-serving proportion, to tolerance rather than fanaticism: If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes... What remains of a human being who has lost sight, and sound, and a sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave. (131-2) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 96 Lady Bradshaw’s proportion consists now of embroidering, knitting, and looking after her ehild while her important husband is called away to see the wealthy in their homes. This kind of proportion, the narrator informs us, is repressive, arbitrary, and sexist. And yet, surprisingly enough, she is the least dangerous of the two sisters: Conversion is “less smiling, more formidable” (100). Conversion admits no opposition; she is intolerant of diversity: she is a Goddess whose lust is to overcome the opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relatives of his victims. (102) The narrator breaks all restraints, drops the last vestiges of her sareastic cover and condemns Sir William Bradshaw and his colleagues in no uncertain terms. Their “victims” are the weakest of the weak, “the exhausted, the friendless”—not, notice, the “mad” or the “insane,” but, to borrow Clarissa’s words again, “people in the uttermost depth of misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives.” Even as she proclaims her contempt for the Sir William Bradshaws of the world, Woolf wipes out with a single stroke of ink the insane as a eategory and replaces them with people trapped in their own uniquely personal hell, people who, were it not for the victimization perpetrated upon them by psychiatrists like Bradshaw, could hardly be put together in a group and identified as alike. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 97 In Rezia and Clarissa, Woolf gives a blueprint for a true anti-psychiatry movement, one in which resistance to psychiatric ahuse starts from the patients and their friends. The unlikely alliance of Clarissa Dalloway and Lucrezia Warren Smith, two women otherwise divided by the virtually insurmountable barrier of class, is one of goals and inner direction, a spiritual connection sustained by the consciousness of the reader, as the two never cross paths, or even know of each other’s existence, in the novel. Their alliance is fostered by a very similar reaction to Bradshaw. Neither Rezia nor Clarissa believes the doctor. They do not trust him. Their reaction is one of skepticism and self-protection. The very sight of the doctor makes Clarissa “curl up.” Immediately after Bradshaw tells Rezia that Septimus will have to be taken away and put into an asylum, Rezia also curls up: when the doctor asks her if she has any questions, the until-then vivacious and vocal Rezia is silent: “She had nothing more to ask— not o f Sir William” (97; emphasis added). This last sentence mirrors very closely even in its syntax the “No; not that man” of Clarissa. It is not Bradshaw’s expertise that the women question, but the power to harm he wields. Far from being awed by his imposing, self-assured image, they recoil from him and find his power oppressive and threatening beyond endurance. Back at their home Septimus protests this outrageous power: “‘Must,’ ‘must,’ why ‘must’? What power had Bradshaw over him? ‘What power had Bradshaw to say “must” to me?’ he demanded” (147). It must be noted that Clarissa’s, Rezia’s, and Septimus’ anger at Bradshaw are presented in the novel as, to some degree, unexpected and atypical: after all, is it R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 98 not true that Bradshaw’s way “endeared [him]... greatly to the relations of his victims”? What is wrong with Rezia, that makes her fail to appreciate the great doctor’s “combination of decision and humanity?” What is wrong with Clarissa? (102). “The friends and relations of Bradshaw’s patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Chistesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed”(99). This treatment certainly sounds benign, especially compared to the degree of lunacy allegedly displayed by Bradshaw’s patients: the doctor must indeed be a kind and gentle genius if he can correct such aberrations with something so mild and wholesome as “milk in bed.” This apparent innocuousness, however, obscures two essential facts (to which Rezia, Septimus, and Clarissa are instinctively alert): that “milk in bed” is a euphemism for imprisonment and the obliteration of one’s autonomy, and that the stereotyping of people suffering from psychic pain (as madcap prophets of the apocalypse) annihilates them as individuals.^' Rezia’s and Clarissa’s questioning of Bradshaw is not limited to thoughts or feelings, but translates into active rebellion. Both women in their own way resist the doctor: Clarissa, it is implied, by not seeing him again, Rezia by planning bold acts of subversion. First, she helps Septimus to hide his drawings and writings: “‘There!’ she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them. She would put them away” (148). Then, she determines that Septimus and herself will not be separated: The “milk-cure” was particularly loathsome to Woolf. See Marcus 1987, 96-114. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 99 “Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not separate them against their wills, she said” (148). Rezia's determination to resist and overcome the psychiatrist’s will is acknowledged movingly by Septimus, who, lost in the agony of his hallucinations, barely hanging on to reality, is at the same time keenly sensitive to the clues of his own fate: She was a flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the face o f a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and the greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over them she triumphed. (148; emphasis added) Those who dare challenge psychiatry, who refuse to he cowed and reduced to obedience, become the rightful lawgivers and their autonomy stands untouched. I have been focusing on W oolfs portrayal of Rezia's and Clarissa’s “alliance” against psychiatry because I see it as revealing of W oolf s vision of female solidarity across class boundaries against men's punishment of “madwomen,” which I take here to represent also men's threatened punishment and disciplining of all women. At the end, Rezia and Clarissa are the only ones left to mourn Septimus' death, which is after all the death of one of their own, caused by the arrogance, the indifference, and the bullying of the others, the doctors, the men with power. While Holmes, not understanding, never having understood, can only cry “The coward!” at R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 100 the sight of Septimus’ dead body, Rezia, who knows better, picks up right where Septimus left off, and, having been administered a sedative by Holmes, drifts away into hallucinations of her own, in which for the first time Septimus makes perfect sense to her: It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock was striking—one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering: like Septimus himself. (150; emphasis added) The images in her mind are strangely peaceful and free, images from the sea mixed with serene images of death. The perception of Septimus’ death seems much more wrenching to the strangers who are now in the apartment than to Rezia herself: ‘“He is dead,’ she said smiling at the poor old woman who guarded her.’’ For the first time in the novel, Rezia smiles. At about the same time, Clarissa has her own moment of mourning for, and communion with, the dead man. Her reaction to the news of Septimus’ suicide, conveyed to her with much discretion, within “the shelter of a common femininity,” by Lady Bradshaw, herself, let us not forget, a victim of psychiatry and thus a perfect candidate for W oolfs envisioned movement of women against it, is stupendous, the visionary pinnacle of the novel, Clarissa’s own epiphany (183). At first, she feels an uncanny physical identification with the suicide: He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident: her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 101 spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. (184) The narrator tells us only that Lady Bradshaw informed Clarissa about a war veteran’s suicide, not about the modality of it; and of course Clarissa wonders “but how?”. So we wonder whether Clarissa learns the details of Septimus’ brutal death through a sort of psychic connection with him. Whether this is the case, or whether Lady Bradshaw told her more than the narrator reports, it is indeed shocking that Clarissa should relive the man’s fall and death with such a high degree of identification. But then she starts reflecting on the incident and, most movingly, she reaches the same state of serene elation, of pure appreciation of life that we have glimpsed in Rezia. As she reflects on life and death and her own past contemplations of suicide, she reaches peace just as Rezia had, while listening to the clock striking one, two, three: The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on... She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. (186) Septimus becomes the one who sacrificially “threw it away” for both of them, Rezia and Clarissa, and through the latter’s reflection it becomes clear that what his death has earned them is fi-eedom from an oppression that imprisons the soul, that makes life an exercise in anguish—freedom from fear of having one’s life taken away by another, fear of being alone: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 102 communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (184).^^ Clarissa is talking about the struggle of living, the ultimate solitude of existence. At the end, however, she identifies the reason that finally prompted Septimus to “give it away” in Sir William Bradshaw: Suppose he had had that passion [for life? for freedom?], and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doetor yet to her obseurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now). Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like thatl (184-5; emphasis added) Clarissa is finally able to see the reason why she has always pereeived Bradshaw as “obscurely evil:” it is his outrageous power to annihilate lives. Woolf draws a key distinction here, between madness and the specific psychic distress that comes as a consequence of having been treated by a doctor like Bradshaw. While she sees the former as a sort of overwhelming passion which makes death attractive but possibly does not go as far as to make life intolerable, the latter is for her something so severe that it pushes life beyond tolerability. “Men like” Bradshaw step inside the inviolable zone where one fights one’s private battle with aloneness and meaning, and impose ^ Henke makes much the same point when she says: Septimus dies that Clarissa may live. His death is an escape from authoritarian forces that would rape his consciousness, trammel his soul, and imprison him in a madhouse down in Surrey. By “throwing it all away,” Septimus makes of his life an unsoiled, gratuitous offering. He has preserved the chastity of spirit that Clarissa jealously guards in the privacy of her attic room. His visionary idealism remains intact, untouched by the “world’s slow stain” of compromise and defilement. (1981,126) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 103 the horror of petty order. Ultimately, psychiatry is, for Woolf, disrespect for the human condition. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 104 II. HEALING THROUGH LOVE: JANET FRAME’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF THE ASYLUM Janet Frame, “New Zealand’s most celebrated living writer,” was bom in 1924 in New Zealand, where she still lives (Alley v). Long recognized as a major writer both in her native country and abroad, she achieved world-wide popularity only with the 1990 release of Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table, based on her autobiography. Janet Frame’s name is mostly linked to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding her eight-year-long incarceration in several New Zealand psychiatric hospitals. She was released from her lengthy commitment at the age of 30, following nationwide publicity for her first book. The Lagoon and Other Stories (1961), which received a prestigious literary award a mere few days before she was due for lobotomy surgery. In the eight years of her imprisonment in backward New Zealand state asylums. Frame “received over two hundred applications of unmodified E.C.T.,” administered without the use of anesthetic or muscle relaxant, each “the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution” (Frame 1991,224). As the psychiatrist who treated her in England years later has observed, it is nothing short of a miracle that such extensive exposure to electroshock should have left her brain, as it did, undamaged (Cawley 7). Her experience did not, however, leave her memory unscarred. In her Autobiography she writes; “The nightmares of my time in hospital R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 105 persist in sleep and often I wake in dread, having dreamed that the nurses are coming to ‘take me for treatment’” (235). In this chapter I would like to explore the ways in which the trauma of the asylum manifests itself in Frame’s novel Faces in the Water (1961) and in her Autobiography (1989).^ Frame, I suggest, portrays the experience of the asylum as an experience of radical dislocation, a dislocation so powerful as to make her effectively lose knowledge of her own identity. Her writing both describes and is itself a manifestation of Frame’s urge to repeat the traumatic experience. In the accounts of her ordeal contained in the Autobiography^ Frame describes her recurrent need physically to go back to the asylum, while simultaneously offering rationalizations, justifications and to some extent apologies for her multiple returns. At the same time, the very act of writing about the asylum experience is in itself a return, though one that, as we shall see, proves fiuitful rather than stultifying. I propose that Frame’s healing, her relocation in a psychic landscape in which her identity feels solid to her, takes place precisely through the act of writing about the trauma, an act that seeks and establishes interpersonal acknowledgment and recognition. Healing can take place, in other words, only if the community that first rejected Frame by pushing her into the liminal place of the asylum accepts her back by acknowledging and approving her narrative. Faces in the Water and the Autobiography go about earning such acceptance in importantly different ways. The Autobiography takes the line that R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 106 Frame’s diagnosis and incarceration were “an awful mistake,” while Faces in the Water describes Frame’s incarceration through a fictional first-person narrator who is in fact mentally ill (277). According to hex Autobiography, Frame, having completed in 1945 her two years of Teachers’ Training College in Dunedin away from home, started a one-year probationary teaching job in a Dunedin primary school. At the same time, she kept on attending evening classes at the University on a scholarship, as she had done during Training College. In that year, she took psychology classes with a young junior lecturer, John Money (John Forrest in the Autobiography), a man barely her senior whose lectures she greatly enjoyed.^ Her teaching in the primary school also went well, and she was comfortable with and delighted by the children. Because of her extreme shyness, however, she had terrible trouble socializing with her colleagues and especially confronting the fact that, as a teacher-in-training, at some point during the school year she would have to be observed by an inspector. On the day on which the dreaded “inspection” finally took place, the inspector and the headmaster came into my classroom. I greeted them amiably in my practiced teacherly fashion, standing at the side of the room near the display of paintings while the inspector talked to the class before he settled down to watch my performance as a teacher. I waited. Then I said to the inspector, “Will you excuse me a moment please?” “Certainly Miss Frame.” ' The Autobiography, now available in one volume, was originally published in three separate volumes, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). ^ John Money later moved to the United States where he studied at Pittsburgh and Harvard. He went on to become one of the most influential names in the field of gender identity. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 107 I walked out of the room and out of the school, knowing I would never return. (1989,187) Following this startling getaway Frame went to a doctor, declared she was very tired, and promptly obtained a certificate granting her three weeks of sick leave. When the leave was up, Frame, terrified of going back to school, tried to kill herself by ingesting a box of aspirin. She woke up many hours later, violently sick. Once she realized the suicide attempt had not been successful, she called her school’s headmaster and resigned. The way the Autobiography presents these events suggests that the crisis would have ended here had Frame not told Money of her suicide attempt. Money talked to his colleagues, and a few days later he and two other members of the Psychology faculty showed up at her door suggesting she go with them to the hospital, for “a few days’ rest” (190). Frame, who had grown up in poverty in New Zealand’s backwaters and was rather naive, was charmed by the men who had come to her rescue and saw salvation in their proposal: I felt suddenly free of all worry, cared for. I could think of nothing more desirable than lying in bed sheltered and warm, away from teaching and trying to earn money, and even away from Mrs T. [her landlady] and her comfortable home; and away from my family and my worry over them; and from my increasing sense of isolation in a brave bright world of brave bright people; away from the war and being twenty-one and responsible; only not away from my decaying teeth. (190) When the three weeks of her voluntary stay in the psychiatric ward of Dunedin hospital were up (though she had not known it was a psychiatric hospital the three R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 108 men were suggesting—the first in the series of miscommunications, some intentional some unintentional, that characterized Frame’s life as a mental patient), Frame’s mother was called to take her home. Frame was appalled by the prospect of going home to her family and refused to leave. She thought that, following this refusal, she would simply he allowed to “stay in hospital a few more days then be discharged, find a job in Dunedin, continue my university studies, renouncing teaching for ever:” I did not realise that the alternative to going home was committal to [the state asylum of] Seacliff. No one thought to ask me why I had screamed at my mother, no one asked me what my plans were for the future. I became an instant third person, or even personless, as in the official note made about my mother’s visit (reported to me many years later), “Refiised to leave hospital.” I was taken (third-person people are also thrust into the passive mode) to Seacliff in a car that held two girls from borstal and the police matron. Miss Churchill. (191) Frame’s spent the following eight years, with brief interruptions, in Seacliff Hospital in Dunedin, Sunnyside Hospital in Christchurch, and Avondale Hospital in Auckland. She walked out of the New Zealand psychiatric institutional system for good in March 1955. Shortly afterwards she met Frank Sargeson, a New Zealand writer who was a tireless supporter and promoter of New Zealand literature. Sargeson became a mentor and a friend to Frame, and remained so, despite various ups and downs, until his death in 1982. Aware of Frame’s value as a writer as well as of her tragic past, Sargeson proposed that she stay with him in a simple cottage on Auckland’s North Shore, where she could write undisturbed and live cheaply. In the year that followed, supported both spiritually and materially by Sargeson, Frame R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 109 wrote her first novel, Owls Do Cry. At the end of the year Sargeson thought it hest for Frame to go to Europe for a while, ostensibly to “broaden her experience,” in reality to escape the threat of the asylum: “We both knew that in a conformist society there are a surprising number of ‘deciders’ upon the lives and fate of others” (266). Frame spent most of the next seven years in England, in and around London. While in London she saw several psychiatrists and had a few stays, some of them for many months, at the Maudsley Hospital, a mental hospital known as “an oasis of good psychiatric practice” (King 183). The most influential of her doctors was Robert Hugh Cawley, to whom a few of her books are dedicated. Cawley helped her see that she “was obviously suffering from the effects of [her] long stay in hospital in New Zealand” and suggested that she “write [her] story of that time to give [herself] a clearer view of [her] future” (Frame 1989, 384). In 1961, after a dry spell of several years. Frame’s second novel. Faces in the Water, a fictional narrative of her time in the asylum, was published. In the Autobiography Frame explains that she sought psychiatric treatment in London in order to “discover by objective means whether I had ever suffered from schizophrenia” (367). She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic during her very first stay at Seacliff, and this diagnosis had haunted her since. Twelve years later, at the Maudsley, that nightmare was over when, following extensive tests and interviews, a team of doctors chaired by the Maudsley’s director. Sir Aubrey Lewis, declared that she “had never suffered from schizophrenia [and] should never have been admitted R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 110 to a mental hospital. Any problems [she] now experienced were mostly a direct result of [her] stay in hospital” (375). Schizophrenia, she had read at the time of her diagnosis in her psychology textbook, was also known as dementia praecox, and was “a gradual deterioration of mind, with no cure” (196). The diagnosis came to her with the force of a death sentence: Shizzophreenier. A gradual deterioration of mind. Of mind and behavior. I suffered from shizzophreenier. It seemed to spell my doom, as if I had emerged from a chrysalis, the natural human state, into another kind of creature, and even if there were parts of me that were familiar to human beings, my gradual deterioration would lead me further and further away, and in the end not even my family would know me. (196) The metaphor of the chrysalis resonates with the theme of exclusion, which is central to the way in which Frame conceptualizes the trauma of her New Zealand institutionalization. The diagnosis of schizophrenia, like the incarceration in the asylum, feels to her as an act through which the community pushed her away, to the point of complete alienation: “.. .my gradual deterioration would lead me further and further away, and in the end not even my family would know me.” This act of radical displacement is powerfully traumatic because it violates some of the most fundamental rules which govern things human as one—the pre-traumatized subject—knows them. Since the doctors do not ask Frame for any explanation before committing her, she feels that the tenets of ordinary societal life—its grounding in rational inquiry, explanation, justification and communication, not to mention the legal requirements of personal freedom and autonomy—are most mystifyingly, and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. I l l terrifyingly, subverted. From the moment she enters the institutional world Frame checks her subjectivity at the door and acquires the status of an object: “I became an instant third person.” Since her mental health never gets properly investigated, Frame is considered mentally ill and therefore incompetent because she is in the asylum, rather than the other way round. In the Autobiography she writes: For I was now officially suffering from schizophrenia, although I had had no conversation with the doctors, or tests... and as the years passed and the diagnosis remained, with no one apparently questioning it even by formal interviewing or tests, I felt hopelessness at my plight. (213) And later: The experts... over the years as my “history” was accumulating, had not spoken to me at one time for longer than ten or fifteen minutes, and in total time over eight years, for about eighty minutes;... had administered no tests, not even the physical tests of E.E.G. or X-rays. (221) Kali Tal articulates the plight of the trauma victim precisely as one in which “normality” (the reliance on commonly understood norms) is replaced by a sense of ungroundedness. Trauma throws its victim into a space that is ruled by incomprehensible rules and in which her ability to predict events is systematically and hopelessly frustrated. Tal writes: “An individual is traumatized by a life- threatening event that displaces his or her preconceived notions about the world. Trauma is enacted in a liminal state, outside the bounds of ‘normal’ human experience, and the subject is radically ungrounded” (15). When talking of her experience in the asylum. Frame returns constantly to the theme of displacement. The presence of this theme is not limited to the narrative of her incarceration, but R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 112 appears regularly in the description of subsequent life events, as if the trauma she suffered in the asylum had “ungrounded” her subjectivity so deeply as to make it impossible for her ever to find the way home again. About her first stay at Seacliff, her introduction to the world of the asylum and the locus of her first traumatic shock, she writes: The six weeks I spent at Seacliff hospital in a world I’d never known among people whose existences I never thought possible, became for me a concentrated course in the horrors of insanity and the dwelling- place of those judged insane, separating me forever from the former acceptable realities and reassurances o f everyday life. From my first moment there I knew that I could not turn back to my usual life or forget what I saw at Seacliff. I felt as if my life were overturned by this sudden division of people into “ordinary” people in the street, and these “secret” people who few had seen or talked to but whom many spoke of with derision, laughter, fear... When I left Seacliff in December 1945, for a six-month probationary period... I felt that I carried with me a momentous change brought about by my experience of being in a mental hospital. I looked at my family and I knew that they did not know what I had seen, that in different places throughout the country there were men and women and children locked, hidden away with nothing left but a nickname, with even the word nickname hinting at the presence of devils. (193-4; emphasis added in italicized phrases) The terms in which Frame casts the relation of Seacliff to the outside world is similar to those employed by some Holocaust survivors to describe their lives in the death camps. Primo Levi prefaces I f This is a Man, his account of his time at Auschwitz, with a poem/prayer in which he asserts the presence of a radical difference between the world of the death camp inmate and that of the person who has always lived outside, protected by the unquestioned boundaries of normality: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 113 You who live secure In your warm houses, Who return at evening to find Hot food and friendly faces: Consider whether this is a man. Who labors in the mud Who knows no peace Who fights for a crust of bread Who dies at a yes or a no. Consider whether this is a woman. Without hair or name With no more strength to remember Eyes empty and womb cold As a fi-og in winter. (375) The extreme oddity, the unthinkableness, for those who live in the reign of normality, of a world in which a man is barely a man and a woman barely a woman is such that Levi feels the need to assert its reality with prophetic forcefulness; “Consider that this has been.” While in the Autobiography Frame is very concerned with pointing out that she never was insane and never suffered from the terrible shizzophreenier, in Faces in the Water she seemingly adopts the point of view of the insane through her narrator, Istina Mavet. The symptoms of Istina’s unspecified madness are a powerful sense of isolation and separateness, and occasional hallucinatory experiences. At the same time, Istina is on a different level fi’ om the other patients: she is the one who can articulate the ignominy perpetrated upon the asylum’s inmates, the one to whom the task is entrusted of telling the story. Istina has a superior understanding of what goes on in the asylum; she can see inside the staffs motives and the patients’ pain: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 114 as a narrator, she is basically omniscient, because she sees into people’s hearts. Her superior status is confirmed by the fact that she is the only patient in Faces in the Water who will regain her freedom. Her very role as the wimess who not only observes but can articulate her and other people’s trauma belies Istina’s madness. And in fact, in a superimposition of past and present, Istina’s symptoms are more post-traumatic than psychotic, hi the Autobiography Frame leaves Istina’s madness ambiguous: In my book Faces in the Water I have described in detail the surroundings and events in the several mental hospitals I experienced during the eight following years. I have also written factually of my own treatment and my thoughts about it. The fiction of the book lies in the portrayal o f the central character, based on my life but given largely fictional thoughts and feelings, to create a picture o f the sickness I saw around me. (194; emphasis added) The syntax leaves unclear whether the creation of a “picture of sickness” is done by Frame in portraying Istina, or by Istina in portraying the asylum. Further on Frame puts Instina’s madness in quotation marks: I began to write the story of my experiences in hospitals in New Zealand, recording faithfully every happening and the patients and the staff I had known, but borrowing fi’ om what I had observed among the patients to build a more credibly “mad” central character, Istina Mavet, the narrator. (387) Even as Frame’s position with respect to Istina’s madness is unclear, it is important that Istina is unquestioningly portrayed as mad in Faces in the Water: as the witness, Frame/Istina can better tell the story if she does not distance herself fi-om her fellow sufferers. And, of course, at the time when the novel was written, the experience of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 115 madness—of having lived with those who are mad, of having been considered mad, and of having thought o f herself as mad—was so pressing and close to Frame, that talking of the mad as others would have certainly felt like a betrayal. At the same time. Frame’s decision to tell her story in the persona of someone who at least appears to be a madwoman can be read as a distancing device: through her “mad” alter ego, the recently-pronounced-sane author of Faces in the Water can tell the story of her trauma from a position of alterity in which she is less vulnerable to the attacks of shame, guilt, and self-incrimination. Frame will uses other alter egos to tackle subjects she perceives as difficult: through Sister Bridge, Istina’s own other self in the novel, for instance, she will explore Istina’s (and possibly her own) perception of herself in terms of desire, sexuality, and love. The name of Istina Mavet comes from the Serbo-Croat word for truth and the Hebrew word for death.^ One interpretation of this is that in Faces in the Water Frame means to tell the truth about some important events, and that the subject of this testimonial feels to her at some level like a death experience. The choice of these unusual words, moreover, can be seen as a direct reference to the Holocaust, in which Slavs as well as Jews were killed in massive numbers. The theme of radical separateness appears at the very beginning of the novel, in a metaphorical, fantastic chapter that precedes the narrative proper. The chapter ' See King, 207. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 116 begins with a description of the requirements of the (ironically capitalized) law of Safety: Never sleep in the snow. Hide the scissors. Beware of strangers. Lost in a foreign land take your time from the sun and your position from the creeks flowing towards the sea. Don’t struggle if you would be rescued from drowning. Suck the snake bite from the wound. When the earth opens and the chimneys topple, run out underneath the sky. (9) But it is not ordinary danger the narrator is about to describe. Rather, it is the ultimate danger of “the final day of destruction when ‘those that look from the windows shall be darkened’.” For this time, “they have provided no slogan.” The streets throng with people who panic, looking to the left and the right, covering scissors, sucking poison from a wound they cannot find, judging the time from the sun’s position in the sky when the sun itself has melted and trickles down the ridges of darkness into the hollows of evaporated seas. (9-10) The apocalyptic, biblical tone of the narrator’s preface to the narrative of her asylum days is reminiscent once again of the language of Holocaust or Hiroshima narratives. There are no guidelines for life beyond the limina, where not only the laws of society but also the laws of nature are suspended, and the sun melts out of the sky. The job of the narrator vis à vis this time of extraordinary danger is one of testimony: “I will write about the season of peril” (10). This solemn declaration has an equally solemn, if wry, counterpart in the last lines of the novel, spoken by Istina Mavet as she is about to leave the hospital after a ten years’ stay: I looked away from them [her fellow patients] and tried not to think of them and repeated to myself what one of the nurses had told me, “when you leave the hospital you must forget all you have ever seen. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 117 put it out of your mind completely as if it never happened, and go and live a normal life in the outside world.” And by what I have written in this document you will see, won’ t you, that I have obeyed her? (253-4; emphasis added) The “Safety” Istina talks about at the beginning of her narrative, it turns out, is the conventional wisdom of society, the covenant of normality, forced on the patients in the asylum with particular brutality. Those who trespass the boundaries of normality, those who are different, are taken to the hospital in order to be punished. The hospital’s function is, in Foucault’s words, that of closing gaps, leveling the field, erasing difference: “The power of normalization imposes homogeneity” (1995,184). Madness is simultaneously portrayed in Faces in the Water as mental derangement—with its accompanying symptomatology of hallucinations, delusions, regressions, dissociations, and violence—and as the adoption of a different language. In the novel. Frame vacillates between portrayals of madness that fit the traditional conception of deranged thinking and behavior, and an underlying suggestion that, sometimes at least, madness is a category produced by psychiatrists to level out difference. In this latter case, the asylum produces madness by first classifying difference as mental derangement, and then setting out to erase it by “curing” it. In her analysis o f Faces in the Water, Gina Mercer qualifies the asylum’s repression of difference in terms of gender and race. About the former, she says: Frame reveals how important the maintenance of a single reality is to the “normal” order. Women who persist in believing in alternative realities must be isolated as if they carried contagious diseases, locked up together, for the “Safety” of the rest of the eommunity. (44) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 118 As for race, she compares the hospital to a colonized space in which natives are held in captivity; [Frame] depicts the hospitals as isolated punitive colonies, subject to, and empowered by, an imperialist culture... In this context, the women are seen as equivalent to “native” people or children, who fail to comprehend the “proper” values of the colonising culture. (46) Frame represents the asylum as a place ruled by, in Foucault’s terms, “disciplinary penalty.” Disciplinary penalty targets non-conformity: “What is specific to the disciplinary penalty is non-observance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it. The whole indefinite domain of the non- conforming is punishable” (178). Punishment in meted out not (or not only), as society would have us believe, to those who do harm, but (also) to those who deviate fi-om the norm by failing to meet the approved standard: The art of punishing, in the régime of disciplinary power... differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move... It introduces... the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved... The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. (182) Frame portrays the asylum as a place of both Safety and danger, discipline and terror; it safeguards society’s orderly functioning by inflicting pain and humiliation on those who threaten it. Correspondingly, danger is represented both by madness itself, as a subjective state in which the rules of normal life cease to apply or even be R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 119 meaningful (a definition that is consistent both with a conception of madness as mental derangement and with one that sees in madness a label society attaches to the expression of difference), and by the asylum. The nature of danger in the first chapter o îFaces in the Water is ambiguous. On the one hand, the narrator speaks as if madness were the cause of great and unprecedented danger in her life. Madness produced in her a state of painful separateness: I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-colored sea where hammer-head sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice... Perhaps I could have dived into the violet sea and swum across to catch up with the drifting people of the world; yet I thought Safety First, Look to the Left and Look to the Right... therefore I stayed on my ice floe, not willing to risk the danger of poverty, looking carefully to the left and the right, minding the terrible traffic across the lonely polar desert: until a man with golden hair said, “You need a rest... Mrs. Hogg will help you...” (10, 12-3) Madness leads the narrator to lose understanding of the law of Safety and distort it in such a way as to induce separateness from rather that community with others, exclusion rather than integration. On the other hand, the hospital to which she is taken does not restore safety to her life by reassigning correct meaning to the dictates of Safety. To the contrary, in the hospital she encounters veritable horror in the form of pain and privation, neglect and proliferation of disease, humiliation and terror. This horror is in fact the real apocalyptic danger mentioned by the preface. Mrs. Hogg is the implacable hospital matron; like the golden-haired man who promises rest (clearly an allusion to John Money), Mrs. Hogg appears as only R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 120 superficially good. She is “the Berkshire sow who has had her goiter out, and you should see the stream of cream that flows from the hole in her throat and hear the satisfactory whistle of her breath” (13).'^ There is abundance in the stream of cream that flows from the matron, hut also putrid decay, and her name also suggests filth. Sure enough, Mrs. Hogg immediately disabuses her hopeful charge: “You have made a mistake... I may have ginger whiskers hut there has never been a stream of cream that flows from the hole in my throat.” Mrs. Hogg’s first test to the new patient—the fairy-tale test that determines the heroine’s fate—is, significantly, to identify difference: And tell me, what is the difference between geography, electricity, cold feet, a child horn without wits and sitting drooling inside a red wooden engine in a concrete yard, and the lament of Guiderius and Aviragus, Fear no more the heat o ’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’ s rages... No exorciser harm thee Nor no witchcraft charm thee. Ghost unlaid forbeare thee. Nothing ill come near thee. (13) The narrator cannot answer the test question because the difference has been lost, “dispersed in the air and withered” (14). The story of trauma to which Istina is about to testify, her “season of peril,” is as much the pounding in her of the notions of difference and sameness, on which much of society’s functioning depends, as the result of the inhumane treatment inflicted on her in the asylum. The asylum is a ’ The Berkshire Sow appears in P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle novels; Guiderius and Aviragus, R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 121 training camp in the acceptable scopes of these two notions, in the latitude that is allowed to the expression of difference and the cut-off point beyond which sameness is mandatory. While the the preface to Faces in the Water leaves the nature of Istina’s danger ambiguous, the rest of the novel indicates that the peril of madness pales in comparison to that of the asylum, since the latter is portrayed consistently in terms of death. Istina’s hospitalization is broken into three phases with two short probationary discharges, and it involves two hospitals, Cliffhaven and Treecrofl, where she is moved from one ward to the next in progressive stages of desolation and horror. While the first wards are relatively neat, humane, and hopeful, the last are sordid and filthy, and house only chronic patients for whom the only treatment, if any, is lobotomy surgery. The dominant theme of Istina’s asylum journey is unadulterated terror, the import of which she often conveys through images of blood and death. Every new step in Istina’s path towards greater and greater dehumanization is characterized by such images, frequently in the narrator’s terrified hallucinations. The three elements of the asylum Istina most dreads are electroshock treatment, seclusion, and the demotion to a worse ward. When they happen, these events are always perceived by her as direct acts of punishment. Such punishment is dispensed glibly and capriciously by doctors and nurses who relate to patients, in the best of cases, as if they were children in need of a good lesson, in the worst, as if they were mentioned just below, are characters in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 122 animals in a paddock. The hospital, it is clear from the first, is a place where people get punished for a crime that, while unspecified, is terrible enough to warrant the most extreme retribution. Terrified of electroshock (sometimes called E.S.T. in the novel) Istina protects herself with woolen socks, without which she feels she will certainly die. Electroshock is adminstered erratically, without warning and seemingly without system. Istina knows that she is “up for treatment” in the early morning, only a short time before it is administered, and thus perceives each session as an unannounced execution: Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime. Waiting in the early morning, in the black-capped frosted hours, was like waiting for the pronouncement of a death sentence. (15) The death threat of E.S.T. is the most serious element of Istina’s “season of peril:” For in spite of the snapdragons and the dusty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter. And it was always our season of peril: Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day. (18) To express her horror of E.S.T., the narrator returns over and over to images of death by execution: We know the rumors attached to E.S.T.—it is training for Sing Sing when we are at last convicted of murder and sentenced to death and sit strapped in the electric chair with the electrodes touching our skin R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 123 through slits in our clothing; our hair is singed as we die and the last smell in our nostrils is the smell of ourselves burning. Or: Again and again when I think of Cliffhaven I play the time game, as if I have been condemned to die and the signals have been removed yet I hear them striking in my ears, warning me that nine o’clock, the time of treatment, is approaching and that I must find myself a pair of woolen socks in order that I shall not die. (31) It is Istina’s inability to control her fear of electroshock (“I lost all control of myself in a culminating panic of screaming”) that lands her eventually in her first back ward. Lawn Lodge at Treecrofl. In complete disregard of therapeutic considerations, Istina earns admission to the subhuman world of the chronic patients as punishment for not being able to submit with docility to punishment (88). Lawn Lodge has much lower standards of acceptable behavior, being full of raging screaming fighting people, a hundred of them, many in soft straight jackets, others in long canvas jackets that fastened between the thighs, with the crossed arms laced at the back with stiff cord, and no way out for the hands. (89) There is a price to be paid, though, for the privilege of being able to scream with impunity. The guardian angel cum Cassandra who meets Istina in Lawn Lodge, “an ex-Borstal girl, who had had a brain operation and was wearing a soft jacket of ticking,” announces to the new patient the most important feature of the back wards: “Once here you never get out” (90). In Lawn Lodge patients are baited into violence and fights by bored nurses and fellow patients for everyone’s entertainment, meals are “a bedlam of grabbing and throwing and almost delirious excitement,” clothes R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 124 are distributed randomly, if at all, in the morning to inmates assembled naked in a pack-like group, the floor serves as alternative toilet, and, in the general filth and neglect, many contract limb infections. Instead of restraint, what the nurses and matrons expect of the dweller of the back ward is that she act according to her appointed role of madwoman. Istina quickly learns the “orchestration of unreason” that makes up the lives of the patients in Lawn Lodge. Forced by terror to conform, she immediately joins in the rituals of insanity; “I was horrified to feel in myself the communal excitement that spread through the patients and the three nurses at the prospect of a tooth-and-claw battle” (90). She confesses: “I joined in the throwing of the food... We flicked; we banged our crockery on the table; we sang rude rhymes” (93). The principle that rules the patients’ lives at Lawn Lodge is assimilation. The patients are expected first and foremost to look and act like one another. The “normality” required of the dweller of the refractory ward is based on the rule of the minimal threshold: humanity is reduced to its bare minimum; reason and language are renounced; people behave just marginally better than animals. Conformity to the rule of the minimal threshold, in fact, is not only expected in Lawn Lodge, it is positively required. The nurse who delivers Istina at the door warns the receiving nurse: “Watch out. She’ll fly at you” (89). The narrator comments: “I had never shown aggression; I had never ‘flown’ at anyone. I had heen only frightened confused and depressed.” But Lawn Lodge is for refractory patients, and the nurse’s R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 125 warning works simultaneously to reinforce in her colleague a perception of her patients as violent and out of control, and to instruct Istina on the rules of the new ward. The reduction of the patients to animals is performed through acts that appear to be intentionally aimed at subtracting their human identity: patients’ names are “forgotten” and replaced by nicknames; personal possessions are not allowed, nor is there any place to keep them; patients do not have clothes of their own and often are not given one item or another of clothing, including underwear, especially unnecessary as “there are no men around” (92, 94). With or without men around, not being allowed to wear underwear makes the women patients more vulnerable than if they were deprived of any other piece of clothing. Istina’s self-respect runs out of her body with the free outpour of her menstmal blood. Sexual abuse, Istina quickly learns, can come from women as well as men: “I dreaded every month when I would have to ask for sanitary napkins which were supplied by the hospital, for once or twice I was refused them, and told by the overworked besieged staff, ‘Use your arse hole’” (95). The vulgarity of the reply underlines the fact that female patients are denied recognition of their sexual identity—which is supposedly irrelevant in the absence of members of the opposite sex—even as their sexuality is openly abused by members of their own. Gina Mercer describes the denial of femininity encountered by the female asylum patients in Faces in the Water in terms of “stitched up” femininity, which she individuates in images of enclosure, stagnation, decay, and bad R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 126 smells. The fact that women are all locked up in tight spaces, where the smell and dirt of decay are overpowering, suggests to Mercer “suppression” of femininity in the asylum (42). The other back ward in Istina’s asylum journey is Ward Two at Cliffhaven. As with Lawn Lodge, she is transferred to Ward Two as a disciplinary measure for her increasingly frightened state of mind: I was afraid of everything. They assured me that I would not have E.S.T., but could I believe them? How could I believe anybody?... My moments of fear became uncontrollable, and one day Matron Glass and Sister Honey gave their joint prescription, beginning, “What she needs is...” “What you need,” Matron said to me, “is bringing to your senses. What you need is a stay in Ward Two.” (134-5) The assimilation that Lawn Lodge obtains from its patients through terror, violence and humiliation, Cliffhaven’s Ward Two, a more modem ward that prides itself on having abandoned the methods of the past, obtains through pressures of a less tangible nature. Ward Two is divided in two rooms, the “dirty” dayroom and the “clean” dayroom. In the dirty dayroom are kept “the continually ill patients [and] those with intermittent attacks... as long as their attacks lasted” (136). Both rooms have “new and bright” furniture, and the clean dayroom has pictures on the walls and a full wall of windows, “so that one did not have the feeling of being immured and left to rot in an abandoned dwelling” (136,137). In these pretty environment, the patients behave surprisingly well; Although the surroundings were openly studied or even admired by the patients, they were not abused. Windows might be broken in the course of a day yet the pictures remained untouched and the flowers R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 127 stayed in their vases. It seemed that the more articulate members of the ward exuded a fertile pride that spread and flourished silently even in the midst of what one might have called the desert of the most withdrawn patients. (137-8) The “new attitude” that allows a relatively non-violent enforcement of discipline in Ward Two relies on patients’ involvement and even pride in the tools of their own disciplining. While they attack the windows, they do not touch, but study and admire the pictures and vases that beautify their jail. In Ward Two, patients who suffer from “attacks”—and who, consequently, attack other patients or things or themselves, as if an “attack” of madness were a current flowing through the patient and discharged in attacks on her surroundings, only to return to the patient in the form of punishment—are not restrained but exiled to the “dirty dayroom.” As Foucault points out, modem techniques of discipline and punishment do not operate (primarily) through pain, but through the loss of rights.^ The division of patients into those who belong to a dirty place and those who belong to a clean one, furthermore, allows the notion of hierarchy to operate in their social body, thus encouraging behaviors that will ensure residence in the higher ranks of the hierarchized body. The kind of repression Ward Two practices is best embodied in the character of Sister Bridge, a nurse who, while abusive and bossy, like all the psychiatric nurses who people Faces in the Water and asylum narratives in general, inspires in her patients respect, trust, even love: ^ Foucault is however quick to point out that physical torture is never entirely absent from punishment. See for instance Foucault 1995, 15. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 128 Her attitude was one of happy sarcasm where words which came from her as sarcasm and mockery... seemed in the air to undergo a transformation, to be fused with her abundance of vitality and sympathy so that they arrived without seeming to hurt... The patients would smile delightedly at whatever Sister Bridge said to them. Sometimes I wondered if perhaps she had not actually discarded words as a means to communication and was putting her meaning across in some other way while shouting (she usually shouted) the sort of near-abuse that one hears spoken every day by mental nurses to their patients. (139-40) The chapters dedicated to Sister Bridge display great ambivalence on Istina’s part, and conclude significantly with a suicide attempt. Sister Bridge functions in the novel as Istina’s doppelganger: she reflects Istina as if the divide that separates psychiatric personnel from patients were a looking glass and the two women were specular images of the same person, similar in everything but their respective role tags. Istina is as committed to bridging the distance that separates her from Sister Bridge as the latter is to maintaining it. Aware that she can relate to Istina as she cannot to any of her other patients. Sister Bridge is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by her. Sister Bridge’s ability to preserve the distance between herself and Istina by reinforcing their difference in status and power becomes a condition of her very existence. In a society that puts so much stock in the separation between sanity and insanity, and an establishment whose goal is to keep this separation sharp. Sister Bridge cannot afford to rip the thin veil that separates her from the other woman. Thus a great part of her time and energy is devoted to keeping Istina in her place. This does not escape the other patients’ attention: ‘“Why does she hate you so much?’ they asked. ‘Why is she so afraid of you? What have you done?”’ (155). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 129 Faces in the Water does not provide us with a physical description of its narrator, but attributes to Sister Bridge some of the features of the author. Like Janet Frame, Sister Bridge is red haired; she is also “freckled faced, fat, blowsy,” and has the appearance of a “female butcher” (139). Istina has fantasies that she and Sister Bridge are in fact the same person: Sometimes I had the fantastic idea that we were two hawks in the sky, as distant from each other as opposing winds, who had both swooped at a precise moment upon the same corpse and, on beginning to scavenge it, had found it to be composed of decaying parts of our two selves. (152) This striking image contains elements of the women’s sameness as well as of their unbridgeable difference. When the two impossibly distant hawks come finally together, it is only to devour each other at one remove. The doppelganger motif is paired here with the principle of mutual exclusion. If Istina and Sister Bridge are mirror images of each other, distinct only in virtue of their opposite positions inside the asylum, subversion of their balance of power and powerlessness is a threat to their existence as individuals. Their coexistence in the novel is a doomed one, which must result in the elimination of one or the other. The absolute management of power in the asylum does not allow for communion or love across the divide between doctors/nurses and patients. While Sister Bridge tries to annihilate Istina by disciplining her into conformity and assimilation to the other ward patients, Istina effectively works at erasing Sister Bridge’s otherness through awareness of their similarity and a desire to create a bond of love with her. Istina’s fantasy of R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 130 identification with Sister Bridge—and, in the passage that follows, also with the suggestively named Matron Glass—brings her to imagine that they “had known me all my life and had spied on me even when I was a child” (153). That Istina should feel this way suggests that, like Foucault’s Panopticon, Ward Two succeeds in getting patients to internalize the gaze of power. At the same time, it points to what Istina possibly perceives as her only road to salvation: a coextensiveness so thorough of herself with the all-powerful nurses, as to open the possibility that power might one day be shared, and abuse replaced by love. Istina recounts that, once, she and Sister Bridge shared a “moment of confidence,” in which the nurse told her that when she first started, she found the sight of disturbed patients in “locked boots and strait jackets,” as they all were at that time, so upsetting that she decided to become a nurse in the general hospital “where the patients were not shamed and abused because of their illness” (138-9). Instead, she stayed at Cliffhaven, where “it seemed you had to forget that the patients were people, for there were so many of them and there was so much to do. The remedy was to shout and hit and herd.” In her confidence to Istina, Sister Bridge breaks two rules: she admits to having loved, or wanted to love, her patients; and she creates closeness with a current patient. And in fact, Istina says that Sister Bridge “always regretted” that special moment of confidence, “which caused her to show to me the kind of antagonism often felt towards those who share the secrets of our real or imagined frailties” (138). Since any alteration in the balance of power must be R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 131 expiated with punishment, Istina pays the price for Sister Bridge’s violation by attracting her cruelty. On another occasion, the nurse catches Istina observing her in a moment of kindness to the ward patients. This second moment of unguardedness on Sister Bridge’s part seals her animosity towards Istina for good: “From then on Sister Bridge showed her resentment towards me and seized every opportunity to hurt me. By an unintentional glance I had surprised her into surprising herself into an uncomfortable consciousness that seemed to amount to fear” (140). Instead of recognizing in Istina’s insight a proof of her sanity and thus a reason for her release. Sister Bridge and Matron Glass take it as a violation of the ward’s status quo. Whether Istina belongs in a ward meant for seriously ill people is not questioned. Once in the ward, her behaving above the standards of sanity expected of those for whom the ward is meant will not be tolerated. Instead of having the hospital fit the needs of the patients, Cliffhaven has the patients fit the preconceived demands of the hospital. In a previous chapter the narrator recounts that a doctor would ask the patients if they were “settling in.” The act of “settling in,”—she observes—was surrounded with approval: “the sooner you ‘settle’ the sooner you’ll be allowed to go home” was the ruling logic; and “if you can’t adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live ‘out in the world’?” (42) Normality, it appears, is context sensitive. Society demands from an individual that she be normal in precisely the way in which normality functions in the context in R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 132 which she is situated at any given time. The “normality” specifically required of the mental patient is one of codified insanity. Istina and Sister Bridge share another moment of unexpected intimacy on the occasion of Istina’s brief escape from the asylum. This intimacy, which lasts only the time it takes Sister Bridge to walk Istina back to the ward, happens significantly when the two women are by themselves and outside the asylum’s walls. Like all catastrophic moments in Faces in the Water, Istina’s escape is preceded by a crisis of fear in which she hallucinates hlood. At about this time in her asylum journey Istina is confronting the double prospect of spending the rest of her life in the asylum and of being given lobotomy surgery: On the day that I really believed what they had been telling me for the past few years now—that I would be in hospital for the rest of my life, the floor of the dayroom seemed to change to layers of shifting jagged slate that cut into my feet, even through the thick gray ward socks which were soon saturated with blood... I ran away. (166,168) Istina’s escape takes her only as far as the local train station; once there she gets on the telephone and calls Sister Bridge. When the nurse answers, Istina announces her own name twice: ‘“This is Istina Mavet,’ I repeated over the phone, defiantly” (172). Istina is aware that the double announcement of her name, just like her escape, is aimed at forcing Sister Bridge to look upon her with acceptance and respect: Had I escaped only to announce myself to Sister Bridge in the hope that from a distance, without seeing me and thus not having the urge to pick at me as a sick hen, she would realize that I did not need to be taught this everlasting “lesson” which she conspired with Matron Glass to teach me, that I did not need to be “changed” by operations on my brain, that I had never been bom with an enclosed leaflet in R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 133 which the “management undertakes to replace or renew all goods not found satisfactory?” (172) The nurse does not send an orderly after the runaway patient, but walks herself to meet her. Unexpectedly alone with Sister Bridge outside the oppressive setting of the hospital, Istina is overpowered hy a sense of yearning for the nurse’s love and by a simultaneous, powerful resentment over being deprived of it. Pain, rejection and desire combine to induce in her an erotic infantile fantasy, the unfolding of which constitutes the only point in the novel in which the narrator owns up to the presence in herself of desire, love, or erotic feelings. Through this infantile fantasy, Istina appropriates the nurse’s power over her and transforms it into enraged love: I felt her beside me; I felt her discomfort in the heat. And I hated her, I hated her, hut I wanted to pummel her mounds of flesh... and I wanted her to speak, for her voice to be drained of sarcasm and bitterness and self-consciousness and fear that it held whenever she addressed me. Who was she? Was she my mother? I wanted to hit her and to climb crying on her lap and plead to be forgiven. (172-3) Istina’s fantasy contains the infantile compulsion to ask for love hy acting violently against the love object. Like an angry child, she wants to be accepted hy the mother figure so completely that acceptance should extend to the violent gesture itself. Surprisingly, Sister Bridge meets Istina’s fantasy hy spontaneously adopting a motherly role: she buys her an ice cream, and later on shows her her house, a place where, Istina imagines, the two women might live together as mother and child: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 134 And I sat all my life in a gasoline shed under the walnut tree in Sister Bridge’s house... And when I lived in that little house my mother lived there with me, taking out her floppy titties to feed the baby and sometimes giving me a taste... So which was... my mother and which was Sister Bridge?... Sister Bridge was my mother. I licked at the softening ice cream and walked with her up the country road. (174- 75) The juxtaposition of Istina’s fantasy of sucking at her mother’s—or Sister Bridge’s—nipple and her licking of the ice cream is loaded with erotic suggestion. Beside allowing the narrator to explore and express her thoughts on the relations between identity, power, and love, the doppelganger, then, serves also as a foil with which to confront themes that, like sexuality, she perceives as difficult to deal with. As the nurse (nursing)/mother who has known Istina all her life and in whom Istina recognizes her own self. Sister Bridge is a safe enough object of erotic attachment in a novel in which sexuality is so strikingly absent.® Her love and desire for Sister Bridge are for the narrator an affirmation of her own lovability and a validation of her need to love. At the same time, these feelings bridge the terrifying split between herself and the nurse—terrifying because of its oppressive, punitive, and dehumanizing implications—and, in so doing, transform for a moment the horror of the asylum into the occasion for a meaningful human exchange/ ® Two instances constitute an exception to this nile. In one, the narrator observes a fellow inmate in the act of masturbating, in the other a woman from the ward runs away with a male patient and is then kept in isolation until it is ascertained that she is not pregnant. On both occasions, sex is quickly dispatched as an object of embarassment, shame, or guilt. Only through her doppelganger Sister Bridge can the narrator talk about sex in pleasurable and comforting terms. ® Barbara Hill Rigney, too, observes that the female “split subject” finds integration through identification with a mofiier figure. In her analysis of four women’s novels about madness (Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, and Atwood’s Surfacing, she writes: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 135 Reentry inside the perimeter of the asylum brings an abrupt end to the two women’s brief intimacy. Although she does not punish Istina, Sister Bridge immediately reverts to her bossy style; “Once inside Sister Bridge said to me in her usual sarcastic voice: ‘Get into the dayroom, rag bag, and don’t try anything with me. A person of your education ought to be ashamed of herself ” (175). Sister Bridge’s betrayal prompts in Istina a string of self-destructive actions. First, she does the unthinkable and physically attacks the nurse by pushing her and causing her to fall. Unlike in her fantasy, this gesture of aggression is not forgiven: I had pummeled her at last... I had pushed her and I wanted to run to her and put my arms around her because she was my mother and I had caused her pain. “You little bitch. You did it deliberately.” I went white and I began to cry. I knew that she would never forgive me, that our contract of enmity was signed and sealed, surprisingly enough, with my love which I had shown by rushing at her and thumping her soft belly, knocking, like a demand to be let in out of the dark, to seek shelter from the special storm cloud which hung over me dispensing a significance of private rain. Let me in! “I am sorry,” I said, as if reluctantly. “I didn’t mean it.” “You bitch. You cunning bitch!” (175-6) Istina then tries to kill herself by ingesting stolen pills. In the chaos that follows she finds herself “screaming screaming at Sister Bridge” (203). Sister Bridge knows that Istina’s desperate gesture is a message to her (“Bitch to try and get me sacked; bitch Each protagonist either begins by realizing, or comes to a conscious recognition later in the novel, that she has lost a self somewhere among the socially prescribed false selves which she has assumed, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or subconsciously. In panic at this realization, she searches for some rationale, some agent or helper to heal the divided self—a mother. The protagonist inevitably finds, whether in an actual mother or in some other R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 136 I know why you stole,” 202), and punishes her with the dreaded seclusion. Locked up in the next room, Istina finds a patient called, like the prototypical madwoman in the attic, Bertha. Bertha sings loudly all day and all night and Istina, exhausted by the psychological and physical trials of many weeks of seclusion, wants to kill her. But, unlike the madwoman in the attic, Bertha does not die, and neither does Istina, who, having completed the downward spiral of her journey and having survived it, is shortly thereafter miraculously moved “up” to a better ward, where she will never again receive E.S.T. or be threatened with lobotomy, but will be administered the (relatively) more gentle insulin treatment. Thus begins Istina Mavet's progress towards freedom, as mysteriously as her descent to the bottom of the hospital world. Since Istina survives. Sister Bridge disappears from the novel, never to appear again. No explanation is given for Istina’s move from Ward Two other than the interest of a Dr. Trace, who, deaf to the skepticism that surrounds Istina’s hope of recovery (whatever that might mean), decides to “trust” her. Istina is well aware of the meaninglessness of talking about trust in the asylum: There was always talk of trust, with the doctor inquiring as if his life depended upon it, “Do you trust me, will you trust me,” and expecting you to say eagerly and without reservation, “Yes, yes,” when you knew, privately, that he scarcely had time to trust himself in the confusion and tiredness that accompanied the day-and-night attempt to solve the human division sum that had been omitted from his mathematic training: If one thousand women depend upon one and a half doctors how much time must be devoted to each patient in one figure, a mirror image of her own split psyche, a doppelganger who is a manifestation of her schizophrenia. (121-22) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 137 year; state the answer in minutes, and with eggs at three shillings a dozen, and allowing three minutes for each egg boiled consecutively, what is your change out of five shillings? Enough to buy a cup of coffee. (232) While in the asylum trust generally flows from patients to doctors, with the latter assuming that the former will blindly trust them, in the case of Istina’s transferal from Ward Two trust flows in both directions. This is significant, because it is a subversion of the asylum’s characteristic dehumanization of patients. And it is precisely with this subversion that Istina begins her progress towards freedom. Subversion of the asylum rules brings out the humanity in individuals like Dr. Trace and Sister Bridge, who are otherwise too heavily captured by the asylum routine to allow themselves the expression of human feelings like trust or love. And, as with Sister Bridge, Istina is immediately ready to love this man who takes a chance on her: “He was my grandfather... He was my grandfather and no doubt his pockets were full of striped mint lollies.” Istina once again uses her imagination to transform the oppressive and dehumanizing relation of psychiatric jailer to prisoner/patient into the loving relation of a grown-up to a child. Both involve some degree of human diminishment, but the latter is of course more positive and pleasurable. The narrator’s consistent effort at excusing doctors and nurses for their meaimess, neglect or indifference by mentioning the impossible conditions under which they work is a manifestation of the same drive to imaginative reinterpretation. Throughout the novel, in fact, Istina is constantly trying to see people’s humanity behind their sub- or inhuman actions—doctors, nurses, and patients alike. Those who R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 138 dwell inside the asylum are like distorted reflections of themselves, because the rigid role-attribution enforced hy the institutional setting prevents people from expressing their true humanity. The suggestion that everyone is a victim in the asylum and that the institutional regime dehumanizes the jailers as well as the inmates is, however, an extremely problematic one. It threatens to treat as irrelevant the important distinction between those who have the keys and those who do not. It also overlooks issues of responsibility and freedom—both the jailer’s freedom to throw the keys in the cell and walk away, and the prisoner’s right to freedom from incarceration, torture, and demeaning treatment. Finally, it risks belittling the trauma of the asylum survivor and the plight of those who do not survive the asylum but, like Bertha Mason, live and die in it.^ Any attempt to present the executioner as one more victim of an unjust system runs the risk of theorizing away the pain of those who have experienced the blade of the axe. * Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic has helped turn the image of Bertha Mason, who dies by hurling herself from the top of the patriarchal madhouse as it bums to the ground, into an emblem of patriarchal society’s elimination of troublesome women. In Faces in the Water the narrator observes that Ward Two itself had burned to the ground, “with thirty-seven patients, a year before I first came to Cliffhaven” (136). History, however, has not been ungenerous with real-life examples of its own. I will just mention here the tragic end of Zelda Fitzgerald, who burned to death in a fire that killed eight other women at Highland Hospital in Asheville, NC, in 1948. Partly thanks to the continued efforts of her husband Scott, Fitzgerald was institutionalized on and off for the last 20 years of her 48-year-long life. Nancy Milford writes: At midnight... a fire broke out in the diet kitchen of the main building where Zelda was sleeping. The flames shot up a small dumbwaiter shaft to the roof and leaped out onto each of the floors. The stairways and corridors were filled with smoke... There was no automatic fire-alarm system in the old stone-and-frame building and no sprinkler system. The fire escapes were external, but they were made of wood and quickly caught fire. Firemen and staff members stmggled valiantly to bring the patients to safety, but they were hampered by locked doors, and by heavy windows shackled with chains. (382-3) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 139 The compassion that the narrator extends to inmates and staff alike does not imply unwillingness on her part to give blame where blame is due, but is the expression of a desire to transform the system through love. This the narrator does, both by reinterpreting what she sees with a forgiving imagination and by loving those who are imprisoned with her in the asylum, on either side of the great divide, while trying to elicit their love in return. This attitude allows the narrator to survive through abuse and squalor. The novel is full of passages in which the narrator weeds through the manifestations of illness in her fellow patients to detect the humanity that lies behind, like “the ripple of a rainbow fish” swimming in “foul water” (168). With the same wisdom and patience, she looks for the humanity behind the persormel’s inhuman behavior: It may seem strange to learn that all the nurses were most of the time without compassion; until one remembers that those who longed to care for their patients either gave up their lonely struggle in its unfavorable conditions of staff shortages and twelve-hour days, or were corrupted into harassed reluctant hypocrites and bullies with some sweet talk in Ward Seven and coarse instances in Lawn Lodge. (106) Eventually, as we have seen, it is an act of kindness that saves her from the tragic fate of lobotomy. Faces in the Water is not a testimonial in which the witness gathers the energy to testify through anger and rebellion. Istina Mavet chooses to survive through love and forgiveness.^ ® In her novel Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter turns Foucault’s conception of the panopticon on its head. She describes a panopticon especially designed for women who have murdered their husbands, ruled by the Countess P. who sits in constant watch over prisoners. Carter sees the “wardresses” as victims of the system, just like the prisoners: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 140 The asylum stayed with Frame even after she left it. A year and a few months after her final release, she went to Europe where she spent several months in London and another few months in Spain. Upon returning to London after her Spanish interlude, Frame immediately got in touch with the Institute of Psychiatry “to discover by objective means whether [she] had ever suffered from schizophrenia” (1991, 367). The diagnosis of schizophrenia, which Frame at this time still believed applied to her, interfered significantly with her chosen career as a writer. While she “cherished” as a “distorted ‘privilege’” sharing an illness with “great artists” of the past (John Money was fond of comparing Frame to Vincent Van Gogh and Hugo Wolf), she was concerned that her novels would be peopled only by characters suffering from what she called the “Ophelia syndrome” (376). Even as she saw the limitations of being always condemned to writing this way, she also could appreciate its advantages: “I knew that the Ophelia syndrome is a poetic fiction that nevertheless usefully allows a writer to explore varieties of otherwise unspoken or unacceptable feelings, thoughts, and language.” Frame’s situation was vastly complicated, however, by the fact that she was, in a way, her own Ophelia. Believing The wardresses were also trapped, women... who lived barrack-style amongst those they policed, and were imprisoned by the terms of their contract just as securely as the murderesses. So all within were gaoled, but only the murderesses knew this was the case. (214) Unbeknownst to the Countess P., prisoners and guards fall in love and all escape happily together. The Countess P. cannot even imagine that her guards will turn against her and therefore fails to detect the rebellion the women are fomenting: “She never thought the guards might turn against her; did she not keep their contracts in a locked iron box in her watch-room? Had she not bought them? Were they not forbidden to discourse with the inmates? Did not the forbidden thing itself forbid?” (217). Love is the X factor, the element it is impossible to predict, forbid, or control, even within the most autocratic, all-embracing disciplinary system. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 141 herself to be schizophrenic undermined the solidity of her vision and ultimately prevented her from writing. Just before entering the Maudsley Hospital in London, she wrote to her ex-psychology teacher John Money; I would feel... a little easier if I had myself more on my side, to keep the balance, so myself would not be able to surprise and frighten me with so many dark obsessions and commands. I don’t want to change myself, only to have command in my own house, and the right of shutting or opening the door on the darkness. You know that I live almost completely in a fantasy world, that though I may walk fearfully in it, I never want to leave it, only not to be exhausted there, to death. (King 180) Frame’s particularly anxiety of authorship is the anxiety of a writer who is forced to weigh the truth of her vision with the powerful institutional message that such vision is not to be believed because it is the product of "dark obsessions and commands.” Far from obtaining from her schizophrenia the aura attached to the mad artists of the past, the woman who has survived the asylum cannot find any authorial stance at all, not even enough author-ity to rule in the dark chambers of her own house. When Frame writes to Money that she does not want to change, she is alluding not only to the lobotomy surgery that she had narrowly escaped in New Zealand, but also to Money’s insistence that she take chlorpromazine, the recently discovered antipsychotic drug. Frame is scared of the consequences the drug will have on her writing: To me the need to write and the act of writing are worth more than any opinion of what I write. You understand that if I change myself, I fear that perhaps I may no longer need to write; yet such has been my recent confusion and exhaustion that I am not able to write. (King 180) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 142 Tortured by psychic pain, Frame returns to the place of the trauma by knocking on the door of the Maudsley, where she enters voluntary hospitalization. During her initial interview, she is paralyzed with fear: I panicked during an interview with a woman who had a face like a dungbeatle (How many in your family? What is your work? Usherette? Waitress? You change jobs rather frequently, don’t you?)... [By] the time I arrived at Dr Shepherd I wasn’t in a state to conduct a very rational conversation... I spent the time trying to hide the answers to any questions he asked—I mean about having been in mental hospitals... I left because it was all too much; I cannot talk to people... The visit to the hospital brought back all the fear and terror of imprisonment. (King 181) The traumatized subject returns to the place of the trauma driven by the fantasy that those who caused the trauma will now be kind, and the trauma will be erased: the perpetrator will stop injuring; he (or she) will apologize and make things right. The trauma, though, heals not through the intervention of others, but through the sufferer’s efforts to confront it and unearth it. The Maudsley will enable Frame to regain her ability to write, not, or not primarily, by offering her a positive model of the mental asylum, but by helping her to tell the story, a story so important that no other writing can be done till the story is told, read, and shared. Frame did not limit her telling of the story to Faces in the Water, but continued doing so throughout her life. In the Autobiography she returns constantly Several critics of Janet Frame have questioned the status of Faces in the Water as a work of art by claiming that it was written as “therapy.” In ''''Faces in the Water. Case-History or Work of Fiction?”, for instance, Donald W. Haimah explicitly asks whether a piece of writing that was written for therapeutical reasons can also be a work of art (his answer is a cautious yes). Even a sympathetic critic like Gina Mercer feels the need to justify Frame; “Certainly, knowledge of a particular R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 143 to the importance of telling one’s story. Just before meeting Robert Cawley, she complains: “The desolation of having no-one to ‘tell my story to’ surged through me’’ (382). Once in therapy with Cawley, she marvels at the great “luxury” of having the opportunity to “unearth herself,” an activity which, alone, allows one to reach the truth about oneself: At last with the help of a combination of circumstances, coincidence, providence, and good friends, I arrived at the point of knowing the agony of the luxury of trying to tell my story, of demanding and accepting the luxury of “the truth.” (383) Frame connects storytelling with trauma at another point in the Autobiography. When she first arrived in London from New Zealand she found a two-week job as a housemaid and waitress at the Battersea Technical College Hostel. The household staff was made up of middle-aged women. During lunch, the women would sit together and talk, first about television shows, and then, invariably, about the London blitz of 1940-1 : Day after day the women talked of the war, reliving the horrors they had never mentioned and could only now describe, while I... sat silently listening, feeling a growing respect for the relentlessness of experience that like a determined, pursuing, eternally embracing suitor will at last secure its match with speech, even if the process, as here, takes fifteen years’ work in its refining, defusing, washing, drying of tears, change of content and view, preserving, discarding, undergoing death and rebirth. (309) Trauma subverts the structure of time and drags the past into the present, making of therapeutic function of a text should not automatically lead to a negative assessment of it as fiction” (41). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 144 the past the real present of the psyche, more present to the sufferer’s mind than her daily life. While Freud places the difference between verbalizing trauma and reproducing it in the temporal structure of each process—the former based on memory and comprehension of time past, the latter on the conflation of past and present—Frame thinks that even the simple telling of the story “abolishes the present,” if only for a short time. The intensity of this temporary invasion of the present by the past upsets even the listener’s perception of time: “At the hostel I found myself unexpectedly living as if during the days of the Second World War.” The real difference between talking about and acting out the trauma, I suggest, is that one activity is intrinsically and essentially social, while the other is performed in isolation.'* What gives such power to the storytelling of the Battersea women—the power to reshape the past, abolish the present, and induce in the listener a feeling of being inside the story—is that it is bom of a shared experience. But the shared experience of the storytellers is not just, as Frame suggests, that of having all being through the same wartime events. It is also that of finding themselves day after day to tell it to one another. The anecdote of the storytellers of Battersea has an extraordinarily important meaning within the Autobiography and Frame’s other testimonial writings because it points to the author’s awareness of the paramount R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 145 importance both of storytelling and of story-listening. In the anecdote, Frame figures as the paradigm of the ideal listener. Although she is just ahout as far removed—hy age, nationality and cultural background—from the traumatic events as any contemporary might be, she “sits silently listening,” taking in the horror, aware of the solemnity of the moment, with respect, intelligence, and awe. The experience of listening to the women’s story profoundly alters her. She sees things that she might not have seen: In those days I hegan to relive the war as the Londoners had known it. The relics were evident: bomhed sites not yet rebuilt, overgrown with grass and weeds and scattered with rubble; the former Underground station with its hundreds of entombed Londoners caught in an air raid; squares and streets where death and destruction had now heen given a place and names. (309) At the same time that she shares in the women’s trauma, she also shares in the relief the storytelling brings: My interest in the storytellers of Battersea made more tolerable for me the early morning waking in the now cold damp Garden Room, the walk through damp fog to the hostel, the thankless task of emptying the ashes, and in the evening, the waiting at the High Table, for tea during the week and high tea on Sundays. (309-10) Finally, she sees in this group of women a beacon of quiet revolution, a promise of change in a world split hy class division (particularly evident to her in the hierarchy of the Hostel) and war: “I felt, however, that the storytellers of Battersea were quietly arranging their own revolution, even without thought of past uprisings... the " Acting out may be perceived by the actor as a desperate attempt at communication, but is not in itself a communicative act, and in fact it rarely succeeds in creating understanding of the sufferer’s trauma, both on the part of the sufferer and of the observer. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 146 Piets and the Scots... the Angles... the Saxons... the Romans of Londinium...” (310; ellipses in the text). Just as in Faces in the Water, Frame sees the brightest promise of change in love and communion, empathy and compassion. Stuck right in the middle of the war experience and yet ignored by the history books, Janet Frame’s housecleaners effect the most powerful revolution through their daily revisitations of the traumas of history, their communal rewriting of it, their effort of finding meaning in it, together. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 147 III. SYLVIA PLATH’S THE BELL JAR AND THE TRAUMA OF FEMININITY Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar is probably the best known female asylum narrative in English. Published a month before Plath’s suicide, the novel recounts in fictional form the events surrounding Plath’s early suicide attempt, as a consequence of which she was institutionalized in two Massachusetts mental hospitals, one of them the famous McLean Hospital in Belmont.* The suicide attempt Plath fictionalizes in The Bell Jar took place in the summer of 1953, when she was 20. hi the poem “Lady Lazarus,” written several month before her death, she claims that this was not the first time she had tried to take her life: “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / 1 manage it—” (244). Fulfilling her own tragic prophecy, Plath would kill herself ten years after her 1953 attempt, in February of 1963, at the age of 31. Plath’s depression at the time of her earlier, failed attempt is abundantly documented in her journals, letters, and in The Bell Jar. As The Bell Jar recounts, she had spent the month of June in New York, guest-editing at Mademoiselle \ magazine (the magazine remains unnamed in the novel). When she returned to Boston her depression worsened and her mother took her to their family doctor, who ‘ McLean Hospital is known for having housed a number of famous patients, including Aime Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Nash, Ray Charles, and Susanna Kaysen. For a history of McLean Hospital and its patients, see Alex Beam’s Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall o f America’ s Premier Mental Hospital. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 148 arranged for her to see a psychiatrist. The visit with the psychiatrist was not successful. The doctor, a young man, interviewed Plath superficially and quickly decided that she should receive electroshock treatment. Plath’s response was dramatic. After a number of outpatient sessions, “given with no preparation and no follow-up counseling,” Plath crawled into a narrow space under her house, overdosed massively on sleeping pills, and remained unconscious and unfound for two days (Wagner 103). During her disappearance she became something of a celebrity and her story made the national news. Once found, she was taken to Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Framingham and was soon transferred to the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she received insulin shock treatment. Thanks to the intervention of the writer Olive Higgins Prouty, her sponsor at Smith, she was later admitted to the prestigious McLean Hospital in Belmont.^ Here she received more insulin treatment, and, when that proved ineffective, another course of electroshock. At McLean she also had psychotherapy with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, a woman psychiatrist whom she liked and with whom she remained fiiends throughout her life. She was discharged at the end of 1953. ^ Olive Higgins Prouty had also had a bout with mental illness and had been in an asylum. Part of her novel Now, Voyager (1941) is set in a private, modem mental clinic, probably similar to the clinic where Prouty herself stayed during her breakdown. The director of Prouty’s clinic, Dr. Austen Fox Riggs, helped her overcome her guilt about her successful literary career and encouraged her to “treat her writing professionally, to rent a room outside the home and work for a half day, five days a week” (Hughes par. 6). Later in life, Prouty described Dr. Riggs' clinic as “an educational institution from which I ‘graduated’.” Now, Voyager was made into a movie with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid. Besides Now, Voyager, Prouty’s most famous work is Stella Dallas (1923). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 149 The temporal span of The Bell Jar, narrated in the first person by Esther Greenwood, its protagonist, covers exactly these events, starting with Esther’s internship at a women’s magazine in New York during the summer of 1953, and ending with her release from the private clinic to which she is admitted thanks to the intervention of the noted writer Philomena Guinea, her sponsor at the women’s college she attends. The novel traces Esther’s progress from rejection to acceptance of societal norms for femininity. The asylum plays a key role in Esther’s resolution to smother her unhappiness with established gender roles and accept them. In this way it functions here, as in the other works examined in this dissertation, as an enforcer of conformity and punisher of difference. The project of this chapter is to read The Bell Jar as a trauma narrative. This involves, not only individuating the original trauma(s), but also the post-traumatic symptoms of psychic fragmentation displayed in it. The trauma of The Bell Jar, I claim, is the trauma of femininity, of women’s being reduced “to the passive place from which phallic arrows shoot o ff’ (Gubar 115).^ This reading of Plath’s writing is not new. Susan Gubar, for instance, talks about “traumatized womanhood” as the object of Plath’s work.'^ What has never been suggested before is that the trauma of femininity merges in The Bell Jar with the trauma of psychiatric treatment, in ^ Gubar is alluding to something Esther remembers Buddy Willard’s mother saying, that “what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from” (Plath 1963, '' See Gubar, 114. In this essay Gubar claims that, in her Holocaust poems, Plath does not equate her traumatized womanhood to the Shoah, but, rather, presents traumatized femininity “as a mere figure of verse ‘really’ about the psychological repercussions of Auschwitz on literature and Jewish identity” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 150 particular electroshock. This conflation is exemplified by the electrocution of the Rosenbergs, which appears at the beginning of the novel and is alluded to throughout. Esther is not uniformly traumatized by psychiatric treatment. When she moves to a private clinic and enters a therapeutic relation with Doctor Nolan, her treatment, which also involves electroshock, appears in fact to be positively healing. Thanks to Doctor Nolan, Esther seems to overcome the trauma both of passive womanhood and of the electroshock she had previously received. I claim however that this psychic healing is simply a faeade behind which Esther remains as tortured and fragmented as before. Doctor Nolan’s benign and motherly therapy, while appearing at first to return Esther to herself, is not enough to make her truly independent and free. By the end of the book, Esther returns to the world having embraced the traditional femininity that she found so oppressive and traumatic. The litmus test of this failure is her adult self, who emerges on a couple of occasions as a present-tense narrator who is recounting the events of the book in flashback. Instead of being the independent, professional woman she expected to be, this present-day Esther is mother to a young baby, surrounded by the paraphernalia of domesticity. Like Frame in Faces in the Water, Plath posts a warning at the very beginning of her novel that the traumatic crux of the narrative ahead lies in electroeutions. In the opening sentence Esther identifies the summer in which she (115). According to Gubar, Plath interprets the Holocaust as having left in its wake, among other things, a shameful feminization of European Jews. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 151 went to New York as “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs.” The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, which took place on June 19,1953, functions simultaneously as a temporal, cultural, and emotional signifier. Besides identifying the novel’s temporal frame, it introduces the theme of a society that represses and punishes difference, one of the main undercurrents of The Bell Jar. Finally, it provides the emotional backdrop for the introduction of Esther’s depression, which she implicitly associates with the couple’s electrocution: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York... I was supposed to be having the time of my life... [Instead] I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of the tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. (1-2) Besides providing a psychological, validating counterpart to her own private emptiness, the Rosenbergs’ execution causes in Esther a physical reaction of sickness: I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street comer and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. (1) The sickness Esther claims to feel at the thought of being electrocuted becomes a powerful psychosomatic theme in the whole first part of The Bell Jar, where it is repeatedly connected by Esther to the fact of womanhood. Sickness, womanhood. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 152 and electrocutions will prove inextricably linked in Esther’s mind and will form the core of The Bell Jar^s narrative. According to Linda Wagner-Martin, one of Plath’s biographers, Sylvia Plath had a strong somatic reaction to the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in real life: She reacted strongly to the enormous public debate over the Rosenbergs’ electrocution... The situation peaked on the morning of the execution, when Sylvia criticized the [other guest-editing] women eating breakfast for their lack of concern, their being able to eat “at a time like this.” According to Janet Wagner... Sylvia left her coffee in disgust and stormed out to go to the office. Janet went along, at least partly because she didn’t want Sylvia to be alone. As they walked to the Mademoiselle office at 575 Madison Avenue, Sylvia kept asking Janet what time it was. At 9:00 A.M., the time Sylvia thought the execution was set for, she turned to her friend and said, “Now it’s happening.” Then she turned the insides of her arms to Janet. Each arm was covered with red pinprick bumps and, as Janet watched, they elongated into each other and formed a series of welts running up and down Sylvia’s arms. (99-100) By reprising her somatic reaction in the novel, Plath turns it into a signifier of dread and foreboding: it is not only spies who get electrocuted, but also girls like Esther (or herself). The first scene that ends in physical sickness is marked by anguish about the place of women in society and the way in which they are expected to act; it also introduces the post-traumatic element of psychic fragmentation, another mainstay of the novel. Esther and Doreen, her best friend in the prize-winning group, are dressed up for a party. Doreen looks “terrific” in a “strapless white lace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair that curved her in at the middle and bulged her out again spectacularly above and below” (6). Esther, by contrast, wears a dress “cut so R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 153 queerly I couldn’t wear any sort of bra under it, but that didn’t matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled.” Bra-less and flat-chested, Esther admits to feeling “almost naked.” Although she claims to find pleasure in this feeling (“I liked feeling almost naked in the hot summer nights”), she is clearly not comfortable. A couple of lines later she confesses: “Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress... but being with Doreen made me forget my worries.” Doreen, however, is hardly one to soothe Esther’s worries. When she decides on the spur of the moment to ditch the magazine-organized party and go to a bar with Lenny, a man she has just met in the street, dragging Esther along, everything goes wrong for Esther. Forced by Doreen to play the heterosexual game but unable or unwilling to do it, she dissociates into a fictional doppelganger. Instead of using her real name, she introduces herself to Lenny as Elly Higginbottom from Chicago, because “I didn’t want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston” (9). Esther’s adoption of another persona points simultaneously to her perception that her identity is threatened, and to an effort to regain control. Doreen acknowledges Esther’s dissociation, but while such an acknowledgment could have been helpful, she does it in the most unhelpful way, by reinforcing it. Much to Esther’s initial surprise and subsequent dismay, she immediately picks up her new name and calls her Elly throughout the night, even when they are alone. Overwhelmed by the sexual aura that comes from Doreen and disowned by her friend, Esther/Elly feels as if she were disappearing: “I felt myself R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 154 melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life” (8). Esther’s disappearing feeling continues when she, Doreen, and Lenny go to the man’s apartment, and Lenny and Doreen start making out as if Esther were not even there: I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground... It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller, and you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and the excitement at about a million miles an hour. (14) In fact, Esther is so busy feeling abandoned and erased that she fails to pay attention to what is really going on between Doreen and Lenny. Trying, in a telling comparison, “to look devout and impassive like some businessman I once saw watching an Algerian belly dancer,” Esther is just as uninterested in the danger involved in Doreen’s sexual play with the older man (13). Under her “impassive” eyes, Lenny and Doreen turn rough: Doreen bites Lenny, and Lenny sends her flying up on to his shoulder, and her glass sailed out of her hand in a long, wide arc and fetched up against the pine paneling with a silly tinkle. Lenny was still roaring and whirling round so fast I couldn’t see Doreen’s face. Instead of making sure her friend is all right, Esther decides to leave. Characteristically, she shows full awareness of what is happening and of the implications of her action: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 155 I noted, in the routine way you notice the color of somebody’s eyes, that Doreen’s breasts had popped out of the dress and were swinging out slightly like full brown melons as she circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder, thrashing her legs in the air and screeching, and then they both started to laugh and slow up, and Lenny was trying to bite Doreen’s hip through her skirt when I let myself out the door before anything more could happen. (14; emphasis added) Happily promiscuous, intelligent, and witty, Doreen is the first of Esther’s flesh and blood alter egos in The Bell Jar. She is more sophisticated and mature than the other girls, and Esther finds her immediately attractive. Even as she is fascinated by Doreen’s worldliness, though, Esther is uncomfortably aware of the gulf that separates her from the other girl, and finally rejects her as a friend. The process through which this rejection takes place illustrates the antagonism Esther feels towards femininity and women, and ultimately the hatred she feels towards herself. By leaving Doreen to fend for herself, Esther rejects both the flirtatious, sexual femininity Doreen embodies, and the caring femininity that would have required her to stay and help. Esther is so determined to distance herself from Doreen that, back in hotel, she perfects her abandonment by taking a cleansing bath in which she ritualistically washes off her friend along with the dirt and soot of New York: I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again... I said to myself: “Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepard is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving. New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin... is turning into something pure.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 156 The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby. (17) Safe in the appropriately named Amazon hotel, Esther achieves purity by regressing to a childlike state of pre-sexual innocence. Doreen however will not stay away long. When she returns to the hotel in the middle of the night, almost passed out from drunkenness, she goes to Esther for help. She knocks on her door and, again, calls her Elly. Esther’s first reaction is to ignore her friend’s call with its implicit obliteration of her self: I didn’t pay any attention at first, because the person knocking kept saying, “Elly, Elly, Elly, let me in,” and I didn’t know any Elly... I thought if I pretended to be asleep the knocking might go away and leave me in peace, but I waited, and it didn’t. “Elly, Elly, Elly,” the first voice mumbled, while the other voice went on hissing, “Miss Greenwood, Miss Greenwood, Miss Greenwood,” as if I had a split personality or something. (17) When she finally opens the door, Esther responds to Doreen’s sickness as to a nuisance. At first she is tempted to tell the hotel maid that she “had nothing to do with Doreen” (18). After the maid leaves, she resolves instead to “dump her” on the floor and go back to bed. At that point however Doreen starts vomiting, and Esther is forced to deal with her. Esther is clearly unhappy with the helping role that has been foisted onto her, and shows complete lack of feeling for Doreen. In a fashion that will turn out to be typical for The Bell Jar, she also takes advantage of her role as the narrator and describes Doreen in the most unflattering terms. Whereas before she had portrayed her as formidable, she now depicts her as bedraggled and helpless: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 157 I started to lower Doreen gently onto the green hall carpet, but she gave a low moan and pitched forward out of my arms. A jet of brown vomit flew from her mouth and spread in a large puddle at my feet. Suddenly Doreen grew even heavier. Her head drooped forward into the puddle, the wisps of her blond hair dabbling in it like tree roots in a bog, and I realized she was asleep... Quietly, I stepped back into my room and shut the door. On second thought, I didn’t lock it. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that. Coming after the scene in Lenny’s apartment, Doreen’s sickness appears as much connected with sex as with drinking, at least in its associations, and Esther, as we know, wants nothing to do with all that. At the same time, she is perfectly aware of the moral implications of her multiple abandonments of Doreen, and a few lines later acknowledges that the way she behaved testifies to her own “dirty nature.” Esther’s and other people’s dirty natures appear repeatedly in The Bell Jar, a novel that is in many ways cruel and even brutal. Much of the brutality contained in The Bell Jar is cormected to femininity, not only because women are almost invariably its objects (and not infrequently its perpetrators), but because, like in the scene just described, the abuse they suffer is directly connected to their sexuality. Esther, it must be noted, while a frequent recipient of abuse, is also an active dispenser of it, not least in her role as the novel’s narrator. Unlike Istina Mavet, the protagonist/narrator of Faces in the Water, Esther is almost uniformly unsympathetic to those who populate her story, and shows particular mean-spiritedness in describing their appearance. This lack of sympathy extends fully to herself. Esther’s self-hatred emerges not only in the physical attacks she brings upon her own body (the culmination of which is her suicide attempt), but also in the insistence with R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 158 which she puts herself down—again, mostly from the point of view of her appearance. Finally, it is The Bell Jar itself that displays cruelty towards its characters, by making them dislikeable and reprehensible, by discarding them when their narrative function is exhausted, and by inflicting on them illness and death. The Bell Jar's constant depiction of abused femininity is significant in the understanding of it as a narrative of psychic splits. The key to this is given by Esther herself in the famous fig tree metaphor. Through this metaphor, Esther provides a self-conscious reading of the way in which the alter egos she creates are a means, or, better, an impediment, to her constitution of herself: I saw my life branching out before me like [a] green fig tree... From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above all these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (62-3) All the female characters that appear in The Bell Jar match, to a greater or lesser extent, one or another of the versions of femininity represented by the figs. A future of husband, happy home, and children is represented by Betsy, the girl to whom Esther eventually decides to give her loyalty instead of Doreen. Betsy comes from R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 159 America’s wholesome heartland; she is “imported straight from Kansas with her bouncing blonde ponytail and Sweetheart-of-Sigma-Chi smile” (5). While Doreen appeals to Esther’s intelligence, wit, and desire to be independent, Betsy “was always asking me to do things with her and the other girls as if she were trying to save me in some way” (5). By casting Betsy as a savior, Esther intentionally characterizes her as Doreen’s opposite, the angel to her devil. Betsy’s role is, in fact, precisely that of saving Esther from Doreen. Esther comments that, whenever Betsy asked her to “do things” together, “she never asked Doreen.” Betsy’s dislike for Doreen is, unsurprisingly, reciprocated: “In private, Doreen called her Pollyanna Cowgirl.” Even the husband-home-children version of femininity, as it turns out, is not without its deadly dangers. One day Esther and the other guest-editors sit at a banquet organized for them by the appropriately named Ladies ’ Day magazine (Doreen is not present, having decided to spend the day with Lenny). A “big women’s magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale each month,” Ladies ’ Day is a celebration of upscale, consumerized domesticity, and thus the best advertisement for the joys of a happy home (21). Before lunch, the girls are led around the “Food Testing Kitchens,” “glossy” facilities staffed by women in “hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color.” The artificiality of the domesticity embodied in Ladies ’ Day is apparent, not only in its ambiance and R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 160 personnel, but in the very food the kitchens produce: under the lights of the magazine photographers, the food loses perkiness and shape, and “has to be propped up from behind with toothpicks.” The suggestion that domesticity and its fruits may be less wholesome than they appear is bom out by the events that follow the banquet. The delicious and expensive food prepared in Ladies ’ Day's model kitchens turns out to be spoiled, and all the girls fall seriously ill with food poisoning. The scene that describes the girls’ sickness is, again, graphic and un-charming. First, Esther and Betsy vomit in the cab that is taking them back to the hotel; later, they vomit again in the hotel elevator; finally, they become sick with violent diarrhea. This new description of sickness reads like a physical attack on Esther’s body—and like poetic justice for her unkindness to Doreen: I... staggered down to the bathroom. Betsy was already there. I could hear her groaning behind the door, so I hurried on around the comer to the bathroom in the next wing. I thought I would die, it was so far. I sat on the toilet and leaned my head over the edge of the washbowl and I thought I was losing my guts and my dinner both. The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces. I don’t know how long I kept at it... When I felt reasonably safe I stretched out on the floor and lay quite still. (36) The humor that arises from this scene masks its dangerous and premonitory associations. The sickness Esther first mentioned in connection to the Rosenbergs’ R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 161 electrocution has rolled, like a great wave, in all sorts of directions: from being metaphorical to being real, from Doreen to Esther and Betsy, from hitting just one girl to hitting them all. The “glittering white torture chamber” in which Esther is losing her guts, moreover, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the torture chamber where the Rosenbergs are going to he electrocuted, and premonitory of that in which Esther will receive her own electrocution in the form of electroshock. Finally, of course, the sickness that hatters Esther’s body is closely connected to the domesticity 0 Î Ladies ’ Day, a feminine vocation Esther had turned to precisely because she thought it safe. Sex (or at least the heterosexual version of it), apparently, is dangerous for women whether in the wild version of Doreen or in the tame, traditional version of Betsy and Ladies ’ Day. The food poisoning that results from the Ladies ’ Day banquet is a commentary on the kind of “innocence” Esther is looking for, and thinks she can find in Betsy. This innocence is just as fake as the artificially-looking “fresh” food portrayed by the Ladies ’ Day’s photographs. As in a modern-day rendition of the myth of Eden, Esther and friends become sick not because, like Doreen, they feast on the forbidden pleasures of alcohol and sex, but because they eat harmless-looking avocado pears filled with crahmeat that is “chock- full of ptomaine” (39). This connection of femininity and food follows a well-established tradition in women’s literature. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar show how issues of hunger, food, and starvation are powerful signifiers of women’s condition R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 162 in a male-dominated society. While hungering for the nourishment of recognition and self-definition, women starve in the confined and suffocating spaces patriarchy assigns them. But starvation is not only the symbol (or the reality) of women’s condition in society: it is also a state they sometimes seek in order to express their rejection of a culture that offers them food that does not nourish and presents them with a fiction of access while in fact meting out exclusion and repression. Not only, therefore, does hunger represent women’s reality; the rejection of food, and the self starvation that results fi-om it, can be a signifier of women’s rebellion and desire to escape.^ Such rebellion, Gilbert and Gubar claim, exacts from women a toll of anguish and guilt. Gilbert and Gubar find that, tom between anger, guilt, rebellion, and acquiescence, the nineteenth-century woman writer creates fictions that powerfully dramatize female fragmentation, in particular through the dialectical duplicity of angelic female characters on the one hand and monstrous witches on the other. While the angels starve, the monsters die.® The struggle for female self- ’ Gilbert and Gubar show the anorexic heroine as a staple of nineteenth-century women’s literature. Charlotte Bronte’s fiction, for instance, presents a sustained “feminist critique of the biblical myth of the garden” (374). In her last novel, Shirley, Bronte portrays not only how the hunger of women is, in the words of Dickinson, a “way / Of Persons outside Windows— ,” but also why “the Entering—takes away— ” desire, since the foods and fictions that sustain men are precisely those that have contributed to the sickening of women. In Caroline Helstone, one of Shirley’ s two heroines, Bronte presents a strikingly modem portrayal of female depression, a depression the author explicitly links to the inability to take in food. At one point Caroline falls seriously but mysteriously ill and comes very close to dying. As she lies fading in her bed, she wonders, “Why can I not eat?” (Bronte 421). Gilbert and Gubar comment: “Women will starve in silence, Bronte seems to imply, until new stories are created to confer upon them the power of naming themselves and controlling their world” (391). For a 20th century exploration of female anorexia as a signifier of women’s cultural starvation, see Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969). * Shirley's Caroline Helstone is a perfect example of starving angel, while Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 163 affinnation is once again conducted on the woman’s body. Gilbert and Gubar sum up the plight of female authorship in the nineteenth century: Rejecting the poisoned apples her culture offers her, the woman writer often beeomes in some sense anorexic, resolutely closing her mouth on silence (since—in the words of Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney—"a woman’s only power is the power of refusal”), even while she complains of starvation. Thus both Charlotte and Emily Bronte depict the travails of starved or starving anorexic heroines, while Emily Dickinson declares in one breath that she “had been hungry, all the Years,” and in another opts for “Sumptuous Destitution.” Similarly, Christina Rossetti represents her own anxiety of authorship in the split between one heroine who longs to “suck and suck” on goblin fhxit and another who locks her lips fiercely together in a gesture of silent and passionate renunciation. (57-8) This same split Gilbert and Gubar find in the texts of nineteenth-century women writers appears in The Bell Jar in Esther’s fragmentation into a variety of alter egos. As we have seen, this fragmentation is partly linked in the novel’s first part—the part that takes place in New York—to food and sickness.^ Unlike the food- shy heroines of Charlotte Bronte, Esther is at first appearance an enthusiastic eater. Though “skinny as a boy,” she enjoys food greatly. The chapter dedicated to the Ladies ’ Day banquet starts, in fact, with Esther’s mouth-watering description of the is the most famous and paradigmatic of the dying monsters. Besides Doreen and Betsy, another double of Esther in the first part of The Bell Jar is her editor at the magazine, Jay Cee. Jay Cee appears in the fig tree metaphor as Ee Gee (Esther Greenwood), “the amazing editor.” Jay Cee and EsÜier’s last psychiatrist. Dr. Nolan, are the only two characters in the novel Esther likes, and, consequently, the only ones who are spared her vicious verbal attacks. Significantly, both Esther and Doreen feel the need to de-sexualize and de-feminize Jay Cee, who is married: “Jay Cee’s ugly as sin,” Doreen went on coolly. “I bet that old husband of hers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or he’d puke otherwise”... Jay Cee had brains, so her plug- ugly looks didn’t seem to matter... I tried to imagine Jay Cee out of her strict office suit and luncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat husband, but I just couldn’t do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together. (4-5) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 164 attractive food that lies in front of her and which she is enthusiastically looking forward to eating. But there is an intimation of an eating disorder in the fact that Esther first stuffs herself and then loses all her food through sickness, so that the whole event could be read as a disguised binge-and-purge experience. When she returns to Boston, Esther will become unable to eat. Esther’s contradictory attitude to sex and food, her going back and forth between desire and revulsion, are elements, I suggest, of her general enmity to her body and its femaleness. In the electrocutions she will receive in the asylum Esther will bring to consummation her vision of femininity as something that earns its bearers harsh punishment—not least of all from their own selves. On her last day in New York, Esther is almost raped by a man she meets at a party to which she goes with Doreen. Esther is initially drawn to the man, whose name is Marco, because of the diamond stickpin he wears on his tie. When he teasingly gives it to her, she slips it into her evening bag, as if to keep it. Marco, annoyed, decides to become Esther’s sole escort at the party. Throughout the evening, he is consistently rough and hostile to her. When he first takes hold of her, he leaves five visible purple fingerprints on her arm. Later, he gets her drunk and then manhandles her into dancing with him, all the while insulting and showing contempt for her. Finally, he throws her on the ground of the muddy garden outside the club and tries to rape her. The rape scene is unlike anything that precedes it in the novel for its brutality. As he crushes her to the ground and tears her dress to the waist R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 165 with his teeth, Marco repeatedly calls Esther a slut. At first Esther reacts passively to Marco’s violence, but then fights back: she bites him, gouges his leg with the heel of her shoe, and punches his nose, causing blood to flow. Marco, hurt and disgusted with Esther and women in general, draws two bloody streaks on Esther’s cheeks and lets her go. While Marco behaves towards her with contempt and aggression (something Esther explains calmly away in terms of his being a “woman hater”), Esther maintains a schizophrenic detachment from what is happening to her. Her observations are those of an onlooker rather than a victim. When Marco first grabs her, allegedly to escort her to the party, she compares him to a snake she saw in a glass cage at the zoo: Marco’s small, flickering smile reminded me of a snake I’d teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on the stout cage glass the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to smile. Then it struck and struck and struck at the invisible pane till I moved off. (86) The “stout” cage glass promises to protect Esther from the frenzied assault of the phallic snake, not only as a virginal hymen, but also as the bell jar of depression protects one from the intrusion of the world. Depression lets Esther remove herself from reality, its complications, and the necessity of making choices. During her interaction with Marco, she perceives her body as distant and unconnected to her observing mind. In spite of Marco’s beatings, Esther never mentions feeling pain, but reacts as if she were feeling nothing at all. It is Marco who has to point out to her the marks left by his fingers on her arm. Esther’s reaction is simply to “look:” “Marco R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 166 removed his hand. I looked down at my arm. A thumbprint purpled into view. Marco watched me. Then he pointed to the underside of my arm. "Look there.’ I looked, and saw four, faint matching prints” (86; emphasis added). Even when she fights against Marco as he attempts to rape her, Esther’s actions appear to be prompted more by instinct than by a conscious desire to avoid injury or pain. Ground under Marco’s body, Esther remains eerily fearless: “Tt’s happening,’ I thought. Tt’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen’” (89). Besides conveying the impersonal, dissociated realization that her loss of virginity “is happening”—not that it is happening to her, but that it is simply happening, like an event outside the sphere of the self— Esther’s thought also contains the desire that it should happen. Esther clearly hopes that she will lose her virginity without having to do anything: that an act of violence on the part of a stranger will take care of her sexual life and the making of her femininity, without her cooperation and without her assent. In the moments before her body starts reacting to Marco’s attack, Esther views rape as a possible solution to her misgivings about femininity. From the first, the burden of virginity runs like a steady sub-theme through the pages of The Bell Jar. Esther’s feelings on the subject alternate between fear of and disgust with sex on the one hand, and the desire to achieve sexual maturity, on the other. In one of the few moments when, as the narrator, she reveals herself to be an older woman looking back on events that happened to her in her teens, she says: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 167 When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. (66) Loss of virginity completely dominates the narration in flashback of her relationship with boyfriend Buddy Willard. Esther feels no affection for or attraction to Buddy, but considers him as a useful accessory that allows her better to fit in and he normal. Since a key element of the normality she seeks is dating and sex, and since she is bored by the former and repelled hy the latter, the stories she tells ahout herself and Buddy are filled with discomfort and resentment. As a medical student. Buddy appoints himself as Esther’s rightful initiator into the sexual world, hi this capacity, he takes her to see a baby being bom. Esther experiences the event as a terrible violation of the mother’s body, very much resembling a sadistic and technologically sophisticated rape: I was so strack by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn’t say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn’t make out properly at the other. (53) The woman is semiconscious; at the same time, she is obviously in a lot of pain, because she constantly groans and swears. Buddy tells Esther that, thanks to a dmg she has been given, the woman will not remember a thing. Esther observes: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 168 I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (53) The drug the woman is given is described by Esther in terms suggestive of today’s date-rape drugs: the woman is rendered unconscious, given great genital pain by several men (the delivery is attended by two male doctors), and sent home unaware of what happened but in a condition that makes it likely she will become pregnant (again) soon. When the head of the baby appears in the woman’s dilated vagina, the way in which the narrator sets up the event and the words she uses to describe it evoke a sense of violation akin, again, to rape: “And finally through the split, shaven place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy things appear” (53). When the baby’s head gets stuck and one of the doctors has to make a cut, this painful scene becomes positively gruesome. The man’s application of scissors to the woman’s vagina is reminiscent of deflowering: “I heard the scissors close on the woman’s skin like cloth and the blood began to run down—a fierce, bright red” (53). If the sickness of femininity produces vomit, the sexuality men violently force upon women produces blood. This is true also of Esther’s experience with Marco, because while at the end it is he, not Esther, who bleeds, she is the one who carries the bloody R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 169 marks on her body, refusing to wash them off and keeping them for many hours, all the way back to Boston. The childbirth scene should also be read as a commentary on Esther’s attitude to children. A number of passages in the novel comment clearly on her complete lack of interest in being a mother, even her dread of it. Consistently with her attitude to all things related to traditional expectations of women, Esther unequivocally proclaims: “Children make me sick” (96). This pronouncement appears in a scene that includes her Boston neighbor Dodo Conway, a Catholic mother of six children whom she finds despicable. Dodo’s motherhood is particularly objectionable to Esther because it came at the expense of a possible professional career: [Dodo] had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house... surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies—the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood. (95) Dodo Conway drives a black station wagon that is “the dead spit of a hearse,” and it is in this appropriately mournful car that she and Esther’s mother will drive Esther home after her first, appalling electroshock treatment. Not one to shy away from explicit symbolisms, Plath, here as in the childbirth scene, associates motherhood with death. After returning firom the party at which she is almost raped by Marco, on her last night in New York, Esther symbolically renounces her participation in the gender game and throws all the nice clothes she bought for her trip from the sunroof R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 170 of her hotel, into “the dark heart of New York” (91). This act of despoliation constitutes, for the associations it evokes, her first suicidal gesture. As Esther approaches the parapet, one feels certain she means to jump: At that vague hour between dark and dawn, the sunroof of the Amazon was deserted. Quiet as a burglar in my cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet. The parapet reached almost to my shoulders, so I dragged a folding chair from the stack against the wall, opened it, and climbed onto the precarious seat. A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral. It was my last night. (91) This scene introduces into the novel the theme of suicide and acts rhetorically as a transition between the first and the second halves of The Bell Jar, the latter taking place in Boston, with a substantial section of it occurring in the asylum. At home with her mother, Esther’s depression worsens considerably and she becomes unable to sleep, eat, read, or write. Letters on the written page “wiggle about” under her eyes. They “get cocky” and “[grow] barbs and rams’ horns:” “I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic and Chinese” (102, 112). Letters also behave weirdly when she tries to write them: When I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew. (106) Esther’s inability to read or write signals, not only the loss of the tools of her R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 171 creativity and, consequently, of her main source of confidence and self-fulfillment, but also a breakdown in communication between herself and the outside world. It is at this point that Esther sees her first psychiatrist. Dr. Gordon. At the time in which she was working on The Bell Jar, Plath was also working on some of her Holocaust poems, and Dr. Gordon, a man with perfect features and eyes that look like “green, glacial pools,” looks indeed a bit like a Nazi.^ The interaction between Dr. Gordon and Esther is immediately characterized by failure of communication. Dr. Gordon’s very appearance makes it difficult for Esther to talk to him: I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out... But Dr. Gordon wasn’t like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was conceited. (105; emphasis added) Esther explicitly connects her inability to “find words” to talk to Dr. Gordon to gender and sex. On his desk, the doctor keeps a picture of his wife and two kids. Partially turned towards the patient, the picture makes Esther “furious:” I didn’t see why it should be turned half toward me unless Doctor Gordon was trying to show me right away that he was married to some glamorous woman and I’d better not get any funny ideas. Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card? (106) * Several critics have commented on the significance of the fact that “Plath wrote most of the Ariel poems on the back of drafts of The Bell Jar" (Rose 142). In her Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’ s Ariel Poems, Susan Van Dyne studies the relationship between the Ariel poems and the novel’s draft, concluding that “there is more than a casual relationship between what takes place on both sides of those sheets” (Rose 142). In any case, since the poems and the novel were written at roughly the same time, it makes sense to conjecture that Plath was preoccupied with similar issues. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 172 Suspicious of the way in which their respective genders will be played out in their relationship, Esther feels compelled to adopt a strategy of disguise and selective disclosure: “I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart” (107). Esther’s fantasy of being able to control the interaction proves empty, however, since it is apparent that Dr. Gordon is not listening to a single word she says. The contrast between Esther’s painful attempts at maneuvering around gender expectations to create a persuasive narrative of her pain and Dr. Gordon’s blithe disregard of her is shattering. While Esther talks. Doctor Gordon absent- mindedly taps his pencil on his desk, producing a regular, insistent tap-tap sound. When she is finished talking, he turns the conversation to himself: “Where did you say you went to college?” Baffled, I told him. I didn’t see where college fit in... I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, “I remember your college well. I was up there, during the war. They had a WAG station, didn’t they? Or was it WAVES? I said I didn’t know. “Yes, a WAG station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls.” Doctor Gordon laughed. Then, in one smooth move, he rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the comer of his desk. I wasn’t sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well. Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it. “See you next week, then.” (107) In Esther’s visit with Dr. Gordon, Plath reprises the literary model of psychiatric exchange we have seen in Mrs. Dalloway and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 173 in which female (or, as with Septimus Smith, female-like) patients desperately try to cajole arrogant, insensitive male psychiatrists into listening to, and appreciating, the complex nuances of their psychic agony. Unlike writers like Gilman and Woolf, though, whose doctors have sexist, oppressive, and depersonalizing views and attitudes hut at least try, or pretend, to act in the interest of the patient according to accepted therapeutic practices, Plath gives Dr. Gordon no professional qualities whatsoever. In keeping with the general thrust of The Bell Jar, in which men are portrayed as insensitive, mean, and, when the circumstances are favorable, abusive and violent. Dr. Gordon simply could not care less about his patient’s well-being, his only interest in her residing in the faet that she attends a college he associates with a “pretty hunch of girls.” This association is poignant both because it depersonalizes Esther and because it acts as a confirmation that men like Doctor Gordon relate to women as sexual objects. After a second session in which Esther again completely fails to get through to him. Dr. Gordon, outrageously observing that she has not “improved at all,” prescribes shock treatments “at his private hospital in Walton” (111). The verdict of electrocution Dr. Gordon pronounces against Esther brings prophetic fulfillment to the dreadful promise of Esther’s New York summer, “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs.” Esther’s New York experience, in the meantime, has shifted the emphasis from “the Rosenbergs” as a couple to Ethel Rosenberg (whose name is similar to Esther/Elly’s), woman, wife, and mother, symbol of society’s brutalization R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 174 of women. Esther/Plath’s association of Ethel Rosenberg’s with her own “electrocution” fully conveys the sense of doom she attaches even to ordinary, traditional femininity. Though Ethel Rosenberg was no stereotypical housewife, she was altogether within the norm of 1950s womanhood.^ Married and the mother of two young children, Ethel was portrayed by the US government and media, and thus presented to the American public, as first and foremost a woman. While the government was not initially interested in Ethel, who had had no accusations brought against her, it eventually resolved to arrest and charge her, in order “both to make Julius talk and to disallow Ethel’s testifying in behalf of her husband” (Carmichael 89). Ethel was therefore brought into the trial as the wife of Julius Rosenberg. Judge Irving Kaufman’s sentencing of the Rosenbergs, given on April 5, 1951, sums up with chilling precision what, by the end of the trial, had come to be expected of Julius and Ethel. Revealing the secret of the bomb—the Rosenbergs’ alleged crime—was unforgivable, not only because it created grave danger for the American people and by extension the whole world, but also because, as an act of cooperation with a communist regime, it threatened the essence of the American way of life and the family values that resided at its heart. Indeed, Judge Kaufman reveals his concern for the betrayal of family values in the very wording of the sentencing. After emphasizing the enormity of passing the secret of the atom bomb to the ’ The extent of Ethel Rosenberg’s political involvement has not been fully ascertained, though it seems certain that, unlike her husband Julius, she was never a member of the Communist Party. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 175 Russians, thus risking a “destruction which can wipe out millions of Americans,” he goes on to analyze the internal dynamics of the Rosenberg family: The evidence indicated quite clearly that Julius Rosenberg was the prime mover in this conspiracy. However, let no mistake be made about the role which his wife, Ethel Rosenberg, played... Instead of deterring him from pursuing his ignoble cause, she encouraged and assisted the cause. She was a mature woman—almost three years older than her husband and almost seven years older than her younger brother. She was a full-fledged partner in this crime. Indeed the defendants Julius and Ethel Rosenberg placed their devotion to their cause above their own personal safety and were conscious that they were sacrificing their own children... Love for their cause dominated their lives— it was even greater than love for their children. (70; emphasis added) Notice that Judge Kaufman’s words place Ethel in a role that is exclusively relational, as a wife, sister, and mother. And although Judge Kaufinan accuses both parents of negligence towards their children, Virginia Carmichael points out that in the two years between the trial and the executions “the brunt of this accusation came to bear primarily on Ethel as an unnatural mother” (101-2). At about the same time, American Civil Liberties Union co-counsel Morris Ernst prepared an unsolicited psychological report of the Rosenbergs without having met or talked to either of them. In this report, Ernst claimed that “Julius is the slave and his wife, Ethel, the master” (103). At the end, Carmichael observes, “what had been designed as a tactically political exploitation of the alien woman as spy turned or returned to require the murder of the woman and the mother” (98). Connecting her story to Ethel’s, the woman who was punished for being a woman and simultaneously, in a deadly double hind, for not being woman enough. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 176 Esther also sees her own “electrocution” as punishment. She describes the scene of her first shock session as if it were an execution; I lay down on the bed... Doctor Gordon... dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease... “Don't worry,” the nurse grinned down at me. “Their first time everybody’s scared to death.” I tried to smile but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment. Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes. There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done. (117-8) Esther is so traumatized by her single shock session that her life becomes completely dominated by suicidal fantasies. She cuts herself with razors; she considers drowning and hanging herself; and finally she overdoses on sleeping pills. The overdose episode, arguably the novel’s pinnacle of self-abuse, is described in comforting, almost cozy terms. The narrator intentionally chooses words and images that evoke the weary traveler’s return home and to her mother’s womb. She attaches a Mother Earth symbolism to the fact that her suicide attempt, in the novel as in real life, takes place in the cellar of her mother’s house. After descending, Esther finds a “dark gap” in the wall and crawls into it (138). This space is like a “secret, earth- bottomed crevice;” she crouches “at the mouth of the darkness, like a troll.” Inside this space she feels a sensual comfort: “The dark felt thick as velvet... Cobwebs R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 177 touched my face with the softness of moths. Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly.” For the first time since the beginning of the book, ensconced in this vagina like opening that welcomes her with softness and silence, Esther feels safe and calm: The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down. The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep. Her fragmented self, the “tatty wreckage of [her] life,” reaches a sort of integration: her broken self gathers, if momentarily. The Bell Jar's suicide scene is the hook’s true center, the heart of its argument, and its most truthful conclusion. Esther clearly feels there is no place for her in this world, and no chance at all she might find fulfillment and happiness. But instead of dying she is rescued, and later in the book it will be up to another of Esther’s alter egos, her college fiiend Joan, to kill herself. Esther’s failed suicide attempt is followed by a series of events whose final outcome will be the molding of Esther into an acceptable version of 50’s womanhood. These events, though superficially portrayed as part of a success story, in fact tell a story of defeat. It is only fitting, then, that Esther’s awakening from her drugged slumber should be a rude one. A “great, hard weight” smashes against her cheek, then something that she perceives as a chisel “[cracks] down on [her] eye,” and she feels tom from the “thick, warm, furry dark” (139). Esther’s return to consciousness is marked by fragile ego boundaries. In this twilight moment, she becomes dissociated and cannot tell her R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 178 voice and actions from those of others. She hears a moan, but then the moan could come from herself. And whose voice is it that, when Esther is tom from her fuzzy dark space, cries out “Mother!”? Esther’s dissociation at this point foreshadows the split she will later have to effect on herself in order to take her conventional place in society. The first step on her road to normality is punishment for her suicide attempt. In the hospital to which she is taken, Esther is treated by the nurses with the cheerful craelty that is the literary trademark of nurses’ attitudes to the mentally ill: I opened my eyes. It was completely dark. Somebody was breathing beside me. “I can’t see,” I said. A cheery voice spoke out of the dark: “There are lots of blind people in the world. You’ll marry a nice blind man someday.” (140) Even the doctor who removes the bandages that cover her eyes—thus restoring her to the vision she never lost—cannot refrain from sneaking in a moral lesson: “You are a very lucky girl. Your sight is perfectly intact.” It seems unlikely that Esther’s luck should be connected to her sight, which was probably never threatened by the dmgs she overdosed on. Her luck, the doctor presumably means, is that she survived at all. He fails to make the distinction, however, and thus misleadingly suggests the ominous outcome. It is not only the hospital staff that treats Esther cruelly. When she persuades a young nurse to give her a mirror, Esther is shocked by her image and, in a new symbolic act of self-destruction, smashes the mirror: R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 179 You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was pale brown, with a rose-colored sore at either comer. The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colors. I smiled. The mouth in the mirror cracked into a grin. A minute after the crash another nurse ran in. (142-3) Mirrors are never kind to Esther in The Bell Jar. At the beginning, riding the mirrored elevator at the Amazon hotel, she looks at herself and sees someone else: “I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked” (16).*° After having her picture taken at the magazine (something that upsets her greatly and makes her cry), she looks at herself in a pocket mirror and comments: The face that peered back at me seemed to be peering from the grating of a prison cell after a prolonged beating. It looked bmised and puffy and all the wrong colors. It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance. (83-4) On the train back to Boston she again looks in the mirror and finds that “the face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian” (92). Finally, when she is considering slashing her wrists at her mother’s house, she looks in the bathroom mirror and feels that “if I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play;” then she adds: “But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing” (121). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 180 In these and other scenes in which mirrors appear, they invariably reinforce Esther’s sense of alterity with respect to herself, her tendency to dissociation. They also give tangible expression to her self-hatred, since she always sees herself as looking, not only ugly and stupid, but also bruised and beat up. The breaking of the mirror in the hospital causes more reproach and cruelty on the part of the ward’s nurses: The other, older nurse came back into the room. She stood there, arms folded, staring hard at me. “Seven years’ bad luck”... “That’s only superstition,” I said then. “Huh!” The second nurse addressed herself to the nurse on her hands and knees as if I wasn’t there: “At you- know-where they’ll take care of her.” (143) All the tropes of female asylum literature appear in this exchange. Esther, the supposedly crazy person, speaks the language of reason and common sense. The nurses, on the other hand, are unreasonably angry and employ the language of superstition. Most importantly, though, they use the asylum as threat and scare tactic, treating Esther as a very bad child. Later on, when Esther is about to be transferred to a psychiatric hospital, her mother returns to the theme of the bad child in the very same terms: “You should have behaved better, then... You shouldn’t have broken the mirror. Then maybe they’d have let you stay” (143-44). The breaking of the mirror acts as a turning point in the novel. Having destroyed the reminder of her fragmentation, Esther finds herself newly able to eat and sleep. For the first time since the beginning of the book, things seem to be On several occasions Esther, when disparaging her appearance, compares herself to someone with non-Western facial features. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 181 working out for her. After a brief stay in the psychiatrie ward of the city hospital, she is rescued hy her college mentor, Philomena Guinea, and taken to an expensive private hospital “that had grounds and golf courses and gardens, like a country club, where she would pay for me, as if I had a scholarship, until the doctors she knew of there had made me well” (151-2). Philomena Guinea’s help, though, comes with a condition: Mrs. Guinea had telegrammed, “Is there a boy in the case?” If there was a boy in the case, Mrs. Guinea couldn’t, of course, have anything to do with it. But my mother had telegrammed back, “No, it is Esther’s writing. She thinks she will never write again.” (151) Esther’s admission to the private asylum is thus from the first conceived of as a sort of reprogramming of her into the scholarship student and eventual professional woman exemplified hy Philomena Guinea. Such a model of successful womanhood is, as is suggested by Philomena Guinea’s reaction to the possibility that a boy may be involved, incompatible with the home-hushand-and-ehildren life.** The new asylum is thus presented as the place where Esther will overcome her confusion about how to fit into a man’s world. As if to underscore this point, the first person she meets at the hospital is Doctor Nolan, a “slim and young” woman doctor who embodies both professionality and feminine attractiveness (152-3). Doctor Nolan is dressed fashionably but not extravagantly, with “a white blouse and a full skirt gathered at the waist hy a wide leather heft, and stylish, crescent-shaped " A “famous woman poet” at her college says as much to her: “When I told the poet I might well get married and have a pack of children someday, she stared at me in horror. ‘But what about your career?’” (180). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 182 spectacles” (153). As befits a modem woman, she smokes. At the same time, and in contrast to the evil Doctor Gordon, Doctor Nolan is caring and attentive towards Esther. Doctor Nolan seems to embody all the qualities represented by the figs in the tree. Like Jay Cee, she is smart, but unlike her she is also pretty and hip. Like a mother, she is caring and tender. Significantly, she is the only major character whose sexuality Esther steers clear of: we never learn whether she is married or what her sexual orientation is. But whereas Esther never brings up sex in relation to Doctor Nolan, the latter will take a great interest in Esther’s sexuality, introducing her to contraception and homosexuality. Through her words and behavior Doctor Nolan tries to convince Esther that psychiatric treatment can be healing instead of punitive. In particular, she tries to reassure her about electroshock: I told Dr. Nolan about the machine, and the blue flashes, and the jolting and the noise. While I was telling her she went very still. “That was a mistake,” she said then. “It’s not supposed to be like that.” I stared at her. “If it’s done properly,” Doctor Nolan said, “it’s like going to sleep.” “If anyone does it to me again I’ll kill myself.” Doctor Nolan said firmly, “You won’t have any shock treatments here. Or if you do,” she amended, “I’ll tell you about it beforehand, and I promise you it won’t be anything like what you had before. Why,” she finished, “some people even like them.” (155)*^ The few female asylum narratives in which the patient is taken care of by a woman psychiatrist seem all to contain a sense of care and healing that sharply contrasts with the atmosphere of punishment that dominates narratives in which only male doctors appear. This is true also of works that still maintain that the asylum is a bratal and violent place. In I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the young protagonist has an intense and fruitful relation with her female psychiatrist even as she is regularly brutalized by the institution. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 183 Trauma, however, has a tenacious grip on the psyche, and Esther lives her days at the hospital in dread of demotion to a less advanced wing and horrified by the prospect of electroshock, the two things clearly connected in her mind. Incomprehensibly, while fellow patients move “down,” she moves steadily “up.” First she is moved to the front of the main building, where “there’s lots more sun,” and later, after she has the intended reaction to insulin shock therapy, she is rewarded with a move to Belsize, “the best house of all” (158,167). These movements are mysterious to her, and the mystery causes her to be afraid and confused. Even in the nice and friendly surroundings of the private hospital, Esther’s stay in the asylum resonates with the themes that characterize all of women’s asylum literature: loss of control over one’s fate, subjection to irrational and random rules, and a perpetual sense that punishment is just around the comer. Because fear dominates her life and prevents her from getting better (she spends every day wrapped in a blanket, isolated from the other patients, dreaming of escape), Esther is finally scheduled—as we knew she would be—for shock therapy. The event feels to her like a death sentence: If [Doctor Nolan] had told me the night before I would have lain awake all night, of course, full of dread and foreboding, but by morning I would have been composed and ready. I would have gone down the hall between two nurses, past DeeDee and Loubelle and Mrs. Savage and Joan, with dignity, like a person coolly resigned to execution. (173) Esther’s fantasy of a dignified acceptance of her execution may perhaps be an allusion to Ethel Rosenberg, who shocked America with the decidedly unfeminine R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 184 composure with which she faced death/^ The mention of execution at this crucial point, however, functions not as a signifier of a new trauma for Esther, but as a marker of the moment in which she starts to overcome her trauma. The trauma that lies at the foundation of The Bell Jar, the brutalization and punishment of femininity, can be overcome only by being relived in a setting made safe by the presence of a positive model of womanhood. The figure of Doctor Nolan, the good and motherly psychiatrist, operates in the novel as the provider of such a setting. Sure enough, while Esther expects “two burly men attendants” to “bear [her], howling and hitting,” to the electroshock room, she is met instead by the loving presence of Doctor Nolan: Doctor Nolan put her arm around me and hugged me like a mother. “You said you’d tell me!” I shouted at her through the disheveled blanket. “But I am telling you,” Doctor Nolan said. “I’ve come specially early to tell you, and I’m taking you over myself.” (173) Unlike the unfeeling Doctor Gordon, Doctor Nolan is genuinely “upset” by Esther’s distress. And she behaves maternally towards her throughout the ordeal: she wipes the tears off her face with her own handkerchief; she walks her to the treatment room Reporter Bob Considine, one of the three media witnesses to the execution, wrote in his 1967 book on the Rosenbergs: Ethel wore a Mona Lisa smile. Her little minnow of a mouth was curled at the edges in the faintest possible way. She was dressed in a dark green print of cheap material, a prison dress that revealed her plump legs below the knee. Her dark brown hair... was set in an almost boyish manner... As the hood was lowered over her eyes and the black strap placed across her mouth, she was looking straight ahead almost triumphantly. (Carmichael 105) Since the other two media representatives “were emotionally overwhelmed and allowed Considine to speak for all three to the waiting reporters,” Considine’s appearance-obsessed representation of Ethel became the definitive story of her death (254). His report “appeared in newspapers and on radio both nationwide and globally.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 185 “arm in arm, like an old friend;” she hands her over to a nice female nurse who, in turn, puts her arm around Esther’s shoulder and talks to her “in a low, soothing voice” until she falls asleep; and she is right there, calling her name, when she wakes up: “‘Esther.’ I woke up out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan’s face swimming in front of me and saying, ‘Esther, Esther’” (176). This awakening stands in contrast to Esther’s previous one after her suicide attempt. Whereas before she had emerged lost and dissociated, this time she surfaces while Doctor Nolan, through the repetition of her name, performs a symbolic reinstatement of her identity. Esther experiences a profound sense of newness and relief: Doctor Nolan led me through a door into a fresh, blue-skied air. All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. (176) While one could infer that Esther’s liberation from the stifling oppression of the bell jar is a result of shock therapy done properly, I prefer to read it as a consequence of the loving attention of Doctor Nolan. Now that Doctor Nolan has walked her through the trauma and initiated her healing and integration, Esther can get busy with the task of building herself as a woman. The first step is to counteract the power of sexuality to confine women to stifling domesticity. With the help of Doctor Nolan, she makes an appointment to be fitted with a diaphragm: “What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.” R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 186 “Would you act differently if you didn’t have to worry about a baby?” “Yes,” I said, “but...” and I told Doctor Nolan about the married woman lawyer and her Defense of Chastity. Doctor Nolan waited until I was finished. Then she burst out laughing. “Propaganda!” she said, and scribbled the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad. (181) After another few shock treatments Esther, who now has “town privileges” and can spend her days outside the hospital, is all but cured (177). She is so well, in fact, that she would leave the asylum altogether, were it not for the fact that she has nowhere to go until the new term at university starts and she can move back to her dorm. Cured of her misgivings about the world and fitted with a diaphragm, Esther has only one thing left to do before turning into a liberated woman: lose her virginity. She accomplishes this by sleeping with a math professor she has just met, fittingly, outside Harvard University library. Esther approaches her first sexual experience with deliberateness and practicality. The thing she appreciates most in the man, whose name is Irwin, is that he is somebody “I didn’t know and wouldn’t go on knowing—a kind of impersonal, priestlike official, as in the tales of tribal life” (186). Sex with Irwin turns out to be not only impersonal but also startlingly painful. Irwin, supposedly a ladies’ man, shows no interest in or concern for Esther and jumps into the shower the moment he is done with her. Not quite sure of what happened, Esther is left to wonder if “he had done what he planned to do, or if my virginity had obstructed him in some way” (187). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 187 The answer comes in the form of blood, the visible confirmation of lost virginity but also, as we have seen, of male violence. Meant to represent a step forward in Esther’s ownership of herself and liberation from society’s constrictions, this scene, I propose, is nothing of the sort. Esther goes through sex with Irwin in much the same way as she was willing, if only for a second, to go through sex with Marco, gritting her teeth and putting up with it. Her primary goal, which she achieves, is the mechanical loss of her virginity. The goal she does not achieve, however, is genuine emotional fulfillment. Most importantly, this brutal deflowering does nothing to make her feel fi-ee and independent. Rather, it reproduces the same pattern of male domination that Esther sees as the trademark of family life. The emptiness of such an achievement is implicitly confirmed by the fate of Esther in later life. Laura Anderson soberly observes that “however hard she may try to imagine otherwise, Esther repeatedly discovers that her gendered body is already commodified, violently appropriated, beyond her control” (121). The betrayal of herself that Esther effects in this cold sex scene will be atoned for by her college fiiend Joan Gilling, who unexpectedly j oins her in Doctor Nolan’s asylum. We first encounter Joan when Esther tells the story of how she and Buddy Willard started going out. Joan was Buddy’s previous girlfnend. Big and horsey, she is full of energy and life; unlike the bookwormish and asocial Esther, she is “a big wheel [at the college]—president of her class and a physics major and the college hockey champion” (48). Esther is therefore surprised when Joan appears at R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 188 the hospital. As it turns out, Joan also became depressed and suicidal during the summer, and when she read in the paper about Esther’s suicide attempt decided to follow suit. Joan is the Bell Jar character who is portrayed most explicitly as Esther’s doppelganger. She shares with Esther boyfriend, college, and town of origin. Like Esther’s other alter egos, Joan clearly admires her and craves her friendship and approval. For her part, Esther has only contempt for Joan—a contempt that, characteristically, manifests itself most prominently in her description of the girl’s physical appearance. When she recounts in flashback learning that Buddy was dating her, Esther comments: “She always made me feel squirmy with her starey pebble- colored eyes and her gleaming tombstone teeth and her breathy voice. She was big as a horse, too. I began to think that Buddy had pretty poor taste” (48). In Joan’s asylum room, Esther claims she can smell “a strong horsey whiff that made my nostrils prickle” (162). She comments: “Joan had been a champion horse-jumper at the annual college gymkhana, and I wondered if she had been sleeping in a stable.” This narrative cruelty is accompanied however by repeated suggestions that, notwithstanding her large teeth and horsey appearance, Joan is Esther’s mirror image, possibly even Esther’s true self. When she first enters Joan’s room at the asylum, Esther observes that it is “a mirror image of my own” (160). On two occasions, as a true mirror, Joan shows Esther pictures of herself. On her arrival at the asylum, she gives Esther the newspaper clippings that inspired her own copycat suicide attempt. The clippings contain several pictures of Esther and her family. As R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 189 on previous occasions, Esther treats these images of herself as if they were of someone else, referring to the girl in the pictures in the third person. Also typically, she disparages her appearance: The first clipping showed a big, blown-up picture of a girl with black- shadowed eyes and black lips spread in a grin. I couldn’t imagine where such a tarty picture had been taken until I noticed the Bloomingdale earrings and the Bloomingdale necklace glinting out of it with bright, white highlights, like imitation stars... The last picture showed policemen lifting a long, limp blanket roll with a featureless cabbage head into the back of an ambulance. (162-3) On another occasion, Joan sees a picture of Esther in a fashion magazine, taken when she was in New York, and shows it to her. Again, Esther does not identify with the girl in the picture: The magazine photograph showed a girl in a strapless evening dress of fuzzy white stuff, grinning fit to split, with a whole lot of boys bending around her. The girl was holding a glass full of a transparent drink and seemed to have her eyes fixed over my shoulder on something that stood behind me, a little to my left. (169) While Esther cannot recognize herself, she sees in Joan, who is progressing very fast in her hospital life, her double: Joan had walk privileges, Joan had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double o f my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me. (167; emphasis added) A last, uncomfortable similarity between Esther and Joan is that they both now despise ex-boyfriend Buddy Willard. For Esther, this contempt spreads itself over all men; for Joan, it has transformed itself into the love of women. Through Joan the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 190 issue of lesbianism is introduced into the novel. One day Esther discovers Joan in bed with one of their fellow patients. She finds the scene so disgusting that when Joan greets her, her “comhusk voice [makes her] want to puke” (179). Even as she claims to feel disgust for Joan and, by implication, female homosexuality, Esther is also fascinated by the other girl. She explicitly says so: In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own. (179) Although Esther’s fascination with Joan is dictated more by curiosity than liking, she admits to feeling very close to her. The key to this deeply ambiguous identification may be offered by a conversation about female homosexuality that takes place between Esther and Doctor Nolan. When Esther asks her what women see in other women that they cannot see in men. Doctor Nolan replies: “Tenderness” (179). The answer, Esther admits, shuts her up. Tenderness is the one thing that Esther, with all her liberation, never learns to feel in The BellJar. While she is not infrequently the recipient of love or caring—from Doreen, who tends to her after she gets food poisoning, from Betsy, from her mother, from Dodo Conway, from Philomena Guinea, from Doctor Nolan, and from Joan herself—she never reciprocates. It is possible, therefore, that the vicious hostility Esther feels towards Joan may be a sign of envy of the latter’s ability to engage in mutually tender relationships. It is worth pointing out at this R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 191 point that a “famous poet” in Esther’s college is herself a lesbian. She lives “with another woman—a stumpy old classical scholar with a cropped Dutch cut” (180). While Esther overtly disparages lesbians, the love of women is portrayed by The Bell Jar, not only as emotionally fulfilling, but also as compatible with women’s independence. Unfortunately, as Linda Anderson points out, “tenderness or its possibility can only enter the novel as a disruption of Esther’s ‘normal’ thinking about sexuality” (121). The Bell Jar is, however, not a novel of alternative routes, hut one of surrender, and while Esther paints herself into a comer of misery and unfulfillment, preparing for a life she despises, Joan chooses to die. Her suicide takes place immediately after Esther has sex with Irwin and should probably be read as an act of atonement: Joan, Esther’s “old best self,” cannot survive Esther’s betrayal of herself. So Joan dies and Esther, in self-deceit, reads her demise as an act of liberation. When she hears that Joan has disappeared and cannot he found, Esther’s reaction is to sever the bond between herself and the other girl: “Suddenly I wanted to dissociate myself from Joan completely” (191). Joan’s death, in reality, allows Esther to pursue her newly chosen life without having to face her past. While Joan was alive, Esther felt that she was a reminder of past lives and decisions: Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose. (179) R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 192 Now, at Joan’s funeral, Esther listens “to the old brag of her heart,” finally free to say: “I am, I am, I am” (199). With Joan (and Doreen and Betsy) gone and the new term at school about to start, Esther is ready to leave the asylum. The description of this momentous occasion, supposedly the glorious conclusion of the novel, Esther’s rebirth into the world, is filled with troubling signs. Esther’s re-entry into society is not something she controls and decides; it is not even decided by her doctor and friend Dr. Nolan. Instead, it is legislated by a group of strangers in front of whom Esther appears in an official final interview, a sort of asylum graduation exam. Dr. Nolan describes the upcoming interview to Esther in reassuring terms: “I’ll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and some visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all doctors, will ask you a few questions, and then you can go” (199). Unsurprisingly, Esther is still “scared to death.” The content of her exam, Esther seems to know, is not whether she has found an answer to the torturing questions that brought her to the asylum in the first place. These questions, she knows well, have not been answered: “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead—after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks.” Troubling as they are, though, her unanswered question will not hamper her in the exam with the hospital discharging committee. The success of the exam, and her subsequent liberation, seem to depend on something much more superficial, the successful achievement of womanhood: “I kept shooting impatient glances at the R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 193 closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans” (emphasis added). Dressed in clothes that proclaim her femininity as much as those she had dropped from the sunroof of her New York hotel, Esther feels as if she were getting married (“But I wasn’t getting married”). The novel has come full circle, and Esther is hack where she started, thinking that marriage, after all, will (re)make a woman of her. Her foray into rebellion is over. Released from the hospital with a diaphragm in her pocket, a broken hymen, and nice clothes, she feels as if she were “horn twice.” Deep down, however, she knows full well this rebirth is just a fiction. What the hospital accomplished is nothing more than a reprogramming: like a worn out tire, she has been “patched, retreaded and approved for the road.” The Bell Jar thus ends on the ominous note of a false liberation and a false healing, and Esther goes hack to the world that drove her to distraction without having learned how better to deal with it. At the end of the dark tuimel of The Bell Jar, though, there looms one tenuous light: the solace of women’s solidarity, that bond that, alone, can lift, if for a short time, the horror of the bell jar. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 194 WORKS CITED Ali, Alisha. “The Convergence of Foucault and Feminist Psychiatry: Exploring Emancipatory Knowledge Building.” Journal o f Gender Studies 11.3 (2002): 233-242. Alley, Elizabeth, ed. The Inward Sun. Celebrating the Life and Work o f Janet Frame. Wellington: Daphne Brasell Associates Press, 1994. 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Herland (1915). New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. . The Living o f Charlotte Perkins Gilman. An Autobiography (1935). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. . “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. New York: Bantam, 1989. Gilman, Sander L., Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits o f Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 198 Goffinan, Erving. Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation o f Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961. Goulet, Robert. Madhouse. Chicago: J. P. O’Hara, 1971. Greenberg, Joanna [Hannah Green]. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Grob, Gerald N. From Asylum to Community. Mental Health Policy in Modem America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. . The Mad Among Us. A History o f the Care ofAmerica’ s Mentally III. New York: The Free Press, 1994. Grobe, Jeanine, ed. Beyond Bedlam. Contemporary Women Psychiatric Survivors Speak Out. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1995. Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: The Case of Sylvia Plath.” Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Eds. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 112- 128. Guy, Rosa. Bird at My Window (1966). Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001. Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper”’ (1986). Erskine and Richards 191- 208. Hannah, Donald W. "'Faces in the Water. Case-History or Work of Fiction?” The Ring o f Fire. Essays on Janet Frame. Ed. Jeanne Delbaere. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992. 74-81. Head, Bessie. A Question o f Power. London: Davis-Poynter, 1973. Henke, Suzette. “ Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of Saints.” Marcus 1983, 125-147. . Shattered Subjects. Trauma and Testimony in Women’ s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: BasicBooks, 1997. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 199 Hemdl, Diana Price. Invalid Women. Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Homstein, Gail. “Bibliography of First Person Narratives of Madness.” Sep. 2003. <http://www.ffeedom-center.org/pdf/madnessbibliographyhomstein.pdf> Hughes, Lynn Gordon. “Olive Higgins Prouty.” 21 July 2003. <http ://www.uua. org/uuhs/duub/articles/olivehigginsprouty .html> Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind. A Memoir o f Moods and Madness. New York: Knopf, 1995. Jefferson, Lara. These Are My Sisters. An “ Insandectomy. ” New York: Anchor Press, 1974. Jensen, Emily. “Clarissa Dalloway's Respectable Suicide.” Marcus 1983,162-79. Kasmer, Lisa. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Symptomatic Reading.” literature and psychology 36 (1990): 1-15. Kaufman, Marc. “FDA Cautions on Antidepressants and Youth.” The Washington Post. 28 Oct. 2003. A2. Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). New York: New American Library, 1989. King, Jeanette and Pam Morris. “On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 23- 32. King, Michael. Wrestling with the Angel. A Life o f Janet Frame. Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 2000. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs o f a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Kolodny, Annette. “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts” (1980). Erskine and Richards 159-180. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self {I960). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. 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Creator Pompele, Giovanna (author)

Core Title Trauma and survival in twentieth century women's asylum narratives

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Biography,comparative literature,literature, American,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-524240

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Identifier 3140538.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-524240 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3140538.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Pompele, Giovanna

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