Transcript Homes of the MadWomen? Meanings, Debates, Critical Insights

Homes of the MadWomen?
Meanings, Debates, Critical
Insights
1st International Health Humanities Conference
Madness and Literature, The University of Nottingham, 6th – 8th August
2010
Saara Jäntti, PhD student,Department of Languages/English,
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
[email protected]
Stories of Madness and PsychiatricEras
Janet Frame
Faces in the Water
1961
Asylumstory
BessieHead
A Question of Power
1973
Madness as a
spiritualjourney
Lauren Slater
ProzacDiary
1997
The rise of the
psychopharmaceuticals
FeministAetiology of Madness
home ->madness
Focus on the genderedfeatures of reproduction, violence and division of
labour
-> home a site of physical and structuralviolence,
spacethatrestrictswomen’sagency and constraintheirparticipation in the
publicsphere (Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, Chesler, Friedan and Showalter)
immanence and ”comfortableconcentrationcamp” ->sadnessend of madness
Criticaldicourse of women’smadness (Schlichter 2003)
concernedwithmedicalization of women’smisery (Ussher 1991, 2010, Lafrance
and Stoppard 2006)
Madwoman as an emblem of women’soppression and ”houses as
primarysymbols of femaleimprisonment” (Gilbert and Gubar’s (1979)
But: There’sMoreto Home…
It was almost Christmas time and everybody in the mental hospital was
wanting to go home. Some had homes and some didn’t but that made
not much difference, they all wanted to go to a place that could be
called home, where there were no locked doors and dayrooms and
parks and Yards and circumspect little walks in the gardens on a
Sunday afternoon […] When I get home, the patients said to each
other, when I get to my own home, and sometimes when they went
shopping down to the store on a Friday afternoon, past the school
where the kids gardening in the school garden stopped to stare at the
loonies till the master jerked them back to their task with, they’re
people like you and me, remember, when they weren’t at all, they
weren’t people like anybody in the outside world, they were shut away
from streets and houses and fun and theatres and beaches, well, when
they got to the store they would buy a Christmas card, for the
Superintendent they said, then perhaps he will let me go home,
because I want to go home, there’s nothing wrong with me really.
-JanetFrame The Bedjacket
Madness and Home here
historical/culturaldiscursivematerialconstructs
Madness: differencewithin and betweenwomen, (former)
patientswhoarewomen
Home: A narrativemeans to conveydifferentaspects of the livedexperience of
madness and itstreatments
a subject’srelation to significantmaterialand/orimmaterialspacesshapedbymadness
and itstreatment
A concretesite of acts of living: ”anyoften-visitedplacethat is the object of
cathexis, that in itsveryfamiliaritybecomes a symbolicextension and
confirmation of the self.” (Felski 2000, 88)
A site of subjectconstructionwithpoliticalpotential (Young 1997, hooks) and
minimalagency (Honkasalo 2006)verb: to inhabit, dwell cf. sairastaa (To beill)
symbolic, metaphorical
Dwelling, Moving, Belonging (Homes in TransformationJohansson and
Saarikangas 2009)
Dwelling (1)
a Human Mode of Being (Heidegger)
genderedmode of being (Irigaray: menconstruct,
womendwell; women as homelessmakers of homes)
Frame: the sadness and pointlessness of
houseworkremovedfrom the home of one’sown
“I knew from the intricacy of the pattern and the care with
which it was being followed, that this woman had been in
hospital for a long time. I had seen it before, at Cliffhaven,
this needling of their whole life into a peace of fancywork - a
dressing-table cover, caddy table cloth; with no hope of ever
seeing it in their own home, on their own furniture”. (Faces,
82-3)
Dwelling (2)
Head’s Elisabeth: cooking and mothering – means of
warding off the torments of madness, home as a site of
hosting guests, counter-force to madness:
”Elisabeth kept her house scrupulously polished up and
clean.” (QP, 121)
Slater: learning to bake, cook, work the alarm clock:
gaining minimal agency, buying furniture
Young: home a space where the objects support us
physically
Moving
Madness and its treatment as restriction of movement
Frame: confinement
Istina removed from her home and placed in the hospital, and within the
hospital moved from one ward to another depending on her prognosis; the
hospital gates:
“We stood at the gate, considering the marvel of the World where people, such is
the deception of memory, did as they pleased, owned furniture, dressing tables
with doilies on them and wardrobes with mirrors; and doors they could open and
shut and open as many times as they chose; and no name tapes sewn inside the
neck of their clothes; and handbags to carry, with nail files and make-up; and no
one to watch while they were eating and to collect and count the knives afterwards
and say in a frightening voice, “Rise, Ladies.” (Faces, 52) (nostalgicrelation)
Order and discipline in the hospital: “rise ladies!” “Dormitory, ladies!”
Moving (2)
Head: exile
Apartheid regime: people forcibly moved from their homes, Elisabeth
leaves South Africa on an exit visa. Madness as intrinsic to exile
Movement in and out of her hut, a place to return and to leave for the
day’s work. Crisis point in her madness: she locks herself in the home,
does not let anyone in. Mad state of being portrayed as one where a
subject and her home cease to be permeable and become closed-in space
with no interaction.
Slater:
immobility and rigidnesscausedby OCD
Health: extending the geographical space of movement and agency
Life story as a succession of homes : moving and imagining houses and
homes presents itself as a way to construct one’s identity. She abandons
her basement flat and moves to another, upper-scale neighbourhood.
Belonging
Scale:
from the handback to the World (Frame),
family and personal relations to humanity
Frame:return: estrangement from the family, humour used
to accommodate her “trip” to the hospital to the life story:
resort to popular stereotypical imagery
Head: “half-race” origin of homelessness, madness as a site
to negotiate one’s belonging to humanity
Slater: ability to pose questions and participate in meaningmaking achieved through the everyday act of swallowing the
pill:
It is morning again, and I shake one capsule from the bottle. I
stare into the pearl of the pill and wonder whether it has
given rise to an addiction that brings me closer to my oystery
heart or further from it. […] I hold the gem up between
thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that, assessing
how light lands on its surface, pushes to illuminate the
sphere’s interior, where, I sometimes imagine, my whole world
might live, a long long time ago there once was – a hospital, a
nurse, a horse, a love. […] I picture it all inside the pill […],
and finally, then, I am grateful. My cognition may be fraying,
my libido might be down, I may lose language. Prozac is a
medicine that takes much away, but its very presence in my
life has been about preserving as well as decaying. The flowers
I cure. […] In the dream I forget the words where, I forget the
word home, but in my waking life Prozac has taken me deeper
and deeper into those questions – me or not me, crutch or
inner bone. Returned, I am then, with each daily dose, with
the wash of water to take the pill down, returned I am to my
stomach, to my skin, to the fabrics of my past and, yes, to the
threat of the synthetic. This is Prozac’s burden and its gift,
keeping me alive to the most human of questions, bringing
me forward, bringing me back, swaddling and unswaddling
me, pushing me to ask which wrappings are real. (PD, 200)