Women and Madness: Teaching Mental Illness as a Disability (original) (raw)
International Journal of Practical and Pedagogical Issues in English Education, 2023
The study investigates the two novels of Jane Ayre and The Bell Jar, the aspects focus on the psychological matters. These matters are like mental instability and behavioural instability, also the madness. The forms of mental illnesses are many, the ones those are known commonly are linked to women as long as these women are not obedient. The mental instability occurs to several reasons and these reasons are mostly through the life of the women who face such conditions. The reasons are like the imprisonment of women and being locked. The other aspect is the role of the psychological pressure women suffer of and these psychological pressures are made of forms those are different.
Saving Sylvia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Genius, Gender, and Madness
2017
Beginning in the late 19th century, the field of psychology increasingly concerned itself with the study of creativity; at the same time, female authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman were criticizing the deleterious effects of psychiatry on the creative woman. Just decades later, Virginia Woolf publicly mused upon the deadly consequences of "the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body" Seven decades later, in 2001, Dr. James. C Kaufman coined the "Sylvia Plath effect," referring to the "preliminary finding of notable mental illness in female poets. An interdisciplinary exploration of the links between "genius" and "madness," madness and gender, and gender and genius offers several perspectives of the Sylvia Plath effect. Despite the historical trends related to this issue, there are lessons to be learned and help to be offered to future female poets so that they are able to thrive in their profession as well as in their personal lives. Therefore, philosophical, medical, and literary perspectives are reframed here as potential solutions and suggestions, enabling the mentors of postgraduate/professional female poets to encourage the stability and eminence of those under their tutelage by mitigating the effects of mental illness and increasing sustainable creativity.
The Bell Jar: An Inextricable Hysteria of a Woman Consequent of a Distorted Identity
History Research Journal, 2019
The portrayal of women as ‘Deviant’ has an elongated history. Even the world’s foremost religions and traditions dealing with spirituality often projected women as “uncontrollable.” In literature woman suffering from hysteria have been an engrossing subject. Hysteria as a female condition refers to emotional excess such as fear or panic. The term comes from the Greek word ‘hysterikos’, which means “of the womb.” It was originally seen as a neurotic condition associated with women.
The Female Mental Disorder as a Reaction to Patriarchal Practices in
2021
This paper aims at shedding light on the female mental disorder from a positive perspective. The connections between women’s gender, their mental disorder, and their psychological state are scrutinized within a feminist scope since the feminist approach is required in this context. Indeed, under the umbrella of feminism, women are able to reject oppression and discover their identity. Moreover, many female autobiographical novels, such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, are recognised by the presence of women’s mental disorder. The findings reveal that gender and the patriarchal practices lie at the heart of women’s mental disorder, but, fortunately, the latter is considered as a form of rebellion rather than a form of weakness. Thus, this study emphasizes the fact that madness can lead to the formation of an integrated self and a free space away from the traditional social demands.
The Bell Jar: A Psychological Case Study
Plath Profiles an Interdisciplinary Journal For Sylvia Plath Studies, 2010
The bell jar is an image that readers of twentieth-century literature recognize all too well. The suffocating, airless enclosure of conformism making life hell for an iconic nineteen-year-old girl in the 1950s is on par with Holden Caulfield's carousel. The bell jar itself as an isolated object is simple enough to characterizea smothering, stiff, unbreakable case, the captive helplessly enclosed within its glass walls. However, the embedded symbolic meaning is slightly more obscure. Many critics view the bell jar as a symbol of society's stifling constraints and befuddling mixed messages that trap Sylvia Plath's heroine, Esther Greenwood, within its glass dome. However, another often overlooked reality is that the physical, albeit metaphorical, suffocation induced by the bell jar is a direct representation of Esther's mental suffocation by the unavoidable settling of depression upon her psyche, and that this circumstance greatly alters the way in which the entire novel can and should be perceived. The majority of critics, who tend to view the heroine primarily through our social constraints of the 50s, generally neglect to recognize that the lineage of events within the novel are entrenched in Esther's personal psychological turmoil. Therefore, the way in which the narrative simply portrays a depressive, and the way in which the narrative's construct and Esther's mental outcome is largely dependant on this fact, is clearly just as pertinent a reading as that which maintains a lens of social critique. For example, in Reflecting on The Bell Jar, Pat Macpherson interprets Plath's novel solely through a lens of social criticism. Esther's suicide attempt becomes an act of retaliation against suburbia (41), and her ultimate release from the mental hospital, or her "last-passed-test" is simply a reflection of her "social" and "psychic" maturity (6). Diane Bonds characterizes Esther's depression as an "intolerable psychic conflict produced by trying to meet cultural expectations of women" (57). Marjorie Perloff describes it as her "human inability to cope with an unlivable situation" (520-21). These analyses, though in no way discreditable, do not account for the immediate reality of Esther's illness. Critics tend to argue that society is making Esther sick; however, it is impossible to refer to Esther's perceptions her experiences, her observations, her self-criticismswithout accounting for the fact that her perspective is unstable. It is unsurprising that Esther regards suburbia as a prison (Macpherson,
"Art and Mental Illness, An Art Historical Perspective"
Art and Mental Illness: Myths, Stereotypes and Realities, 2007
Alongside these developments are changes in consumer group attitudes to the display of art produced by people who experience mental illness. Consumer groups have reached the conclusion that such displays must respect the whole person and not focus exclusively on the relationship between the artwork and the mental illness of the creator. Consumers and consumer representatives have begun to argue that art should not be discussed through the use of diagnostic categories as such discussions have the potential to demean the creator by reducing them to a function of their illness.To take a prominent but little-known example, the widow of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner sued her late husband's analyst in 1977 for exhibiting drawings produced by Pollock during therapy under the heading 'Psychoanalytic Drawings'. As she argued at the time:
Mental Illness and Imagination in Philosophy, Literature, and Psychiatry
Philosophy and Literature, 2013
can existential themes, such as anxiety, the will to die, or our simultaneous will to live forever be logically described? does a literary language or philosophical and psychiatric term exist that can express phenomena nonreferential to the external world? In short, does a genre exist that can redefine the relationships between symbol and meaning? drawing upon various theoretical perspectives developed by Michel Foucault, Ludwig Binswanger, gaston Bachelard, and Karl Jaspers, this paper discusses the ability to depict life as we are living it, whether it is a product of mental illness or a matter of normal schizophrenic imaginings. M ental illness and imaginings affect people of all ages, races, religions, and incomes. Mental illness as such is not the result of personal weakness, lack of character, or poor upbringing. Instead, mental illness shows incredible creativity in terms of behavior and thought. nevertheless, it also disrupts a person's thoughts, feelings, mood, ability to relate to others, and the capacity to cope with the ordinary demands of life. The understanding of mental illness as a medical condition includes diagnoses such as major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd), panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTsd), and borderline personality disorder. In 2012, the american Psychiatric association (aPa) approved a set of updates, revisions, and changes to the reference manual used to diagnose mental disorders. The revision of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsM), is the first significant update in nearly
Sonja Sekula and "Art of the Mentally Ill"
American Art, 2021
In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, modernist artists were fascinated by what was then called "art of the mentally ill." There are three nodal points in this history. First, in 1890, the pioneering German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin began to collect artwork by patients with severe mental illness at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic. Hans Prinzhorn published some of that collection as Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) in 1922, and many well-known artists, such as Paul Klee, were inspired by the book. 1 Second, the sequel to the Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) was Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (also 1936), which included examples of art of the "insane." 2 Third, beginning in 1945, the French artist Jean Dubuffet began to collect what he termed art brut (raw art), uncultured and purportedly pure art by outsiders, including people with mental illness. The collection was on view in the home of the artist Alfonso Ossorio in East Hampton, New York, from 1951 to 1962, when it returned to Paris and was established as the Compagnie de l'art brut. It lives on today as the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. 3 As different as these moments were, they largely shared a psychoanalytic perspective-initially more Freudian, and later, more Jungian. 4 The art historian Hal Foster has characterized this long-standing interest in "art of the mentally ill" as a successor to artists' interest in "primitive" and children's art: "most modernists saw the art of the mentally ill according to their own ends only-as expressive of an aesthetic essence, revelatory of an innocent vision, or defiant of all convention-and for the most part it was none of these things.. .. [Yet they] bespeak modernist fantasies either of a pure origin of art or an absolute alterity to culture." 5 Clearly the modernist investment in "art of the mentally ill"-what today we would call art by people with mental illness-was deep and sustained, however self-interested. 6 What this interest, on the part of artists, and assessment, on the part of historians, fails to address, however, is modernist art by practicing artists who themselves had mental illnesses. Indeed, art historians have exerted much effort in separating art by formally trained professional artists from art produced by those who suffer from mental illness. The curator Alfred H. Barr Jr., for example, included art by the mentally ill in Fantastic Art, but it was deemed "non-art" in comparison with art by "normal" artists assumed to have no mental health conditions. 7 Later, Michel Thévoz, a historian of Art Brut, lamented that patients in psychiatric facilities were becoming increasingly aware of artistic trends and gaining rudimentary artistic training, which, in his view, spoiled their supposedly unfiltered access to the truth. He writes, for instance, "Institutes for
The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia Plath’sThe Bell Jar
Women's Studies, 2004
In 1953, when Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem "Admonition" that To diagram the tongue You'll cut the chord Articulating song. (1-4) she was addressing the inadvertent violence attached to the act of searching for the truth. Insightful answers may become evident but the concomitant penalty is the inability to render them coherently. When the bird-body in the poem cited above is cut apart, its utterance ceases. The opposite is also true though: when the body is healthy, the song ensues. For Sylvia Plath, writing the disabled body in The Bell Jar engenders a series of intimate encounters with the ineffectuality of language. The mind/body connection, or, more pointedly, its dis-connection, is explored in this article by utilizing a combination of feminist and disability studies, highlighted by the theoretical concepts of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the nature of disability encompasses a wide category including nuances ranging from congenital and acquired physical differences, mental illness and retardation, chronic and acute illnesses, fatal and progressive diseases, temporary and permanent injuries, and a wide range of bodily characteristics considered disfiguring, such as scars, birthmarks, unusual proportions, or obesity. (13)
Crossing the Borderline (Personality): Madness Interrogated in Girl, Interrupted
This is a talk (unrevised) that I gave at a American Literature Association conference in Mexico in 1999. For obvious reasons, it is a companion piece to my talk "Grif, Interrupted," which it spawned many years later. I locate Kaysen's memoir in the context of contemporary disability memoir and discuss how she avoids certain pitfalls in the conventional genres and discourses used to narrate disability, mental illness in particular.
ASBİDER, 2021
This article examines Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar within the context of the 1950s’ America and the ways the novel criticizes the workings of medicine in perpetuating the gender roles of the time together with Rebecca Myers-Spiers’s personal account entitled “The Bell Jar Revisited: Putting Young Girls Under the Lenses of Patriarchy” that was published in 1999 and aims at showing that there has not been much progression in psychiatry in terms of focusing on the female problem. The Bell Jar chronicles the life of Esther, an independent young woman, and her journey of self-realization and psychological crisis during the 1950s which was a decade of conformism and traditionalism that encouraged the traditional gender roles. On the way to her crisis and final recovery, Esther interacts with different doctors through which Plath criticizes how modern medicine is treating women in general. As exemplified by the characters Buddy Willard and Doctor Gordon, doctors of the time use their scientific knowledge and medical profession as ways to manipulate and dominate women. In this respect, they act as the proxies of the patriarchal discourse and oppress Esther which worsens her condition. On the other hand, Esther’s relationship with a female psychiatrist Doctor Nolan highly contrasts her previous experiences with medicine. Doctor Nolan’s treatment methods are gynocentric. Thanks to this feminist approach and the female solidarity she builds with Esther, Esther is able to overcome her psychological crisis. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath recognizes feminism and a gynocentric approach in medicine as a cure for the problems of women in the 1950s. Similarly, Rebecca Myers-Spiers’s account shows that there has not been much change in terms of the treatment of women in psychiatric clinics since the 1950s. Patriarchal ideology still oppresses women by using and manipulating the scientific discourse.
Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.
Female Mental Illness, Monstrosity, and Male Medical Discourses
Anglistik, 2019
Beginning with Romanticism's interest in the 'grotesque,' the 19 th century saw a "cultural revaluation of monstrosity in all its forms" (Gill 2009, 211). One of these forms is the fascination with the mad woman. While Romantic poetry uses the mad woman first and foremost as a referent of the mysterious and the sublime (compare e.g. Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" (1800) and Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (1819)), the 19 th-century novel connects the theme of female madness with threatening monstrosity. A striking example is Lucy Ashton, the heroine of Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), who, after being forced into an unwanted marriage, stabs her husband on their wedding night. When she is discovered, she huddles in a corner, "her eyes glazed, and her features convulsed into a wild paroxysm of insanity" (Scott 1964, 323). Violent female madness becomes an act of female rebellion and empowerment in the face of male oppression. However, "even the murderous madwomen do not escape male domination" (Showalter 1986, 17). On the one hand, madness is a rather desperate form of rebellion. Shoshana Felman characterizes it as "the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest and self-affirmation" (1975, 2). On the other hand, madness is eventually just another "poetic form of pure femininity as the male culture had constructed it" (Showalter 1986, 17). With this argument the feminist scholar refers back to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who suggested in their influential monograph The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that Victorian women were "fated to inhabit male-defined masks" (2000, 19), of which the most prominent are the images of the 'angel' and 'monster.' According to Gilbert and Gubar, the main challenge of the woman writer is to "examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of 'angel' and 'monster' which male authors have generated for her" (2000, 17). They argue that the monster is the "necessary opposite and double" (2000, 17) of the angel. This thesis draws our attention to the prominence of literary doubles in 19 th-century literature. Connected to the fact that Victorian society was characterized by high moral standards, the literary motif of doubles and Doppelgängers can be regarded as a fictive attempt to outsource the monstrous from the supposedly clean and sound ideal Victorian citizen. The monstrous was outsourced in many different ways: In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), the invisible inner moral monstrosity of Frankenstein becomes visible in the physical outer monstrosity of his creature. A different relationship of visible and invisible monstrosity can be observed in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886): the well-respected gentleman Dr. Jekyll is one and the same person as his ugly, satanic, and deformed alter ego Mr. Hyde. Jekyll can stay respectable by experimentally separating his dark other from his well-respected self. In contrast to the pair 'Monster and Frankenstein' that negotiated the relationship between visible and invisible monstrosity, the pair
Mental Illness and Women in Cinema: “Beautiful and Troubled Women”
International Perspectives on Feminism and Sexism in the Film Industry, 2019
The representation of mental illness and individuals suffering from a specific mental illness in films is a phenomenon encountered since the first years of cinema. Mental diseases in many film genres such as horror, science fiction, comedy, and crime are used as scary, laughing, or drama elements. The representations of various psychopathologies in the films give an idea about these disorders to the ordinary viewer. However, these representations can accurately describe the reality and also have the risk of being defective and incomplete. It is seen that people who have mental disorders in cinema are generally presented in the way that 'dangerous, violent, unpredictable characters' within the frame of limited and distorted patterns. It is possible to say that these cliché representations differ according to gender. Female characters with mental disorders are described as 'beautiful and troubled women' in cinema. Related films were taken as an example in this study and it is aimed examine the representation of female characters with mental disorders in these films.
2024
There are several academic works focusing on mental illnesses and the struggles of the female political body. Women’s writing and theory become a central issue for feminist theorists such as Betty Friedan, Elaine Showalter, Simone de Beauvoir or Hélène Cixous. These theorists denounce the detrimental consequences of a patriarchal reality on the mental health of women. These two issues have often been intrinsically connected to one another. This essay attempts to explain the mental issues that women have struggled with due to female oppression and discrimination. In this essay, the analysis of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar will provide an insight of the female experience based on the protagonists’ personal pursuit of happiness and well-being as well as the analysis of their gender oppression. I illustrate the connection between the role of two ambitious young women and mental illness. Both novels will, thus, be examined through a comparative and critical analysis to understand the evolution of the female roles in society over the years as well as the question of happiness. Thus, the contextualization of these novels will foremost expose the impact of female reconciliation with the question of happiness.