Women and madness in SF

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Madness, Gendered

How much is madness a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions? e.g., Yellow Wallpaper; Friedan / Feminine Mystique. Patriarchy as literally maddening. Madness as depression; social conditions of women as more likely to suffer severe depression & attempt suicide; social outlets for men to channel emotions into rage (and social outlets for them to express rage; e.g., military; sports)

Rebecca West, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, defined different types of madness by gender:

"Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."

Narrative Uses of Madness

The gendering of madness in fiction need not echo the gendering of madness in real life, but may serve a narrative purpose, or espouse a narrative tradition based on sexist ideology without questioning the basis of that ideology. It may be necessary to portray women as inherently diminished, to find psychological causes for women's social status, in order to avoid examining social factors as the cause of women's psychology, which would then suggest upsetting society as a means of curing the madness it can cause. Reactionary defenses against revolutionary avenues of thought: another way of blaming the victim for her condition.

early notes & thoughts:

• It is more likely that a writer will chose women characters to be "mad"? Use of madness to punish female social/sexual transgression?

• Feminine madness versus masculine madness: obsession (e.g., Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein; see mad scientist) treated almost as not madness at all, but a drive; murderous rage similarly treated as temporary, not a mental illness. The nervous maladies of women; hysteria; numerous representations of women recovering, always on the verge of slipping back into madness. Men's madness is strengthening; women's madness weakens them, languishing (relationship to multiple representations of women dying of tuberculosis, a disease which in literature shows a strange affinity for young attractive female characters).

Examples:

• Niki Sanders (Heroes (TV series)): Is madness for Niki weakness? Social punishment for an out-of-control / strong female character? Or, not intended as punishment, but a prerequisite for a female character's superhuman abilities that she find them out of her control? Can she integrate? Is Jessica actually another character, rather than a form of mental illness? (SF's ability to make metaphors or psychic phenomena actual, literal phenomena within the story.)

• Firefly (TV series)/Serenity (film): River's madness vs. her particular abilities.

• Drusilla, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (TV series): an insane, prophetic female vampire.

• Millennium (TV series): Frank Black & Lara Means, their parallel journeys into the darkness of the human mind and pre-millennial apocalyptic lore.

• The X-Files: Mulder's obsessions & frequent suggestions that he's losing it (general obsession & commentary; Anasazi - drugged; Demons - mysterious neural events; Unusual Suspects - drugged & raving; Folie a Deux - hospitalized; Biogenesis, Sixth Extinction, Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati - driven mad by visions;
• "The X-Files": various instances of madness & psychiatric hospitals; esp b/c confusion b/w people mad or not mad: Pilot (M&F characters w/ mental/brain trauma), Deep Throat (men returned home OCD, not normal), Eve, Duane Barry (man starts in hospital), Aubrey (woman ends up in hospital); Grotesque (cop driven into insanity; final scene in psych hosp); Patient X etc (Cassandra Spender in & out of mental hospitals); "Hungry" (male monster seeking therapy); "Millennium" (Frank Black in psych hospital;
• "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" - s6 ep "Normal Again" when buffy may be in mental hospital ... S3 "Earshot" when Buffy being driven mind by ability to read thoughts ... s5 "Listening to Fear" psych hospital, and Joyce is incapacitated / temporarily insane (Alzheimer's like) because of treatments for cancer;
• "Heroes (TV series)" - character incapacitated by early ability to read thoughts
• "Angel (TV series) -s5 episode with an insane Slayer
• telepathy as incapacitating or driving people crazy - a staple. X-Men (did Professor X ever have this problem? Jean and others did), X-Files (Mulder), Heroes, Buffy in the episode "Earshot" ...

SF and other art forms

early notes & thoughts:

• SF as always offers opportunities to explore different forms of madness and different social treatments for madness. (See Piercy/WOTEOT.)

• Madness long history in non-SF and para-SF genres; see, e.g., Lucia di Lammermoor (opera); Brontë's Jane Eyre (early gothic / romance) and feminist re-take on madness told from Rochester's wife's perspective (Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea). Madness haunts gothic literature from Jane Eyre onward; Yellow Wallpaper in partial response to that.

• Madness or the possibility of madness is also a common gambit in SF: Characters confronted by the fantastic or the alien wonder whether what they are experiencing is real, or whether they are mad. Sometimes the audience wonders also, creating a number of works which may, or may not, have fantastic elements.

List of works

• Lois McMaster Bujold - The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman - "The Yellow Wallpaper"
• Gwyneth Jones - Life - A major character has a mental / nervous breakdown for some weeks.
• Justine Larbalestier - "Magic or Madness Trilogy" - A major character has a mental breakdown; madness hangs over many characters.
• Norma Marden - An Eye for Dark Places (1993)
• Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time (in "utopian" future society it is discussed that one character had a breakdown; mental breakdowns are not treated negatively. This is in contrast with treatment of protagonist in modern-day US society, where diagnosis is affected by racism and sexism, and treatment is inhumane and stigmatizing.)
• Raccoona Sheldon - "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!"
• Sarah Waters - Affinity (Are there psychics or is she mad?)
• Ophelia / Shakespeare
• "Millennium (TV series)" episode; see Lara Means; see also Frank Black as comparatively rare example of male protagonist experiencing madness or insanity
• Heroes (TV series) - character Niki Sanders in season 1
• Jean Grey in X-Men 3 movie
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Point Pleasant - Meg Boyd, Judy's mother, is receiving psychic visions and is therefore insane, or thinks she is insane, or is thought to be insane, or all of the above. Jesse's mother Sarah is semi-insane: obsessively Christian.

• Georgia Wood Pangborn -- Jessica Amanda Salmonson lists several titles by Pangborn and notes that "[w]omen & madness is also a recurrent theme in Mrs. Pangborn's fiction, as is suicide."
  • "The Fourth Watch" (Bookman November 1905)
  • "The Intruder" (Harper's June 1907)
  • "The Ghost Flower" (Bookman November 1908)
  • "Andy MacPherson's House" (Romance March 1920)
  • "The Boulder" (Holland's Magazine December 1925) (nonsupernatural, romance)

suggestions & possibilities

• "A Very Little Madness Goes a Long Way" by M. Rickert

See also

• Feminist rage
• Psychological ghost story
• Women crazed by power
• Jean Grey, meet Jane Eyre (therem 2/21 feminist sf blog)