The voices, the voices worm through: Sick Sick Sick.
My female writer friends battle with these codes of identity — we often write on our blogs about our personal psychiatric histories, or worry over whether we’re being pathological, whether we should reveal our personal psychiatric histories or struggles with mental health. We are messy, intense, stressed, difficult, anxious, depressed. We are toxic, fucked up. (Yet whose language do we use? Is it our own? Or theirs?)
How does this infect us when we take up the pen, our identities married to a diagnosis? Our anxieties?
In modernism the madman is romanticized, glorified, yet still legitimized as an author, even once he is put away. Artaud, Nietzsche, Gérard de Nerval. Foucault writes of Artaud in his work on madness: “Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness.” I’m thinking too about Sylvère Lotringer’s interview with one of Artaud’s doctors at Rodez, the doctor who dimisses Artaud as mentally ill, his writing as the rantings of a madman. Lotringer fighting for the value of Artaud’s texts in the world.
Herr Doktor: I consider his written work as a kind of scream, a scream of horror from a man who had no sense. And Lotringer says: When a mad person writes and that writing is read, it becomes literature.
Yet who decides what counts as an oeuvre? As Foucault has asked, “If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a ‘work’”? Zelda is often classified as a “minor” writer because of her output — but she obviously wrote much that was destroyed, by others and herself. Yet what about Kafka’s output, unfinished and fragmented?
It all comes down to who gets to name, including the Professor X’s listing off Great American Writers on their fingers. The madwomen of modernism have been named — diagnosed — and this diagnosis, this demonology has been endlessly repeated through how they have been documented, written about, and read. The codes of identity in psychiatry have molded their identity in literature, as characters and authors, and this extends also to how we read women in general, and to how women read and write themselves.
And we forgive our so-called geniuses so much, we allow them to be difficult, but are quick to make paper tigers and medusas out of the women. I’m thinking of that horrible hatchet job of Djuna Barnes, by her former assistant, about her last years, when she was an elderly woman, in her Trappist period at Patchin Place, almost blind and in terrible daily pain, guarding over her scraps of paper, many of which were going to the archives at the University of Maryland (which he is ostensibly helping her to prepare). She is writing her poetry collection which she types up on grocery lists. He depicts her as obsessive, pathological, like she’s on an episode of Hoarders. Or like a modernist Grey Gardens, living in the weeds and detritus of the past. Her sin appears to be being a difficult woman.
The photos of the older Djuna by Berenice Abbott, mirroring the ones she took when Djuna was young and lovely and the height of fashion in Paris, the same aristocratic profile and ruffled shirts.
The Book of Repulsive Women—the name of one of Djuna’s earliest chapbooks.
It was the stroke at 40 that turned Jane into a hag. She began to be seen around the Morocco grain stalls as a sort of bag lady, wringing her hands, giving her money away. Unable to write again, to speak clearly. Institutionalized in London because of extreme anxiety and depression. In and out of psychiatric treatment: in London, in upstate New York, later in Málaga, Spain. Shock therapy heavily encouraged by her husband and doctors. The doctors who “found her seedy-looking and bizarre. They thought her relationship to her husband bizarre, her sex life bizarre, even her published writing bizarre.” They diagnosed her as manic-depressive, then schizophrenic.
I am reading Jane’s last year. I am mourning my poor Jane, my poor shadowed Jane. I feel so viscerally for these women when I read their biographies. All these women and their abject ends. Demonized as angry old women or insane. We forgive the eccentrities of young girls (sometimes), but almost never those of older difficult women.
“Oh, I’ve heard of her,” one of my students says in my Women and Literature class, years ago. We are reading Jane Bowles’ story “Camp Cataract.” “We read about her in my Abnormal Psychology class.”
The female author is reduced to a diagnostic category, which imprisons her, reduces her subjectivity.
The Baroness’ biographer diagnoses her as schizophrenic.
Deirdre Bair’s pathologizing biography about Anaïs Nin, which won the National Book Award. The biographer seems to really detest (and judge) her subject, and find her basically narcissistic and disgusting. I read an interview on Salon.com where she talked about handing over the journals to some distinguished panel of female psychoanalysts. They decide unanimously the writings are a classic case of adult-onset incest (the woman is a case). In the biography, she further pathologizes Nin for her glittery, associative, bodily, destructive stillbirth scene in her journal. “The account of the birth in the diary almost defies interpretation. It is a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness, horrifying in its callous indifference.” (How often do biographies of Henry Miller put him on trial for his humanity or morality, or dismiss Fitzgerald or Hemingway for being alcoholics?)
Everything read through his genius, through her illness. The Great Men seldom diagnosed with mental illness, it undercuts the canonization.
At the conclusion of a largely sympathetic almost 700-page biography on Jean Rhys, Carole Angier retreats to diagnostic language and the authority of psychiatry, presenting Rhys’ life story on a platter to doctors who decide she had borderline personality disorder. (Why do these biographers have this habit of handing over the writings/materials to teams of doctors, and concluding with this diagnosis?) This is on the last two fucking pages. A tidy explanation. Some neat little bow.
Rhys’s obsession with make-up seen as a sign. Her vanity. Just like Anaïs Nin. That gorgeous picture of Jean Rhys as an old woman, her white feathery hair still waved, face made up, still arranged in an elegant expression. One arm lifted to grasp the top of the chair.
Once they are diagnosed, every aspect of their biography is read and interpreted according to the disease. Their identities are married to the diagnosis.
As I write this, on Wikipedia Virginia Woolf is tagged as “People with bipolar disorder.”
Actually, it seems so many of the biographies of these literary women that I have read retroactively diagnose their subjects with bipolar disorder (they don’t specify which diagnosis on the current “spectrum”), and theorize that medications (usually outdated in the older biographies, or weakly corraled as “lithium”) would have been a balm for these women, mirroring the overdiagnosis of the disorder in contemporary practice, as well as twinning the way “bipolar” has seemingly become the new female malady du jour for the self-destructive or fucked-up girl/woman.
My students who reduce the characters in literature to symptoms. They can be solved, be fixed. They learn to be diagnosticians from TV, from people who armchair-diagnose celebrities. We diagnose female characters more than male characters. We psychologize them, pathologize them. Male characters have the convenient model of the anti-hero — do we ever talk of anti-heroines when we speak of literature? Is she, like, bipolar or something? My students ask of Edna Pontellier, of the character in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” of Esther Greenwood, of Jean Rhys’s Sasha Jensen. Someone I once met told me that in graduate school she went through The Awakening and highlighted every instance of what she saw as clinical depression. Then wrote an essay on it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman struggled with depression so the story must be her diary. When you reduce an author or character’s torment to a diagnostic category you are not allowing her the existential alienation of a novelist-hero, but the narcissism of a heroine.