Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In 1998, Shulamith Firestone published Airless Spaces, a slender collection of vignettes about her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The book begins with a nightmare: “I dreamed I was on a sinking ship” (5). Firestone’s narrator flees from a manic, drunken party on an upper deck and seeks shelter deep in the watery bowels of the ocean liner. Searching for a protected air pocket, she stows away in a refrigerator, “hoping to live on even after the boat was fully submerged until it should be found” (5). Unfortunately, the ship sinks in the Bermuda Triangle, where no one is willing to search. Unlike the buoyant, repurposed coffin that saves Ishmael in Moby Dick, Firestone’s basement refrigerator sinks like a rock, lost to obscurity in the Bermuda Triangle of mental illness. These are “deadpan, deadend stories,” the back cover warns.

Airless Spaces, with its psych ward sketches and tales of “losers” and suicides, nevertheless contains and beautifully preserves these last gasps of breath. These are tales that are devastating in their brevity, for the monumentally small acts of courage and resistance and for the neglected moments of grief and loss that they encapsulate and record. The fact that the book even exists is itself an unlikely wonder. Beginning her activist work in the late 1960s, Shulamith Firestone was a force to be reckoned with. A radical feminist leader and organizer, Firestone published a groundbreaking manifesto of second wave feminism, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, in 1970 when she was only 25. But as Susan Faludi describes in her memorial essay, “Death of a Revolutionary,” bitter divisions in the feminist movement led Firestone to “self-exile” (58). And Firestone’s emerging, concurrent mental health problems made her almost disappear. Diagnosed with paranoidschizophrenia, she spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals on involuntary committals (Faludi 60). But in the early 1990s, a makeshift support system of women organically emerged to help Firestone survive, meeting with her weekly to “help her with practical needs, from taking her anti-psychotic medications to buying groceries” (Faludi 61). Lourdes Cintron was at the core of this support group, which included friends who admired Firestone’s work and friends who were healthcare professionals. As a caseworker for The Visiting Nurse Services of New York, and an ardent admirer of The Dialectic of Sex, Cintron successfully advocated for Firestone to receive nursing support services, even though she had no insurance (Faludi 61). Bolstered by the care of this community of women, Firestone’s health and standard of living improved, and her hospital stays were less frequent. Airless Spaces, which is dedicated to Cintron, is a product of this special period in Firestone’s life. Yet in the late 1990s her support group began to fall apart just as organically as it had formed: Cintron became ill, and other women, including Firestone’s psychiatrist, moved away. Firestone relapsed more often, spent more time in hospital, and increasingly withdrew from family and friends. She died in August 2012: her body was discovered in her apartment, only after her landlord noticed that her rent bill sat untouched on her doorstep for several days (Faludi 61).

Airless Spaces exists because a feminist community of carers worked both within and beyond the traditional mental health care system to support Firestone when she wanted and needed it. The book is a product of feminist ethics of care in action, of a web-like interdependency among women. But its origin story is secondary to the remarkable content of the book. Airless Spaces is the muckraking, realist, disability studies antidote to the misogynist fantasy psych world of Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. Firestone’s work is sparse and direct, mired in the mundane details of case workers and day programs, involuntary commitments and missed rent payments, homelessness, taking meds, not taking meds, and the hard and rarely glamorous work of surviving with a chronic psychiatric disability. Airless Spaces should be a classic in a canon of literature about mental illness; it should be a text that disability scholars routinely turn to when they discuss disability and mental illness. But chances are you haven’t read it. Yet.

Literatures ofMadness is an initial step in creating a tradition of literary disability studies of mental illness, mental disability, madness. The collection itself embodies a search for primary texts like Firestone’s and a search for the language and methodologies of analyzing these texts within a disability studies framework. The collection is meant to function as a provisional hub or way station: a point at which to meet together collectively, to commune, build on synergies, and honor differences, before continuing on the longer journeys forward.

The book is organized into three sections: Mad Community, Mad History, and Mad Survival. These themes directly correspond to aspects of Firestone’s life and work. The Mad Community section is about the importance of connection among people with disabilities, and the often invisible networks that link them together, which is reflected in both the content of Firestone’s vignettes and the creation of Airless Spaces. This section begins with Elizabeth Brewer’s “Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled.” Brewer examines the historically uneasy fit between mad studies and disability studies and explains some of the fundamental ideological differences between the two. Brewer notes, for example, that many psychiatric survivors do not identify as being disabled, and likewise many disabled people do not identify as psychiatric survivors. In an effort to bridge the divide between mad studies and disability studies, Brewer analyzes scholarship by three authors who strategically come out as both disabled and mad: Margaret Price, Katie Aubrecht, and A.J. Withers. The form of Brewer’s chapter also reflects and reinforces her larger argument about coming out and coalition building: she weaves her critical readings together with her own personal stories to reveal her positionality, perspectives, and motivations for analyzing the tricky contacts between madness and disability.

In a similar vein, PhebeAnn Wolframe’s “Going Barefoot: Mad Affiliation, Identity Politics, and Eros” bridges mad and queer communities. Wolframe examines the ways in which consumer, survivor, ex-patient, and mad (c/s/x/m) communities, like LGBTQIA communities, are bound together across messy identity categories and shared experiences of otherness. Beginning with a reading of Persimmon Blackbridge’s novel Prozac Highway (2000), Wolframe explores how c/s/x/m people forge a sense of kinship through online listservs. Wolframe further theorizes mad reading practices as a form of community building by analyzing excerpts from MadArtReview, a private blog she created. Reading MadArtReview alongside Prozac Highway, Wolframe considers the way mad people undermine the fixing of madness as identity, instead carefully negotiating their identifications and affiliations, and consciously blurring boundaries. This blurring, Wolframe argues, offers the possibility of messy affiliations across difference, and the re-emergence of a kinship between queerness and madness.

The next two essays in the Mad Communities section examine different types of structural, institutional barriers that complicate the creation of mad communities. In her essay, “‘Hundreds of People Like Me’: A Search for a Mad Community in The Bell Jar,” Rose Miyatsu provides a new, alternate reading of madness in Sylvia Plath’s canonical asylum novel. As Miyatsu points out, previous readings ignore the fact that while Esther is searching for and rejecting female role models, she is also searching for identity and community as a person with an enduring mental illness. It is rare, Miyatsu argues, for any critic to even mention characters like Valarie, the lobotomized patient Esther meets, or Miss Norris, her mute neighbor in the asylum. When critics dismiss these friendships as symptoms of illness rather than a legitimate attempt at community building, they deny the personhood of those who cannot “recover,” people who end up getting left behind as Esther moves toward normalization. Although the hierarchical structure of the asylum, an institution based on progress and “cure,” ultimately dampens Esther’s attempts at forming bonds, her experiences there encourage her to imagine what a community that can incorporate pain might look like, even if it is currently unrealizable.

Erin Soros explores very different types of institutionalized barriers to mad community building in her chapter “Writing Madness in Indigenous Literature: A Hesitation.” Soros grapples with how her embeddedness in a history of colonial violence against Indigenous communities in Canada troubles her desire to write, as a non-Indigenous, mad-identified scholar, about madness in Indigenous texts. Soros attempts to reconcile or balance her wish to share with a general audience her deep appreciation for the insights into madness that she has gained from texts like Alicia Elliott’s “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” and Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song with her gut feeling that her “act of literary witnessing…can only quite helplessly fail.” Out of this project, Soros envisions creating a collaborative hypertext designed to further develop the historical and cultural context of the Indigenous texts she describes here, with the hope that it will lead “to a potentially unending series of conversations.” And so her essay will ultimately extend beyond the page—creating a new mad community online to bear witness, however conflicted and complicated that act may be, to madness in Indigenous literature.

The essays in the Mad History section recover women writers and texts—like Firestone and Airless Spaces—that are part of an often unacknowledged or hidden mad legacy. In “‘Is the young lady mad?’: Psychiatric Disability in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction,” Karyn Valerius offers a fresh reading of the author most popular for her nineteenth-century Little Women novel series. As a careful reading of Alcott’s journals and letters reveal, Alcott herself was “moody” and experienced periods of depression, which included a disturbing suicidal episode. In this chapter, Valerius examines how madness and mental maladies inform three of Alcott’s lesser well-known texts: the sensationalist short story, “A Whisper in the Dark”; her first novel, Moods; and the autobiographical fiction Work. “Whisper in the Dark,” Valerius argues, reconfigures Gothic tropes in order to illustrate the gendered double bind of madness; in Moods, Alcott’s tragic, manic-depressive heroine destabilizes a conventional marriage plot; and Valerius reads Work, certainly the most optimistic of the three, as a feminist narrative of depression and recovery.

Elizabeth J. Donaldson’s chapter “The Snake Pit: Mary Jane Ward’s Asylum Fiction and Mental Health Advocacy” reconstructs the publication and reception of Mary Jane Ward’s autobiographically-based novel about her experiences as a psychiatric patient in a state mental hospital. This book and the successful feature film that followed helped to garner public support for reforms in psychiatric institutions and made Ward famous. This chapter examines the close and productive relationship between Ward’s fiction writing and her later work as a mental health advocate in the 1950s. While Ward’s The Snake Pit had great success in its day, its popularity has not been lasting. And Ward’s later novels have been ignored by critics. Using archival evidence from Ward’s papers, Donaldson argues that Ward’s life and her books are an untapped, important resource for disability scholars of mental health.

Similarly, Tatiana Prorokova claims the work of Ann Bannon in the “Golden Age” of lesbian pulp fiction as territory ripe for literary disability studies of mental illness. In her chapter “Alcoholic, Mad, Disabled: Constructing Lesbian Identity in Ann Bannon’s ‘Beebo Brinker Chronicles,” Prorokova argues that Bannon’s novels reveal the connection between lesbianism and madness in ways that both resist and complicate medical models of homosexuality as pathology. For Bannon’s characters, madness is engendered in part by the patriarchal, heterosexual norms of 1950s–1960s America. Beebo Brinker’s alcohol-fueled jealousy transforms her into a madwoman and almost ruins the life of her partner. Another mad heroine, Vega, is obsessed, suicidal, and disfigured from surgeries related to her tuberculosis. Bannon’s portrayals of lesbians as addicted, alcoholic, physically and psychologically mutilated women are historical reflections of a culture that uses the power of psychiatric diagnosis to pathologize lesbians, yet they are also pioneering characters in the history of lesbian literature.

Andrew McEwan closes the Mad History section with his analysis of a unique lineage of mad poetry in “Seeing Words, Hearing Voices: Hannah Weiner, Dora García, and the Poetic Performance of Radical Dis/Humanism.” McEwan begins with Hannah Weiner’s 1977 televised reading of her Clairvoyant Journal poems. Weiner saw words, and she incorporated these linguistic visions—big words that sent commands and also little words that criticized—into her autobiographical poetry. Thirty-seven years after Hannah Weiner’s performance, the Spanish artist Dora García staged a similar recorded reading of Clairvoyant Journal as part of her Mad Marginal project. García’s project moves Weiner’s poetics into an interconnected linguistic investigation of radical marginality and antipsychiatric movements, and further blurs distinctions between literature, experience, and performance. McEwan places these performances in conversation with critical disability studies critiques of subjectivity and with emergent posthumanisms. This mad history of seeing words and hearing voices prompts McEwan to forge a new theoretical space, a non-binary radical dis/humanism, that demands a redefinition of relations from a mentally disabled, outsider, and avant-garde perspective.

The final section, Mad Survival, is about strategies of resistance and resiliency, searching for and finding that pocket of air on a sinking ship where you can still manage to breath, at least for a while (Firestone 5). An empathic relationship between doctor and patient, one that acknowledges mutual dependence and vulnerability, can provide that method of survival, as Gail Berkeley Sherman explains in her chapter “‘My Difference Is Not My [Mental] Sickness’: Ethnicity and Erasure in Joanne Greenberg’s Jewish American Life Writing.” Sherman analyzes Greenberg’s autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas and post-Holocaust Jewish ethics. Rose Garden, Sherman argues, challenges stereotypes of psychiatric disability and purposefully works to undermine the hierarchical binary of sane/insane and even doctor/patient. Although the 1977 movie version of Rose Garden erases all discursive performance of Jewishness, the original 1964 novel explicitly counters the historical anti-Semitic association of Jews and mental illness. As Sherman’s fine-tuned close reading reveals, the respectful therapeutic conversations in the novel demonstrate Greenberg’s moral insistence that all human beings are both dependent on, and obligated to, the varied others whom we encounter through speech.

Srikanth Mallavarapu’s chapter, “Resistance, Suffering, and Psychiatric Disability in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom and Amandeep Sandhu’s Sepia Leaves,” shares a similar faith in the possibility of human connection and survival in response to chronic mental illness. Using Arthur Kleinman’s model of resistance and suffering in the context of the lived, embodied experiences of patients, families, and caregivers, Mallavarapu analyzes two recently published Indian novels that deal with schizophrenia. Em and The Big Hoom highlights the social and intersubjective experiences of illness and suffering, which include not just the patient but also the extended network of family and caregivers. And in Sepia Leaves, the young narrator tries to simultaneously make sense of a dysfunctional family and a dysfunctional nation. Together Em and the Big Hoom and Sepia Leaves offer a nuanced representation of disability and mental illness in India, as well as the struggle to construct meaning out of these experiences for individual families.

The final essays in this section map out Mad Survival on two very different conceptual landscapes, which are both marked by trauma. Drew Holladay’s chapter, “Mental Disability and Social Value in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng,” explores the value of difference in postcolonial culture. Cliff’s 1984 novel Abeng, Holladay argues, creates spaces for individuals that colonial culture would otherwise reject as mad, unintelligent, bizarre, or inefficient. Abeng critiques the deleterious effects of disability in Jamaican society while also recognizing and valuing people with mental disabilities. Holladay examines four central characters in Abeng who have a mental disability and bear its stigma—but whose circumstances and relationships lead to varied personal consequences. Cliff’s portrayal of these disabled characters reveals a new picture of difference and créolité in Caribbean literature. Abeng shows us that mental disability, and disability more generally, should be recognized as an essential part of the global project of social justice.

Holladay’s comprehensive and global perspective is a productive juxtaposition to Jessica Gross’s focus on an inner landscape. In “It Doesn’t Add Up: Mental Illness in Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother,Come Home,” disability studies meets comics studies and graphic medicine. Gross offers a detailed reading of trauma in Mother, Come Home, a graphic narrative of a child’s experience with his father’s depression and suicide, which he witnesses after encouraging his father to abscond from a psychiatric hospital. In the comic, the father floats through what Gross describes as a “traumascape”—a bizarre, surrealistic illustration of how the world seems to the survivor of trauma. Graphic novels and comics, Gross argues, are important modes of communicating trauma: they can present experiences of disability in images when words fail. This is especially important when dealing with mental illnesses, which have symptoms that may be impossible to express in words and are also often not visible to others. Mother,Come Home’s visual format powerfully and insightfully represents the dissociation and embodiment of trauma and depression, making these experiences legible in new ways.

We hope that Literatures ofMadness makes literary disability studies of mental health legible in new ways for our readers. And for Shulamith Firestone, who survived as best as she could for as long as she could in airless spaces, and for others like her, we hope this work finds them and gives them new space and more breath.