Madness &; Women:Part 2

Madness and Women : Part Two

Psychiatric Modernism : Women in the Drawing Room

This essay will cover an era that marks a departure from the Victorian
one, where the Asylum played an important role in the containment of
women's minds. Although the institution was still around and growing in
numbers a shift of psychiatry was taking place which had a lot to do
with women's place in history and politics. The late nineteenth and
early twentieth century are its times of focus, as the fin de siecle
was an important time for activity in both cultural and political
movements. Like movements in literary history it is difficult to
comment on beginnings and endings, the period however is marked by
clearly major events; the development of what was termed the Darwinian
science, the birth of psychoanalysis and the event of the Great War. I
have referred to this era symbolically as a time when the woman enters
the "drawing room" of the mind compared to that previously of the
madwoman confined to the attic. By this I mean that moral and mental
management was becoming more domestic.

What marks the transition of this phase according to Showalter is the
advent of what is described as Psychiatric Darwinism. This transition
from the old institution of the asylums psychiatry, marking the early
Victorian era is described in her chapter 'On the Borderland'

This "Borderland" is described as many things including the transitory
space between the drawing room in a country house and the oppressive
Asylum's confined spaces. There are many cases reported of the mistaken
identity of asylums and also wrongful confinement in them. That
literature at the time was written about the mistaken identity of these
confined spaces indicates their effect on the mind at the time. This
not only blurs the boundaries between institution helping to fragment
their hold on the mind but also sets up confusion in the treatment of
psychiatric problems in terms of application.

Showalter gives examples in this chapter of the borderland cases in
psychiatric history and questions the worth and purpose of the Asylum
as healthy institution. Reformed outlooks were then being considered by
many sections of the medical and asylum profession.. A scientific
approach was taken by the Darwinians including Henry Maudsley who would
testify to causality in defining the mind's diseases and disturbances.
They defined this causality to suggest the mind's problems related to
aspects of a person's background and breeding, stretching this to
include even belief and behaviours. Their approach attempted to extend
moral management beyond the Asylum walls into the drawing rooms of
society itself, in order it seems to exercise a wider appeal.

This borderland in the psychiatric change of management, was a
signifier of a new terminology that could be applied to defining the
conditions of mental problems differently.

This new defining approach was intended to cast the net wider into
society, in attempt to contain or at least proscribe on those "many
people who, without being insane, exhibit peculiarities of thought,
feeling and character which render them like ordinary beings." "The
borderland was a perilous no-man's land"

It is also a powerful metaphor that aids in representation of other
marginal groups. The fragmentation of definitions and as a result the
societal groups they define enabled a shift of emphasis in political
and gender boundaries. The term conjures with ambiguity in terms of
identity that deals a developmental ascendancy from the world of
sensations, passions ,and emotions that build on reason to create a
well-fashioned will. Politically this could be taken as a shifting of
focus towards those elements in Society i.e. New Women and decadent men
including homosexuals that threatened the mental stability of the
establishment, that of the so-called Darwinian defence of "fittest"
members of society. And it was for the survival of the fittest that the
project of Darwinism theory was intended. Acceptable behaviour in the
family, in sexual conduct and in professional life appeared to be its
aims and influences.

The woman's professional position was particular singled out for
attention in this project in that their advancement was considered,
under Darwinism as a form of deviancy. We have moved out of the Asylum
into the consulting room with Maudsley's approaches, and his attitude
was more aggressively masculine, favouring the rational above the
emotional .

"He set the model for the "nerve specialists" of the age who would
preside over the "kingdom of disease", inhabited by middle-class women,
who refused to adjust to the inevitable conditions of their lies, and
whose rebellion against their sex roles led to a unprecedented wave of
nervous disorders".

The New Woman's ambition was linked by the Darwinians to these growing
nervous conditions such as anorexia nervosa, hysteria and neurasthenia
that marked the Fin de siecle which can also be read as another
defining "borderland" characteristic. It was the Darwinian scientific
influence that these masculine psychiatrists were under, suggesting
that man had become superior to woman in courage, energy, intellect and
inventive genius, and that they would more likely excel in art, science
and philosophy.

Therefore what they saw as "proper" feminine behaviour was policed or
encouraged by these masculine nerve specialists, moral police who acted
as a check to middle class women who wished to enter the male dominated
professions, and to alter the restricting condition of their lives.
This new form of control can be viewed as a defensive tactic on the
part of the male psychiatric profession to check the rising tide of
women's professional ambitions. Their insistence on the differences
between the sexes being not only physical but mental, suggested that
women by their very "nature" were meant to compliment rather than equal
man, setting her apart for merely the role of motherhood, which was
seen to compliment her "nature". A defiance of this nature would
according to the Darwinians result in obvious mental breakdown.

The battle of the feminists and New Women would rage in the decades
from 1870 to World War I. Both the words feminism and homosexuality
were brought into use in this period together with the terminology of
New Women and "odd women". All serving to redefine the aesthetics as
well as the politics of gender or more historically femininity and
masculinity.

The Fin de siecle which can also be read as another defining
"borderland" characteristic was the scene for much change in the
notions of the masculine and feminine. Where in a new sexual anarchy we
see the presented of men becoming women and women becoming men both in
life and literature. It was the time of the dandy and the lesbian. In
Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando this borderland between male and female
roles is explored. An actual change of sex roles is seen to take place
in the narrative which although written later relates to this idea of
transformations in the turn of the century gender politics.

In her life Woolf suffered four breakdowns and after finishing Between
the Acts she "went out for one of her usual walks, placed a heavy stone
in her pocket and stepped into the River Ouse." What resulted after
these breakdowns was usually a customary dose of what was referred to
as a "rest cure". This was defined as periods of comfort and domestic
isolation, seclusion of the self where no extremes of intellectual or
sensual excitement were sought or administered. Like the containments
of Bronte this cure suggests an imposed suppressive control,
discouraging any challenging activity be it intellectual or
cultural.

An isolated withdrawal as seen in the rest cure conflicts with a desire
to merge with others, both culturally and politically. Reconciling the
public and private was not only a problem for women who wished to
advance yet also for men as husbands or doctors to women. The rest cure
appears to be born out of this tension to resolve the growing public
requirement of expression that women were now desiring and being
delivered.
It is also an extension of the Darwinian borderland psychiatry.

In The Yellow Wallpaper this duality of the public and private, doctor
and husband is highlighted. The relationship is perceived by the female
writer, so could have the erotic qualification of a domestic form of
psychiatry, yet equally in the husband and doctor axis there is the
diagnosis of marital suppression or marriage as an institution that
could be seen to limit the expressive identity of the wife. The
portrayal can be read as ambiguous portrait of the husband as a doctor
character advising, counselling, controlling. This relates to Bronte's
male muse, or Freudian father that characterised her text. In fiction
particularly the nerve specialist and his hysteric became a familiar
couple.

Husbands it can be argued were encouraged to be psychiatrists and
police the minds of their wives at home, similar to the role of
Rochester played in relation to Bertha, yet the confines had moved from
the attic of the country house to the drawing room. In terms of
Institutional replicating the asylum had become the country house and
was represented as such in much writing of the time.

The replication can be read as liberating, as a process of emancipation
and feminist expression, that the female character as well as the New
Woman were changing the location of this confinement. Transformation
from the attic to the drawing room of the house, shows a multiplicity
of representation, therefore a democratisation of woman's madness. This
rippling out of the mind control enables women to begin to police their
own minds, and in turn add to the expressive medium of psychiatric
writings. Gilman's Yellow Wallpaer as well as an obsessive story of
fancy, becomes a guide to other women on the dangers of the "rest cure"
confinement and its treatment. Not only as inspiration but a scientific
insight.

It is a comment on the predicament for the female writer and a text
that confronts the "sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife
relationship. In its time the story was read as a Poe-esque tale of
chilling horror-and as a story of mental aberration." Its tragic
conclusion of the full breakdown to the state of drivelling animal has
shades of the fate of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and reads as both a
feminist warning of the effects of the controlling psychiatric male
practises of the time, this Darwian in the marketplace. It also can be
read as an anti-feminist warning to expressive women who succumb to the
influences of their fancy.
"At first he meant to repaper the room, but
afterwards he said that I was letting it get the
better of me, and that nothing was worse for a
nervous patient than to give way to such fancies."

This anti-feminism is indicates how the influence of control affected
the writing life of the woman, who are denied the mental and emotional
food to equally grow with men. As a critique of the rest-cure it serves
to illustrate its restrictions both on the woman as a wife but also an
independent creative artist.

In terms of Woolf's political opposition to such reductive advances in
the suppression of women's ambition we have her more prominent feminist
essays, including Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own in which a
platform of conditions for women were considered for their advancement,
and in critique of a male dominated system of political, educational
and cultural activity.

In her fiction she developed the modernist devices of "interior
monolgue" and stream of Consciousness". These could be said to
profoundly effect the anti-formulaic approaches to not only fictional
or novel style but also to views of the mind's operations. She believed
that thousands of ideas move through the human brain in an average day
meeting and conflicting in states of disorder. There was a welter of
perceptions that characterised the individual personality she argued
and the expression of this was her project in the expressive word
through her fiction.

In The Waves which is considered the culmination of the "stream of
consciousness" technique we see the chaotic yet highly charged and
poetic emanations of the characters as they grow through their lives.
It is in these fragments that Woolf presents the disorder of the human
experience in psychological terms. Like Eliot's Wasteland the voices of
separate identities are pasted together to develop a dovetailing of
some description, yearning for larger patterns of order.
Woolf was influenced by the new movements of psychoanalysis and in her
work we see the more subtle integration, needed to integrate narrator
and character expressions, an organic device was put forward in her
work.

In Mrs Dalloway the parallel of the death of Septimus Warren Smith from
shell-shock related suicide adds to Clarissa's dilemma and questions of
her own death. The nerve specialist is delayed from attending at the
party and helps to form a linkage of time that is one of the novels
major themes. Time is set in that aforementioned ordinary day in which
so much mental activity is said to take place, yet this novel plays on
the extra-ordinary living within it. It creates an atmosphere of
intensely populated time and space in which the world is seen by the
sane and insane in simultaneity.

Madness is transferred here to the war veteran in the form of his
suffering from shell-shock. He is also shown to be requiring nerve
specialism and indicates this great shift during and after the great
war towards what is termed "male hysteria" in Elaine Showalter's book.
The focus is towards the growing male nervous problems and male
psychology, this has much to do with women's emancipation as well as
obviously a result of the great war.

Preceding the war at the fin de siecle the map of changing psychology
was already in the process of being redrawn. A transference on that
borderland of gender concerns, men becoming women and women becoming
men, was taking place in the mind. These transformations and the
problems of male psychology are covered in books like Jeckyll and Hyde
and The Picture of Dorian Gray .
These transformations in a gothic form externalised the struggle of the
male psyche in coming to terms with the changing shape of gender
politics. It is the external world of man's power that they are coming
to terms with and how a tension is formed by the very secret and
troubled "nature" of the private or interior world that they are
adjusting to and which has usually been described as a female
domain.

This debate of madness with its focus on troubled interiors, outlines
how the confined undergo development through the many various forms of
the institution, be it an asylum, an attic, drawing room or the mind
itself. Psychiatric modernism appears to be concerned with the bringing
forth of these problematic interiors into the market place of
expression, in novel, story, political essay. It is also a reconciling
of the duality of gender, balancing the chaotic implication the tension
of duality brings. It is this debate of interiority that Woolf forwards
in the progression towards psychological realism. In "interior
monologue" we experience a visible approach to the fragmentation of
thought and the multiplicity and incohesiveness of the human mental
processes towards the balance a new order.

No of Words : 2574