The self on madnessanglophone mental illness narratives in the early 21st century

Abstract

This dissertation delves into anglophone mental illness narratives written in the early twenty-first century and, with its threefold structure, it aims to explore the history, theory, and criticism of this life writing subgenre. The first part seeks to situate contemporary mental illness narratives within a tradition of madness narratives. To this aim, chapter 1 examines five trends in life narratives on madness written from the 15th to the 20th century—trends which are characterized in terms of the epistemological paradigm adopted in the writing and the attitude displayed toward the institutional understanding and treatment of madness. The second part presents the theoretical framework of the dissertation. Chapter 2 investigates the academic literature on illness narratives, including the earliest works that underlined the narrative dimension of the illness experience and the therapeutic and ethic dimension of illness narratives, and the recent debates over the limits, and even dangers, of the narrativization of illness. Ultimately, the chapter turns to the “unsayability” of madness and the unreliability of the mad narrator as the main challenges of mental illness narratives. Chapter 3 situates these challenges within some central debates in life writing studies; it shows that the elusiveness of the autobiographical self has been a core concern in the field since its inception. It subsequently discusses a recent line of inquiry that accepts the opaqueness of the self as an inherent and even valuable component of the autobiographical text. This discussion substantiates the study of mental illness narratives that offer a porous understanding of autobiographical subjectivity, making the text permeable to alternative epistemologies on madness. The third part of this thesis provides a critical reading of some contemporary mental illness narratives. These works address the most salient topics in the subgenre, while also presenting forms of mapping mental illness that overcome the conventional storyline of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Chapter 4 explores the authenticity and agency of the self in the face of illness and treatment in Jay Griffiths’s Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression (2016) and Mike Barnes’s The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth, and Metamorphosis (2008). The analysis shows that metaphoricity opens up new ways to apprehend and convey aspects of identity and experience that the upheaval of mental illness often makes elusive or problematic. Chapter 5 examines works that address mental illness at the intersection of sexual abuse and Native identity: Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir (2018) and Eliza Washuta’s My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014). The discussion foregrounds the relational dimension of Heart Berries, where Mailhot’s testimony is entangled to the occidental gaze of her husband and to the voices of a lineage of Native women that help her contest Western-based pathologizing and individualizing understandings of her distress. Then, the analysis of My Body Is a Book of Rules shows how Washuta destabilizes her autobiographical voice to contest the discourses that situate her as a mixed-race subject, a survivor of rape, and a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder, inscribing her agency in the process of searching for a truth that cannot be ultimately attained. Chapter 6 centers on discussions of stigma in a trend of mental illness narratives that combine testimony and research. The chapter addresses Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), Andrew Salomon’s The Noonday Demon (2001), Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety (2014), and David Adam’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop (2014). It further offers a close reading of Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (2019), exploring how Wang navigates the internalization of stigma, ultimately shedding her façade of normality and embracing alternative epistemologies about illness.