Walter Rafael Ramos Villanueva. “Mental Illness as Metaphor: Madness as a Form of (Dis)Empowerment in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing”
Critics have variously described the mental breakdown of the unnamed protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing as a symbolic rejection of the patriarchy, urbanization, and colonialism. Despite the astonishing range of meanings the narrator’s madness takes on for these scholars, they appear to all agree on at least one thing: her madness is a form of empowerment. However, in order for this interpretation to be accurate, the novel’s depiction of madness must be flattened in a way that suggests that her madness is nothing but a plot device. Disability studies scholars have contended that metaphorizing disability in such a way is problematic; for the narrator’s psychosis to embody these connotations, her madness can and must mean nothing in and of itself. The framing of madness as only empowering precludes a more nuanced reading of the text. In response, I will argue that a literal reading of the protagonist’s psychosis reveals how her madness is both empowering and disempowering. Whereas traditional interpretations of the novel tend to ignore the more disquieting features of her madness, my essay will tend to how the protagonist’s experience of mental illness is multivalent without reducing her madness to a plot device. I will suggest that this issue is not an either/or situation. Although some literary disability scholars would have us think that metaphorizing women’s madness in literary works is nothing more than reductive and harmful, critics of Surfacing are similarly misguided in their attempts to suggest that madness is nothing less than empowering. Madness and consequently mental illness are far more complicated than this strict binary would lead us to believe, and it is perhaps in this in-between space that other scholars such as myself can produce more compelling work on the implications of using mental illness as a metaphor.
Claire B. Karnap. “Cultivating and Preserving Positive Sensibility in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility“
My paper considers how changes in spaces and relationships create disruptive but necessary alterations in characters’ sensibility, specifically Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Recent scholarship examining Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) views sensibility as a pathological state for Marianne Dashwood. Critics, Marie E. McAllister and Jacqueline M. Labbe view sentimentality as being represented and portrayed in Marianne, and they view it as a hazardous condition for her well-being. I argue that sensibility is not a characteristic that should be considered negatively. In my paper, I examine how Austen portrays sensibility as a positive attribute for Marianne to use to recover from damage caused by external stimuli by examining key moments of the novel. Rather than viewing excessive emotion as negative, Austen is representing it as a positive trait for the novel’s characters, specifically Marianne. As I analyze key moments of Austen’s evaluation of sensibility, I reference extra-mental factors that shape the heroine’s mental life. Such factors, I argue, are responsible for Marianne’s psychological crises, which at times removes her autonomy. While I believe Marianne genuinely suffers from her mental crisis, there are external pressures rather than psychological issues responsible for inflicting the crisis onto Marianne. In conclusion, I attempt to prove that Marianne’s empathetic tendencies are a positive trait that eventually enables her to recover from her illness. I conclude that Austen responds to the evolving discourse on sensibility by representing it positively and showing its importance for a woman’s empathetic nature and mental well-being.
Ashley Barry. “Delusion as Plot Twist: An Existential-Phenomenological Approach to Mad Cinema”
In R.D. Laing’s 1960 book The Divided Self, Laing urges his fellow psychiatrists to reconsider delusions, hallucinations, and other mad symptoms from an approach that combined existentialism and phenomenology. In the text, he challenges the very basis of insanity as false or irrational, writing: “I am aware that the man who is said to be deluded may be in his delusion telling me the truth, and this in no equivocal or metaphorical sense, but quite literally, and that the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed” (28). In the sixty years since, Mad Studies and Mad Pride still exist on the fringe of disability theory and activism respectively; on a popular cultural level, representations of madness have not evolved far past Norman Bates and the Joker. Among other mental illnesses and symptoms, psychosis remains a narrative device to facilitate a plot twist in what I call the psych-genres: psychological thriller, horror, and drama. This project examines films outside of this realm that offer a more compassionate and just representation of Mad characters from a scholarship based in feminist film theory and disability studies. By analyzing two independent dramas, Tully (2018) and Horse Girl (2020), alongside the — arguably forgotten — existential-phenomenological approach of R.D. Laing, this paper asks how each protagonist’s delusions are presented counter to dominant sanist narratives. Additionally, I am interested in how the use of an “unreliable” narrator affects the spectator’s conceptualization of real individuals with mental illness, as each film escorts the spectator through states of natural lucidity and “fake” hallucination scenes.
