“I have talked to the lady,” [the physician] said quietly, “and we understand each other very well. There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a life-time. It would be dementia in its worst phase perhaps: acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!”6
This physician’s diagnosis indicates a few things, first and foremost that he is shit at his job, or, to give him the benefit of the doubt: he is relying heavily on his misogyny in order to determine Lucy’s condition. The novel has already revealed that her mother was confined to an asylum, and that because madness was ostensibly a fundamentally feminine condition, one passed from mother to daughter, Lucy has long assumed that she would one day meet the same fate. The physician echoes her own premonitions, his analysis buttressed by his sexism: she is indelibly stained by her mother’s illness, assumed to be insane even when her deeds would not necessarily point to this.
Yet as critic Lyn Pykett remarks, many debate whether or not Lucy is, in fact, mentally ill, or instead a devious mind bundled away in an asylum in order to protect society from the mirage of her innocent comeliness. Then—and in many cases, now—“madness was used to label and manage dangerous, disruptive femininity in the nineteenth century.”7 But this question over Lucy’s mental health, the possibility that she could be misdiagnosed or even lying, so subtle are her symptoms, renders her all the more frightening to behold precisely because her behavior cannot be differentiated and cordoned off as definitive signifiers of madness. “Someone who acts ‘normal’ raises the uncomfortable question, What’s the difference between that person and me?” writes Kaysen, “which leads to the question, What’s keeping me out of the looney bin?”8 Kaysen suggests that our compulsion to stigmatize anyone who has sought treatment for mental illness is a method of bracing the illusion that sanity, rather than a naturalized construct, is something that can be clearly deduced—“a general taint is useful,” she explains, in order to dispense with the hazards of nuance and instead rely on broad, stigmatizing generalizations, a paintbrush that delivers an indelible mark, at once a false exoneration for some—you are sane, you are pure—and damnation for others: you were never sane like the rest of us; you were tainted and weird and grotesque, and you always will be.9
The inheritance of female madness and its conceptual entanglement with moral dissipation emerges again and again across Victorian fiction, the most famous example being the vengeful Creole Bertha Mason who, in Jane Eyre (1847), serves as the obstruction to the titular character’s happiness: she is Mr. Rochester’s first wife, married because she was alluringly beautiful; despised because she was, allegedly, hypersexual and boozy; and ultimately incarcerated in his attic as a purported kindness because her mental degeneration would have otherwise required her to be institutionalized. The novel implicates her ambiguous heritage as fertile breeding ground for madness. Victorian readers would have understood the assignment of “Creole” as a marker of racial impurity, someone whose lineage intermingled European and non-European blood. The specificities of Bertha’s parentage are obscure: her father was a European colonist in the West Indies.10 Her mother was a native of the archipelago where Bertha was born, and she, like her daughter, was deemed insane. Ultimately, the specificities of DNA and psychology matter less than the beclouded assessments of British men like Rochester, who require very little information—only that she is neither white nor mentally normative—in order to distrust and disrespect her. Like Lucy Graham, it’s unclear what, precisely, her diagnosis would have been; the novel instead seems to posit that mental illness comes as just deserts for those who indulge their too muchness—in Bertha’s case, those who enjoy sex and libations and a good party. Rochester’s account of her to Jane, meant to inspire sympathy, steams with racist loathing:
I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste.11
The “infamous mother” to whom Rochester refers is labeled as such because—why else—she, presumably Jamaican like her daughter, is “mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum.”12 Poor Rochester, bewitched by a woman of the island, was content enough to marry a person of mixed race when he was stupefied with wine and rich food and the dazzle of Bertha’s wealth and charms. But as he wails to Jane, he was duped into wedlock with a woman “intemperate and unchaste,” with “a pigmy intellect.” To be clear, marriage to Bertha Mason doesn’t exactly sound like a picnic; perhaps she was, as Rochester suggests, a woman motivated by lascivious cruelty and self-destructive indulgence. Perhaps, but that simply isn’t what matters most. Just as Lucy Graham’s madness is an obscure condition easily conflated with her desire for upward mobility and the sexual prowess that enables it, Bertha’s Creoleness and unapologetic desire are implied as the soil that nourishes her own mental illness. A woman who wants, who hungers—especially if she is a woman of color—might as well be insane. Her temperament is in opposition to the ideological structures, Victorian and present-day, that demand women who are silent, starved, and, in the face of it all, complacent. How many mental illnesses have gone untreated because they manifested in quieter, more discreet ways?
When Jean Rhys, a British author born on the island of Dominica, wrote her novella Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), it was meant as a corrective and a critique of Jane Eyre’s flagrant dehumanization and erasure of Bertha Mason. Focusing instead on Bertha—or Antoinette, as she is called before her husband renames her—Rhys reminds us that one vantage point blinkered by racism, misogyny, and a colonialist mind-set can utterly deform a narrative and the woman thrust from its center.
Sections of Wide Sargasso Sea are narrated by Antoinette’s unnamed husband, whom we assume to be a young Rochester. After they wed, he gazes with fatigue at the verdant Caribbean landscape, its relentless vibrancy an extension of his trepidation regarding his Jamaican wife:
Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains to high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks.13
It’s not unusual that an Englishman, accustomed to a muted atmosphere of porpoise-gray skies and the slump of fog, would be overcome by an island beaming with lush brightness from every corner. And yet, Rochester—we’ll refer to him as Rochester for simplicity’s sake—complains about the landscape as a prelude to his misgivings regarding Antoinette, which indicate on their own that she is “too much” for him, that her “pleading” visage broadcasts a glut of unreciprocated longing. As a child, Antoinette endures the teasing of village children who accuse her of madness because her mother has suffered an emotional collapse; the perception of mental illness as a feminine inheritance, Rhys suggests, is not exclusive to Western society. But if Antoinette loses herself by the end of the novella, it is through her husband’s calculating barbarity: his insistence that she “be” Bertha instead of Antoinette, thereby negating her identity; his efforts to diminish her through performative infidelity—he sleeps with a servant where she can overhear; and his brash, racist cruelty within a community where, as a mulatta, her sense of belonging is already tenuous. He whittles her down, broad blossom to limp, broken stem, contesting every syllable that comprises her reality until, finally, he can bury her in an
English manor attic where Antoinette’s timeline slips away and she becomes a stranger to herself, lonesome and bereft of any anchoring selfhood.
Lady Audley’s Secret, Jane Eyre, and, by extension, Wide Sargasso Sea convey narratives of mental illness that are steeped in gothic mystery, echoed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which chronicles a woman’s mental breakdown, sometimes interpreted as postpartum depression run amok due to the smothering and shoddy care of her smug husband. Gilman’s story, told from the perspective of the unnamed woman, depicts the deleterious impact of a so-called “rest cure,” prescribed by the narrator’s physician husband, John. Monitoring and regimenting her every remark or twitch, John demands that his wife neither write nor visit with her family whose company she enjoys—activities that are designated as overly stimulating, and that she resist her urge to express to him the anxieties crackling inside of her head. With the rare exception of a severely circumscribed walk in the garden, the narrator is confined to a bedroom papered a ghastly yellow, tucked into a bed that is nailed to the floor. She harbors doubts that what her husband has ordered is at all helpful; in fact, she suggests at the start that this oppressive mental health regime will harm more than it remedies:
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?14
Very often, women are not permitted to be sick—to experience pain—on their own terms, particularly in ways that would be received as illegible or queasy in their intensity. We aren’t trusted to decipher the stimuli percolating in our brains or in our bodies. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is, for all intents and purposes, forbidden from presenting symptoms that would contest her husband’s diagnosis, or, at best, her accounts are discarded or recontextualized to suit the absurdly generalized, catchall description of hysteria. She writes on the sly, for “relief,” but in particular so that she may assert the validity of her discernments, to carve out territory where they may exist without the threat of negation. “John does not know how much I really suffer,” she confides. “He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.”15 The narrator understands all too clearly that she cannot trouble what John “knows” with the articulation of her own experience. His blinkered assumptions supersede anything his wife could discern by virtue of living in her body.
Even the inventions of her imagination, evermore feverish, become fodder for chastisement, rather than concern:
I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.16
The narrator’s treatment, such as it is, is one of vehement intellectual and emotional suppression, in which both her creative inclinations and whatever distress she experiences—hallucinations, ultimately—are targeted as dangerous to acknowledge in the slightest. The impact, you will be unsurprised to learn, is that the narrator slides into a black muddle where, like Antoinette, she cannot distinguish herself from the phantom women she spies “creeping” behind the wallpaper and all throughout the secluded manor her husband has rented for her recovery. Gilman, who was hospitalized for “a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia,” was prescribed a rest cure of this sort in 1887 and instructed “to ‘live as domestic a life as far as possible;’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush or pencil again’ as long as I lived…I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.”17 She penned “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a cautionary tale, and a plea to physicians, particularly the one that had treated her to the brink of insanity, to dispense with methods that, rather than engage a female patient’s concerns, served primarily to buttress the cult of domesticity and quash men’s nerves over mouthy women. Make her life small, and direct her to lock her brain in a vise. Toss her into prison, and when she protests, assure her that it’s her sanctuary.
* * *
Today, we are quick to point to women writers who suffered from depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia as a means of creative affirmation—particularly Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who both famously suffered nervous breakdowns throughout their lives. But these literary celebrity comparisons have further focused the spotlight on white women of comfortable socioeconomic standing. Plath in particular adheres to idealized white girl femininity, with her beauty, voguish style, and fashion magazine internship—indeed, she is the very sort Hollywood would depict via Gwyneth Paltrow (and Focus Features did precisely that in 2003 with the biopic Sylvia). Those of us who have struggled with mental health are fortunate to find comfort in The Bell Jar and in Plath’s poetry—she, like Woolf, was a masterful, visceral wordsmith who understood that living in the world can feel as nourishing as a rattling husk. But as we worship evermore feverishly at the temple of White Feminine Genius, she has become a Lana Del Rey-esque icon: fucked up, but beautiful and glamorous. Woolf, perhaps due to the esoteric tenor of her work, has not become quite so trendy, and yet she, too, has been co-opted as shorthand for the troubled but brilliant white woman creative. (A brief side note: the twentieth-century modernist was, unsurprisingly, sensible to the oceanic crash of too muchness—and its more distempering effects—particularly as she grappled with the demands of the literary profession. On Saturday, April 11, 1931, Woolf wrote in her diary, “But I have no pen—well, it will just make a mark. And not much to say, or rather too much and not the mood.”)18
Repurposing women’s mental illness as a signifier of genius enables us to bear witness from a cozier vantage point. Although few, hopefully, would argue that Woolf and Plath were brilliant because they endured sieges of the mind, we do seem to tacitly accept the inextricability of these attributes, to welcome others to suffer for the art we enjoy. I make no claims to the greatness of either Woolf or Plath, but I can state with certitude that I write best when I am regularly attending therapy appointments and adhering to my prescribed dosage of medications. Dark nights of the soul are creatively derailing, in addition to being positively miserable.
But we’ve long sought palatability and justification where women have anguished. Charles Dickens’s heroines—generally pretty—are, accordingly, always pretty when they cry. As Elizabeth Gaskell’s titular heroine Ruth (1853) succumbs to a bullyish hair-shearing after enduring the traumas of romantic desertion and childbirth out of wedlock, the elegant resignation of her visage, its beauty consistently emphasized, insinuates her moral fortitude. Her benefactors’ housekeeper carries out this punitive crop in a shame-wielding thrust of power but, notably, doubts her actions after peering into Ruth’s docile, finely wrought face. In George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch, young doctor Tertius Lydgate proposes marriage to the pretty and snobbish Rosamond Vincy after encountering her in tears. Eliot’s narrator indicates the folly of this union, but nonetheless, it illuminates the idealized manifestation of feminine distress: something delicate, trivial, and comely—a sight to make a man fall in love, or at least to turn him on. Eliot’s narrator—who harbors precious little love for Rosamond—admonishes against both the fetishizing of a sad and beautiful woman, not to mention the assumptions we make about a person’s inner life when their exterior is so aesthetically pleasing. But we cannot resist suffering made exquisite, and modern life has made gawkers out of the lot of us.
Yet for all our beauty
worship, we are even more inclined to hanker after the grotesque—particularly when it emanates from someone or something who has heretofore excelled at the performance of conventional desirability. In the midst of a 2007 custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline, Britney Spears absconded from rehab, walked into a hair salon, and, with purposeful promptitude, shaved her head. She was widely lampooned for the incident. Media outlets broadcasted images of her shorn and snarling visage to elicit, what else? Gasps of shock and, in the most uncharitable cases, laughter. There was, and there remains, lurid fascination in watching a bubblegum sex symbol shed her practiced poise, and the golden hair she saucily teased throughout her performances. A few days later, at a Mobil gas station in Tarzana, California, Britney, bald and donning rumpled leisurewear, slumped in the passenger seat of her silver Mercedes, Alli Sims, her second cousin twice removed at the wheel. While Sims briefly vacated the car, videographer Daniel “Dano” Ramos, together with a photographer from X17, descended upon it, the click of the camera tittering, a sonic curtain of opportunism rendering Ramos’s queries laughable as he asks, still filming, “Are you doing okay? I’m concerned about you.” In the fluttering light of the camera flash, Spears seems to dwell in the liminality of boredom and resignation. She rests her arm against the car window, casts her gaze beyond the flash, but—for now—she meets the paparazzi’s dizzying deluge without detectable reaction or recalibration. Briefly, she seems a skewed reincarnation of Ruth, a melancholic beauty divested of her crowning glory, though of course Spears did not yield to another’s razor. And before long, she reveals that she will not suffer this intrusion. When the crew continues to film Spears at a Jiffy Lube, she exits the car and, wielding a long, green umbrella like a spear, Spears rams it into Ramos’s Ford Explorer as she yells, “Fuck you!” It’s a hasty retaliation: after a few strikes, she drops the umbrella, trots back to the Mercedes, and she and Sims immediately drive away.19 I can recount these details, of course, because Ramos’s footage is available online. It will be retrievable, probably, until the internet implodes.
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