Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  I am using the word “nurturance” somewhat loosely. I mean the consistent and readily available gift of physical, domestic, and emotional support in childhood, together with the added gift of compassion and respect in adulthood. “Nurturance” or, mythologically speaking, “protection,” “guidance,” and “intervention,” is depicted most often by pagan gods and goddesses helping mortal men on their pilgrimages to heroism: Athena helps Odysseus and Perseus to either escape from or slay female powers as embodied by Circe and Medusa. It is interesting to note that Psyche, one of the few mortal heroines in pagan culture, is helped on her pilgrimage toward an essentially “feminine” destiny only by non-human objects. No wise or powerful goddess or god (save her husband Eros) intervenes for her. Her “protectors” are an ant, a reed, water, an eagle, and a tower.

  Female children turn to their fathers for physical affection, nurturance, or pleasurable emotional intensity—a turning that is experienced as “sexual” by the adult male, precisely because it is predicated on the female’s (his daughter’s) innocence, helplessness, youthfulness, and monogamous idolatry. This essentially satyric and incestuous model of sexuality is almost universal. It is reflected in marriage laws and practices, and in the rarity with which rapists, child molesters, and frequenters of prostitutes are legally prosecuted. This model of sexuality is mythologically Olympian in origin: Zeus, the father, made a habit of seducing, raping, and impregnating as many Virgin Maidens as possible. The Catholic Father apparently preferred virgins for his divine offspring also.

  Daughters don’t turn to their mothers for “sexual” initiation, or, as Freud would have it (but couldn’t explain it), they specifically turn away from them, for a number of reasons. Mothers are conditioned not to like women and/or the female body They are phobic about lesbianism; they are jealous of their daughters’ youth—rendered so by their own increasing expendability. Also, mothers must be harsh in training their daughters to be feminine in order that they learn how to serve in order to survive. This harshness traditionally characterizes fathers’ training their sons to be masculine. Any society with sex-role stereotypes implies an often crippling harshness between adults and children of the same sex. However, bio-patriarchal culture is still essentially a male homosexual one—in spirit and/or in practice. It is neither lesbian nor bisexual in spirit or practice.

  The way in which female children grow up—or learn how not to grow up—is initiated by the early withdrawal or relative absence of the female and/or nurturant body from their lives. Nurturance-deprivation, and the sexual abuse of female children are possibly the two most important factors involved in making female children receptive to “submission” conditioning—at a very early age. Female children move from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of their own sex to a foreign “grown-up’” world dominated, quite literally, by members of the opposite sex. Male children graduate from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of the opposite sex (women) to a “grown-up” world dominated by members of their own sex. Unlike women, they can safely go home again by marrying wives, who will perform the rites of maternal, domestic, and emotional nurturance, but who are usually younger, economically poorer, and physically weaker than themselves.

  In patriarchal society, the basic incest taboo (between mother and son and father and daughter) is psychologically obeyed by men and disobeyed by women. One-quarter to one-third of female children are raped or molested by their fathers or by adult male relatives in our culture; maternal incest is a far rarer occurrence. Psychologically, women do not have initiation rites to help them break their incestuous ties. While most women do not commit incest with their biological fathers, patriarchal marriage, prostitution, and mass “romantic” love are psychologically predicated on a sexual union between daughter and father figures. Psychologically speaking, in a matriarchal or Amazonian society, the incest taboo would have another purpose entirely, and women would not violate it. The taboo would function as a way of keeping sons and husbands away from daughters—who would be their mothers’ only heiresses. This particular distance is precisely what is breached by patriarchal mores: the breach immediately tells us which sex is dominant, i.e., which sex controls the means of production and reproduction.

  What would female sexuality be like if women did not violate the incest taboo, did not willingly marry father figures, or were not seduced or raped by them? How would women know pleasure, love, and economic security? How would they reproduce themselves when and if they wished to? And how would they raise their children?

  The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character…. If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman’s nature, what other protection does it need save love and freedom? Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.

  Emma Goldman18

  Female biology obviously includes the capacity for sexual pleasure, physical prowess, and childbearing. Whether or not human childbearing constitutes the “greatest pleasure” for women,19 whether or not it is a “natural” or a “learned” activity, is irrelevant.20 What is relevant is the price modern women are forced to pay for this pleasure and the overwhelming lack of other available pleasures and privileges. Women are forced to choose between reproduction and (hetero) sexual pleasure; reproduction and physical prowess; or reproduction and worldly or spiritual power.

  Today, women are still choosing maternity for traditional reasons: in order to survive economically and psychologically and because contraception and abortion are still inadequate, illegal, expensive, dangerous, and increasingly morally censured for most women. The twentieth-century phenomenon of romantic love also accounts for—or justifies—the traditionally inevitable female destiny of marriage and children. Contemporary women are “free” slaves: they choose their servitude for “love.”21 Women are trained to be those creatures who are supposed to get so carried away emotionally that they cannot think clearly, if at all. Pluto (Zeus, Dionysius) had to carry the Daughter-Maiden Persephone away from her mother Demeter; for centuries families have arranged this leave-taking for their daughters; today, contemporary women carry themselves headlong down the same path to the Underworld.

  Maternity has been glorified and feared, by ancient and modern people, as the most eloquent and effective human response to the fact of biological death. Mothers have been eulogized—and I use the word advisedly—as more powerful than kings and soldiers who, in turn, have defended motherhood in speeches and destroyed its labors in battle. Poets, scientists, and philosophers have sighed over the time-bound vanity of male accomplishment and have continued their creative work.

  Modern businessmen envy the female maternal “out”—often to the point of disease—but remain involved with the accumulation and circulation of money, an activity best done without children underfoot. Despite the numerous ways in which men have attempted to mimic or colonize the gloriousness of biological maternity (and consequently, to devalue or punish it in women), men, particularly in Judeo-Christian and Islamic culture, are not very “maternal” to their children, their wives, their mistresses, their prostitutes, their secretaries, their housekeepers—or to each other.

  In patriarchal culture, Mother-Women, as deified by the Catholic Madonna, ar
e as removed from (hetero) sexual pleasure as are Daughter-Women, as deified by the pagan Athena. Athena is the archetype of a motherless daughter: Zeus’ forehead is her “mother.” (Interestingly, Aphrodite, the goddess who persecutes Psyche, is also motherless. According to myth, she was “created from the severed phallus of Uranus which had fallen into the sea.”22) It is Athena who casts the deciding vote in Orestes’ favor and proclaims matricide to be of lesser importance than patricide. Orestes’ mother kills her husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Orestes avenges his father’s death by killing his mother and is acquitted of the crime. In Aeschylus’ trilogy, Athena says:

  “My task it is to render the last verdict,

  And I cast this stone for Orestes,

  For I did not have a mother who bore me;

  No, all my heart praises the male,

  May Orestes win over your tied vote.”

  Athena, despite her warlike trappings, is an original “Daddy’s girl”: she does not get sexually involved with men—or women. Athena pays for her wisdom and power by giving up reproductive sexuality and (hetero) sexual pleasure. Mary, mother of Jesus, pays for her maternity by giving up her body, almost entirely: she foregoes both (hetero) sexual pleasure (Christ’s birth is a virgin and “spiritual” birth) and physical prowess. She has no direct worldly power but, like her crucified son, is easily identified with by many people, especially women, as a powerless figure. Mary symbolizes power achieved through receptivity, compassion, and a uterus. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a consciously willed “receptivity” to the universe; on the contrary, it is highly desirable, and should certainly include “receptivity” to many things other than holy sperm and suffering.)

  A more feminist (or rather, matriarchal) interpretation of the Catholic Virgin birth certainly exists: it symbolizes the unique and “miraculous” ability of women to conceive and bear children. Childbearing—the union of body and spirit that overcomes death—resides in the female principle. Men do not enter this realm, either socially or biologically. Thus, it is just as we all thought as children: all our mothers immaculately conceived us and we are all divine.

  In many pagan and Catholic “downfall” myths, the male god is usually stripped of his full former powers by being sent “earthward,” the female, by being sent “skyward.” For example, Poseidon was sent to the sea; Pluto, as well as the Judeo-Christian Lucifer, were sent beneath the earth. Mythologically, one expression of power loss for men is to be returned to the earth, to the concrete. Often for women, the expression of power loss is to be removed from the earth, or from their (heterosexual) bodies. Goddesses such as Athena, Diana, or the Catholic Madonna are virgins, i.e., either unmarried or childless, (hetero) sexually uninvolved, or “innocent” of experience.

  Psychologically speaking, in Amazon society, a “virgin” is not chaste, but unmarried; in Catholic mythology a “virgin” is married and chaste. The pagan Artemis (Diana), the Virgin-Huntress, is not motherless. She is raised together with her brother Apollo and, unlike Athena, is probably a lesbian goddess of Amazon origin. She requested—and received from Zeus—sixty ocean nymphs and twenty river nymphs as companions. According to one myth, she rescues Iphigenia from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon. According to another myth, one of her lovers is the woman Callisto—whom Artemis’ father, Zeus, seduces—only by taking Artemis’ form.23

  Virginity, one form of mind-body splitting, is the price that women are forced to pay in order to keep whatever other “fearful” powers they have: childbearing, wisdom, hunting prowess, maternal compassion. Of course, de-virginization via heterosexual rape is as maddening a split in female mind-body continuity.

  HEROINES AND MADNESS: JOAN OF ARC AND THE VIRGIN MARY

  How do mythological figures such as Athena or the Catholic Madonna, or historical heroines such as Joan of Arc, relate to what we call madness? On one level, not at all. (Mythology may be viewed as the psychology of modern history. It seems to represent the interaction of human nature with early culture, just as history represents the interaction of human nature with later culture. Myths may also refer to actual historical events or personages.) Many women who are psychiatrically labeled, privately treated, and publicly hospitalized are not mad. Like Plath, West, Fitzgerald, and Packard, they may be deeply unhappy, self-destructive, economically powerless, and sexually impotent—but as women they’re supposed to be.

  There are very few genuinely (or purely) mad women in our culture. Society generally banishes such experiences from understanding, respect—and from plain view. Madness is shut away from sight, shamed, brutalized, denied, feared, and drugged. Contemporary men, politics, science—the rational mode itself—does not consult or is not in touch with the irrational, i.e., with the events of the unconscious, or with the meaning of collective history.

  Such madness is best understood within a mythological context. For example, some mad women in our culture experience certain transformations of self or incorporate the meaning of certain heroines such as Joan of Arc and the Catholic Madonna. Some women also experience themselves as female Christs or as Dionysus. Dionysus is essentially androgynous but is most often depicted as a man. The male Dionysus is the mirror image of Persephone’s or the passive Maiden’s sacrifice. Dionysus is killed by women—by women whom he has driven mad.

  Phillip E. Slater, in The Glory of Hera, sees Dionysus as a male child, forever envied, loved, hated, and seduced by his cruelly imprisoned and crippled mother. In understanding Dionysus, he also says that: “Dionysus’ characteristic attribute of boundary-violator is symbolized by the Orphic myth of his serpent birth—a myth whose great antiquity is alleged by Kerenyi (cf. also Euripides: The Bacchae). Demeter is said to have hidden Persephone in a cave in Sicily, guarded by two serpents. While the maiden was engaged in weaving, however, Zeus came to her in the shape of a serpent and copulated with her, Dionysus being the fruit of this union (Kerenyi, 1960). His ability to shatter cognitive boundaries is thus intrinsic, and does not depend upon any external power. He is in fact born with it—it is the child itself which drives the mother mad by its very existence. Just as the child has twice violated the physical boundaries of the mother by its conception and birth, so it drives her to raving infanticide by its having ceased to be a psychological part of her. In the child-murdering myths of Dionysus, one can easily discern some of the underlying ideation of the postpartum psychosis.”24

  Joan of Arc and the Catholic Madonna involve the sacrifice of the Maiden (Persephone-Kore) for purposes of male renewal. In the Madonna’s case, the renewal is achieved through classic patriarchal rape-incest; in Joan’s case, first through military victories and then through patriarchal crucifixion, and sanctification-expiation.

  Joan of Arc is the only Persephone-Kore Maiden in modern history who is not raped or impregnated by her father—be it by her biological or divine father; she was probably raped by her British captors. Joan remains a “daughter” figure. As such, she is one of Christianity’s prime remembrances of Amazonian cultures. Joan, like earlier mythological heroines, such as Athena, is a virgin-warrior who helps men. It is important, however, that Joan herself, at her trial of condemnation, said that she bore her banner or standard aloft “when we went forward against the enemy, I held the banner aloft to avoid killing anyone. I have killed no one.”25

  Although, like all Kore-Maidens, she serves as a source of male renewal, she does so through her military victories and her subsequent political and sexual persecution. Her identity, as such, is a crucial one for women. Although she is doomed (and women might identify with her on this ground alone), she is also physically and spiritually bold; she is a leader of men; she does not become a mother. She embodies the avoidance of both the Demeter-Mother fate and the Persephone-Daughter fate. As such, she begins to step completely outside the realm of patriarchal culture. For this, she is killed in her own lifetime—and sometimes re-experienced by those women who are mad enough to wish to “step outside” cu
lture also.

  It is frightening to read the account of Joan’s imprisonment by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II), quoted by Regine Pernoud: “It is known that, taken in the war, the Maid was sold to the English for ten thousand gold crowns and conveyed to Rouen. In that place, she was diligently examined to discover whether she used sortileges (spells) or diabolical aid or whether she erred in any way in her religion. Nothing worthy to be censured was found in her, excepting the male attire which she wore. And that was not judged deserving of the extreme penalty. Taken back to her prison she was threatened with death if she resumed the wearing of man’s clothes … her gaolers brought none but male attire.”26 It is as tragic as it is inevitable that female warriors in patriarchal mythology are necessarily denied that part of their sexuality that includes biological maternity. What this always signifies is grief at not having been born male—because of the nurturance-deprivation being female implies.