·
References:-
1.
Fitzgerald’s
The Crack-Up
2.
Michael
Fucoult’s Madness And Civilization
3.
Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell Jar
4.
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Mental
illness has been used as a trope in literature for many centuries with the
mentally ill character playing different roles. The late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries witnessed the development and popularity of sentimental
and Gothic novels in America. Many of these novels employed the use of mentally
ill characters for a variety of reasons. Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)
uses mental illness in many of his novels, but he does so in such a way that he
calls into question the correlation between mental illness and immorality while
also making explicit some of the reasons mental illness seems to follow so
quickly on the heels of women's loss of virginity that are implicit in other
novels. Although characters portrayed with mental illness
have progressed from the Victorian era, more novels with believable and
real protagonists need to be authored, says writer, poet and activist
Jhilmil Breckenridge.
I will also discuss the history and
development of attitudes regarding mental illness. Two histories I use are Roy
Porter's Madness: A Brief History published in 2002 and Michel Foucault's
Madness and Civilization published in the United States in 1965. Porter's work
is a general history of mental illness which provides brief background on how
it is depicted and theories of causes and cures. Porter discusses depictions of
mental illness all over the world from ancient times through part of the
twentieth century. Foucault's work focuses on depictions of mental illness in
western culture from the ancient world to the twentieth century and its social
construction mainly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Foucault's
work provides relevant context for developing attitudes in eighteenth century
England and Anglo-America.
Perceptions
of mental illness have a complex history changing over time to suit a
particular culture's needs. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, mental illness played an important role in popular literature and
medical documents. Most doctors of the period believed that mental illness
could be brought on by a number of external, physical occurrences, and it
became a means to control behavior that medical doctors as well as writers
utilized.
Michel Foucault
traces the way that mental illness was used in literature in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance to show that while mentally ill characters often represented
ironic truth in ignorance or folly, mental illness was also associated with
death and crime such as in Macbeth and Hamlet. Foucault notes that as mental
illness began to be perceived as something that prevented a person from conforming
to social norms, it began to be thought of as a problem that needed to be
addressed.
By the
mid-1700s, the belief was that mentally ill patients were lacking the moral and
psychological faculties that sane people had, and that these faculties had to
be revived in order for the patient to regain rationality. Rush was a
well-known American doctor and prolific writer, who practiced in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Often considered the "father of
American psychiatry," Rush was the first American doctor to publish on
psychiatry, and he lectured a great deal on both mental and physical health.
Benjamin Rush is credited with influencing the perceptions of mental illness in
America and bringing about more human practices in its treatment.
The two
main types of mental illness described by these writers are melancholia or
atonic madness and mania or tonic mania. According to Dr. Edward Cutbush, a
person with melancholia demonstrated the following symptoms: "the mind is
generally fixed to one subject; many are cogitative, silent, morose, and fixed
like statues; others wander from the habitations in search of solitary places,
they neglect cleanliness, their bodies are generally cold, with a change of
color and dry skin; all the different secretions are much diminished, the pulse
slow and languid". He
believed those with mania could "endure hunger, cold, nakedness, and want
of sleep with astonishing degree of impunity; they are very insensible to the
operation of contagion, vomits, & purges. During the paroxysm, they
obstinately refuse food and medicine; in the decline, they become stupid and
mournful, and when they come to be acquainted with their situation, they are
much dejected and oftentimes burst into tears"
Coming to the present keeping the mental issues in literature
beside, there are various people nowadays, who suffer from mental health issues
like depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, PTSD
and others, are stigmatized simply, because society is not comfortable
with these issues. According to the UK’s leading mental health charity, MIND,
1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each
year. In India by the most conservative estimates, at least 5% of the population
lives with a mental illness, which translate to over 50 million people.
These numbers have a close bearing with the rate of suicides, cardiovascular
health and several days of productivity lost. And because of
the stigma surrounding mental health, sufferers may take longer to seek
professional health or support from their peers or well -wisher. If there
are more fictional or real life accounts with protagonists with mental
health issues, perhaps readers can identify with characters in books or
films, and feel they are not alone. There are various books and various stories
and novels, which are based on the fight of a protagonist to the antagonist
mostly the mental disorders, depressions etc. some are following :
1. It’s A Kind Of Funny Story (By Ned
Vizzini)
It is a novel inspired by the author’s
own struggles with depression. Vizzini uses humour to describe
the protagonist’s hospitalization for depression, and though Vizzini later
went on to commit suicide, this book is a testimony to his struggle and is
one of the more realist portrayals of depression ever written. A phrase from
this novel, "I work. And I think about
work, and I freak out about work, and I think about how much I think about
work, and I freak out about how much I think about how much I think
about work, and I think about how freaked out I get about how much I think
about how much I think about work.”
2.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson (by
John Green and David Levithan)
It is written by 2 award winning authors John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) and David Levithan (Boy
Meets Boy) is a funny, rude and original (according to the New York Times
Book Review) account of a character, Will Grayson, who battles with
depression. Told alternatively by the two authors, they describe Will
Grayson’s struggles with depression. This book also offers a perspective
on how the way society deals with the term “depressed” or “mental health”
is not at all helpful for those diagnosed or labeled with mental illness.
And a hilarious dialogue from the movie is, “I think the idea of a 'mental
health day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue
what it's like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be
aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be
cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal.”
3.
The
Bell Jar (by Sylvia Plath)
This novel is partially based upon
Plath’s own struggles with depression. It has become a
modern day classic and is poetic, literary and beautifully written as it
describes Esther Greenwood’s experiences in New York, as a young fashion
intern’s spiraling ride into depression. Plath says, “I didn't know
why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked
at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would
fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
4.
The Tell-Tale Heart Many (By Edgar Allan Poe)
This is a short story examining the
concept of insanity. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator attempts to
convince the audience of his own sanity, but with each attempt ironically
proves how insane he truly is. This is closely related to the guilt the
narrator feels for killing someone for no apparent reason. This act is
considered insane because of the lack of motive. However, the narrator never
claims to be innocent; he is honest about what he has done from the beginning.
Instead he blames an outside uncontrollable force. This force can affect anyone
and cause a person to commit an “insane” crime. So the audience must question
whether or not the narrator is insane or a victim. It would seem that the
narrator’s claim that he is “sane, calculating, and methodical is unconvincing,
however, and his erratic and confused language suggests that he is disordered”.
The narrator’s evidence of a sane person is actually seen as the opposite,
insane. Whatever the case may be, the narrator seems to be obsessed with
proving his sanity, and the act of murder is commonly accepted as an insane
act, especially when a person claims an outside force made him do it!
Although characters portrayed with mental illness have progressed from
Victorian ones with forced lobotomies, evil nurses, and mad women
locked up in attics, and perhaps readers with mental health issues of
their own can identify with some of the more modern portrayals, more needs
to be done to create more novels with believable and real protagonists. It
could, indeed, happen to any of us, and reading these books or
watching films will help us get to know and relate to these characters as
people, like or hate them, just as we do with all good literature.
Sometimes,
these literatures are so much content of mental depression of the writer, that
even reader to become depressed. As we look to the text, “The Crack-Up written
by
American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote this and
published in last months of his life. Fitzgerald had written about his
depression and mental situation, and he described himself with an old crack
plate. Fitzgerald had already passed the peak of
his fame, health and marriage. Zelda's mental illness took a toll on the
family. She spent the first part of the decade shuttling between different
hospitals in Europe and the U.S., racking up huge medical bills. By the
mid-1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald himself suffered a mental crisis, which he
detailed in a three-part essay for Esquire magazine in 1936. "There
is another sort of blow that comes from within," he wrote in "The
Crack-Up," one that "that
you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize
with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again."
At the time of his death,
Fitzgerald was considered himself as the unfortunate poster boy for the Roaring
Twenties. But over time, the publication of “The
Crack-Up” has come to be regarded as the trigger to
Fitzgerald’s resurgence as an essential and enduring figure of 20th-century
American literature. The critical response to the book’s appearance in 1945 was
a far cry from the reception the ‘Esquire’ publication of
the essays had elicited. And, Lionel Trilling, for one, praised Fitzgerald’s
“heroic self-awareness” in his review in ‘The Nation.’
But I will phrase the
question and ask what does a novel do to us? If novels spell out the
importance of moral values and brings out emotions to readers, which cause the
reader at that time to think on it; without a reason that this happened to him
or not. Therefore, there arises a conflict between our logical mind and a
sensible heart which is a harsh economic reality. If the novelist does catch
the truth, it is because he/she does not give the reader a mirror image of
society. The novelist creates a picture that goes behind the facade, beneath
the surface. A questioning picture is exploring not only what is, but the
silences, the gaps, the ambiguities and the contradictions. The truth is that
the novelist is impelled into writing by something deep within her, something
she can’t explain, because she does not understand it herself. Often, reading
what she has herself written, the writer is puzzled. “Did I write this?” she
asks herself in amazement. On a more conscious level, the novel comes out
of questions, confusions.
A well-known example in
literature is American poet Anne Sexton, who was induced to write poetry by the
doctor treating her for depression (she bluntly calls it madness) said, “I
understand something in a poem that I haven’t been able to integrate into my
life.” Such integration is important to the person's mental well-being. Working
with experiences, plumbing into memories, writer is confronted by things she/he
had refused to look at, things she/he had refused to accept, to face. It has
been said that writers are the only sane people in the world because they are
able to get rid of much of their emotional burdens in their writing. it is a
writer who said this, but undoubtedly writing provides a kind of catharsis
which helps the person to move on.
Mental illness is punishment for sin because
mental illness can happen to anyone. It can happen to the religious family man,
the doting father, the devoted, the seduced woman, and the villain alike. The
novels show us that one's susceptibility to mental illness is derived more from
family history, community, educational background, and changes in
socio-economic status than from sin. Unlike other novelists who use mental
illness as a means to both monitor women's behavior and foreground unequal
conditions. Wollstonecraft's ideology incorporates his own reformist ideas to
use medical discourse for a more feminist end. Unlike the sentimental novelists
who wanted other women to feel pity for "fallen" women and to learn
from their mistakes, readers should realize that each could do his or her role
in protecting women against mental illness by providing them with sufficient
education, job opportunities, and community support.
