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Immanence and Transcendence: Aesthetic Responses to "Madness" in Women's Literature from 1892

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Immanence and Transcendence: Aesthetic Responses to The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Ph.D. Thesis Immanence and Transcendence: Aesthetic Responses to "Madness" in Women's Literature from 1892 Joanne Elizabeth Howell English Literature Department University of Durham 2003 Supervisor: Professor Patricia Waugh 21 MAY 2003 Contents Abstract 2 Part One: Theoretical Frameworks 4 The Immanent and Transcendent Female Subject 5 Women and Madness 6 The Hysteric: Reading The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) 14 Women and the Body 29 Simone de Beauvoir 38 The Narcissist in Angela Carter's Magic Toyshop (1967) 45 Women and Language 56 Writing the Body: the Schizophrenic and Autobiography 64 Feminist Responses 76 Notes 86 Part Two: Reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath 89 Virginia Woolf Writing a Woman's Life 90 Life and Fiction: Writing the Self 95 Writing the Body 104 Woolf s Mirrors 121 "The Lady in the Looking-Glass" (1929) 124 "The New Dress" (1927) 128 Economics, Class and Katherine Mansfield. 138 Death 149 Septimus Smith and Suicide 153 Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse 165 Language and feminism 170 Notes 178 Sylvia Plath: A Woman Telling Stories 180 The Art of Saying "I" 187 "Poem for a Birthday" (1959) 195 The Bell Jar (1963) 199 Economics, femininity and popular culture. 205 "The Wishing Box" (1956) 214 "Day of Success" (1960) 220 "Its only a story / Your Story. My Story." 225 Notes 247 Contents Postmodern Bodies and Conclusion 250 Subjectivity, Feminism and Postmodern Theory 251 Fantastic Bodies 266 Nights at the Circus (1984) 269 Conclusion 275 Notes 278 Bibliography 280 Primary Sources Virginia Woolf 288 Critical Sources Virginia Woolf 289 Primary and Critical Sources Katherine Mansfield 289 Primary Sources Sylvia Plath 290 Critical Sources Sylvia Plath 290 Declaration No part of this work has been previously submitted for a degree at any university. The material is wholly the work of the author. This thesis conforms to the word limit set out in the degree regulations. Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without their prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Acknowledgements I have many people to thank for their continued support while I have been working on this thesis: Pat Waugh for her academic brilliance and intellectual advice throughout and Mary Eagleton for getting me started and offering me paid work. Also, Mum and Dad for their financial support and inexhaustible encouragement and Paul for his diligent proof-reading and understanding as I approached my final deadline. Above all, Lucy and Amy, two beautiful young women, whose patience, love and faith have sustained me from beginning to end. 1 Abstract: Ph.D. Thesis Immanence and Transcendence: Aesthetic Responses to "Madness" in Women's Literature from 1892 Joanne Elizabeth Howell English Literature Department 2003 Supervisor: Professor Patricia Waugh This thesis will consider notions of immanence and transcendence and how these relate to the theme of madness in women's writing focusing in particular on the work of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. I have begun with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and finished with Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). There are also references to other leading female writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing and Jeanette Winterson. My aesthetic responses are centred around how women writers find expression for subjectivity. The notion of an immanent self is inextricably linked to an experience of a self which inhabits a body whereas the transcendent self moves beyond embodiment. It is these states of being and the relationship between the experience of a fragmented and / or a dispersed self which I have investigated through fiction and non-fiction alongside an analysis of the writers' search for expression of these states. Part One provides a theoretical critical framework which considers feminist writing about madness, the body and language with a focus on French feminist theory. I have considered "madness" from various perspectives: as a patriarchal construct, a result of oppression and the fabricated notions of femininity, and a form of rebellion. I have also investigated recent feminist theory regarding autobiography because in Part Two many readings of my readings of Woolf and Plath refer to autobiographical texts. I have analysed the relationship between fiction and autobiography and the form of expression Woolf and Plath employ to represent the experience of mental instability. 2 My final section considers the relationship between postmodernism and feminism, largely focusing on Patricia Waugh's essay "Postmodernism and Feminism" (1998), Donna Haraway's cyborg, and the grotesque in Angela Carter. The themes of relationality and conununitarian values and how these relate to transcendent and / or immanent selves recur throughout my analyses in a sustained consideration of how a relationship between situated, embodied selves and fantastic selves can be established. Within the 'postmodern sublime' we can trace those tendencies towards the themes of transcendence and immanence which we encounter within the work of Woolf and Plath. Imaginative explorations of cybernetic and grotesque female bodies can also be read as sexualisations of the female subject in crisis. 3 Part One: Theoretical Frameworks 4 The Immanent and Transcendent Female Subject Female subjectivity is inextricably linked to a relationship with the body. A sense of immanence, or being in the body, can be problematic given that women have been negatively defined through their bodies in patriarchal societies; a woman's role and her situatedness in the world is largely connected to her experience of a self which inhabits a biologically female body. A transcendent self would escape those narrow confines which contain and often constrict a life. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and many other women writers have explored ways of expressing female experience both as an experience of being in the body and as selves who are free to roam beyond the skin. Although I have investigated the theme of madness through the work of Woolf and Plath, I have been concerned not to offer pathological readings based on biographical knowledge of these two writers. My premise here is not based on pyschoanalytic theory but on aesthetic readings of women's texts. For Woolf, the self can be described both an essential, interior core and as an entity which is not contained and can attach itself to exterior stimuli such as the rhythmic, strobing beams from a lighthouse. Woolf moves between these two positions throughout her work so that her special "moments of being" can often be read as embodied or disembodied experiences. For Plath, the urgency towards transcendence can be most clearly seen in her final poems where the subjects or speakers often escape the body which throughout Plath's work is often regarded as problematic. In this sense we can read Plath's work as being an exploration of what it is to be a fragmented being in the world which is a notably different project to Woolfs expression of a more dispersed self and the multiplicitous experience of female subjectivity. These notions of multiplicity and fragmentation will be helpful to us as we consider women's "madness" and how it is expressed through autobiography and fiction as an 5 experience of being a split or a diffuse subject. As I began to pursue my interest in women's writing which expressed the experience of 'madness' I became particularly fascinated by fictionalisations (many in part autobiographical) of mental breakdown in women's texts. I was first interested to consider the following premises: that women's "madness" is a construct, designed to control women; a direct result of the insidious oppression which saturates Western ideology; and an expression of rebellion. As the project progressed I became more interested in the relationships between women and the body, women and language, women and fantasy, and how these might relate to female subjectivity more generally. What emerged most strikingly in my readings of Woolf and Plath was the extent to which aesthetic practice has been used by women to 'manage' or 'heal' those crises of subjectivity referred to as female madness. Women and Madness Studies of the history of psychiatry in Britain and Europe from the seventeenth century, found in such comprehensive works as The Anatomy of Madness (1985: eds., Roy Porter et al.) show that the development of the treatment of mental illness was closely linked to social reform. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of the 'hysteric' and Freudian theories of sexuality placed women firmly at the centre of psychiatric pathologies. The 'nervous woman' in late Victorian society in Britain, for example, led to a synonymous encodement of 'women' and 'madness.' As Elaine Showalter points out the terms woman and madness were inextricably linked in the late Nineteenth Century. Madness is perceived as a "female malady" because it is considered to be "one of the wrongs of woman ... the essential feminine nature unveiling itself before scientific male rationality" (Showalter: 1987, p.3). Showalter explains that from the seventeenth to the twentieth century records show that women have formed the majority of mental patients in asylums and as psychiatric outpatients (1). The notion that madness is both a construct designed to control the population and a 6 manifestation of the deconstruction of societal modes of control is fully explored in Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1967). We have now got in the habit of perceiving in madness a fall into determinism where all forms of liberty are gradually suppressed; madness shows us nothing more than the natural constants of a determinism, with the sequences of its causes, and the discursive movement of its forms; for madness threatens modern man only with that return to the bleak world of beasts and things, to their fettered freedom.
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