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Bringing Madness Home. the Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’S Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’S a Question of Power and Lauren Slater’S Prozac Diary

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Bringing Madness Home. the Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’S Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’S a Question of Power and Lauren Slater’S Prozac Diary JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 181 Saara Jäntti Bringing Madness Home The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 181 Saara Jäntti Bringing Madness Home The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary Esitetään Jyväskylän yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan suostumuksella julkisesti tarkastettavaksi yliopiston Historica-rakennuksen salissa H320 toukokuun 26. päivänä 2012 kello 12. Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by permission of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Jyväskylä, in building Historica, hall H320, on May 26, 2012 at 12 o'clock noon. UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2012 Bringing Madness Home The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary JYVÄSKYLÄ STUDIES IN HUMANITIES 181 Saara Jäntti Bringing Madness Home The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ JYVÄSKYLÄ 2012 Editors Sirpa Leppänen Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä Pekka Olsbo, Ville Korkiakangas Publishing Unit, University Library of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities Editorial Board Editor in Chief Heikki Hanka, Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä Petri Karonen, Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä Paula Kalaja, Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä Petri Toiviainen, Department of Music, University of Jyväskylä Tarja Nikula, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä Raimo Salokangas, Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä URN:ISBN:978-951-39-4738-5 ISBN 978-951-39-4738-5 (PDF) ISBN 978-951-39-4737-8 (nid.) ISSN 1459-4323 Copyright © 2012, by University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä University Printing House, Jyväskylä 2012 ABSTRACT Jäntti, Saara Bringing Madness Home. The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2012, 358 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4323; 181) ISBN 978-951-39-4737-8 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-4738-5 (PDF) Yhteenveto: Kodin monet merkitykset naisten hulluuskertomuksissa: Janet Framen Faces in the Water, Bessie Headin A Question of Power ja Lauren Slaterin Prozac Diary This study brings together two contested themes in feminist debates: madness and home. While both have been analyzed as sites of women’s oppression, they have, too, been celebrated as liberatory spaces. Through a close reading of three women’s writings on the experience and treatment of madness in three different cultural and psychiatric contexts, this study discusses and challenges these views. To bring madness home is a methodological move that seeks to combine (post)structural and phenomenological readings on women’s madness. It engages the feminist debates on women’s madness, the critical discourse on madness where home has been first and foremost understood as a site of oppression that drives women mad, with more recent debates on gendered notions of home that deconstruct and reconstruct notions of home. Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (1961) is an asylum story where home consists of the (imaginary) home in the World outside the asylum and the lived everyday realities of the hospital. The patients settle for minimal home spaces in the hospital and maintain a nostalgic relation to the home in the outside world. In Bessie Head’s narrative madness is perceived as a journey, and a violent intrusion of the protagonist’s homespace in the village where she, a refugee from South Africa is settling. In Prozac Diary the protagonist’s world as she knows collapses when her new medication removes her multiple ailments. Depending on the historical/cultural/psychiatric context, home becomes a space where madness removes the ailing subject or where she endures it and creates sites where the inevitable pain and suffering entailed in the experience of madness can be tolerated. These sites are homes. Material and immaterial, livable spaces, where the subject can dwell. Keywords: Home, women’s madness, psychiatry, gender, literature, space, belonging Author’s address Saara Jäntti Department of Languages, English University of Jyväskylä P.O.Box 35 40014 University of Jyväskylä [email protected] Supervisor Sirpa Leppänen Department of Languages University of Jyväskylä Reviewers Professor Kirsi Saarikangas Faculty of Arts University of Helsinki Professor Mary Wood Department of English University of Oregon Opponent Professor Mary Wood ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like madness, research also can be conceptualized both as a journey and as a relation to home. In the course of the eight years that it has taken me to write this thesis, this research has taken me to – and provided me with – many homes. Some of them had walls, some of them consist(ed) of human relations, and oth- ers provided me with theoretical frameworks that helped me to build the foun- dations of this work. The thesis has been written in four countries and six towns, all of which taught me their own lessons about home and belonging. In the course of these years, the thesis itself became a kind of home that held things together when life around it got rough. And now that the work has been done, it is time to thank all those involved – and time to move on. Here are a few peo- ple and institutions I wish to acknowledge and thank: When I started this study, I was in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, and it has been this Department and the Faculty of Humanities that have supported my study financially throughout these years. For this I express my deepest gratitude. I also wish to thank the Ellen and Art- turi Nyyssösen Foundation for a grant that helped me to finish this work. A travel grant from the Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies allowed me to participate in the Madness and Literature Conference held at the University of Nottingham in 2010. A Mobility grant from the University of Jyväskylä enabled me to visit the University of Bologna in 2011. This financial support has been vital, but the actual work would never have been realized without intellectual – and often also affectionate – support from the academic community. First and foremost, I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Sirpa Leppänen, for her unfailing faith in me and encouragement. Your guidance and kindness have seen me through academic and other troubles more times than I can possibly count. Thank you, Sirpa. I also wish to express my gratitude to the reviewers of my thesis, Mary Wood and Kirsi Saarikangas, whose valuable comments – and patience in wait- ing for the delayed script – helped me substantially to improve it. I wish to thank the organizers and participants of the Post-Graduate Pro- gramme in Women’s Studies at Utrecht University in 2005 for valuable com- ments and guidance. I thank Professors Rosi Braidotti and Rosemarie Buikema, and Daniela Gronold, Silvia Ruschak, Katariina Kyrölä, Björk, Annabel, Sara, Luisa and all the others for lovely five months. While in Utrecht, Sara Angevine and Professor Eeva Jokinen read and commented on the first versions of the chapter on Frame. Thank you! The later version of the same chapter was read and commented by Tuija Saresma, Kaisa Hiltunen and Suvi Järvinen. Thank you! I also thank Matteo Capelletti for the good times in Utrecht. And thank you Jet and Rien for lively dinners and the attic that provided me with a peace- ful place to write. The Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies offered a valuable space for discussing my work. I thank you all! Anne Soronen’s com- ments helped me a great deal with the Introduction; Sanna Rikala shared much of the early struggles with the thesis over a number of madness lunches in Ilokivi. Kiitos Sanna! I also had the opportunity to discuss my work at the unit for Women’s Studies at the University of Jyväskylä. Thank you all! In the Department of Languages, a group of Sirpa’s PhD students, our dear “tekstiryhmä”, provided a safe space for sharing scattered thoughts, aca- demic frustrations and a number of buns: April Huang, Henna Jousmäki, Samu Kytölä, Sanna Lehtonen, Saija Peuronen, Piia Varis and Elina Westinen. I also had the opportunity to discuss my work in the English postgraduate seminars and wish to thank the participants for comments. With Helena Miettinen and Laura McCambridge I shared an office and so many funny and not-so-funny incidents in everyday life. Thank you for the laughter! I also wish to acknowledge the kind interest in my work of the departmental secretary Ulla Mustonen who also carefully handled all the grants and contracts that helped to sustain this work. And thank you Michael Freeman for the careful proofreading of the whole work! Thanks to you, “discursive caps” disappeared from the text and Slater’s students “have to learn” rather than “shave to learn.” For whatever mistakes remain, I, of course, take full responsibility. In the course of these years, many colleagues have become friends and friends have become fellow researchers. Some have always been both. I thank – and blame - – Dr. Emily Jeremiah for ever having launched myself on the PhD track: it was with you that I first made contact with women’s writing on mad- ness and its literary critique, and cotaught the MadWoman in the Text course in the Universities of Jyväskylä and Helsinki during 2001-2003. The thesis emerged from these seminars.
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