PART II
CHAPTER NINE
Laura E. Colmenero-Chilberg
Madness … the word brings a cascade of popular cultural images to mind. Some may think of Norse berserkers running headlong into battle; others of Shakespeare’s Ophelia broken by “love madness” from the cruelty of her beloved Hamlet,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Perhaps the image that comes to mind is of the abandoned forever-bride Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Or maybe if you’re a traditionalist, it is the ancient Greek maenads madly worshipping Dionysus, the “raving ones” dancing in a frenzy intoxicated by wine and their revels. Or if the images that pop into mind are more recent, maybe you think of The Hobbit’s Gollum, driven mad by his obsession with “his precious” or the insane fan in Stephen King’s Misery. The possibilities seem endless. While we see images of both male and female madness throughout history, one thing is very clear—much of the discourse about madness has revolved around the condemnation of and an attempt to control women.
What do we mean when we say “madness”? Andrew Scull’s definition in Madness in Civilization is “massive and lasting disturbances of reason, intellect and emotions” resulting in “sadness, isolation, alienation, misery and the death of reason and of consciousness.”1 When in the company of madness, the “sane” feel a frisson of horror seeing the images, hearing the sounds, witnessing the irrationality, all calling up a primal fear and with it the stigmatizing label of madness. What then is the difference between madness and mental illness? The medicalization of madness began during the 19th century when it became the purview of males in the medical profession and soon became mental illness. Today, mental illness is a social construct largely defined by the DSM-5, a quite controversial diagnostic tool. This essay, however, will focus on the original definition of madness.
The history of women and madness, in particular what became known as hysteria, will be our focus. Throughout western history we have seen this deviance “named” in a variety of ways when applied to women stigmatizing those who are uppity, who are sinful, and who are mad. The focus of this study is two historical works of literature that defined female agency as madness, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” compared to several examples of modern and contemporary popular culture including Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, and the television series Penny Dreadful. While we might expect that in the past women might have been controlled by the threat of the label “insane,” we’ll see that today this same kind of women’s agency is also often seen as “crazy,” continuing a long-standing tradition of controlling women by defining them as insane.
History of Madness and Women2
The earliest image of madness in women can be found from around 1900 BCE in Ancient Egypt. The condition is thought to have been hysteria, a term based on the Latin word for uterus, a mental disorder that is automatically identified as a “female malady.” The explanation for why women suffer from this mental disorder remains constant throughout much of history: the spontaneous movement of the uterus in women’s bodies. Symptoms included seizures, a sense of suffocation, and fear of impending death. Treatment was logical within the context of the time period; the uterus had to be driven back to its proper location. Foul-smelling and pungent odors were placed near a woman’s mouth and nose and sweet-smelling ones next to the vagina thus driving and drawing the uterus back to where it belonged. It is also interesting to note that another term for madness, “lunacy,” also has ties to women. Luna is Latin for the moon, and lunacy is madness often thought to have been brought on by the moon. Clear links can be drawn between women’s “lunacy” and their menstrual cycles, motherhood, and sexuality.
The ancient Greeks also saw the uterus as the offending part of the body and its irregular movement as the cause of women’s madness. The reason for the movement, however, differed somewhat from the Egyptian explanation. The organ suffered from melancholy brought on by a lack of carnal satisfaction. Unmarried, sterile, and widowed women were encouraged to engage in sexual activity to stop movement of the uterus, but if it did occur, the cure was the same odor treatment as used by the ancient Egyptians. When we look at another ancient culture, Rome, we find that the physician Galen suggested similar remedies including purges, herbs with strong odors, getting married, and limiting those activities that could excite women.
Greek and Roman explanations and treatments retained authority even after the fall of Rome. Like Hippocrates, Trotula de Ruggiero, the first woman physician in Christian Europe, identified abstinence as the root cause of hysteria and melancholy in women. Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, another woman physician, used a religious explanation; these mental disorders were incurable and the result of original sin, for which she held men and women equally responsible. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, took the more popular path of misogyny identifying women as defective and inferior and totally responsible for original sin, and also, therefore, their madness. It is at this time in history that women with these disorders began to be the target of supernatural explanations for their mental ailments with exorcism identified as the appropriate cure. In the early Middle Ages, exorcism was not considered a punishment for women’s sin but instead was a cure for the illness caused by the sin. By the late Middle Ages, with the publication of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, a witch hunter’s manual, attitudes change; it’s all about punishment for women’s demonic possession, not treatment of the mental disorders.
Throughout the Renaissance and into the modern age, the focus of explaining mental disorders in women was still on the uterus. For example, Victorian women carried smelling salts in case of fainting, which probably had more to do with tight corsets than wandering uteruses. The strong and malodorous smell of the salts was believed to return the womb to the proper location in the body, after which the woman would awaken. It was not the salts that brought a woman back to her senses; they returned the uterus to its proper location and the woman’s body to equilibrium. In late 19th-century America, beliefs about what caused madness in women included grief, use of abusive language, suppressed menstruation, sexual promiscuity, epilepsy, overexertion, disagreement with the dominant religious beliefs, and failure to accept male authority, all of which could result in imprisonment in an asylum.3 These ideas about women and the causes of their insanity would not change until the 20th century.
Today, we still focus primarily on women. According to “Behavioral Health Trends in the United States: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health” sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,4 women are more likely to suffer from a serious mental illness than men except in the case of schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and ADHD. Madness remains woman-identified.
Women’s Madness, Traditional Gendered Roles, and the Mass Media
Beliefs about correct gender behavior are threads running through every part of society, and training in doing gender right begins at birth and runs throughout the life course.
Traditionally, women are identified as dependent, men as independent; women as caregivers, men as breadwinners; women as passive, men as aggressors; women as incompetent, men as powerful, often over women. Women are required to provide self-denying generosity, to limit their physical location primarily to their homes, and not to engage in adventurous or sexual behaviors. Women are required to look pleasing as well as to be chaste, emotional, nice, and flexible. On the other hand, men are encouraged to compete, to be adventurous, courageous, and sexually active. They are to limit all emotions except for aggression and anger, and be rational, logical, and independent. Madness, which can be seen as rampant emotionality, is the very antithesis of logic and rationality and, therefore, seen as a feminine characteristic.
Images in the media, both past and present, still often represent traditional gender roles, but what about images related specifically to women and madness? Do these, too, identify a narrow role for women, a role that is both confining and limiting?
Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Let’s look at two historical works of fiction that deal with women and madness—Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre provides us with the character of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad wife. Confined and hidden in the attic (the original madwoman in the attic5), Bronte describes Bertha as both hideous and violent.
In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal; but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.6
Bertha’s madness is inherited from her mother (“a madwoman and a drunkard”), and like her mother, after marriage Bertha becomes “intemperate and unchaste.” She fails to meet many of the traditionally required characteristics of a woman of the Victorian time period; most particularly, she breaks the sexual behavior rule. Described as a “monster of sexual appetite,” Bronte ties Bertha’s madness to her female sexuality, reporting that during blood-red moons she becomes most vicious and destructive, hallucinating a familiar who tells her “to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones.”7
At first glance Bertha appears to be the insane foil to Jane’s sane grounded pragmatism. But is she, or is Bertha really the cautionary example to rein in Janes’ passionate and independent nature? Worried about the possibility of descending into love madness, Jane says,
[I]t is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and if discovered and responded to, must lead, [will-o’-the-wisp]-like into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.8
And when pressured by Rochester to become his mistress, Jane attempts to stave off her own madness.
I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by men when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.9
It is not only a fear of madness that concerns Jane, but also a fear of the loss of her sense of self.10 She comes to realize that her relationship with Rochester will never be one of equal partners, an idea clearly but subtly communicated by his gently couched threat:
[I]t is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently: and once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I’ll just—figuratively speaking—attach you to a chain, like this (touching his watch guard).11
While Bronte never discusses wandering uteruses, the failure of Bertha to conform to society’s expectations resulted in her incarceration in her own private asylum. The message is clear: if Jane does not control her own passions and toe the gender line, Rochester may have to lock her up too.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”12 continues the same themes seen in Jane Eyre. A woman’s perceived madness is seen as both a symptom of and a cause of a woman’s descent into madness. The story centers on another Jane, a woman who has been confined by her husband John, usually in their upstairs bedroom (another madwoman in the attic). The room has been papered in a horrible shade of yellow. “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow.” The confinement is a Victorian “neurasthenic rest-cure” and is prescribed by John, a doctor, because he believes she is suffering from “but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.” The neurasthenic rest cure was developed by a well-respected physician, S. Weir Mitchell, during the 19th century. Treatment included enforced bed rest, isolation, force-feeding, and massage. Perkins Gilman’s description of this cure in “The Yellow Wallpaper” rings particularly true because she had actually been a patient of Weir’s after suffering what today would be called acute postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she reports Weir’s prescription: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time…. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.”13
It is clear that John places the blame for the condition directly on Jane, whom he sees behaving in a way that perpetuates “a false and foolish fancy.”14 Whatever the reason, she is expected to spend most of her time resting in the ugly yellow bedroom, overseen/spied on by her husband and servant, and ordered to rest and spend her life passively, isolated, and with no mental activity. With nothing to occupy her, her focus and then her obsession becomes the horrible yellow wallpaper.
Jane’s first hallucination is eyes—bulbous and unblinking—all over the yellow walls, constantly watching her. This may be an indirect reference to a new form of prison developed during the Victorian period, the panopticon, a prison where inmates are always within the sight of guards, paralleling Jane’s feeling that she is being watched. Although originally a nursery, the room has other prison-like characteristics including bars on the windows and rings mounted on the wall, bringing to mind shackled prisoners.
Jane’s delusion soon changes. In addition to the eyes, she begins to see a figure moving beneath the wallpaper. “[I]t is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.”15 Eventually Jane begins to tear the wallpaper off the walls, trying to get to the figure imprisoned behind it, but by the time it is all removed, Jane herself has begun creeping about the walls telling John, “I’ve got out at last … in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”16 Jane is no longer Jane but has become the woman trapped behind the wallpaper.
Perkins Gilman’s short story gives us both a view of how women were controlled by the male application of the label “mad” and how the imposition of that stigmatizing label may intensify the harmful effects of the mental disorder.
A Streetcar Named Desire, Kill Bill, and Penny Dreadful
Switch time periods to the mid-20th century through present day and we find a very different collection of popular culture choices.
A mid-20th century investigation of the madness of women can be seen in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams identified the main theme in all his fiction as “the destructive impact of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual.”17 Blanche DuBois aptly illustrates this kind of person. Beautiful, delicate, sexually promiscuous, dependent “on the kindness of strangers,” and somewhat eccentric in attitude, speech, and dress, Blanche loses her job and her family home and turns to her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, for support. Raised with her sister in shabby refinement, Blanche is unable to accept the lifestyle of the Kowalskis, seeing it as vulgar and brutal. Initially merely unwelcomed by her brother-in-law, tensions continue to rise, culminating in Blanche’s rape by Stanley. Stella chooses to believe Stanley over her sister about the rape and tells her friend, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.”18 It is Stella that calls the asylum to institutionalize her sister.
Blanche’s emotional and eccentric nature coupled with her sexual promiscuity breaks the gender rules, and her punishment is to be publicly indicted, imprisoned, and labeled crazy. Just as in Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is the male that controls a woman’s life and dispenses punishment for what he deems unwomanly and deviant behavior through rape and the label “crazy.”
Kill Bill 1 and 2, on the other hand, provide us with the character of The Bride, an atypical woman who on the surface fails to fit the traditional characteristics of a woman. A martial-arts-trained assassin and part of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS), The Bride becomes tired of that life, falls in love, becomes pregnant, and is at the church about to be married when the DiVAS arrives, led by Bill—her past boss, lover, and father of her unborn child. The squad kills everyone and Bill shoots The Bride in the head. She falls into a coma and awakens four years later with a steel plate in her head and no child, catapulting her on a campaign of revenge against the DiVAS. She plans to kill them all, saving Bill for last so he can suffer the anticipation of his impending death. She is successful in her revenge but discovers that her daughter lived and was raised by Bill. The Bride kills Bill, and she and her daughter go off together, mother and child reunited.19
The character of The Bride at first does not seem to conform to the traditional woman’s role script—she is aggressive, courageous, and adventurous and uses logic to guide her actions—all traditionally male characteristics. But it is clearly emotion and the denial of motherhood that guides her path of revenge. Her grief at the assumed death of her child pushes her over the line from sanity to insanity. Where her past assassinations were business, the death of the DiVAS is personal, maternal, and ruthlessly violent. There are no accusations of insanity directed at The Bride, but the impetus for her actions is clearly outside of the norm and as a result of behaviors that have typically resulted in a label of insanity.
The last example of contemporary mass media is Showtime’s series Penny Dreadful,20 a unique mash-up of Victorian horror characters which include Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; Victor Frankenstein, the Monster, and an updated Bride of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Van Helsing, Renfield, and Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and Dr. Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Add to this set of literary characters Sir Malcolm Murray, an African explorer; Ethan Chandler, an American werewolf gunslinger; and Vanessa Ives, a sometimes demon-possessed witch.
The character of Vanessa Ives certainly falls into the category of mad hysteric. She is over-the-top emotional, sexually promiscuous, a practitioner of witchcraft, and a target of the devil. The season 3 opener finds her dirty, unkempt, and eating like an animal, somewhat reminiscent of Bertha in Jane Eyre. Her bouts of deep depression and catatonia fit well within the criteria of madness established for the time period. But it is not only Vanessa who suffers from deep pits of depression from which it is a struggle to escape. In fact, most of the male characters, too, have these same troubles, and almost all have their origins in family issues, usually seen as the concern of female characters.
Victor Frankenstein, an opium addict, allows his fascination with science to lead him to take on the role of God and create life—the original male Monster, a second male creature, and a female Bride. Victor is horrified by the first creature, both because of his shocking physical deformity and the anger he directs at his maker. In turn the original Monster despises Victor. In revenge the Monster kills the second male, with whom Victor had bonded. Trying to placate the creature, Victor creates a Bride for him, but she rejects both Victor, the father figure who incestuously lusts after her, and the Monster. Suffering from grief and betrayal by the “family” he has created, Victor enters a lingering drug-fueled depression.
Sir Malcolm lets his obsession with Africa stand in the way of being a “good father.” He loses his son because the young man is unable to achieve his father’s high standards, dying in the attempt; he loses his daughter to vampirism, and his wife is killed by his mistress. His disastrous family relationships send him over the edge into alcohol abuse and depression.
It is family, too, that haunts Ethan Chandler, as well as his uncontrollable and violent werewolf alter ego. At the end of season 2, Chandler’s father kidnaps his son and has him transported in chains back to the American Southwest. Guilt at the murders he unknowingly commits when in his werewolf form and his clearly coming from a severely dysfunctional family contribute to Chandler’s own isolation and depression and the denial of his love and abandonment of Vanessa.
Hysterical behavior in Penny Dreadful does not limit itself to a single gender but paints both sexes with its brush. Throughout history, we have seen women controlled by men who determine when their behavior is “rational” and when it is “mad.”
Popular culture throughout history has reflected this image of women, and we still see elements of that today. However, we are also seeing the redefinition of gender roles in some of these fictional works to include male characters who clearly have adopted some characteristics of women’s madness.
Notes
1. Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 11.
2. Cecilia Tasca et al., “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Illness,” Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health, 8 (2012): 110–119.
3. Katherine Pouba and Ashley Tianen, “Lunacy in the 19th Century: Women’s Admission to Asylums in United States of America,” Oshkosh Scholar, 1 (2006): 95.
4. Sarra L. Hedden et al., “Behavioral Trends in the U.S.: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,” National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, 2014), 28.
5. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000).
6. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 370.
7. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 67.
8. Bronte, 201.
9. Bronte, 404–405.
10. Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 33–34.
11. Bronte, 341.
12. Bronte, 201.
13. Anne Stiles, “The Rest Cure, 1875–1924,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and 19th-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-stiles-the-rest-cure-1873–1925.
14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985), 1156.
15. Perkins Gilman, 1155.
16. Perkins Gilman, 1161.
17. Jacqueline O’Connor, Dramatizing Dementia: Madness in the Plays of Tennessee Williams (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 5.
18. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet, 1951), 133.
19. Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill, 2003.
20. John Logan, Penny Dreadful, Showtime.