CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nicole Eugene
Graphic narratives that feature invisible disabilities must grapple with the dilemmas of representation. This means illustrators, authors, and readers approach narrative ready to wrestle with the interconnected nature of knowledge and visual culture. In her essay about the role of vision in culture, Haraway argues that “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see.”1 This chapter explores how two graphic narrative authors choose to render their invisible mental illness in a visual language and argues that the partial depiction of their lives are examples of feminist embodied knowledge that resists fixed and universalist knowledge claims about the nature of vision and bodies. I conclude that these depictions of mental illness offer two different modes of relating to mental illness and both reflect how mental illness can be visually imagined.
Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a groundbreaking graphic nonfiction book that developed a vocabulary for translating identities that lurk in the shadows of stigma and shame into opportunities to see and be seen on their terms—in comic form.2 This essay focuses on how Bechdel’s book depicts her experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) before turning to Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me, to trace how Forney’s narrative presents an account of her bipolar disorder.3 I claim that Forney’s work is situated in the author’s experience in a way that validates the experiences and perceptions of the mentally ill. The essay concludes by reflecting on how people with invisible disabilities still crave a sense of belonging and suggests graphic narratives appear to be in a position to fulfill this longing to be seen. Additionally, different graphic depictions of mental illness require a concomitant multitude of ways of seeing disability and impairment. Graphic narratives, and the books I discuss here, highlight how the process of seeing determines who can be seen.
Feminist Approaches to the Act of Seeing and Being Seen
Many people with invisible disabilities like mental illness slowly learn to navigate a world that relies on visual culture and visual modes of communication. Accordingly, some people have endeavored to make their invisible impairments more visible to get access to the social assistance and empathy that seem available to those with more apparent impairments.4 Others focus on the simplified visual symbols used to communicate about disability. For example, one woman created a handicap sign that resembles the iconic wheelchair placard for handicapped parking but instead of denoting a specific type of disability the new sign signals towards disabilities that may not be visible.5 Since the invisible nature of mental illness is a barrier to accessing understanding and empathy, graphic narratives offer a unique gift because they cultivate empathy while also laboring to render invisible impairments and hidden deficiencies in visual terms.
Graphic body studies refer to a theoretically grounded analysis of graphic representations of embodied experiences and social identities.6 Feminist commitments to embodied knowledge situate the politics of seeing and being seen prominently in scholarship, praxis, and activism. For example, the critique of the medical gaze, the male gaze, and the Western gaze are not about the perceptual process of observation; rather these critiques posit that seeing and being seen exist within a visual culture and epistemological system that is committed to allocating resources and power to the universal Western male subject. As Haraway explains, “positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices.”7 To explore what Haraway means this chapter will examine the position from which each author speaks when they illustrate their invisible illness.
The medium of graphic narrative allows authors to present their experiences with mental illness in terms that both depart from as well as rely on conventional depictions of mental illness. Haraway refers to the visual as a type of prosthesis because it is an extension of an individual’s perspective and agency.8 This is a type of violence because it overpowers other ways of interpreting and experiencing the world in exchange for a particular view, a particular interpretation, and a particular position. Based on this understanding of vision and feminism, let me propose that an author’s ability to narrate their own experience with a mental illness relies on the violence implicit in the visualization process. This is the God-trick of objective omniscient knowledge that professes to know the psychological subject better than they know themselves. To place one’s inner life and inner thoughts in the hands of a trained professional creates a subject position that is forever tied to an institution to access a language to describe one’s experiences. To see his or her own mental illness, the author’s stories must be entangled in a universalist position while also working as a departure from generic visual systems. In other words, rather than speaking about all people with OCD or all people with bipolar disorder, this picture of their lives and their mental illness is decidedly partial and based on local knowledge. These partial depictions of a particular experience with mental illness are powerful antidotes to stigmatizing ideas about mental illness that isolate and silence those who come to know it.
The graphic narratives I focus on extend feminist embodiment research in two ways: (a) because the authors are both self-described queer feminists,9 and (b) because of how the texts highlight the centrality of the body in everyday life.10 I focus on politics of seeing and being seen as it pertains to feminist accounts of disability, mental illness, and embodiment. How a mental illness is illustrated communicates a relationship to mental illness. Therefore, depictions of mental illness reflect multiple ways of understanding mental illness regardless of the particular position the illustrator/author speaks from.
To illustrate my argument, I will consider moments in Bechdel’s book, Fun Home, before turning to Forney’s Marbles. Bechdel’s depiction of OCD is foregrounded by an account of her family that highlights the role perfection played in her childhood family. Later in the book we encounter OCD wedged within the pages of her book taking on a visual and written form but the condition remains in the background of a larger narrative. Alternatively, Forney’s depiction of bipolar disorder is central to her book. By drawing bipolar disorder, Forney makes the subjective and perceptual dimensions of the condition visible while resisting the position of an omniscient objective author. Both authors present partial accounts of their experience with mental illness that preserve the semiotic context that give their lives and their conditions meaning.
Seeing Bechdel and What Bechdel Sees
Bechdel’s book, Fun Home, is half autobiography and half biography of her father, who she depicts as a secretly queer man who subscribed to heteronormativity while privately adoring Roy, the family’s babysitter.11 In many regards, Bechdel’s book is a typical coming-out narrative in that it chronicles the emergence of the protagonist as a queer identity and in doing so features themes of liberation and loss intertwined with navigation of social rejection, fear of familial misappropriation, and the eventual embrace of gay or queer culture as one’s own.12 Fun Home is the nickname of the funeral home that her father inherited and ran part-time with the help of Allison and her siblings. Similarly, the memoir puts contrary ideas in juxtaposition via the literary trope of a mistrust of surface appearances.
In the first few pages of the book, Bechdel reminisces about the first years in their antique home that required a number of renovations to restore the gothic structure to its original grandeur.13 The children proved to be a great source of help in maintaining such a large antique house. This is significant because it is how her father instills in her an attention to details and love of perfection, which reappears later in the book reconfigured as an obsessive idealization of truth that undermines Bechdel’s memories as she tries to write about how her day went. Bechdel recreates her personal journals including evidence of her bout with OCD and also illustrates the calendar used to manage her self-recovery. Her inclusion of OCD is simultaneously marginal and yet central to understanding Bechdel as an author and as a character in the book. OCD also is another example of the book’s theme of bodies behaving outside of scripted norms.
In an interview, Bechdel admits that she had OCD as a child, but as an adult, she just has compulsive tendencies that help her do the work required to make comic books that aspire to a level of fidelity that few strive for.14 Bechdel’s creative process of authoring the graphic narrative includes ample use of archival material as a way to register the truth of a panel or page. In other words, each panel is a product of long meticulous studies of photographs and artifacts that are eventually transformed into a drawing. Chute says that for Bechdel, “comics is a way for Bechdel to touch the subjects on whom her work focuses and insert herself into their past.”15 Bechdel believes in the visual medium as an arbiter of truth yet she is reticent to embrace a subjectivity that might yield a heteroglossia of truths and perspectives. As a child, teenager, and young adult, Bechdel changes, but as the author who pens the story she is an unchanging figure. Throughout the book she maintains authorial control as the person who has the final say on what can be included in a story that features a stable “I,” an unchanging set of values, and a narrator with a fixed identity.
One might argue that the social and psychological location of the author is absent in the book. Instead of situating her subjectivity within the story, Bechdel’s presence is via the prosthesis of the eye. Her meticulous study of visual scenes inevitably undermines the subjectivity of her story. For example, Bechdel is depicted as queer throughout the book and towards the end of the book she is able to see her father as a fellow queer subject and this reconciles the incongruity between how her father appeared and who he was. However, her father viewed Allison, the child, as cis-female, yet this understanding is not given space. Readers can only see Bechdel’s queer self-portrait and only can access her belief that she was born queer—Bechdel misses an opportunity to put her self-perceptions beside the perceptions others have of her. The chastened authority of her authorial voice might be a useful way to approach mental illness and queer identities but it also silences alternative truths in much the same way.
Bechdel is a leader in queer circles and has the rare distinction of also being a meme: the Bechdel test, an evaluation criterion to quickly see if a creative work, such as a movie, comic book, or TV series has a minimal quantity of females who exist as self-determined individuals independent of men.16 A recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, Bechdel’s influence on the world of comics and graphic narratives cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to take her depiction of OCD seriously.
In Fun Home, Bechdel depicts OCD in layman terms and does not indicate any engagement with the medical system or rehabilitation experts—rather, OCD is a memory from an era of her childhood and it is a condition that debilitates people close to her.17 The absence of a medical authority in her story simultaneously forces the reader to trust Bechdel’s account as an expert of her own past while also warranting skepticism regarding her choice to include depictions of OCD as quirky and funny memories. Her OCD resembles so many postadolescent accounts of puberty—horrible while it lasted, but necessary. In many interviews, she never fails to attribute her success as a comics artist/author to her obsessive-compulsive tendencies.18 She admits that she has a son who lives on disability assistance because of OCD and as well as a partner who also has the condition. With this in mind, let us return to her depiction of OCD in Fun Home and the question of her position. Her portrayal of OCD naturalizes the psychological condition. Rather than casting OCD as aberrant or as abnormal psychology, she shows OCD as a spectrum of behaviors and tendencies. Therefore, readers are presented with a depiction of a child who was closer to one end of the spectrum alongside accounts of an adult who has a different relationship to OCD. Bechdel’s inclusion of OCD appears to cast hidden disabilities in relationship terms. This requires that she not turn to the abstract psychological concepts of the DSM-IV that tend to alienate people not immersed in this world. Bechdel’s unwillingness to pathologize OCD in her narrative is very different from Forney’s approach to mental illness, which relies on psychology and pathology for a sense of perspective.
How Forney Sees Bipolar and How She Sees with Bipolar
In Marbles, the plot is guided by Forney’s struggle to personally, historically, and artistically understand bipolar disorder. Discovery of the “Van Gogh club” causes Forney to wonder if unmedicated madness is needed to be a successful artist and writer.19 This manic brainstorm motivates a dismissal of her therapist’s help only to be eventually pummeled by depression. There is little visual continuity as she shifts from depictions of manic periods to episodes of depression—and that is the point. The images change because her perceptions of the world change in relationship to the swinging pendulum of bipolar disorder.
Forney’s decision to incorporate subjective intrapersonal dialogue as a major aspect of her experience of bipolar disorder invites the reader into the mind of a person dealing with mental illness. Forney’s rendering of subjectivity is informed by feminist sensibilities and by the extensive research she did on the experience of living with bipolar disorder. As mentioned earlier, Haraway’s call for feminist partial objectivity, or situated knowledge, draws on metaphors of seeing that have particular relevance to the task of analyzing Forney’s graphic memoir.20 I will argue in this section that Forney’s approach to visualizing mental illness draws attention to how seeing involves a neural processing of sensory stimuli that is influenced by her psychological state. Her memoir testifies to how no image or experience is unmediated; there are only highly specific possibilities, each presenting its own wonderfully detailed, partial, active way of organizing the world. Forney’s depiction of perception as mediated by the mind is a type of radical situatedness that allows readers to see visual systems at work.
Forney makes explicit overtures to perceptual processes by sandwiching her book between a front-page and end-page that are optical illusions: like Magic Eye books, the words “Let’s take a look at these symptoms” are repeated and placed in a way that hides the secret “YOU ARE CRAZY.”21 Forney approaches the medium disregarding its conventions, endeavoring to overcome the limits of books by creating an awareness of the process of perception. The book, as an object and the story it contains, recognizes that perceptual processes not only buttress explicit events—indeed, they buttress everything.
Another dimension of the subjective experience of living with bipolar disorder is the presence of mood-specific memories. As Martin suggests, the act of being treated and the process of managing bipolar disorder change a person’s subjectivity.22 The constant charting of one’s mood in relation to an unchanging instrument of measurement transforms a patient who wonders, as Forney did, “what is too happy?” into a patient who can answer this question based on a meticulous charting of her previous mood cycles. Forney communicates her past from the position of a person who has been managing bipolar disorder for several years now. In other words, the currently stable Forney is writing about a previously depressed or manic Forney by doing what Spector-Mersel calls appropriate meaning attribution: a technique in which a storyteller changes the meaning of an event to fit the purpose of the story.23 This is necessary because often the gap between the meaning that the event carried at the time of occurrence and the meaning at the time of telling is noted.24 Forney communicates the difference between the original meaning and the appropriated meaning by repeatedly remarking on the role of mood in creating memories and understandings.25 Memories are physiological processes that are inextricably tied to the very cognitive processes that make perception possible. These often-silent processes are most visible when they malfunction, as in the case of bipolar disorder.
Depression has many forms in Forney’s narrative. Rather than having a sound the way mania did, depression looks like round spheres that threaten to fall and compress Forney.26 The silence, inactivity, and hypersolitude of depression are poetically described when her first depression episode occurs. The subjective act of perceiving and interpreting stimuli is a part of the experience of the mental illness, and more importantly, it is a part of the management of the condition. Refaie points out how consciousness is usually directed outside of the self so much that the body disappears, yet when our body seizes our attention it is a dys-appearance: it appears by malfunctioning.27 Similar to the cancer narratives that Refaie examined, Forney’s work in Marbles makes several moments of dys-appearance visible, and in doing so the work calls attention to the relays between the self and the body in lived experience of having mental illness.
Unlike Bechdel’s book, which does not include a role for health professionals, Forney seems to actively orchestrate treatment, initiate intermissions, and persuade her therapist. Forney’s nondisclosures, confessions, reservations, and fears portray an active agent and not a passive recipient of medical care. When Forney later returns to the question of her membership in the “Van Gogh club” and refers to the people in the club as “company,” she shows how managing the solitary experience of mental illness requires community and a sense of belonging. Mental illness challenges the connections that bind people together, and accordingly, management of mental illness requires extra attention to these interpersonal aspects of the condition. In her memoir and in interviews Forney has encouraged people to “embrace their illness.”28 This call is not solely directed to the people who have mental illness but includes everyone who might ever be directly or indirectly touched by fire.
Conclusion: Multiple Ways of Seeing Mental Illness
Both narratives, Fun Home and Marbles, help readers imagine a life with mental illness in ways that recognize that stigma and shame are not a major part of everyone’s experience with mental illness.29 Bechdel approaches the task of seeing as a straightforward process from a position of an author who determines what can and cannot be seen. Forney, on the other hand, renders the subjective and at times isolating experience of mental illness in terms that recognizes how mental illness affects perceptual processes—which is often a delegitimizing position to speak from. Rather than devaluing the position of being in the midst of a manic episode or depressive episode, Forney’s rendering validates people who view the world through the tinted lenses of mental illness. Although they each present distinct dilemmas of seeing and being seen, both Bechdel’s position as a friend of people with OCD and Forney’s position as a person with mental illness are useful feminist techniques for situating one’s position as they approach the task of turning an invisible condition like mental illness into a visual story.
Notes
1. Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 196.
2. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
3. Ellen Forney, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (New York: Gotham Books, 2012); Bechdel, Fun Home.
4. Natalya N. Bazarova and Yoon Hyung Choi, “Self-Disclosure in Social Media: Extending the Functional Approach to Disclosure Motivations and Characteristics on Social Network Sites,” Journal of Communication 64, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 635–57, doi:10.1111/jcom.12106.
5. Andrea Gordon, “Hidden Disability Symbol May Be the Key to Raising Brain Injury Awareness,” Life, Toronto Star, March 1, 2015, Sunday edition http://www.thestar.com/life/2015/03/01/hidden-disability-symbol-may-be-the-key-to-raising-brain-injury-awareness.html.
6. Martha Stoddard Holmes, “Cancer Comics: Narrating Cancer through Sequential Art,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 33, no. 1 (2013): 147–162.
7. Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” 195.
8. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988); Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision.”
9. S. McBean, “Seeing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28, no. 3 84 (January 1, 2013): 103–123, doi:10.1215/02705346-2352167; Tom Spurgeon, “Holiday Interview with Ellen Forney,” blog, The Comics Reporter, (December 21, 2012), http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_holiday_interview_4_ellen_forney/.
10. Courtney Donovan, “Representations of Health, Embodiment, and Experience in Graphic Memoir,” Configurations 22, no. 2 (2014): 237–253, doi:10.1353/con.2014.0013.
11. Bechdel, Fun Home, 79, 211.
12. Monica B. Pearl, “Graphic Language,” Prose Studies 30, no. 3 (December 2008): 286–304.
13. Bechdel, Fun Home, 3–17.
14. Tim Teeman, “Alison Bechdel: Genius to Watch Out For,” The Daily Beast, September 18, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/18/alison-bechdel-genius-to-watch-out-for.html.
15. Hillary Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives,” Profession, 2011, 113.
16. Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, 1st ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
17. Teeman, “Alison Bechdel”; Judith Thurman, “Drawn from Life,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/drawn-from-life.
18. Anna Gross, “Interview with Alison Bechdel,” AV Club, October 10, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/article/alison-bechdel-63105; Teeman, “Alison Bechdel.”
19. Forney, Marbles, 22.
20. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”
21. Forney, Marbles, 241.
22. Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2009).
23. Gabriela Spector-Mersel, “Mechanisms of Selection in Claiming Narrative Identities: A Model for Interpreting Narratives,” Qualitative Inquiry 17, no. 2 (February 1, 2011): 172–185, doi:10.1177/1077800410393885.
24. Ibid.
25. Forney, Marbles, 30, 77, 153.
26. Ibid., 124–126.
27. Elisabeth El Refaie, “Appearances and Dis/dys-Appearances,” Metaphor and the Social World 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 109–125.
28. Grace Bello, “Page Turner: Ellen Forney,” Curve Magazine, November 7, 2012, http://www.curvemag.com/Curve-Magazine/Web-Articles-2012/Page-Turners-Ellen-Forney/; Forney, Marbles; Spurgeon, “Holiday Interview with Ellen Forney.”
29. Bechdel, Fun Home; Forney, Marbles.