Madness in literature : a closer look

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to investigate the notion of madness in literature from various perspectives. Whilst not being by all means a comprehensive study of the subject, mental illness has been treated from a historical, cultural and autobiographical point of view. The historical aspect of the thesis sets out to traces the origins and development of representations of madness in literature from Classical times up to modem and contemporary representations. Madness in literature seemed to stem from different sources which changed according to the literary periods for instance from divine inspiration and possession in antiquity to an internal bodily change later on. The cultural aspect of the dissertation presents Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the opposition between the novel's hero, Randle Patrick McMurphy and the ward's matriarch as a reflection of America at the time that the novel was published. Essentially this opposition is also; as Michel Foucault argues in History of Madness, an opposition between Reason and Unreason; the institution's attempt to confine madness within its grasp. The autobiographical aspect of the dissertation will focus on Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted and will consider the writer's claim to sanity whilst she was institutionalized at McLean Hospital. It will also be necessary to consider that she is writing her autobiography with hindsight and that the reader may actually be confronted with only one side of the coin. The dissertation's conclusion will consider an issue which is both fundamental to a discussion of madness and unanswerable, the feigning of insanity and its implications on the novels considered in the previous chapters. Madness is part of the human condition or essentially human intention?