Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  Of course, “housework” and “motherhood” are not necessarily more time-consuming or degrading than a fifteen-hour day in an office, factory, or coal mine. But then, most male poets do not work in coal mines, and for such long hours. Somehow, once recognized, they gain some sort of acceptance, however seedy, however limited, by the male literary brotherhood. Not so for Plath. Alvarez notes that he was at first shocked that Sylvia Plath was Mrs. Sylvia Hughes. He reacted to her as to a “bright young housewife.” Although he came to respect her work enormously, he became Ted’s and not Sylvia’s drinking mate and occasional friend. With great honesty, he retells his early reactions to such strongly feminist poems as Daddy and Lady Lazarus: he was “appalled … at first hearing, the things [poems] seemed to be not so much poetry as assault and battery.” Many later critics, including female critics, have felt the same way. Plath was lonely and isolated. Her genius did not earn for her certain reprieves and comforts tendered the male artist. No one, and especially men of culture, felt “responsible” for her plight or felt responsible to honor the poet by “saving” the woman. After separating from her husband, Plath continued to write and keep house for her children. On the night of February 10, or the morning of February 11, 1963, she killed herself.

  Those of us who love Plath’s poetry and who have read what Plath has written about her relationship to her mother and about her psychiatric hospitalization tend to view Plath sympathetically. Many have viewed her as a feminist martyr, trapped in the 1950s, cruelly abandoned by a philandering husband. There is, however, another side to Plath. Biographer Anne Stevenson, in Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, described Plath as

  first the bright and smiling mask that she presented to everyone, and then, through that, the determined, insistent, obsessive, impatient person who snapped if things did not go her way, and (who) flew into sudden rages. Plath wrote that “if anyone ever disarranged my things I’d feel as if I had been raped intellectually.” Indeed, when a friend penciled some passages in a book she had borrowed from Plath, “she brought down the wrath of the avenging angel.”

  According to Dr. Christine Anne Lawson in Understanding the Borderline Mother, Plath—and other “borderline hermit mothers”—might view suicide as an “accomplishment,” a “last act of free will.” Lawson, quoting from the Stevenson, Hughes, and McCullough biographies of Plath, suggests that Plath was cold, secretive, asocial, “guarded her lesson plans as though they contained classified information,” and was “intensely jealous.” According to Lawson, long before her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had been unfaithful to her, Plath assumed that he had. Once, while Hughes was at a business meeting, Plath “… became hysterical and destroyed his manuscripts, as well as his favorite book, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, in a vicious display of unbridled rage, irrational jealousy, and paranoia. Hughes later confided in a friend that the incident was a turning point in their marriage.”

  Few feminist supporters—myself included—ever paused to acknowledge that Plath, the victim, could also be Plath, the victimizer. Indeed, this is precisely how intergenerational patterns of pathology tend to work. In Plath’s view, her own mother, Aurelia, had dominated her children through martyrdom. Plath wrote:

  The Children were her salvation. She put them First. Herself bound to the track naked and the train called Life coming with a frown and a choo-choo around the bend. The burden upon Redeeming children is too great, unfair. What to do with her, with the hostility, undying, which I feel for her? … She’s a killer. Watch out. She’s deadly.

  These four women were treated and/or imprisoned by male psychiatrists—most of whom were, quite literally, agents for their husbands’ “will.” Packard’s psychiatrist-jailer offered to testify for her husband at her insanity hearing. Dr. MacFarland knew that Elizabeth Packard was not “mentally ill.” After sexually approaching her and being rebuffed, he abandoned her to the brutality and anonymity of the “back wards.” She clearly saw that Dr. MacFarland’s “cure” was the “subjection of the wife to the husband’s will.” Her “therapy” consisted of imprisonment and domestic servitude to the other women. She washed them, prayed with them, comforted them, and tried to shield them from beatings. She also freely “chose” to participate in slave labor.

  By sewing for the State, as its imprisoned slave, I can buy the privilege of exchanging the putrid, loathsome air of the ward, for the more wholesome purer atmosphere of the sewing room for half a day. [The male inmates could choose to work on Dr. MacFarland’s private farm.]

  Such slave labor still exists in rural American state mental asylums: the jobs are neatly parceled out along sex-role lines.

  According to her biographer, Barbara Sapinsley, Elizabeth Packard “herself was locked in the screen room [solitary confinement], for trying to help a patient who was being straightjacketed for screaming with pain from an injury acquired during an earlier punishment. The nurse in charge was eventually dismissed for abusing patients and six months later reappeared as a patient herself.” Undaunted, Elizabeth “took charge” of the Eighth Ward. She ministered to her sisters in bondage. She washed (both them and their rooms, daily), comforted, and prayed with them. She tried to shield them from beatings and from suicide. Against all odds, Elizabeth never lost her “wits.”

  Theophilus, her husband, forbade their children, whose ages ranged from eighteen months to eighteen years, to communicate with or talk about her. He kept her inherited income from her, deprived her of her clothes, books, and personal papers and misrepresented her situation to her father and brothers. Dr. Andrew McFarland, the psychiatrist-director of the asylum, remaindered her outgoing mail and seized her few books and smuggled-in writing paper.

  For three and a half years, Elizabeth was not allowed to see her minor children. Elizabeth finally convinced the asylum trustees that she was God-fearing and sane. After forty-two months, Elizabeth was released to her oldest son who had just turned twenty-one—but against her will. Fiercely logical, Elizabeth did not want to return to Theophilus’ custody since he had the power to commit her again somewhere else. (And would soon try to do exactly that).

  Theophilus was unemployed and at home, full-time. The house was dirty, the children disheveled. Theophilus forbid the children to speak to their mother. He also intercepted Elizabeth’s mail, forbid her to leave the house, and then locked her in the bedroom. After six weeks of being a prisoner in her own home, Elizabeth smuggled out a note. Friends took the note to a judge who issued a writ of habeas corpus. Before Theophilus could act on his plan to psychiatrically imprison her again, this time in Massachusetts, Theophilus first had to prove to a jury in Kankakee, Illinois, that Elizabeth was, in fact, “insane.” The trial was a sensation. The local ladies turned out in full force in support of Elizabeth. In 1864, a jury of twelve men “acquitted” Elizabeth of insanity. She returned home, triumphant, only to discover that Theophilus had mortgaged her dowry-bought house and fled to Massachusetts with their underage children. Elizabeth was homeless and penniless.

  Thus, she began selling a printed version of her Asylum writings to passersby for ten cents apiece. From 1864 on, Elizabeth supported herself by selling copies of her autobiography entitled Modern Persecution: Insane Asylums Unveiled (Vol. 1) and Married Women’s Liabilities (Vol. 2). She drafted bills on behalf of the rights of married women to retain their own wages, and to be heard by a jury, or a judge, before being committed to an asylum. She championed the rights of mental patients to send and receive mail.

  In 1865, the Illinois State Legislature passed what became known as “Mrs. Packard’s Personal Liberty Bill.” Elizabeth was maligned as “insane,” a follower of “spiritualism” and “Goddess worship,” a “strumpet,” and “immoral.” Elizabeth understood that to obtain justice for herself meant obtaining it for others in her situation. Utterly canny, clearsighted, Elizabeth wanted to be sure that Theophilus had no legal right to hospitalize her again; no way of seizing her earnings or real property; no right to deny her any visitat
ion or to retain custody of their minor children. She miraculously prevailed.

  Zelda Fitzgerald’s psychiatrists, in Nancy Milford’s words, tried to “reeducate her in terms of her role as wife to Scott.” When Zelda said she wanted to be an artist, her male psychiatrist asked her whether being a famous writer would be more important to her than her life with Scott. Holding up the specter of old age and lovelessness, he asked her whether that would be enough for her when she was over sixty. All of Zelda’s psychiatrists consulted with Scott about his wife’s “condition” and about what was “good” for her. In 1931, when Zelda was released after a year and three months of treatment, her “case” was summarized as an inferiority complex—particularly toward Scott. The psychiatrists declared her ambitions to be forms of self-deceptions, which had deeply troubled their marriage. Over the years, despite Zelda’s pitiful requests for freedom, her obedient confessions of self-blame, and her promises of “good behavior,” the men decided if and when she could spend “vacations” outside the asylum.

  Zelda tells Scott that she is so unhappy she would rather be in an asylum. His response is cold and defensive: he doesn’t care to hear such things. Zelda, in heroically and tragically self-destructive fashion, sees that there is no difference between being hospitalized and being married. She would rather be open about it; she would rather stop the social lie. Let her dependency, helplessness, abandonment, and unhappiness be seen for what it was. Of course, Zelda remains a financial and psychological burden to Scott—one that he bears—as long as she is willing to isolate herself and view herself as “sick” or “bad.” However, neither “madness” nor mental asylums offered her “asylum” or “freedom.”

  Plath’s autobiographical heroine, Esther Greenwood, remains unmarried but is sent to a male psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon. He sits, happily enthroned at his polished desk, surrounded by books and family photographs. Esther wonders:

  How could this Dr. Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?

  He intones the standard “suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong” and Esther

  … turned the words over suspiciously like round, sea-polished pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change into something else. What did I think was wrong? I only thought it was wrong.

  Dr. Gordon recommends shock therapy for her. Plath’s description of this treatment of choice for “manic-depressives,” most of whom are women, is as follows:

  Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.

  I shut my eyes.

  There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light and with each flash a great jolt struck me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

  I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

  One of Ellen West’s psychiatrists, thought she was getting better because

  … whereas during the summer she was repulsively ugly, since then she has grown more and more feminine and almost pretty.

  During one of her asylum periods she, like Esther Greenwood, developed a “homo-erotic” attachment—which, of course, was certainly not encouraged. West’s last letter before fatally poisoning herself was written to this woman.

  Fitzgerald, Plath, and West were desperately and defiantly at odds with the female role. They attempted to escape its half-life by “going crazy.” Plath describes the asylum inmates as “blank and stopped as a dead baby.” There, as “helpless” and “self-destructive” children, they were superficially freed from their female roles as wives and mothers. Plath correctly saw that there was nothing very different about

  … us in Belsize and the girls playing Bridge and gossiping in the college to which I would return. Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

  Uncannily, Ellen West also referred to her condition as being in a “glass ball.”

  I feel myself excluded from all real life. I am quite isolated. I sit in a glass ball. I see people through a glass wall, their voices come to me muffled…. I stretch out my arms toward them; but my hands merely beat against the walls of my glass ball.

  All four women existed under a “bell jar”—both inside and outside the asylum. For them, madness and confinement were both an expression of female powerlessness and an unsuccessful attempt to reject and overcome this state. Madness and asylums generally function as mirror images of the female experience, and as penalties for being “female,” as well as for desiring or daring not to be. If the dare is enacted deeply or dramatically enough, death (through slow or fast suicide) ensues. I. J. Singer portrays this in “The Dead Fiddler,” a story about a young girl’s possession by a dybbuk or demon.15 The girl, Liebe Yentl, is reared in an orthodox Jewish household in which her father “paid little attention to her (and) prayed to God to send her the right husband.” Despite this, she spends most of her time alone, reading. She “complained that the girls of the town were common and backward: as soon as they were married they became careless and slovenly.” A marriage is arranged, but the groom dies before the wedding. A second betrothal is arranged, but unconsummated, as Liebe Yentl is “invaded” by a dybbuk—with a male voice. The dybbuk is a boisterous adventurer—a fiddler—who demands liquor, laughingly insults the townspeople, both quotes and mocks the Torah—and all in singsong rhyme. Soon the fiddler has the village dancing in Liebe Yentl’s bedroom, as he-she

  … told each one exactly what he was: a miser or a swindler, a sycophant or a beggar, a slattern or a snob … most of the time he heaped mud and ashes upon the respected leaders of the community and their wives … his jests provoked both astonishment and laughter.

  Suddenly, Liebe Yentl is invaded by a second, and female, dybbuk, who is a barmaid and whore. Beyle Tslove, for that is her name, sings “ribald songs and soldiers’ ditties.” She calls Liebe Yentl’s father a “short Friday—nothing but bone and beard.”

  Liebe Yentl is able to avoid an unwanted husband through her “madness”—it is the only way she can. Only in “madness” can she also tyrannize her parents, inspire fear and respect, “name” reality as she sees it, criticize the community’s hypocrisy, and engage in some very “unfeminine” behavior: drinking, boasting, and dirty-joke telling. It is important to note that she doesn’t become a rabbi or a highway-woman; she remains in a feminine reclining position. After the two dybbuks depart her body, Liebe Yentl still refuses to marry her parents’ bridegroom choice. Isolation, poverty, neglect, and death are her fate. She is discovered dead, one day

  … among piles of garbage, in a long shift, barefoot, her red hair loose. It was obvious that she had not been among the living for many days.

  MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS: A MYTHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY ON THE LIVES

  Women in modern Judeo-Christian societies are motherless children. Painting after painting, sculpture after sculpture in the Christian world portray Madonnas comforting and worshiping their infant sons. Catholic mythology symbolizes the enforced splitting of Woman into either Mother or Whore—both of whom nurture and ultimately worship a dead man and/or a “divine” male child. The fierce bond of love, continuity, and pride between the pagan Demeter (the Earth Mother) and her daughter Persephone (the Kore-Maiden) does not exist between women in Catholic mythology or culture.

  Demeter is the goddess of life, corn, or grain. As we have seen, her daughter Persephone is abducted, raped, and married by Pluto (Hades), god of the underworld (or by Zeus or Dionysius, either of whom may have been Persephone’s own father), while she is playing in a field of poppies. Demeter seeks her daughter and remains inconsolable at her absence. Finally, in anger, she refuses to let any crops grow if Persephone is not returned to her. Eventually a compromise is reached: Pe
rsephone will remain with her mother for most of the year (spring, summer, and autumn) and with her husband during winter (when no seed or crops can grow). This tale, which incorporates many features of matriarchal and early agricultural societies, also comprised the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries—a Mother-Daughter religion in later—and patriarchal—Greek society.16

  In Judeo-Christian times, mothers have neither land nor money to cede to their daughters. Their legacy is one of capitulation, dependence or drudgery. For example, poor mothers and mothers of color in America may be employed outside the home—but as drudges, whose labor does not result in economic, military, or political power. Middle- and upper-class mothers who are not employed outside the home, or whose employment is “frivolous” or non-paid, cannot provide their daughters with legacies of dignity and self. It is true that some women are more cooperative and sympathetic to each other where “male” and “female” roles are sharply and traditionally defined and segregated, as in non-Western Islamic societies, or in traditional, rural, ghetto and immigrant subcultures within the Western world. However, such cooperation is based on unindividuated uniformity, discontent, and powerlessness. Neither mother nor daughter can redeem the other from certain harsh realities that define the female as “mother” and “loser” under bio-patriarchal rule. As we shall see, this is true of Demeter and Persephone also—but in an era where maternity and biology are more highly valued than today.

  Female children are quite literally starved for matrimony: not for marriage, but for physical nurturance and a legacy of power and humanity from adults of their own sex (“mothers”). Most mothers prefer sons to daughters and are more physically and domestically nurturant to them.17 Within modern society, woman’s “dependent” and “incestuous” personality probably stems from not being experienced as “divine” by their mothers (and fathers). Most women are glassed into infancy, and perhaps into some forms of madness, by an unmet need for maternal nurturance. I say “maternal” because the hourly care of infants and children in most families is entrusted to biological women and rarely shared by biological men. It can certainly be argued that infant males are emotionally scarred by being deprived of “maternal” (Dionysiac) nurturance from their fathers and “paternal” (Apollonian) nurturance from their mothers. Perhaps the male fear and hatred of women, as well as male violence and ego-greediness, stems from sex-role stereotyped families; perhaps it stems from male human nature—and the way in which culture has enhanced it.