| Discussions of autobiography, closely linked to theories of identity, have shifted from the nineteenth-century assumption of a centralized and controlling subject to a twentieth-century questioning of such stability. Voices from the margins—once cut off from self-representation because of their inconsistency with an identity that controls its own fate—have offered fruitful ground for the exploration of new kinds of subjective representation. Autobiographies of mental illness illuminate the complexities of representing contested subjectivity because the psychiatric subject inhabits split identity quite consciously; the healthy self, composing under the threat of illness, writes the ill self into the text, and yet descriptives such as “ill” or “healthy” obscure the coincident relationship between these identities. Illness and health determine the subject not singly, but simultaneously. The writers in this study, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Susanna Kaysen, and Kate Millett, construct their relationships to illness and to the reader differently, often manipulating autobiographical conventions to represent experience that has historically been unrepresentable. Defining madness as a misreading of consensual reality, I posit that these writers challenge traditional conceptions of social and narrative convention by creating new modes of reading—new methodologies for reading their life experience—that offer the reader alternative paths of representation for her own life. Each of these texts reveals a woman's struggle for the right to represent her own experience while creating a new kind of story for women to read, identify with, speak through. In so doing, these writers venture toward new autobiographical forms and thereby forge communities of readers to which they make available representational strategies that expand and challenge narrative and social conventions. Representation becomes a tutorial, teaching us how to read with new vision, how to make sense of experiences never before depicted. While carefully skirting bedlam—both revealing the universe of madness and warily avoiding it through wielding interpretive control over their stories—these women voice experiences, like that of mental illness, that have not yet found a convention. This study is one step in that direction. |
