Appendix W
Doing the “Post-Structural Two-Step”: A “How-To” Choreographic Demonstration
With Lorian Hemingway and Susanna Kaysen
In Lorian Hemingway’s and Susanna Kaysen’s memoirs, Walk On Water, and Girl, Interrupted, the writers manifest guilt as the dominant emotion that powers their motivation to record their lives. At first glance it appears that both of these women send messages of resistance to a dominant, male biased culture. Hemingway nearly destroys herself in attempting to establish her own identity within her family’s legacy, and Kaysen through her narrative about female oppression under mental health institutions of the late 1960s. Kaysen’s memoir in particular asks the reader to question the reasons that young women are considered abnormal, as she was virtually a prisoner for eighteen months at McLean Hospital. However, their narratives reveal a core of guilt that defies the vindication that they appear to seek as they chronicle their oppression under these regimes of power. They are both looking for an explanation to reconcile who they were with who they are, and to provide meaning for their existences. Both authors’ explanations try to punch holes of resistance into the walls of institutions of power within their culture. While dents are created in power’s structures, holes are not made.
One does not choose to be either an addict or a madwoman, yet much discourse within popular culture seems to suggest that a choice has indeed been made. The societal stigmas that are attached to alcoholism and insanity may have receded a bit in recent years, however stigmas do remain. Thus, on an intellectual level both women seem to present much of their perceptions about addiction or insanity in their memoirs as a force that is completely out of their control. Recording their lives in memoirs may be read as their attempts to influence the views of popular culture toward their “afflictions.” However, both women have been so indoctrinated in the discourse of addiction and insanity within popular culture that it becomes impossible for them to write about their experiences without guilt. This guilt is for what each author believes to be her part in the course that her life has taken. Thus, although it can be argued that their memoirs were likely written with the intent to disrupt institutions that have traditionally oppressed women, the guilt that flows in the embedded narratives of both books undermines such intent. The text of both memoirs suggests that these women embrace two positions that are fundamentally at odds, the result in the narrative flow is conflicting messages being conveyed to the reader simultaneously.
For the purposes of this essay I would like to examine these themes of guilt that recur in both women’s memoirs in an attempt determine if indeed their narratives are significantly resisting institutions of power in their memoirs. Contrarily, I would also like to propose the suggestion that their writing is grounded in the dominant ideologies on insanity and addiction that permeated and continue to permeate American culture. If this is the case and the prevailing ideology emerges despite their efforts to counter it with resistance writing, then perhaps first embracing the dominant discourses is necessary in any thought process that seeks to disturb them (Poster 107). Moreover, if ideologies of institutions of societal power whether they be mental health or conventional wisdom about alcoholism do in fact dictate the course that both memoirs take, then are both these writers’ attempts to resist futile? Perhaps they are, if, as critic Roberta Seelinger Trites contends that, “postmodern awareness of the subject’s inevitable construction as a product of language renders the construct of self-determination virtually obsolete” (18).
With this in mind, perhaps we should consider the truths that these women convey in their memoirs within the realm of what critic Gerald Graff calls “Foucault’s assertions that truth is a function of whoever holds power” (Graff 497) and consequently are heavily influenced by what is considered to be the norm within popular culture for both reader and writer. Some might argue that such a view sounds suspiciously like “fascist propaganda” (Graff 497), but in doing so they discount the very real phenomenon that everything around us is part and parcel of who we are. Consequently, the dominant and more powerful themes are likely to have more impact than those on the borders of the mainstream culture. These borderlands include any discourse that seeks to represent those people who are “other” than white, Western and male. Therefore, my response to such arguments lies in the evidence of feelings of guilt within these two memoirs, guilt as both a response to, and an agent of, the powers that dominate contemporary discourse. Such powers are as insidious as they are ubiquitous, namely powers that work as a function of a white, Western male worldview.
In conveying a sense of guilt, both Hemingway and Kaysen are in many respects genuflecting to this dominant worldview as well as offering as much resistance as literary “products” of Western culture will allow. Further, as with all criticism of any type of discourse in adding my voice to the discursive mix I am engaging in a hermeneutical process. My hermeneutics, like all others involves the study of the methodological principles of interpretation. Sadly, as the writers of the 1962 “Port Huron Statement” observe “the dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies” (qtd. in Miller 330). With this caution serving as a reminder that I am as prone to having my mind “blunted” as the two writers whom I will accuse of the same, I will now begin the dance with carefully executed steps.
The dance is what Gerald Graff calls the “Post-Structuralist Two-Step” (498), in this dance I will begin to vacillate between what he terms the strong and weak versions of the “Hermeneutics of Power” (hereafter referred to as HP) (498). However, in analyzing these two texts in this historical moment I fear that not doing so is simply an impossibility. Thus, ample evidence will be produced to support my position, or rather the discovery that I lack a definitive position, which nonetheless tends to lean toward the weaker version of HP that will be defined shortly. It is somewhat comforting to feel that I am in good company in my indecision with both Hemingway in Kaysen whose memoirs have taught me this dance.
Gerald Graff defines his stronger version of the Hermeneutics of Power in terms that sound similar to Foucault’s which posit that there is no “truth” or “knowledge” that exists outside of language and social practice:
The central assertion of the Hermeneutics of Power […] is that normative concepts like truth, logic, knowledge, etc., are forms of “discursive power,” and that therefore any appeal to cognitively “independent” truth, logic, knowledge, evidence, etc., is both (a) fallacious and (b) itself a coercive strategy within a regime of power. The truth of a description according to HP, is a function not of the way the world is prior to discursive formulation, but rather of which group has the power to force its cognitive conventions on others. (499)
This is HP in its strong version, and it holds no room within discourse for such terms as personal expression and individuality. Simply stated, the strong version of HP asserts that no one individual can participate in any type of social discourse in any form that exists independently from or can be considered pure or free from whatever regimes of power exist either historically or culturally.
On the other hand the weaker version of HP allows more room for interpreting the causality that determines the direction in which social discourse runs. In doing so it takes into account the many layers that constitute an individual’s thoughts and discourse processes. Moreover, it includes both the power that lies behind social practice and self-determination as factors that both fuel the engines of social discourse and work to resist or change such discourse. Graff’s definition of the weaker version of HP is as follows:
…the weak version holds that knowledge is implicated in relations of power, but does not draw the conclusion that the cognitive status of knowledge is thereby necessarily compromised or rendered intrinsically coercive. The weak version of HP, in other words allows that knowledge can transcend the social forms which have constituted and controlled it and can thus be used to oppose and alter those forms. That is, there remains a concept of truth and knowledge which the community can advance towards, if not capture with final certainty, and by advancing towards it rid itself significantly of ignorance and oppression (Graff 499).
This version of HP applies to both Hemingway’s and Kaysen’s memoirs if one considers them to be acts of resistance to socially constructed institutions of power, such as the mental health industry and society’s perception of alcoholism among females.
Unfortunately, at the same time these two texts also incorporate the conventions of institutions of power within the narratives, which are manifested in the writers’ feelings of guilt. This is the problematic element of both memoirs and a perfect illustration of Graff’s “two-step.” Both writers waver uncertainly between the strong and weak versions of HP, and in doing so their efforts toward resistance are undermined. Consequently, this essay will proceed to examine Hemingway’s and Kaysen’s works for such evidence of guilt and attempt to elucidate how discourses of power influence these memoirs. Further, I will attempt to demonstrate that guilt feelings do not necessarily preclude these memoirs as discursive acts of resistance. Merely that discouragingly, for readers, guilt undermines any effort to consider either memoir as a piece of resistance writing that is free from the taint of regimes of power that seek to repress and restrain anyone who is “other” than a white Western male.
Lorian Hemingway’s Two-Step
Throughout Walk On Water , her fishing career, and perhaps throughout her addiction, Lorian Hemingway attempts to distance herself from her grandfather, famed novelist Ernest’s legacy of alcoholism and self-destruction. However, she comes to realize that despite her wish to the contrary, there are in fact outside influences “forcing you eventually to define yourself in relation to others” (89). Yet this insight can not impede or temper the invasion of society’s views about alcoholism from entering her consciousness and prevent her from assigning blame to herself for what she views peripherally as her own weakness in succumbing to addiction. She describes herself as “a bombastic, conscience-free, ego-driven alcoholic, immune to subtlety, grace, and personal perspective. And I do not flail myself unduly. That is the truth” (151), which is hardly a flattering portrayal. Moreover it is one that would certainly not be self-assigned if indeed she thought herself to be in the thrall of a deadly disease. It would be difficult to imagine a woman with cancer describing herself in such terms. Unfortunately this is the paradox in which society treats alcoholism as a disease yet stigmatizes those who have “caught” it. Such contradictory assumptions allow a perfect example to consider why Gerald Graff believes the weaker version of HP to be flawed. This multi-faceted view of alcoholism allows society to (a) treat alcoholics as victims of a congenital disorder over which they are powerless and (b) define alcoholics as having a moral defect that they could be rid of if they only had willpower. These two views are diametrically opposed and yet society has no problem in alternating their application as it deems the situation to warrant in an effort to maintain an oppressive status quo.
In allowing these two ideologies to exist side-by-side, society, like the post-structuralist views that Graff critiques, may “have [its] polemical cake and eat it too” (Graff 500). However, by assuming the stance that the one ideology out of necessity negates the other, Graff discounts the multi-faceted nature of both individuals, and the regimes of power that are ubiquitous at every level of human experience. In advocating the stronger version of HP, Graff implies that humans are incapable of assuming agency within their lives by retrieving either mindset without inadvertently incorporating parts of the other. Thus, the history within Western societies that complicates alcoholism, specifically in women, does much to clarify such contradictory beliefs in regard to this ailment/condition. Further, an examination of such history may better inform us as to why Hemingway views herself and her mother with contempt in regard to alcoholism while withholding such contempt from her grandfather.
In the United States within the temperance movements of the nineteenth century, one of the foremost voices was that of the Washington Temperance Society (Crowley ix). This society “gradually incorporated the conception of inebriety as a problem exclusive to men and, perhaps, to women of dubious class and virtue” (Crowley 69). Note the wording here, the term (women) merits negative qualifiers, while the term (men) does not. Such phrasing implies that alcoholism in American culture connotes in women a defect that enters moral territory rather than merely physical as it is implied is the case of men.
More contemporary evidence of this societal inconsistency of viewing alcoholism along strict gender lines lies in the authoritative basic text for Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). To be fair it must be noted that A.A. has had more success in helping alcoholics to recover than any other method of treatment with an estimated worldwide membership of more than two million people ( A.A. xxxiii). However, the text will not go down in history as a feminist manifesto. On the contrary the book has distinctly misogynistic leanings. The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous was published in 1939, and has undergone only minor revisions since that time. To understand what I will offer next it is imperative that the reader understands the significance of the fact that A.A.’s basic text remains practically identical in 2002 to the first published edition of 1939. The “Big Book,” as A.A.s fondly refer to it, offered a solution to men who were deemed to be hopeless alcoholics. The entire text was addressed to men with the exception of one chapter entitled “To Wives” (A.A. 104). A footnote in the fourth edition of the “Big Book” provides the following disclaimer: “Written in 1939, when there were few women in A.A., this chapter assumes that the alcoholic in the home is likely to be the husband” (A.A.). The chapter begins by saying “with few exceptions, our book thus far has spoken of men. But what we have said applies quite as much to women. Our activities in behalf of women who drink are on the increase” (A.A. 104). This wording poses yet another enigma that confounds attempts to view alcoholism with any sort of gender equity. If the book “applies quite as much to women” then why has it predominantly “spoken of men” (A.A. 104)? A.A.’s intention is certainly noble, and yet the group obviously fails to see the paradox of such a statement.
In the fourth edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, which was published in 2001, it is interesting to note the demographics of the personal stories at the end of the book. Out of forty-three stories only sixteen have female authors. It is as if A.A. is not quite sure what to do with female alcoholics. The group manages to provide a venue for women in its basic text, but it is a decidedly uncomfortable fit. It is important to note however, that although the relationship, within its literature, between the fellowship and women appears to be awkward, A.A. is to be commended for assisting many women in their recoveries. Further, this piece of A.A. literature is yet another example of the logic behind Graff’s “post-structural two-step.” It illustrates how a society can almost punch a hole through the walls of power regimes…but not quite. Sadly, once again women alcoholics are left in “no man’s land.”
Thus, the double standard which comes into play where a society can view alcoholism as a disease among men and a character defect among women seeks to firmly root these views into popular culture. In Hemingway’s work, this conflicted attitude seeks acknowledgment in the ways in which she describes her mother and her grandfather, both alcoholics.
Hemingway views her mother as an inherently weak person, almost a non-entity, whose alcoholism merely exasperates the nothingness that she represents; “No matter where we moved my mother […] lived deep indoors, wrapped up tight with [her] bottles of bourbon and vodka” (Hemingway 48-49). Her mother appears to have little impact on Hemingway’s life other than being the link between Hemingway and certain relatives and a brutal stepfather. On the other hand, she views her grandfather, Ernest, with what seems to be a mixture of reverence and fear, for both the legend that he is and the possibility that she might share his fate:
In my late teens I had come up hard against the legend that had become my grandfather, forced then to read his works in school, forced to take a look, finally, at a heritage that, at first glance, looked suspiciously like a bummer. […] At the time I did not understand my mother was, in her curious, inconsistent way, protecting me from the prying, the nosy, but thought instead there must be some secret shame linked with the name, some darkness that, once spoken of, would taint me, too. (Hemingway 88)
While on one level Hemingway recognizes that the specter of addiction and despair that “taints” her grandfather might likely be a part of her own genetic make-up, she nonetheless relegates him to a more auspicious sphere of human experience than the one occupied by her mother, also an alcoholic. Perhaps this is because of the impact that Ernest Hemingway’s work has had on society. Or more frighteningly, perhaps because he is a man, his alcoholism and subsequent suicide are perceived by Lorian to be the unfortunate side effects of a “great mind” in turmoil.
As to Lorian’s own self-destructive tendencies, her feelings of guilt are voiced in the following passage:
It charmed me, this faith he had that I would not, ultimately, destroy myself. And
I knew destruction was coming, could sense it, a vague guilt (emphasis mine) in me
always that a black heart beat in me, that my true talent lay not in the doing of
things, but in the undoing. (139)
Hemingway leaves no question in the reader’s mind about exactly how much value she attaches to herself. The bombastic, ego-driven alcoholic that we met earlier in this essay is revealed here for a self-conscious, guilt-laden woman who has internalized the expectations of others. Seemingly, in failing to meet such expectations, Hemingway succumbs to the guilt that provides the necessary choreography for her “post-structural two-step.”
Regardless of the exact proportions of what influences Lorian Hemingway and how much it influences her, her memoir is at once dominated by and attempting to establish a resistance to popular culture’s discourses that define women and alcoholism as well as the two in concert. Critic Melinda Kanner provides a concrete example of this odd juxtaposition in her examination of how female alcoholics have been portrayed in American film and television. She posits that mass media descriptions of alcoholic women are “variously depicted as morally decayed, sexually promiscuous, tragically inadequate mothers and wives, or more recently, as women seemingly in control of their own lives and their own recovery” (183). Again, the weaker version of HP takes into account how these two seemingly contradictory positions may in fact exist if not in perfect harmony than at least in comparative unison. It also reflects the notion that by chronicling her life for public viewing, Lorian Hemingway on one level does disrupt stereotypical images of female alcoholism. Although feelings of guilt are woven into her memoir, by adding her voice to the discursive mix, she assumes “that meaning making is a political activity within language by historically situated actors” (Theriot 5). In other words, through asserting her own voice into the public discourse of memoir text, Hemingway is in fact enacting change, if only in the number of memoirs that have been produced about female alcoholism. In doing so she blends a new and different picture of female alcoholism into the dominant stream of discourse and perhaps makes a small dent in the armor of institutions of power. In Susanna Kaysen’s memoir this weaker version of HP comes into an even more refined focus. Unfortunately, like Hemingway, Kaysen’s resistance is undermined by the guilt that flows beneath the surface of her narrative.
Susanna Kaysen’s Two-Step
In his biography of McLean Hospital, Gracefully Insane: the Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital, Alex Beam gives insight to, and further answers Susanna Kaysen’s question of “how did [she] get in there?” (Kaysen 5). In the chapter entitled “Diagnosis: “Hippiephrenia,”” Beam outlines and discusses the reasons behind the influx of young people admitted to McLean in the 1960s. “Most of the young people who fetched up at McLean hailed from the social elite” (Beam 197), and Susanna Kaysen was no exception. Other notable alumni of McLean Hospital include: James Taylor, as well as brother Livingston and sister Kate, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. At the time of her hospitalization Kaysen’s father was head of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (Beam 198), as well as the former deputy national security advisor to John F. Kennedy (Beam 6). She was just one among many who experienced what Beam describes as a mass “warehousing of the troubled children of the well-to-do” (198).
Among the reasons Beam suggests for this influx of institutionalizing young people was the increased confidence in psychiatric medicine (specifically adolescent psychiatry), and the fact that most “insurance companies were paying for up to six months of inpatient care” (Beam 198). Oftentimes those in authority, such as Kaysen’s parents, sent their children to McLean in reaction to behaviors that today seem typical or almost commonplace for teens within the context of the 1960s. However, Kaysen’s suicide attempt places her beyond the scope of merely rejecting or questioning authority and into a more dangerous sphere where she might do serious injury to herself. Therefore, her parents may have had legitimate reasons for condoning and financing her hospitalization rather than merely being upset that her future plans did not include going to college, which was the approved course for the children of the economic elite.
Kaysen’s parents are conspicuously absent from her memoir. In her chapter entitled “Bare Bones” she discusses varying familial mindsets of the young women with whom she is institutionalized with when one member is “crazy”.
Our families. […] Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated crazy and goes inside. […] But some families had to prove that nobody is crazy, and they were the ones who threatened to stop paying. Torrey had that sort of family. (Kaysen 95).
It is interesting to note that she does not narrow her focus to her own family specifically, preferring to distance herself from her observations by using the possessive plural. Because she chooses to use Torrey’s family as the median against which other prevailing familial opinions are juxtaposed, Kaysen never lets the reader know in which camp her own family lies. This omission of the very mention of her own parents while devoting an entire chapter to differing familial attitudes towards hospitalization for mental illness suggests that Kaysen still has issues with both her parents and their role in her hospitalization. One of these issues is be the guilt that she feels over the financial obligations that her parents acquire due to her hospitalization.
Of her own family, Kaysen says this; “My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me” (165). If one were to apply second terms to each of these traits it would look something like this: achievement/failure, ambition/apathy, talent/incompetence, expectation/surprise. Now, if Kaysen were to apply each of these second terms to herself, it would present a dismal psychological profile indeed. This is clearly a demonstration of Kaysen’s rendition of the post-structural two-step. In one and the same text the reader is expected to a) accept such a bleak self-portrayal by the narrator and, b) view the narrator as an oppressed person under the powerful institution of the mental health industry. Care to dance?
Kaysen mentions the fact that she did not go to college several times within the text of Girl, Interrupted. “Quite often now, people say to me when I tell them I didn’t go to college, “Oh, how marvelous!” They wouldn’t have thought it was so marvelous back then. They didn’t, my classmates were just the sorts of people who now tell me how marvelous I am. In 1966, I was a pariah” (Kaysen 156). The fact that she needs to bring up this issue at all suggests a deep-seated sense of guilt. If indeed she cares so little about college it seems that one mention of it would have been sufficient within her memoir. After all, her memoir is about her time at McLean, not halcyon years spent at some ivy covered campus. I suggest that there is a core of guilt underneath Kaysen’s outward derision toward her lack of a college career. In this way her recovery reflects Melissa Friedling’s theory on the rhetorics of recovery as well as Graff’s theory of “a kinder, gentler” version of the “Hermeneutics of Power.” For, although Kaysen is making a stance against a dominant authoritative power structure that would have led her to go to college rather than McLean, her resistance is weakened through her guilt which is manifested by her repeated attempts to explain or justify why she did not go to college.
In her essay entitled “Feminisms and the Jewish Mother Syndrome: Identity,
Autobiography, and the Rhetoric of Addiction,” critic Melissa Friedling posits that:
Recovery […] describes a typically logocentric discursive practice that is
structured by binary logic and grounded in Truth claims, identity, and a figure of
the “norm.” The rhetoric of recovery presupposes that a Truth exists and might
be found by peeling away layers that conceal an authentic core. The rhetorics of
recovery contain in condensed form many of the prescriptive pairings basic to
modern cultural “order”: culture/nature, mind/body, self/other, real/representation,
public/private, health/illness, voluntary/addiction. A recovery rhetoric seeks to
uncover the second term in order to cover over and demonstrate the centrality
and dominance of the first, ascendant term—the “norm.” (108)
In uncovering the second terms through her memoir, Kaysen resists the dominant discursive “conventional wisdom” about to mental illness, female promiscuity, male oppression, and yes, parental and societal expectations which claim that college naturally follows high school. However, in so doing she also tellingly acknowledges the dominance of such anglocentric discourse within her mind. In other words, although she resists these ideas, the fact that such discourse is woven through the narrative of her memoir, in the form of guilt, is indicative of the branding of societal mores upon her consciousness. The very act of resistance suggests that in fact an obstacle exists that meets such resistance. Hence, Graff’s weaker version of the Hermeneutics of Power which says that although all discourse is highly influenced by societal institutions of power, individuals can, through agency, advance toward, if not ultimately achieve, change. Through uncovering the second terms in such binary oppositions as “health/illness”, “voluntary/addiction”, and “self/other”, both Kaysen and Hemingway (a) acknowledge the first term as not only the norm against which the second term is compared, but as the term that is preferred and (b) attempt, through their memoirs, to provide a vehicle for the second term to emerge as a force over which they have no control. Herein lies the confusing paradox that muddles an interpretation of their memoirs as either works of resistance or as works that function as conveyors of dominant societal discourse.
The culturally imbued sense of guilt that Kaysen exhibits also extends to encompass her failed suicide attempt. She paints her suicide attempt as pathetic next to Polly’s attempt; “Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof. We’ve all had those” (Kaysen 17). In comparing herself to Polly, or even Daisy who succeeds at suicide (31-35), Kaysen freely admits that her “motives were weak” (36). By downplaying the extent that suicidal thoughts enveloped her, and through her derision toward her own motives which she considers weak, Kaysen invalidates any claim that her bout with mental illness is as serious or as life threatening as say, Polly’s or Daisy’s. In doing so she internalizes a societal belief system in which suicide is viewed as a form of weakness in her own case, but in turn she resists such a belief system by seeing Polly’s and Daisy’s attempts as exhibiting a form of courage. Examining the history of suicide in the United States can assist readers in an understanding of Kaysen’s mixed messages.
In Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide, Howard I. Kushner illustrates how American attitudes towards suicide have shifted and evolved through the years. Suicide was considered a felony offense until the latter part of the 19th century. It was considered a sin and resulted in the forfeiture of all lands and property (33). In the mid 19th century there was a gradual shift in attitudes where suicide went from being a crime to becoming a disease. This shift was due in large part to protect heirs from losing their inheritances. Rather than deem the cause of death to be an act of free will on the part of the deceased, coroners “routinely qualified [the death] to differentiate it from felony suicide” (Kushner 33). Qualifiers could include phrases such as “in a fit of insanity […] partial insanity, [or] much distracted” (Kushner 33). What powered such a shift in attitudes from suicide as crime to suicide as disease was likely the monetary interests of heirs as well as heirs wishing to reduce the stigma attached to a loved one’s death. It is important to note however, that this shift in attitudes toward suicide, from crime to disease, was reflected in laws much more slowly than in popular culture. Further, suicides could not be buried in the consecrated ground of cemeteries. Thus, the church as an institution of power used its considerable influence to dictate popular opinion of suicide. In viewing suicide as a sin, the church is not likely to have fostered public sympathy toward suicide victims and their families. The residue of such conflicting attitudes is noticeable in Kaysen’s memoir.
According to Kushner it is a logical chain of events for “the traditional world [to see] suicide as a criminal act and how adherence to that belief led dialectically to the contrary belief that suicide resulted from mental illness” (17). With such contradictory precedents building the cultural ideology behind suicide in the United States, it comes as no surprise that Kaysen feels guilt about her own suicide attempt and awe toward Daisy’s and Polly’s suicide attempts. Thus, Kaysen’s statement that “suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder” (36) indicates her feelings toward her own attempted self-murder. Not only is suicide murder in this case, it is also the worst type of murder in that it is premeditated, whereas Polly’s self-immolation is viewed as a courageous act by Kaysen.
The existence of two such opposing views on what are related same issues, namely, mental illness and suicide, within Kaysen’s memoir can hardly come as a surprise to readers in a culture in which hysteria and mental illness are sometimes synonyms, and where the term “hysteria” has distinctly feminine roots. The etymology of the word hysteria from the Greek word hyster, meaning womb, implies that the condition is caused by women’s sexual organs and is particularly a feminine characteristic (Herndl 117).
While it is difficult to say to what degree Kaysen is influenced by society’s prejudices, perceptions and misconceptions about mental illness, that she is undoubtedly influenced is evidenced by her repeated examinations of her own motivations for suicide and her choice not to attend college. Diane Price Herndl’s book Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940, provides a lens through which we can examine how and why Kaysen’s memoir has been tainted by cultural mores. Thus, the question is not whether she was influenced, but how much.
According to Herndl “ while it would certainly be overstating the case to claim that our culture treats women’s diseases [mental, physical or both] as a joke, it would not overstate it to say that these perceptions of female illness […] are strongly negative” (xii). Throughout her book, Herndl documents instances in both literature and media, where female illness is interpreted as either manipulative or intended to elicit a sentimental reaction. If this is indeed the case, it is small wonder that Kaysen, as a woman, needs to contest or resist such an image of female illness. For example she questions the term “compulsive promiscuity” (157) in her diagnosis of Borderline Personality. “How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label “compulsively promiscuous”? […] if they ever put that label on boys, which I don’t recall their doing” (Kaysen 158). While in contrast, she often paints herself in an extremely unflattering manner in other parts of her memoir.
Kaysen’s memoir attempts to disrupt cultural conventions that would keep her silent and submissive. Through questioning her diagnosis she questions the validity of the authority that assigned her diagnosis, namely American Mental Health Institutions. However, her disruption falls short of the powerful stance she might have achieved had she not in turn begun questioning her own motivations. Again, return to Graff’s theory of the Hermeneutics of Power where even in narratives that at face value resist oppression, in this case Kaysen’s resistance to dominant discursive practices on mental illness in the 1960s, social causality plots the course that such resistance takes (Graff 498-99). As such, cultural rhetoric on mental illness determines the way in which her memoir translates to Kaysen herself, the reader and popular culture at large. Admitting the “socially constituted nature of truth” (Graff 499) does not detract from the impact that Kaysen’s memoir may have on cultural ideologies of mental illness. Rather, by acknowledging them as part of her own psychological make-up she demonstrates why such ideologies need to be resisted.
The introduction to Diane Price Herndl’s book includes a passage from Roland Barthes’ A Lovers Discourse: Fragments. The passage is apropos to this discussion in that it helps us to understand why both Hemingway’s and Kaysen’s memoirs are incapable of being completely free of the ideologies that complement the institutions of power that seek to oppress these memoirists. It also reinforces both memoirs’ qualities as pieces of resistance writing:
Figures take shape insofar as we can recognize, in passing discourse, something
that has been read, heard, felt. The figure is outlined (like a sign) and
memorable (like an image or a tale). A figure is established if at least someone
can say: “That’s so true! I recognize that scene of language.” (qtd. in Herndl 1)
The reason that I bring this passage to your attention at this late stage of my argument is twofold. First, it forces us, as readers, to acknowledge that through discourse we can play a part in how “figures take shape” within our own perceptions. The various discourses that we are exposed to can and do make an impact on how we will proceed with our lives. My second reason for bringing this passage to your attention is more troubling. If we can “recognize” in our own psyches images that represent women, whether alcoholic or insane, as deviant because of gender, then we have indeed internalized the ideologies that seek to oppress such women.
Primarily I take issue with Gerald Graff’s derision toward the weaker version of the “hermeneutics of power” and the “post-structural two-step.” Both of the memoirs that I have discussed have employed the first, and danced the second. They acknowledge that we are all predisposed to view our immediate and historical world, and all the attendant quirks, foibles, conflicts and complications by what we have learned through discourse, and this is all well and good. But, there are some things (and cultural bias is one) that we cannot escape. However, by Lorian Hemingway and Susanna Kaysen adding their voices to the murky waters of discourse, they have in fact offered a change, even if it is only an interruption.
Works Cited
Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
Inc., 2001.
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