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Since its beginnings in the 1970s disability activist movement, disability studiesscholarship has traditionally focused on physical disability and, in working to deconstruct the figure of the “cripple” as a symbol of pathos, has shied away from close examinations of pain, suffering, and dependency in favor of a focus on disability pride, agency, and community. As the field has grown, however, it has made room for investigations into these more difficult considerations, and in particular into how these affective states cluster around mind-related disability. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay’s 1999 book, Love’s Labor, reexamines social contract theory in terms of what she calls the “dependency relation” and its attendant ethics of care. Bringing together mental disability with an analysis of both gender and race, Kittay’s work undergirds my own project’s intervention into readings of American literature between the Civil War and World War II, along with recent debates (for example, in the work of Licia Carlson, Nirmala Erevelles, Rachel Adams, among others) about the gendered, raced, and classed structures of care and dependency that are particularly evident in the case of mind-related disability. With a few notable recent exceptions, scholarship into the history of psychiatry has largely ignored the early and sustained imbrication of race in the origins of the American asylum movement and its widespread — and long-lasting — cultural impact. My project seeks to intervene into this history by examining the works of American writers who deploy representations of dependency and mind-related disability, and, in so doing, also critique, and sometimes reinscribe, assumptions of racial and gendered Otherness. I argue that mind-related disability produces strong cultural anxiety reflected in these writings precisely because it threatens the illusion of raced-and-gendered autonomy, an American ideal that has never been possible but has loomed large since the earliest days of the republic. Working from Ato Quayson’s insight that attention to disability, like the sublime, activates aesthetic instability in the structures of representation and an ethical core in literary interpretation, I offer textual readings that show that dependency, coded as weakness and vulnerability, was conceived as a condition categorically apart from white male-independence, coded as strength and autonomy. As such, the focus on independence as the organizing principle of a just society — rather than on distributed responsibility and nonhierarchical interdependence — easily survived the shift from antebellum sentimental protection to modernist scientific persecution. Focusing my inquiry on dependency and care, in my second chapter, “The Mad History of Asylums and Abolition,” I show how the early asylum movement and abolitionists produced and responded to oppressive rhetorics of race and madness that could be generative for resistance nonetheless. To that end, I examine the writing of asylum-movement reformer Dorothea Dix, in which we see the strained attempt to advocate for insanity as a specifically white condition that was tied to the vigor of civilization and progress. I then turn to the writing of abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass, who sought to establish the capacity of black Americans to suffer mental anguish or “madness” under slavery and yet also to invert mainstream rhetoric such that madness adhered not to the abolitionist but to the slaveholding society of which he was critical. In my third chapter, “The Traumas and Delusions of the Civil War,” I reveal the mutual dependency of race and mind-related disability in representations of the Civil War and its traumas. Mind-related disability, instantiated in the individual body, becomes a potent metaphor for the social trauma of the war and the trauma of slavery, both of which are repressed in the post-Reconstruction narratives of white national fraternal healing. I focus specifically on the sentimental novella, For the Major, by Constance Fenimore Woolson, and on the genre-bending work, Specimen Days, by Walt Whitman, to show how otherwise promising models of care are profoundly compromised by their erasures of race and/or mind-related disability. In my fourth chapter, “The Medical Gothic: The Medical Gaze and Monstrous Care,” I show how after the war, the consolidation and assertion of medical authority produced a medical gaze defined by empiricism and scientific objectivity, a gaze that was critiqued by several late nineteenth-century writers by figuring the monstrous results of such medical care. I examine the doctor-patient relationship at the heart of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the ethical medical dilemma at the center of Stephen Crane’s novella, The Monster, to analyze the harmful care that produces social death under asymmetrical conditions of power. Despite these critiques of medical authority, the degeneration theories of the finde-siecle and the shift towards biological determinism engendered the rise of eugenics and an especially virulent abjection of mind-related disability. In this context, my fifth chapter, “Eugenic Time, Eugenic Death,” examines how community care could not help but fail and survival itself emerges as a kind of violence, as Charles Chesnutt’s story, “Dave’s Neckliss,” and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story “Old Woman Magoun,” confirm. Throughout the dissertation, I show how the fantasy of American autonomy and rationality relies on racial and gendered hierarchies to sustain it, with often brutal consequences in the care of the dependent mentally ill/disabled. / English

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This analysis examines Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through the lens of lunar imagery and the irrational feminine, arguing that both texts are aspects of an extended, collective narrative in which both heroines rescue and reclaim their feminine essence from the construction of a masculine idealism.

Cette thèse est une réflexion concernant les particularités du langage, principalement de l’utilisation de la métaphore, dans les textes d’écrivaines ayant été internées. Mon analyse considère les œuvres de Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Unica Zürn, Emma Santos et Susanna Kaysen, ainsi que d’autres textes étant mentionnés dans une moindre mesure. Le fait d’avoir vécu une expérience de vie extrême, physique et psychique, a des répercussions sur l’esprit et la perception de soi, leurs représentations textuelles, ainsi que le rapport à l’écrit et à la littérature. Des figures subies ou choisies se répètent dans ces textes. Elles renseignent sur ce que ces femmes ont vécu, comment elles ont été affectées et la littérature. Cette thèse est divisée en cinq idées principales concernant les liens entre la folie, l’écriture et les femmes internées correspondant à la division des chapitres. Le premier porte sur la figure de la cloche de verre et ses variations chez diverses écrivaines. Il s’agit d’une métaphore puissante, efficace pour traduire l’état d’esprit de l’internée qui permet d’expliciter l’importance et le fonctionnement de la métaphore, son rôle dans l’écriture et la pensée. Le deuxième traite des métaphores spatiales et des lieux de pensée présents dans ces textes. Il est un examen de comment, alors que l’esprit devient de plus en plus fragile et l’image du corps incertaine en raison des traitements et des conditions de vie imposées, apparaît la nécessité d’un lieu, figuré ou réel, d’où écrire et de comment ce lieu est en relation avec le langage et la structuration de l’écrit et de la pensée. Le troisième porte sur la notion d’abjection. Ces femmes sont considérées, traitées, se perçoivent et vivent comme des animaux, des excréments ou des déchets. Il est une décortication de la représentation de l’effritement des limites de la subjectivité lors de l’internement. J’y explique à quel point l’hôpital pousse la personne vers la saleté et l’animalité plutôt que vers la guérison, ainsi que les conséquences pour la perception de soi que le fait d’être placé hors du social entraîne. Le quatrième concerne la notion d’objet et les processus qui font qu’à force d’être réifiées les narratrices des textes se perçoivent comme des objets plutôt que des personnes. Le rapport que l’esprit entretient avec les objets et l’importance qu’ils ont pour son fonctionnement y sont examinés. Le cinquième traite enfin des réflexions sur l’utilisation du langage, que ces écrivaines ont réalisées, sur les mots et procédés qu’elles emploient pour les communiquer ainsi que sur l’importance du corps féminin et de la conception de la féminité dans la production des textes et des idées qu’ils portent. J’en arrive à établir à quel point, pour ces écrivaines, la vie dépend du littéraire. Ma thèse démontre comment la littérature leur a fourni un espace d’analyse et de structure de leur personne et de leur pensée, ainsi qu’un lieu de parole émergeant de l’utilisation du langage et des interactions entre l’esprit, les mots et le monde. / This thesis reflects on the particularities of the use of language, especially in terms of recurring metaphors, in the texts of women writers who spent a part of their life in a psychiatric hospital. I question the texts of Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Unica Zürn, Emma Santos and Susanna Kaysen. Some other women writers are also examined, to a lesser extent. It shows that the fact of having lived an experience, which I would qualify as physically and psychologically extreme living conditions, affects these writers’ mind, the self-perception and their textual representations. It also shows how one’s relation to writing and literature is changed by this situation. Undergone, imposed, selected or created metaphors are born, are shown or repeated in those texts. They detail both how these women lived and processed the effects associated to this life, as well as how their writing of these experiences reflects general aspects of literary discourse. This thesis is divided into five main ideas concerning the singular relationship that bonds madness, writing and the experience of living in a psychiatric ward. In the first chapter, I analyze the bell jar figure and its variations according to different writers. This strong metaphor, which is incredibly efficient to translate the internee’s state of mind, helps me explain the functioning of metaphor and the crucial role it plays in the writing and human thought. The second chapter looks at spatial metaphors and spatial representations of the mind. It shows how, while the self and its corporal images are becoming more fragile because of the imposed treatments and living conditions, there appears the necessity of a real or figurative space from which to write. This space is in relation with writing, but also with the mere possibility of human thought. The third chapter builds on the notion of abjection. These women were considered and treated as animals, excrements or waste, and they came to see themselves as such. I analyze those representations and also how they figure the dissolution of the limits to one’s subjectivity that occurs during the internment. The fourth chapter draws on the object notion and the reification of human existence, through processes of subjective reification, which lead the narrators to perceive themselves as objects rather than people. I also examine the relation we can posit between the mind, the objects it chooses to consider, and how they affect the mind’s reflexive operations. The fifth chapter reflects on the use of language, according to the theories developed by these women writers. It also looks at the importance of the female body and femininity in the production of the texts and the ideas fostered by these concepts. My thesis demonstrates how literature gave them a space to analyze and structure both their self and thought. For these women, literature was also a place to speak from. This possibility emerges from the use of language and from the interactions between the mind, language and the world.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

This paper explores the depiction and function of madness on the Renaissance stage, specifically its development as trope of the English revenge tragedy from its Elizabethan conception to its Jacobean advent through a representative engagement of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Madness in these plays selectively departs from popular conceptions and archetypal formulas to create an uncertain dramatic space which allows its sufferers to walk moral lines and liminal paths unavailable to the sane. “Madness” is responsible for and a response to vision; where the revenger is driven to the edge of madness by a lapse in morality only visible to him, madness provides a lens to correct the injustice. It is the tool that allows them to escape convention, decorum and even the law to rout a moral cancer, and, in this capacity, is enabling rather than disabling.