This essay has a feminist focus on the formation of "mad women" in Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Through the lense of time it tries to gain an understanding into how womens mental health issues have been treated by the medical community and how this can be applied to the reading of the book. It also discusses the medical use of the term hysteria and how it has affected the way womens mental health is percieved. The essay have a theoretical foundation in Michel Foucault as well as Simone de Beauvoir and an disertation in psychology.

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Amalie Skram (1846-1905) was born in Norway but lived in Denmark. She published several books about gender relations and built up a reputation as a naturalistic writer. In 1894, a nervous breakdown made her seek help from the famous psychiatrist Knud Pontoppidan. He sent her to an asylum, but she returned home after spending two months in psychiatric care. In 1895, Skram published two novels about the painter Else Kant, based on her own experiences but not written as autobiographies. The books, Professor Hieronimus and På Sct. Jørgen, came to be part of an ongoing debate about the rights of psychiatric patients. My purpose is to analyze the exercise of power in Skram's portrayal of psychiatry, especially the way it is gendered. The power relations are examined with concepts established by Foucault in his power analysis and with relevant medical history as a context. I treat the books as fictive narratives, that should not be seen as describing Skram's own experiences. My result actualizes several of Foucault's main concepts. Psychiatry works through the power to define – the right to give a name. Psychiatry define what madness is, and thus what normality is. The patient is, when defined as mad, also defined as unable to tell the truth about herself and the world. The treatment is a project of normalization and moral upbringing, where the patient is required to learn the norms she is thought to lack, and also to control her feelings instead of expressing them. Hysteria is the diagnosis for expressing strong feelings and can be read as an opposition to the male society, as well as the medical system. Gazes play a big part in these two books. Else is looked at by the medical, defining, gaze. She is herself observing the psychiatry and uses her gaze to look at the other patients in a way that raises questions about both abnormality and normality. In my reading, the gaze exercises power and the so called "male gaze" can also be used by women. The text is ambivalent concerning Else's possible madness. She is described as troubled and almost psychotic in the beginning, but later as sane. My conclusion is that Else gains her own form of sanity, not because of the treatment, but as a way of opposing it. Else is never made an object by the objectifying medical gaze. Instead, she creates herself as an agent and a subject. She is defined as mad, but is determined to in turn define and describe the psychiatry as a form of counter-power.

This essay examines the madness portrayed in Selma Lagerlöf’s The Emperor of Portugallia and Olivier Bourdeauts Waiting for Bojangles, in order to identify a conceptual apparatus describing its interaction with the social ordering of reality, using the theoretical concepts of utopia and heterotopia. The concept of utopia used for this essay is the definition formed by Paul Ricoeur and the concept of heterotopia created by Michel Foucault. The examination is carried out by comparing both of the fictive portraits of madness against first Ricoeurs three-legged utopia and secondly against Foucault’s definition of heterotopia. A conclusion is made that the fictive portrait of madness in these two texts generates heterotopias based on utopian fantasies the characters have for their respective existences.

An investigation in how the psychiatric care of women has been portrayed in four scandinavian novels written by women in and around the turn of the century.

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Uppsatsens syfte är att studera hur Victoria Mas roman De galna kvinnornas bal (2022) anspelar på traditionen female gothic och motivet den galna kvinnan i en kontext av 1800-talets patriarkala strukturer. Romanen studeras därför i relation till Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) och Selma Lagerlöfs Spökhanden (1898), för att urskilja hur motivet den galna kvinnan har använts i 1800-talets klassiska gotiska litteratur, och om några signifikanta skillnader förekommer i Mas (2022) moderna roman. Den komparativa och intertextuella studien utförs med en kvalitativ textanalys som inbegriper närläsningar och tolkningar av materialet i syfte att tolka och förstå den galna kvinnans framställning och funktion. Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystem och genuskontrakt tillämpas för att analysera hur den galna kvinnan underordnas en manlig auktoritetsfigur, och vilka oönskade egenskaper som hon fångar upp. Slutsatserna visar framför allt hur den galna kvinnan i De galna kvinnornas bal (Mas 2022) fyller en samhällskritisk funktion, eftersom romanen med en samtida röst slagkraftigt kritiserar den manliga auktoritetsfiguren till skillnad från jämförelsematerialet. Den galna kvinnans oönskade egenskaper framställs heller inte som orimliga eller farliga, vilket särskiljer sig från Jane Eyre (Brontë 1847) där den galna kvinnan framställs med aggressiva och farliga egenskaper. En annan signifikant skillnad i Mas (2022) roman är att den galna kvinnan framställs som ett intressant forskningsobjekt att experimentera på och visa upp för allmänheten, till skillnad från de galna kvinnorna i 1800-talstexterna.

Mad scenes, mental illness and their consequences are frequently portrayed in opera. In my opinion, every time mental illness is embodied in any media, there is an associated responsibility to do research and to one’s best ability try to understand what mental illness does to those afflicted. To widen our minds to all the peculiarities of the human condition. To understand that our embodiment affects the receivers –our audiences- and is ultimately a contribution to the collective understanding of mental illness in society. If I was going to use a mad scene as my material for research, I wanted to handle it in the most emphatic and nuanced way possible. I wanted to understand what my role figure Elvira (from the opera “I puritani” by Bellini) was going through and how to give her story credibility and respect. The vehicle I chose was dance and choreography.

Denna uppsats undersöker gotiska teman som melankoli, isolering, galenskap och död i verk av Edgar Allan Poe och Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Utgångspunkt är följande forskningsfråga: På vilket sätt framträder melankoli, isolering, galenskap och död i de olika verken, samt vilka är likheterna och skillnaderna mellan hur temana framkommer? Metoden är grundad i tematisk analys, intertextualitet och komparation. De verk som analyseras i uppsatsen är Poes The Fall of The House Usher, Ligeia och Berenice. Verk av Lovecraft som analyserats är Cthulhu, The Color out of Space, The Tomb och Polaris. Resultaten visar att alla teman finns närvarande i verk av båda författarna, men att de tar olika former. Poes melankoli är till exempel mycket närmare hans karaktärer än Lovecrafts melankoli, som är mer kopplade till miljöer och objekt. Vidare visar undersökningen bland annat också att Poe inte fokuserar på fysiska dödsbeskrivningar utan på andra typer av död. Lovecrafts dödsbeskrivningar å andra sidan är mer externa och kopplade till monster. / This essay examines the presence of what is considered to be gothic themes such as melancholy, isolation, madness and death in works of Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The following research question was formulated: In what way do melancholy, isolation, madness, and death appear in the various works, and what are the similarities and differences between how the themes emerge? Methods of thematic analysis, intertextuality and comparison are used. The works analysed in the essay are Poe’s The Fall of The House Usher, Ligeia and Berenice. The works analysed are also Lovecraft’s The call of Cthulhu, The Colour out of Space, The Tomb and Polaris. The results show that all the themes are present in works by both authors, but that they take different forms. Poe’s melancholy is for example much closer to his characters than Lovecrafts melancholy, which are more connected to environments and objects. The study also shows among other things, that Poe does not focus on physical death descriptions but on other types of death. Lovecraft's death descriptions on the other hand, are more external and linked to monsters.

This project is researching how a comedy show on insanity could be created and aims to research the subject of madness and the performance of insanity. What is the creative idiot? How can play be an option for understanding the Other? The research is the phenomenology of crazy as the unknown, the stranger and the other.  This research questions the ethics of the performance as well as its aesthetics. How can crazy perform itself in an international performative arts context? The focus is to understand the Other as the unknown as unavailable to reason and therefore impossible to perform as understandable. The object of research is the conflict between reason and its negation as the unknown stranger.  The result of this project is an idea on how to create this performance, as a way of practicing madness in a safe space and enjoy insanity as a way of producing the not yet known, as a way of playing life. / Det här examensarbetet önskar resultera i en idé till en humorföreställning. Det undersöker tematiken kring galenskap och på vilket sätt det går att gestalta den. Undersökningens fokus är vansinnets fenomenologi och möjligheten till dess gestaltning inom internationell scenkonst.  Detta examensarbete undersöker föreställningens förutsättningar både etiskt och estetiskt via teori och praktik. Hur kan galenskapen gestaltas oavsett tid, plats och form? Fokus kommer först och främst att ligga på själva researchfasen i projektet men delar av materialet kan komma att användas i den framtida föreställningen. Resultatet är en idé till en humorföreställning som gestaltar galenskap och dess bakomliggande teorier om humor som en konflikt mellan förnuft och oförnuft.