Take a quick glance at the annals of literature and you can find madness in bucketloads: Hemingway undergoing painful electroconvulsive treatment, Robert Lowell’s stint in McLean Hospital, David Foster Wallace’s post-suicide canonization, Virginia Woolf with her pockets stuffed full of stones. Suffering can seem like a vital ingredient in the production of great art.
But “madness”, in the terms dictated by this rich literary history, bears no real relation to the objective reality of mental illness. The day to day business of mental illness is hard, boring and unrewarding, and though it can certainly provide benefits – increased empathy for other people’s pain, an ability to withstand intense periods of suffering – it rarely offers profound revelations about the human condition.
“Madness”, on the other hand, sounds wild, romantic, even; a primal, primitive closeness to the essential truths of the universe. In literary history, it translates to something more transcendental, some kind of shamanic understanding – take Coleridge, now considered to have suffered from bipolar disorder, in his drug-induced miseries. Even writers themselves subscribe to the idea: Byron’s “we of the craft are crazy”, Woolf’s pronouncement that “madness is terrific”.
It’s a strange kind of fetishization. In particular, the narrative neuters women writers, cauterizes their experiences in a way that conveniently fails to recognize facets of their person outside their sadness. Poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are easily, and often snidely, disregarded as “suicidal girl poets”: no more, no less. Just take Woody Allen’s dismissive proclamation in Annie Hall: Plath was an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality”. Though Plath’s work does, of course, deal with issues of madness and suffering, to put the critical focus so intently on such topics fails to recognise the richness and complexity also contained therein. Sexton herself is an interesting case study here too, as her work is often compared to Plath’s. “Madness” is one topic, and Sexton’s work is subsumed by it, eclipsed by someone else slightly more mad, slightly more famous.
Of course, there is some tentative evidence that creativity and mental illness are, in fact, linked; Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched by Fire (1993), a thorough, compelling book about the link between bipolar disorder and art, confidently suggests that many of history’s greatest writers and artists had manic depression. The relationship between the two is not clear, though: is it symbiotic? Does one beget the other?
When you read accounts of Edgar Allan Poe spending all his money at once or Hemingway’s orgiastic blowouts, madness sounds almost glamorous. The image of Plath, stealing her mother’s sleeping pills and crawling under her house to die, can, in a certain light, seem romantic. Zelda Fitzgerald’s institutionalization starkly contrasts with the glittering parties we’re told she attended earlier in her life: these lives are also sometimes read as morality tales. And who, honestly, would not secretly want to receive one of Nietzsche’s Wahnzettel – his “madness letters”? This is madness with its own creative licence, though, a rich fiction that bears as much resemblance to reality as a fantasy novel.
Ask anyone with mental health problems to characterize their illness and they’re likely to describe the void of depression as boring, not inspiring, and the frantic, manic despair that many people experience as more disabling than it is galvanizing. This can be particularly true for those with bipolar disorder, which Jamison and others consider to be the “ultimate” in artistic illnesses – but the shuttle between despair, shame and ennui can move so rapidly that taking a shower can sometimes seem ambitious, let alone writing your magnum opus.
The beauty of great works of literature can lie in part in the way they take very specific individual experiences and, somehow, speak to the universal human condition. But the idea that this understanding comes simply from suffering is rarely true.
But “madness”, in the terms dictated by this rich literary history, bears no real relation to the objective reality of mental illness. The day to day business of mental illness is hard, boring and unrewarding, and though it can certainly provide benefits – increased empathy for other people’s pain, an ability to withstand intense periods of suffering – it rarely offers profound revelations about the human condition.
“Madness”, on the other hand, sounds wild, romantic, even; a primal, primitive closeness to the essential truths of the universe. In literary history, it translates to something more transcendental, some kind of shamanic understanding – take Coleridge, now considered to have suffered from bipolar disorder, in his drug-induced miseries. Even writers themselves subscribe to the idea: Byron’s “we of the craft are crazy”, Woolf’s pronouncement that “madness is terrific”.
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Of course, there is some tentative evidence that creativity and mental illness are, in fact, linked; Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched by Fire (1993), a thorough, compelling book about the link between bipolar disorder and art, confidently suggests that many of history’s greatest writers and artists had manic depression. The relationship between the two is not clear, though: is it symbiotic? Does one beget the other?
When you read accounts of Edgar Allan Poe spending all his money at once or Hemingway’s orgiastic blowouts, madness sounds almost glamorous. The image of Plath, stealing her mother’s sleeping pills and crawling under her house to die, can, in a certain light, seem romantic. Zelda Fitzgerald’s institutionalization starkly contrasts with the glittering parties we’re told she attended earlier in her life: these lives are also sometimes read as morality tales. And who, honestly, would not secretly want to receive one of Nietzsche’s Wahnzettel – his “madness letters”? This is madness with its own creative licence, though, a rich fiction that bears as much resemblance to reality as a fantasy novel.
Ask anyone with mental health problems to characterize their illness and they’re likely to describe the void of depression as boring, not inspiring, and the frantic, manic despair that many people experience as more disabling than it is galvanizing. This can be particularly true for those with bipolar disorder, which Jamison and others consider to be the “ultimate” in artistic illnesses – but the shuttle between despair, shame and ennui can move so rapidly that taking a shower can sometimes seem ambitious, let alone writing your magnum opus.
The beauty of great works of literature can lie in part in the way they take very specific individual experiences and, somehow, speak to the universal human condition. But the idea that this understanding comes simply from suffering is rarely true.
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