| "Witness to the Mad City Asylums" examines a wide range of autobiographical and biographical texts---fictional, nonfictional, and poetic---written by and about women and men who were institutionalized as "mad" in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Placing emphasis on contemporary discourses of sex/uality, marriage, family, and psychiatry, the project closely considers the generic, institutional, and cultural forms within which new kinds of literature take shape. It focuses, for instance, on the appearance of several new subgenres of "madhouse literature" in the texts of mostly noncanonical writers, including Mary Jane Ward, Fritz Peters, Paul and Marie Hackett, Carl Solomon, and Allen Ginsberg. These writers adopt a variety of literary strategies in order to resist the notion of identity as self-contained, a resistance that is particularly evident in their in/ability to form interpersonal bonds, blur the worlds inside and outside the madhouse, and incorporate or exclude the perspectives of their fellow patients, family members, and hospital staff. They also evade the demands of linguistic and literary conventions and prevailing scientific and popular psychiatric discourses by creating a distance between their "sane" and "mad" selves which enables them to write with the authority of a (former) mental patient without being regarded as an unreliable "madman." By destabilizing binaries such as in/sanity, writer/subject, self/other, and inside/outside the mental institution, multiplications of the self in these texts suggest productive new readings of categories of identity and difference in and beyond madhouse literature. In closely examining this body of texts, it becomes possible to recuperate an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century literature and culture. |
