Out of the margins: The movement of madness in the literature of the twentieth century

Mad characters, mad narrators, and the subject of madness suffuse the literature of the twentieth century. While madness has fascinated writers throughout history, its depiction becomes increasingly important in the twentieth century as writers seize upon the negotiation of the parameters of madness--of normal and abnormal itself--as an exercise in political resistance, social criticism, and self-canonization.; This dissertation provides an overview of the treatment of madness in the literature of the twentieth century. It does not concern itself with the abstract authenticity of such depictions or with authorial eccentricity. Instead it inquires into what the writers of this century have done with their depictions of madness. It first finds that, in the twentieth century, the poles of madness and sanity have been reversed; then the historical boundary between these two opposites has been slowly eroded. The writers of the twentieth century increasingly normalize the madness that historically was depicted as wholly Other.; Chapter One briefly surveys the history of depictions of madness and argues that twenty centuries of depictions of madness were, until the late nineteenth century, essentially consistent in their depiction of madness as an intruder. Chapter Two argues that the avant-gardes' valuing of madness accelerated the erosion of the boundaries between mad and sane. Chapter Three concludes that writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf subtly rewrote the parameters of madness and sanity under the aegis of stream-of-consciousness realism. Chapter Four examines the theme of drunkenness in modernism and concludes that drunkenness, as a marker of Dionysian "madness," is shown increasingly to be normal and sensible while sobriety is increasingly marginalized. Chapter Five argues that postmodernism, where it does not engage in formalistic experimentation designed to show "real" madness, continues the imbrication of mad and sane practiced by modernism. Chapter six argues that in spite of a conservative tendency in popular literature that maintains madness as an Other, much of popular literature shares in the canonical deconstruction of madness and sanity.