A Study On Shutter Island From Foucauldian Perspective

Shutter Island told a story about the US Marshal Teddy Daniels who was summoned to embark on a journey to investigate the escape of a female patient on Shutter Island. And also, Teddy wanted to find a criminal insane named Andrew Laeddis who directly caused Teddy’s wife Dolores’death. But as the story developed, Teddy got to know the dark truths on the island:Shutter Island worked as prison and asylum for confining and disciplining madness and psychiatrists on the island did experiments by using madness as objects. Before Teddy leftthe island with an ambition for exposing the dark truths to the outside world, Teddy was told his real name was Andrew Laeddis and defined by Dr. Cawley as the sixty-seventh criminal insane who killed his wife and has lived on the island for two years. The whole detection appeared as a kind of treatment for curing Teddy’s madness. Finally, under the confining and disciplining of rational power, Teddy became a "mad man" and received punishment both on his mind and body.This paper was divided into five parts. The first part was introduction involving the works and author, brief literature reviews at home and abroad and Foucault’s theories. The second part, by analyzing Shutter Island’s geographic location and structure, explores the island’s foundation which operated as an institution for confining and disciplining madness. The third part, by analyzing the two distinct living conditions of intellectuals and madness on the Shutter Island, demonstrated the rationality knowledge-power’s suppression on madness, and demonstrates madness’s "voiceless" and docile body. In the forth part, this paper expounded reasons of Teddy’s.failure in partial struggle. Rationality power defined Teddy’s madness and disciplined his body, and Teddy was descended to be an object of rationality power’s experiment. And further, based on Foucault’s theory of partial struggle, this paper argued that Teddy’s partial struggle against the rationality knowledge-power was doomed to fail. The fifth part is conclusion of the whole paper.This paper used Foucault’s theories to analyze the rational power’s confinement and discipline on madness in Shutter Island. Shutter Island worked as a prison for rationality to confine madness. On the island, madness had no discourse power. They appeared as silent and docile bodies under suppression of rational power. By analyzing the discourse power of rationality and madness’voiceless, and the protagonist’s disciplined body and mind, this paper aimed to dig out how rationality power realized the body discipline on "mad" person and constructs civilized person, and showed the plight of modern people’s life. In addition, this paper, showed us modern people’s living predicament under the rationality power mechanism---staying in silence, acting as object and geting confined and disciplined.