Vol. 30 | March 2022 | Mulling Over Madness in Literature: Representation of Female Insanity in Graham Swift’s Waterland | Meena Sharma

Abstract

The lens of gender provides an important perspective in reading the manifestations of madness in the works of modernist writers. This paper examines the representation of madness with particular reference to female insanity in the novel Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift. Madness in different forms permeates the narrative of Waterland, but the depiction of madness is not gender-neutral. Female madness in the novel is linked to mysticism and the enclosed space, and though there are hints of resistance in the madwoman, resistance through madness is seen as disruptive and inconvenient. At the same time, the representation of female madness in a text written by a male author with a male narrator/ protagonist indicates that madness serves more as a tool to complicate the plot as the male protagonist (Tom Crick) is free to paint the women in a manner that serves his purpose. The paper explores these questions around female insanity while considering the discourse of madness in different historical periods up to the modern age as it emerges in the narrative.

Keywords: madness, gender, enclosed space, mysticism, resistance, silence.

Insanity is a dominant theme in the works of Graham Swift, and the concept of being “mentally unfit” features in unique ways in his novels; the subject of “madness” is also a persistent element and an essential aspect of Waterland (1983). Critical inquiry of this novel has predominantly focused on the necessity of history and story within a postmodernist framework. This paper shifts focus from postmodern historiography and attempts to look at the silenced female characters with particular attention to the representation of insanity, particularly female insanity. To understand the depiction of madness in the novel, the paper first looks at the discourse of madness through different historical periods and the different ways of looking at female insanity. This is followed by an examination of the theme of insanity in the novel Waterland. The protagonist of the novel, Tom Crick, a history teacher, is forced to retire as his discipline is considered irrelevant in the contemporary world. As he abandons his lesson to narrate his/story through different historical moments in no particular order, his narrative provides insights into the notion of madness across time and gender. The paper attempts to look at how female insanity is depicted in a text written by a male author with a male narrator. Toms’s narration introduces the reader to three ‘important’ women characters Mary Crick (his wife), Helen Atkinson (his mother) and Sarah Atkinson (his Victorian ancestor).

Modernist literature engages with mental illness/insanity in different ways, and the frequent appearance of insanity, particularly female insanity, invites attention. The concept of ‘madness’ holds different meanings across different cultures and cannot be dissociated from the historical, cultural, literary, and individual context. While Roy Porter’s assertion in A Social History of Madness that “Even today we possess no rational consensus upon the nature of mental illness… madness has been and remains an elusive thing” (8) reveals the complexities of mental illness, any attempt to understand mental illness/instability requires an understanding of individual emotional experiences, environment, and, more specifically, traumatic experience. Until the eighteenth century, madness was associated with the loss of reason and animality; as Andrew Scull points out, “in losing his reason, the essence of his humanity, the madman had lost his claims to be treated as a human being” (86). The register of medical terms entered into the psychological discourse only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which witnessed a radical reconceptualisation of the notions of insanity with a “shift from a philosophy of the mind to a science of the mind” (49) as noted by James Goodwin. There was a strong interest in the human mind and psyche during this era which also saw increased institutionalisation of psychiatry, rendering a conceptual shift in the notion of madness from ‘animality and loss of reason’ to looking at it as an illness which can be cured and treated. Roy Porter notes that this shift or “psychological turn” (Madness 127) is significant as it led to increased attention to exploring the causes and different types of mental illness/disorders /disturbances. The discourse of madness has thus changed from madness being perceived as an imbalance of ‘humour’ divine ‘fury’ to looking at it as a malfunctioning of the brain. In fact, in every historical period, madness /mental illness / has been perceived and misperceived in different ways, which is also reflected in Waterland by Graham Swift.

An essential aspect in understanding the representation of madness/insanity in modernist fiction is closely aligned to the exploration of traumatic events /injury in the wake of the wounded soldiers in the First World War. Exploring the representation of trauma in modernist fiction, Sarah Anderson notes a link “between trauma and its common representation or manifestation as madness” (3). While traumatic experiences at the backdrop of the social and technological upheavals in the early part of the twentieth century impacted the mental health of men and women in different ways, gender becomes a critical factor in the portrayal of mad characters. Examining the representation of madness along gender lines, Sarah Wood Anderson notes that while madmen usually appear “stoic,” madwomen are more often represented as “hysterical” (4). Anderson further states that:

The frequency of female insanity in modernist literature introduces the question of whether authors saw madness as an indicator of trauma or simply as part of a woman’s nature. While authors may provide a source for a woman’s mental condition, her madness often takes over as the point of reader interest. Madwomen make great drama, and how authors use them reveals much about how they view women in general as well as how they think women impact men. (59)

Though madness is manifested and represented in different ways in men and women, the representation of female insanity is, however, not unique to modernist literature. Depiction of female insanity has been a subject of much critical inquiry; some of the early ‘classic’ examples are Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). In these novels, the diagnosis of madness in women characters facilitates silencing, thereby revealing the complexities of mental health, female vulnerability, and the patriarchal system of control. Female madness has thus been interpreted in different ways across the literary canon; Elaine Showalter’s observation that “ hysteria was apt to appear in young women who were especially rebellious” (145) looks at female madness as a tool for self-expression, giving them the voice of rebellion. Feminist critics have countered this prevalent notion of madness as a metaphor for female resistance in the wake of the World War. Examining narratives of women writers, Caminero-Santangelo in The Madwoman Can’t Speak: or Why Insanity is Not Subversive posits that since a madwoman cannot construct her narrative and has to be represented by someone else, madness in women characters does not serve as a tool of rebellion. Though there are hints of resistance in a madwoman’s character, in actuality, she is victimised; insanity is the “final removal of the madwoman from any field of agency” (12). Madness in women has been understood either as a tool of rebellion or a tool of silencing. Sarah Anderson proposes an interesting “third camp” to understanding female insanity in her work Readings of Trauma, Madness and the Body. She notes:

The male writer constructing female insanity typically recognises a need for a woman’s resistance to patriarchy. Yet he creates that resistance with the tool of madness, replete with the accompanying judgment, hatred, and resentment on the part of male characters. Madwomen are often portrayed as disloyal because of their illness, which is interpreted as inconvenient and offensive to male characters who must deal with it. It is a burr in the side of otherwise well-functioning and productive men, threatening, ultimately, to ruin them. Additionally, the implication in these novels is that women’s insanity is part of their nature, part of the female condition. This situation is particularly curious because if men are writing women characters’ madness, then they have the freedom to paint them in any manner that serves their protagonists, who are usually male. Madness, therefore, functions as a tool for complicating the plot, not for resisting patriarchy or voicing resistance. Further complicating matters is the consideration of what Judith Butler calls “gender performativity.” If the women of men’s novels are crazy, then the suggestion remains that they are crazy as a result of their femininity. (66)

The representation of female characters in Waterland reveals the predicament of women in a narrative controlled by the male narrator/protagonist. In this novel, Tom Crick narrates his past in a desperate attempt to make sense of events around him (his early retirement, his wife’s treatment at a mental institution after she steals a baby). His narrative takes the reader to the history of Fenland, the Atkinson, and the Cricks in which the women, especially mad women, become associated with excessive and subversive elements and disrupt progress and the idea of history as conceived in the novel. The following section takes up these aspects of the representation of women focussing on female insanity and its representation. An attempt is also made to trace the discourse of madness presented in the novel.

Referring to the centrality of madness in Waterland, Champion observes that:

Waterland frequently interrogates the “scientific” view of madness in the twentieth century. Especially by juxtaposing the disturbed condition of Crick’s wife with histories of mental states from the seventh-century Saint Gunnhilda through the Victorian view of Sarah Atkinson’s insanity to the extraordinary marsh-man, Bill Clay, the novel exposes the shifting ideological limits of the rational. (40)

Madness is a dominant theme in Waterland, with symbolic and metaphorical connotations. The novel depicts the mental instability of the shell-shocked soldiers, madness as drunkenness, mysticism, delusion, hallucination, idiocy, schizophrenia, and emotional instability are all different manifestations of mental instability. The question of sanity and madness is frequently interrogated in Waterland; a key aspect of this is noted in the description of the effects of Coronation Ale; drunkenness is linked to insanity as it takes one “with astonishing rapidity through the normally gradual and containable stages of intoxication: pleasure, satisfaction, well-being, elation, light-headedness, hot-headedness, befuddlement, distraction, delirium, irascibility, pugnaciousness, imbalance, incapacity -- all in the gamut of a single bottle.” (Waterland 174). The effects of Coronation Ale- from delirium to imbalance to incapacity- as depicted in the novel is also reflective of the progress of the mental illness. Thus, insanity in its “relative” sense is linked with drunkenness in the context of the novel, blurring the boundaries between sanity and insanity. Though not made explicit, drunkenness and its associated madness is seen in male characters, indicating thereby that men are in ‘control’ of their mental state. On the other hand, madness as a psychological and pathological condition is clearly and visibly depicted in the female characters, specifically Sarah and Mary. Examining the novel along gender lines reveals that madness is associated with mysticism and the enclosed space and confinement, both physical and psychological, for women characters. ‘Insanity’ becomes a tool to confine them to the margins and render them silent, untrustworthy and disruptive to the men around them. Though a hint of female madness as resistance lurks in the narrative, it is subsumed in the larger narrative of the male protagonist Tom Crick who is free to paint the women as it serves his purpose.

The novel Waterland has three mental institutions; the Wetherfield Asylum, the Kessling Home and the London mental hospital, representing a kind of progression. The Wetherfield Asylum is similar to the Victorian asylum, while the Kessling Home is created to take care of the soldiers wounded in war, and the London mental hospital represents the modern institution designed to deal with those who cannot cope with the modern society. The theme of madness is introduced early in the novel; Tom mentions his ancestor Bill Clay “the marsh-man, whose brains were quite cracked, was really, nonetheless, and if truth be known, a sort of Wise Man” (20). In the Early Middle Ages, madness associated with mysticism, delusion and hallucination is a part of the experience of “visionaries and fanatics”, also seen in the oracle of Saint Gunnhilda:

Saint Gunnhilda, our local patroness, who in 695, or thereabouts, built a wattle hut for herself on a mud hump in the middle of the marsh, and resisting the assaults and blandishing of demons and surviving on nothing but her prayers, heard the voice of God, founded a church and gave her name (Gunnhildsea-Gildsey: Gunnhilda’s Isle) to a town. (25)

This notion of madness marked by supernaturalism and fantastic rumours sets the tone for the depiction of madness in the character of Sarah Atkinson, Crick’s great great grandmother. Rewriting the story of the Atkinson, Tom Crick introduces his students to the incident in 1820 when Sarah Atkinson, the beautiful young wife of Thomas Atkinson, is struck by her “old and doting –and jealous” (81) husband, who falsely accuses her of committing adultery. Sarah knocks her head against a writing table, “never again recovered her wits” (82) and spends the rest of her long life in the enclosed space sitting on “a blue velvet chair before the window in an upper room…known simply as Mistress Sarah’s room” (83) preserving the demeanour of “an exiled princess”. Sarah is punished for her suspected adultery, first by her husband’s blow and later by her sons, who build the Wetherfield Asylum to “lock her up in the cage for cretins” (100). Sarah’s insanity echoes the archetypal Victorian madwoman figure similar to Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic”. It reflects the Victorian anxiety about female sexuality. Unlike Bill Clay and Saint Gunnhilda, the nineteenth-century notion of madness is marked by “fear, ignorance and paranoid repression” (Champion 41).

The blow on her head and the solitude of the enclosed space sanctify and transform Sarah into a holy figure with a gift “ which is so desired and feared-the gift to see and shape the future”(88). Her figure becomes surrounded by rumour, myth and legends, making her powerful with the ability to bring about the rise and decline of the Atkinsons. Though silent she imparts wisdom to her sons “by some other mystical process of communication, wisdom and exhortation” (88). Interestingly she is a “Guardian Angel, Holy Mother, Saint Gunnhilda-come-again” (99) and “stark-mad” (89). Sarah is a mystical force and a madwoman, a blessing and a curse haunting the community even after her death; she is seen watching the Atkinson brewery burn down forty years after her funeral. Sarah’s madness and consequent silence is also an act of resistance as all attempts by her husband, Thomas Atkinson, to cure her become futile. Following his attack on Sarah, Thomas Atkinson makes desperate attempts to bring Sarah to her ‘senses’ and restore his sense of control. He seeks advice from a variety of (male) experts under the guise of curing her:

And that the reply of the wizened occultist . . . drove the last rivet of grief into old Tom’s soul: that Thomas Atkinson, as Thomas himself well knew, was only receiving the punishment he merited, and that, as for his wife, no magic in the world could bring her out of the state which she herself – had not Thomas looked closely enough into her eyes? – wished to remain in. (85-86)

Here madness gives Sarah mystical powers; her silence appears as ‘empowering’, an act of resistance. ‘Power’ and ‘resistance’ in women is possible only in madness but is not without problems. A counter-argument operates in the larger narrative framework of the novel. Sarah’s silence disrupts the history and progress of the Atkinson dynasty as her husband Thomas “no longer attends to the expanding affairs of Atkinson and sons…History has stopped for him” (80). If Sarah’s madness and consequent silence is an act of resistance, it is also disruptive, disturbing, and an impediment to the Atkinson dynasty. Her sickness/ insanity/silence disturbs and hinders the progress of the Atkinsons by redirecting her husband’s attention and energies.

In 1918, the Atkinson’s build another asylum Kessling Hall Home to house the shell-shocked soldiers. This asylum has its genesis, not in family problems but is built in response to the trauma of World War I. It is a home for ‘shell shocked’ soldiers like Henry Crick (Tom’s father), who are sent to the hospital to recover from the traumatic experience of war and readjust to life in a peaceful world. The Home, however, also houses the story of Sarah’s ‘beautiful’ granddaughter and Tom Crick’s mother, Helen Atkinson. Unlike Sarah, Helen is not mad; as Tom says, Helen does not suffer the same fate as Sarah because “she is possession of her mind, which for fifty years of her life, Sarah Atkinson was not” (215). Following the burning of the Atkinson brewery, Helen follows her father, Ernest Atkinson, into seclusion. For four years, from 1914 until 1918, the father-daughter seldom venture from their hall. Against the backdrop of the insanity and trauma of the World War, Helen’s trauma in the confined, private, domestic space becomes insignificant. Tom rewrites Helen’s story as a fairy-tale about a beautiful daughter trapped by her father. Helen apparently is not insane, but The Kessling Hall Home converted to a hospital to “endow a convalescent home for war victims” (216) does not just treat the shell shocked but is also the space that silences the trauma and perhaps insanity of Helen Atkinson.

Away from the madness of the outside world and War, in the enclosed space of Kessling Hall, another sort of madness grows. Ernest falls in love with his daughter Helen and wants to become the father of the “Saviour” that his daughter will bear. Helen, Tom says, did not grow up in a sane environment and “love[s] her father, both in the way a daughter should and in the way a daughter shouldn't" (228), but she “baulked and trembled” (228) at her father’s wish for a child. To divert her father’s designs, she urges him to turn Kessling Home into a “hospital for victims of war” (228). After four years of seclusion, Helen emerges from the enclosed space, transformed into a nurse with the power to heal the soldiers by telling stories – “a way of bearing what won't go away, a way of making sense of madness” (225). Tom chooses not to focus on Helen’s trauma as she nurses the broken-minded soldiers and her father’s ‘wounded’ mind. This asylum thus becomes a metaphor for ‘madness’, and working at the hospital, Helen “got used to speaking about madness as if it were the normal thing” (228). Helen fails to find sanity around her and feels trapped “like a distressed damsel in the forest” (229). Unable to bear the madness around, Helen strikes a terrible bargain with her father. She agrees to bear her father’s child if he lets her marry one of her patients. This bargain, metaphorically ‘an act of madness’, is again disruptive of history. The child born of this bargain, Dick (Tom’s brother), is not a Saviour, as Ernest thinks, but an idiot, a “potato head” (33), a disintegrating force.

The third asylum in the novel, the mental hospital in the centre of London, introduces a different register to the discourse of madness. Tom Crick uses the terminology of contemporary psychology to describe his wife, Mary Crick, ’s mental illness. He refers to her condition as “schizophrenia” (152) and hints at treatment by a “psychiatrist” (309). Though the terminology used to describe female madness changes and shifts across centuries, the persistent Victorian anxieties towards female sexual agency can be seen in Tom’s attempt to theorise Mary’s madness. Like his ancestor Thomas Atkinson, Tom feels threatened by Mary’s sexuality and alleged infidelity as he suspects her of sleeping with his brother. When Tom Crick describes “the cloistered precincts of this asylum –” one cannot miss the allusions to the celibacy of cloistered nuns like St Gunnhilda. He has to correct himself, “that is, hospital” (327). Tom looks at Mary’s madness as a gendered inheritance, an inherent weakness in the female psyche. In attempting to understand Mary’s madness, Tom situates her and recalls the figure of Sarah Atkinson, the image of Victorian womanhood. But unlike the Victorian asylum, this mental hospital has an antiseptic environment, “protective bars. . . institutional asphalt” (247). It is meant to house victims of modern society and hints at the humane treatment of mental illness in the late twentieth century. Mary must undergo “treatment” in the hopes of being cured as her action of stealing the baby fails to correspond with societal norms and is seen as an act of “madness”. The concept of enclosed space and women is significantly expressed in the character of Mary. It may be noted that Mary confines herself to the enclosed space twice. The first time, after Freddie’s death and her abortion, Mary, still a schoolgirl, voluntarily “decides to withdraw from the world and devote herself to a life of solitude, atonement, and celibacy” (47). She goes into a self-imposed cloister on a “temporary communing with On High” (47) and emerges from the seclusion with renewed strength and endurance. Years later, Mary shuts herself again from the outside world and slips into psychological seclusion, gradually losing her sanity. Seeking Salvation at the age of fifty-two, she begins “this love- affair, this liaison…with God” (48). Mary is once again confined into the enclosed space of the asylum. However, the notion of enclosed space, mysticism and madness assumes a different dimension in the modern context. Madness is no more mystical, transformative and sacred, nor does it confer any prophetic and mystical powers to Mary as it did to Sarah many years ago. Victorian ignorance of madness and the clinical knowledge of psychiatry in the twentieth century is evident as Tom says, “In another age, in olden times, they might have called her holy (or else have burnt her as a witch) . . . They might have allowed her the full scope of her mania: her anchorite’s cell, her ascetic's liberties, her visions and ravings . . . Now she gets the benefit of psychiatry” (328). As Tom leaves the institution in which he places Mary, “his historian’s eye takes in . . . on the pink granite plinth . . . the word which modern preference for plain ‘Hospital’ or, begrudgingly, ‘Mental Hospital,’ cannot in justice to this worthy’s memory,. . . erase: ‘. . . Asylum’” (327). The word asylum connects Sarah, Helen and Mary, indicating the persistence of the Victorian era anxieties toward female sexual agency even in the present. Trying to make sense of and explain Mary’s irrational behaviour Tom Crick traces her madness to her teenage promiscuity, the trauma of abortion and consequent inability to bear a child. Mary’s decision to terminate her pregnancy without Crick’s knowledge seems to give her autonomy and the power of decision. But this act is again disruptive of history, progress and future. The foetal remains in the pail, “what the future are made of” (307), is discarded in the river. Years later, Mary’s irrational act of kidnapping a baby is traced to the trauma of abortion and her inability to bear a child. It puts Crick and his social security into trouble bringing his life almost to a standstill like his ancestors Thomas and Ernest.

The intricacies of female madness and its representation in a male-authored text with a male protagonist is evident in the novel. The three women characters, Sarah, Helen, and Mary, are associated with ‘madness’ in different ways, and each of these characters seems to enjoy some autonomy or agency. However, this autonomy is disruptive to the men around them. So, madness does not serve as a tool of resistance for the women characters in Waterland. Moreover, Tom Crick, the ‘ overtly controlling narrator …” (Hutcheon 117), is free to paint the women in a way that serves his purpose. He narrates the stories of these women and rewrites and paints them in a manner that suits his narrative. Sarah is ‘Guardian Angel, Holy Mother, Saint Gunnhild-come-again … an intrepid Britannia’ (99); she is an angel who guards, protects and brings prosperity to the region. But she is also ‘stark raving…uncooperative…defiant” (100), causing floods, fires, riots and infertility. Helen Atkinson is the personification of Beauty, one apt to be the mother of the next Saviour of the World (219). Tom refers to her as ‘Brewer’s Daughter of Gildsey’ and associates her with ‘ghosts and earnestly recounted legends’ in the villages along the Leem (25). Similarly, Mary is re-written by Tom as the “untouchable madonna” (48) “, Saint Gunnhilda” (121), and “a princess awaiting rescue” (120), his dead mother (283) and his maternal ancestor Sarah Atkinson (118). Tom’s narrative shows that he is not confident of “[his] ability to know the past with certainty” (Hutcheon 117); portraying women as mad, destructive and elusive serves his narrative. The novel reveals the binary attitude towards madness and sanity. Those who are ‘sane’ (Men) must be listened to at all times, and those ‘insane’(Women) cannot be trusted. Rather than a tool of effective rebellion, madness disempowers the women in the novel.

Works Cited

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Goodwin, C. James. A History of Modern Psychology. 5th ed., Wiley, 2015.

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