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'mad' is not a single kingdom
Nov. 30th, 2011 01:48 amOne trouble with trying to read up on The Woman in White is there's a lot of bollocks said about madness. Also a lot of use of the word oedipal, about people that are not father and son, and use of the word incest, about people who are not in fact siblings. Marian calls Walter her brother sometimes, and he ends up her brother in law. What a shocker. Hmmm, there's also a Walter section talking about Laura as "Mine to love and honour as father and brother both." That follows a Marian section talking about how desperate things were for them because they had no father or brother to be on their side. Also Walter says "The sad sight of the change in her from her former self, made the one interest of my love an interest of tenderness and compassion which her father or her brother might have felt, and which I felt, God knows, in my inmost heart." Rats, I might have to concede they have a point on this one. It's meant to differentiate his love from mad ill Laura, which is all neutral and caring, from his love for her as his wife, but he do use the words a bunch. It's a bit creepy, really, he marries the useless one they've been treating as a child. There's a lot about brothers, and Brothers, and the Brotherhood. But mostly they're invisible brothers mucking up history, and then killing people. Sisters are right in the middle doing lots of stuff. So there's lots of essays about sisters, which will link in an essay with sisters in Goblin Market. I'd rather research something else entirely but the easiest way to access essays at the moment isn't our Athens logins, which seem to have been neutered, but to ask the teacher to go grab them for us. Is no good. Shall stick to the ones she already got.
The oedipal bit is because the bad guy is older than the good guy. I don't think they really need to go there based on just that.
And then there's all the bit about madness. I just gave up on an essay for a bit because it's starting to go on about (a) how very mad Anne Catherick is and (b) how scary mad people are. As for (a) their evidence is that she 'in her delirium' believes things which ironically turn out to be true. She loves Laura like a sister, which is in fact biologically true. But because she was in the asylum this essay goes 'Anne is mad, Anne believes mad things, isn't is sad how they turn out to be true?' Whereas I go 'Anne was in the asylum because a powerful man believed she knew secrets, Anne believes she knows secrets, Anne believes a thing that turns out to be true. Hmmmm, maybe she wasn't delusional.' I mean I'll grant she has problems with anxiety, but having been locked up, and knowing she is in fact being followed, and the teensy little problem at the end where we only have the bad guy's word for it that she died before he got around to killing her, she really do have just cause for a great deal of anxiety! So she's a bit fluttery and worried all the time. Surprise! She has a lot to worry about! And while people go on about how she's really kind of stupid, that doesn't make her mad, that makes her possibly learning disabled and possibly just ignorant. So I'll go as far as anxious and learning disabled, but mad? What's the sane response to knowing men want to lock her in a mad house?
As for madness itself being scary... grow up and get over it. Really. Low end estimates for how many of us go there are 1 in 4. Mental illness is a common experience. It's scary the way any illness is scary, in that you don't want it happening to you, and it makes people a bit unpredictable, but hello, everyone is unpredictable, there's just an illusion of predictability that's not true in experiments or lived experience. And if they're just saying that someone being very anxious tends to make people around them very anxious, well that's true enough, but they're talking a lot of mystifying bollocks around and beyond that. It's like they just say the word 'madness' and suddenly it's all inexplicable and rabbit hole. :-p
The actual scary people in the book are (1) abusive husbands (2) best friends of abusive husbands who are probably abusive husbands too (3) rich people who can get the law to do what they tell it to, especially when they happen to also be (1) and (2). The allegedly mad person doesn't do anything scary. It's scary to be alleged to be mad, since they then get locked up for the crazy person behaviour of claiming to be themselves. That means not that madness is scary but that men misusing the label madness are scary.
Stupid essays. Vaguely stupid book. Annoyance now.
The exam won't have a question on the depiction of 'madness' in the texts we've studied but there's enough of it in enough places to be very very annoying because Victorians categories were bloody unhelpful. It's like there's the category people, and the category madness, and you leave the one to be the other. Wrong wrongity wrong wrong. Yuck.
... oh my essay language is totally working there. :eyeroll:
The oedipal bit is because the bad guy is older than the good guy. I don't think they really need to go there based on just that.
And then there's all the bit about madness. I just gave up on an essay for a bit because it's starting to go on about (a) how very mad Anne Catherick is and (b) how scary mad people are. As for (a) their evidence is that she 'in her delirium' believes things which ironically turn out to be true. She loves Laura like a sister, which is in fact biologically true. But because she was in the asylum this essay goes 'Anne is mad, Anne believes mad things, isn't is sad how they turn out to be true?' Whereas I go 'Anne was in the asylum because a powerful man believed she knew secrets, Anne believes she knows secrets, Anne believes a thing that turns out to be true. Hmmmm, maybe she wasn't delusional.' I mean I'll grant she has problems with anxiety, but having been locked up, and knowing she is in fact being followed, and the teensy little problem at the end where we only have the bad guy's word for it that she died before he got around to killing her, she really do have just cause for a great deal of anxiety! So she's a bit fluttery and worried all the time. Surprise! She has a lot to worry about! And while people go on about how she's really kind of stupid, that doesn't make her mad, that makes her possibly learning disabled and possibly just ignorant. So I'll go as far as anxious and learning disabled, but mad? What's the sane response to knowing men want to lock her in a mad house?
As for madness itself being scary... grow up and get over it. Really. Low end estimates for how many of us go there are 1 in 4. Mental illness is a common experience. It's scary the way any illness is scary, in that you don't want it happening to you, and it makes people a bit unpredictable, but hello, everyone is unpredictable, there's just an illusion of predictability that's not true in experiments or lived experience. And if they're just saying that someone being very anxious tends to make people around them very anxious, well that's true enough, but they're talking a lot of mystifying bollocks around and beyond that. It's like they just say the word 'madness' and suddenly it's all inexplicable and rabbit hole. :-p
The actual scary people in the book are (1) abusive husbands (2) best friends of abusive husbands who are probably abusive husbands too (3) rich people who can get the law to do what they tell it to, especially when they happen to also be (1) and (2). The allegedly mad person doesn't do anything scary. It's scary to be alleged to be mad, since they then get locked up for the crazy person behaviour of claiming to be themselves. That means not that madness is scary but that men misusing the label madness are scary.
Stupid essays. Vaguely stupid book. Annoyance now.
The exam won't have a question on the depiction of 'madness' in the texts we've studied but there's enough of it in enough places to be very very annoying because Victorians categories were bloody unhelpful. It's like there's the category people, and the category madness, and you leave the one to be the other. Wrong wrongity wrong wrong. Yuck.
... oh my essay language is totally working there. :eyeroll: