Rationality, Recovery, and Resistance: 20th Century and Contemporary Life-Writing by Madwomen

Madness. The term, as well as the embodied identity category, haunts us. Madness, particularly as it is embodied by mad women, arouses both fear and fascination in the public imagination. In this dissertation, I conduct a close, hermeneutic reading of three autobiographical texts by women diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities who share their stories of madness: The Bell Jar (1963) an autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath; An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995) by renowned clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison; and My Body is a Book of Rules (2014) a memoir by Elissa Washuta, a scholar, essayist, and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. I read this work through what I call a hybrid, anti-assimilationist, crip mad critical lens, arguing that while these texts differ from one another in form, content, and cultural context, each work—to varying degrees—“holds space” for their mad women readers and those allies who care to recognize them—by valuing mad experiences, including the irrational, deviant, undefinable, contradictory, and paradoxical. Taken together, Plath, Jamison, and Washuta provide a range of strategies for creating and holding crip mad space for their readers to find refuge and kinship, instead of resolution and containment.