Imagining madness

That which the gods would destroy, they first make mad…

One of my literature classes this semester focuses on the depictions of madness in fiction, with a reading list that includes King Lear, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You know, the happy books.

In the first class, we established some definitions to separate true mental illness from the kind of “madness” being depicted in these books. Concepts of madness have been used in fiction to uphold oppressive social and political programs, and often levied at those with lesser power in a society who refuse to follow societal norms. Much of what we are discussing will be these kinds of iconoclasts, the people who do not fit in a normative society and thus are deemed mad, rather than those suffering from mental illness that could be ethically diagnosed and treated.

Several of the early readings have circled back to the concept linking sanity with normativity, or at least the perception of sanity by others. The decision to rule one insane often comes from expressing outwardly what most of us think and feel, but have the self-control not to express out loud.

Consider, for example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.” Now, I love Dickinson even when her habit of apparently-random capitalization is driving me up the wall. But her poem practically underlines the concept of the course here:

Much Madness is divinest Sense -