Sarah Marena Gaspard

Thesis Title: Stranger in Fiction: Mental Illness as (Un)Ethical Alterity in Post-1945 American Fiction

Supervisor: Prof. Michael Whitworth

Abstract: 

My dissertation asserts the imperative of applying Dorothy Hale’s notions of the ethics of alterity to mental illness, and tracing how psychopathological alterity, the state of being different as a result of having a mental illness (or significant psychopathological symptoms), has been depicted in a large number of post-1945 American novels.

My research postulates a chronological, aggregative continuity among novels portraying rare and severe forms of mental illnesses by drawing from their knowledge and beliefs about psychopathology rather than from lived experiences of mental illness. My thesis argues that by increasingly blurring the lines between metaphorical interpretations of madness and representations of literal symptoms of mental illness, these works contributed to creating and entrenching archetypes of madness which have distorted conceptualizations of psychopathological etiologies, conflated mental illnesses with notions of risk and dangerousness and damaging constructions of masculinity, and fostered negative attitudes toward persons with mental illnesses which endure to this day.

Alternatively, my thesis argues that narratives centering lived experiences of psychopathology, namely neuronovels evincing endorsement of the diathesis-stress model of illness, allow for more nuanced and insightful fictionalizations of lived experiences of psychopathological alterity – which can engage with the real inflection points affecting the quality of lives intertwined with psychopathological alterity.

Critical attention to depictions of mental illness in fiction has mainly consisted of limited forays into the vilification of psychiatrists and the abjections endured by psychiatric patients, speculation about intertwinements between mental illness and creativity, and narrative and textual techniques for evoking madness. Little criticism has been devoted to investigating how fiction can complement contemporary conceptualizations of mental illness, revisiting post-1945 narratives with mental illness and psychopathological alterity as the main objects of investigation, identifying narrative archetypes which metaphorize psychopathology, or reflecting on the potential afforded by the neuronovel genre’s unquestioning encompassing of narratives centering psychopathology.