SLAVE NARRATIVE RETENTIONS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITINGS ABOUT MADNESS
Jeanne Phoenix Laurel
Blurring Madness and Sanity
Madness always has been with us in twentieth-century American literary studies, particularly in women's writing. Sometimes it has been presented simply as a literal quality of mind, interesting for its own sake, but more commonly it functions as a trope for various kinds of social dysfunction. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1899), for instance, uses a mad narrative consciousness to replicate the effects of social, economic, and political restrictions on women. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's groundbreaking theoretical study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) uses the figure of madwoman as a trope for convention-defying narrative strategies.
But the genre of the psychiatric memoir or fictionalized account of madness by women authors bifurcates along lines of race. As I will show by using Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Nettie Jones's Fish Tales (1983), and Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie (1991), the dynamics of the slave narrative influence African-American women's writings about madness. (A similar kind of historical genre influence can be seen in the way slave narrators made use of the conventions of the Christian conversion narrative, the colonial American captivity narrative, and the sentimental romance.) Here, I am interested in the way the narrative voice is able or willing to articulate the speaking subject's relationship to madness, and the influence of the slave narrative in shaping that relationship. Rather than beginning from a state of wellness, descending into behavior and ideation which are abnormal, and then returning to a state of wellness, the narrative voice in these three texts blurs the lines between the mental-emotional states of wellness and madness.
This blurring between wellness and madness is reminiscent of the blurring in slave narratives between the mental-emotional states of slavery and freedom. Briefly, the main purpose of the former slave’s decision to write his or her most humiliating, dehumanized moments was to serve the cause of abolition. This goal became especially sharply focused after 1830, when the abolition movement began emerging as a coherent (if loosely organized) network with well-defined methods and goals. Slave narrators had to show that they had been hurt mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, by slavery. Because of this hurt, readers were forced to conclude that slavery must be abolished. Yet at the same time, slave narrators had to maintain the posture of credible witness to events and causal sequences that readers well might have dismissed as unbelievable. Because of this credibility, readers were forced to conclude that the slave was a fully rational human being deserving of freedom. Taken together, these competing imperatives forced the slave narrator into a paradoxical presentation of self as both harmed and able to transcend that harm, as both debased and untouched by that debasement.
The competing imperatives in slave narratives are repeated in narratives of madness. In the slave narrative, events that take place during slavery are narrated retrospectively, assessed by the outraged mind that has learned the habits of freedom. In effect, the former slave’s narrative voice proclaims, "There was never a time when I was ‘a slave’ -- although I may have been enslaved." The temporary condition of being enslaved may have denied the narrator access to certain habits of logic, analysis, and morality; but being enslaved never rendered the narrator incapable of learning and wielding those habits of rational human beings. In addition, the slave narrator's process of acquiring and exercising the prerogatives of the free person is designed as an appeal to the reader to recognize similarities between so-called slave/writer and free/reader. This recognition must logically yield another insight: that a mere accident of birth created the difference between slave and free status. The more attentive and sophisticated abolitionists were able to capitalize on this similarity by positing that all people, whether nominally free or not, were to some degree enslaved by the peculiar institution. Of course, it would have been ludicrous to conflate the slave's lack of privilege with the owner's surfeit thereof, but this recognition of an at least metaphoric, mutual enslavement helped to destabilize the opposition between slave and free as reified categories.
Likewise, in African-American women's fictional accounts of madness, competing imperatives blur the lines between madness and sanity. The purposes of the works I have chosen are neither as didactic nor as focused as those of the slave narrative. By nearly any commonly held set of criteria, the narrative voice is mad. Yet, in each text the narrator's voice resists sharp distinctions between the two seemingly opposed mental-emotional states, sanity and madness. None of the three accounts seems willing to label one set of behaviors and ideations "sane," another "mad." Rather, just as slave narrators resist categorization as "a slave" (instead of "enslaved," a temporary condition rather than a defining personal identity), so, too, do the narrators in these accounts of madness, when they name events and conditions that provoke irrational responses, finally resist naming the resulting state of mind as an ontological condition. This refusal to name the subject as either mad or sane destabilizes both categories. If this destabilization in the slave narrative yields a recognition that the terms "free" and "slave" are not absolutes poised in a permanent equilibrium as opposites, then the narrative of madness similarly yields a recognition that the terms "mad" and "sane" are likewise relative terms.
African-American women writers have not yet, to my knowledge, undertaken the genre of personal, autobiographical memoir focused exclusively on a bout of psychiatric illness (although works such as those by bell hooks and Evelyn C. White, as well as the National Black Women's Health Project anthology edited by Linda Villarosa, have focused on specific mental health needs of black women). However, there has been a sufficient recent outpouring of works by white authors to provide substantial grounds for a rough comparison to the three novels I cover. The comparison remains rough because of the difference in genre: The works on which I focus here only approximate the memoir form. Toni Morrison's Beloved is, of course, the author's effort to present a collective psychospiritual biography of the backwash of slavery. Nettie Jones's Fish Tales is narrated so tightly from a first person perspective that it mimics the memoir form. And Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie is, as the author has stated in interviews, a parallel, fictive version of her own repressed memories of incest and childhood sexual abuse. Roughly comparable recent works by white authors include Kate Millett's The Loony Bin Trip (1990), William Styron's Darkness Visible (1990), Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (1993), Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (1994), and three recent entries reviewed by Sharon O'Brien under the title "The Sickness Unto Death: Three Accounts of Coping with Diseases that Cripple the Will."
In its use of "sickness," "disease," and "cripple the will," O’Brien’s title neatly captures the thread running through virtually every white author's memoir: that her condition is a spiritual and chemical malfunction which may be exacerbated by external problems, but is not caused by them. It is true that authors straddling the disciplines of self-help, psychology, and spirituality (i.e., Linda Schierse Leonard, Gretchen Sliker, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes) use madness or a state closely resembling it as a controlling metaphor for book-length treatises on how to heal the soul from malaises that are at least partly external in their origins. And invariably, the narrative voice in these treatises speaks from a retrospective point of "wholeness," wellness, and a return to sanity. Yet the madwoman is "different" while mad. She enters an ontological state of being that is set apart from normalcy by more than an arbitrary set of medical definitions.
Although the person of the reader and the person of the writer in these narratives by white authors may be categorically similar, the crucial difference between "mad" and "sane" remains, and is in fact emphasized. These narratives by white authors draw clear boundaries within which to represent madness, enabling readers to align themselves with the "sane" voice which uses the journey from one state to the other to create narrative structure. From a retrospective stance, guided by the "sane" speaking voice, readers are asked to lament or rejoice modern scientific advances, to praise or disparage the wisdom of psychiatric incarceration, to applaud or condemn the class and power boundaries of mental illness as a critique of social structure.
By contrast, in the works by Morrison, Jones, and Herron, readers are not allowed an orientation to such a set of specific sympathies and interpretations. The narrative voice in these three works cannot or will not delineate the boundaries between "mad" and "sane." As a consequence, the question of fact -- of what really happened -- remains vague and contradictory. Because the facts are indiscernible, it is impossible to make an informed judgment about whether or not the consciousness that provides these facts is, indeed, "mad." As I will show, the disjuncture of facts, coupled with a convoluted, sometimes unchartable cause-and-effect sequence and with often ambiguous characterizations, is not so much a function of the madness within the text as it is of the slave narrative as an informing genre.
Beloved’s “Mad” Narrative Structure
If, indeed, African-American literature as a whole is to present a truthful, recuperative vision of black people, then surely the crazy-making circumstances and consequences of black life in America need to be represented. This is the overt purpose of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-Prize winning Beloved. Beloved literally draws upon the slave narrative, as well as the gothic novel, in its retelling of the actions of an escaped slave who attempted to murder her children rather than be returned with them into slavery. Although Morrison is clearly focused on the lingering trauma this act has caused Sethe, the protagonist, her family, and others in her community, the novel's segmentation into separate parts suggests the taboo against speaking truth directly and immediately.
Beloved is divided into three parts, each increasingly disjointed or "mad." The first section is told from the narrative present, 1874. Past events are distant and fragmented (albeit intrusive) memories, related in enough detail only to limn that something once happened, that strange behaviors and events in the narrative present are sufficiently motivated by the past. Not until the end of the first section, halfway through the novel, is the pivotal event recounted recognizably: Rather than return to slavery, Sethe takes a saw to her children's throats, killing the "crawling-already" baby girl. The vivid retelling of this murder is confirmed and captured in an old newspaper clipping shown by Stamp Paid, the runaways' ferryman, to Sethe's lover Paul D. With the newspaper clipping, the “mad” narrative voice seems to shore itself up by adding a sane counterpart: objective reportage. The clipping's existence authenticates the oral text, much as white abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips appended their imprimaturs to Frederick Douglass's 1845 narrative. Among other uses, an authenticating text's function was to attest to the narrator's veracity -- and thereby, to his or her sanity.
The second section of Beloved becomes more and more absorbed in what Sethe ambivalently describes as "rememory," and in what Paul D metonymically calls a tobacco tin rusted shut in his chest. The novel's narrative structure remains grounded in 1874, the narrative present, but this present becomes progressively more swamped in obsessive, intrusive memories of the past. Paul D's presence in an 1874 storefront church, for example, prompts vivid memories of his last days at Sweet Home. Sethe's nurturing promises to the adult woman Beloved in this year serve as backdrop to Sethe's memories of her own mother. Memory and present-time juxtapositions are within the boundaries of sane, rational reflection and reflexivity, but they are also so doubled-over and enfolded in such radiant, enduring pain that the characters cannot pay more than nominal attention to their mundane struggles for a living in post-Reconstruction Ohio.
Coming as it does toward the end of the section, Beloved's disjointed, stream-of-consciousness narrative makes the other characters' sense of chronological disorientation seem merely an attenuated version of her own. Her prose-poem/free verse images, apparently of a slave-ship capture, her mother's suicide, and her sexual captivity aboard-ship, are more difficult to piece together than those of other characters, since the staccato images contain fewer attempts at sequential narrative structure. In other words, this initially seems a mad piece of writing. But on closer inspection, the structure resolves into a fun-house mirror, more compressed, perhaps, but similarly proportioned to the narrative's progress up to this point. That is, while Beloved's narrative at first seems startlingly different from anything the text has yet presented, it is highly congruent in its fixation on past events, and in its memory-repression sequences from other narrative points of view.
As the third section of the novel opens, past and present briefly merge. Sethe, Beloved, and Denver barricade themselves inside their home, running out of food and money as winter sets in. Boundaries between past and present, between the "crawling-already" baby girl and the adult woman Beloved, even between separate characters, seem to collapse from Sethe's perspective. Yet the narrative voice here truncates description of this madness, as if it is still too painful to talk about. Sethe's blissful, unreasoning conflation of past and present, self and other, lasts a mere five pages. Further, this section of the text is narrated from a sane and reasonable third person perspective. Verb tenses indicate relative time frames; people are correctly identified by their given names; cause-and-effect sequences are described or sufficiently implied. The consciousness of Sethe within this brief section of the novel may be mad by some standards, but the narrative voice makes no effort to mimic that state of consciousness.
A more puzzling lacuna is the question of Beloved's identity, one never fully accounted for in terms of literal narrative. Although the conventions of the gothic genre may dictate that the adult woman Beloved's comings and goings remain mysterious, as if draped in chiaroscuro, we ask: Was there a ghost? Was Beloved, the woman, the same person as the spiteful baby poltergeist whose antics open the novel? To read a return of the repressed into the dual characterization of Beloved makes satisfying sense as a symbolic construction. But to perform this reading, we must locate ourselves outside the literal plot in the position of analysts, making sen se of disconnected story parts by rendering them signifiers within an enclosed psychic economy. The story is doggedly literal. Was there a ghost? Sethe, of course, sees it. Her daughter Denver sees it. But if the ghost functions as a return of their repressed trauma, then why does Paul D, too, witness this ghost at the novel's beginning, when he has been separated from Sethe for eighteen years, and when at this point he is unaware of the reason for there to be a ghost?
On this, the novel is silent. No other portion of the plot confirms or denies the literal presence of occult spirits within this narrative world. Were the text to confirm ghostly presences as real, and Beloved (or some portion of that amalgamated character) as a ghost, then Sethe, Paul D, and Denver would be identifiably sane. Were the text to deny ghosts as real -- even if it did not account further for Beloved -- then the sane characters would be mad, at least in respect to their belief in her existence. But the issue of Beloved is not addressed again except as a metaphor for the angry dead of slavery. Either narrative choice would provide a degree of closure which the novel's anteceding genre, the slave narrative, cannot allow.
Fragmentation in Fish Tales
Fish Tales by Nettie Jones contains an enigmatic plot development in which the boundaries between characters and a "sane" voice are even more difficult to locate than they are in Beloved. The novel begins and ends with a frame narrative about a Mrs. Annie Simmons. One day, she walks out of her house naked and begins masturbating. Her husband either comforts her or restrains her in a blanket; police come; her mouth foams; she either closes her eyes or stares at the sky. She is either asleep or dead. As with the supernatural activity in Beloved, exactly what has happened is left unclear.
Inside that frame narrative are collected a series of vignettes telling the psychosexual history of Mrs. Annie Simmons, better known as Lewis. In the first section, "Connect," many segments are disjointed, filtered through alcohol, pot, cocaine, and Valium. Lewis is molested at twelve by a schoolteacher, continuing the affair into her thirties; and she is emotionally blackmailed into sex at sixteen, resulting in a coat hanger abortion. Her adult life revolves around orgies with a nebulous cast of roommates, pick-ups, male prostitutes, and complete strangers, punctuated by Lewis's increasing violence. She smashes a plate glass window, sets a house on fire, throws a woman into a wall so hard that she has "a brain concussion that affect[s] her speech" (102), makes at least one genuine suicide attempt and several gestures such as "chipping at [her] wrists with a broken champagne glass" (19), and has at least one involuntary commitment in a psychiatric ward.
The remainder of the novel follows her unpaid tenure as caretaker for a quadriplegic man named Brook Fields. Although he is insensate from the neck down, Lewis becomes sexually infatuated with him. She imagines that they can have a child together, and that she is more emotionally significant to him than any of his retinue of caretakers. When Lewis becomes jealous and suspicious of the quadriplegic man's other caretakers, Brook orders her to leave him alone. It is this break that apparently precipitates her final psychotic episode, an account of which brackets both ends of the novel. Lewis has become so emotionally parasitic upon Brook, and simultaneously aware of her rapid physical deterioration from extensive drug and alcohol abuse, that his ultimatum devastates a psyche already fragmented and disassociative.
This fragmentation is represented literally in a character named Sestra, a woman who seems to be Lewis's alter ego, and whose task in Lewis's psychic economy is to offer strategies for self-preservation. While the orgy participants are merely perverse clichés, Sestra is less a cardboard cut-out than they. She is first mentioned as a woman who loans Lewis a mink coat. Most often, she is appears in the role of Lewis's catty, brash, sister-confidante. She is virtually the only character who does not have sex with Lewis, and the only one who can see Lewis's hurt and vulnerability, albeit she speaks of it infrequently and obliquely ("Once you run, Lewis, your eyes will lose the madness. The madness protects you. . . . Girl, it took a long time for this protection system to be developed" [45]).
Sestra seems real enough in most of the narrative through Lewis's first person narration. Since few characters are accorded much visual description, except for Lewis’s explicit comment on their sexual desirability, the lack of detail about Sestra's appearance does not seem disconcerting. For instance, Lewis comments that Sestra is not sweating when they exercise together (73). Another reference suggests fleeting sexual attraction, when Lewis fights "the desire to touch her long, fleshy lips" (132).
But other narrative moments suggest that Sestra also may be inside Lewis's own head, a second (or split) personality whose promptings either do or do not drive Lewis crazy. For instance, at one point, as Lewis is hopping out of a taxi in New York, Sestra speaks in her "inner ear" (57). No other passenger has been mentioned, nor does Lewis seem to be accompanied by anyone. While Sestra enters and exits rooms with other characters, no one besides Lewis notices that she is there. This invisibility becomes most apparent when Brook has a miraculous erection and Sestra repeatedly offers Lewis advice on how to maintain the moment long enough to consummate her passion (126). Brook's actions and dialogue give no hint that he notices Sestra's presence.
Finally, Lewis is unable to follow Sestra's best advice to "Love yourself, sister" (168), perhaps a nod to Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1977). So, is Sestra a real woman? Is she Lewis's own self, split off in a metaphoric emulation of her inability to attain emotional intimacy, despite repeated sexual encounters? And is the first person frame narrator, who witnesses Lewis's final psychotic episode, yet another of Lewis's roaming personalities, or a separate individual? On this, the text remains silent.
Further, Lewis is mad. Her actions are irrational. She has blackouts and must later be told by others what mayhem she has committed, and she spends time in a psychiatric hospital. But what makes her different from other characters -- at least, from those who exist in an objective reality, outside her head? These other characters do not approve of her madness, especially when it threatens their lives. But that they do not have psychotic breaks of Lewis's intensity, given the same volatile and abundant mix of recreational chemicals and sex in which they are all immersed, seems even stranger than Lewis's reactions. They are immune, in ways left uncommunicated by the text. In short, Lewis does not seem terribly different from the other characters, as much as that comparison can be drawn from a chaotic, fragmented, first person narrative.
Of course, the novel's 1983 publication date suggests that Lewis's story may be read as a cautionary tale about the excesses of the hedonistic 1970s and early 1980s. But this cultural-critic-in-the-armchair position is just as dissatisfying as that of an analyst looking for the trace of the repressed in Beloved-as-ghost in Morrison's novel. It forces the reader to adopt a position outside the narrative, reading characters as signifiers within a totalizing structure which points doggedly to one, and only one, allegorical meaning. Such a reductive strategy belies the rich, puzzling, multivalent strangeness of these novels.
The Multiple Tellings of Thereafter Johnnie
In the third and final novel, Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie, the narrative voice is even more fragmented, complex, disjunctive, and broken. The title character Johnnie, whose first person narration dominates, is the product of father-daughter incest, with dark skin yet light eyes reminiscent of Pecola's fantasy in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1987). Herron's narrative seamlessly segues from one character to another, leaving the reader to extensive detective work to determine who, at any point, is speaking. Since each voice is intercut with flashbacks and competing tellings of the same event, sometimes the speaker's identity is indiscernible.
The contrast between the sane, empirical, logical consciousness and a different (if not yet insane) modality is developed in the two generations of the Snowden family, light-skinned, upper-class blacks living in Washington, D.C. The father, John Christopher, is a heart surgeon at Howard University who has never lost a patient, and who tries to prove the triumph of reason by performing open-heart surgery on a dog before his three daughters. The characterizations of the daughters are crystallized around antithetical approaches to knowledge of life. Cynthia Jane, or Janie (probably an allusion to Hurston's heroine Janie Crawford in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God) is keenly aware of the spiritual world. Eva, the youngest (perhaps an allusion to Gayle Jones's eponymously named heroine in Corrigedora [1975], or to Morrison's Eva Peace in Sula [1973]), hedonistically loves life. Patricia, the middle daughter, loves dead things, and studies the ancient Greek language -- the foundation upon which empirical logic is constructed -- thereby bringing her closest to her father's mode of perception.
At its most expressive, the three sisters' ecstatic escapes from the bounds of rationality present a deeply troubling vision to the father's post-Enlightenment, scientific mind. John Christopher witnesses his daughters dancing one snowfallen, moonlit night (in a chapter entitled "Three Witches") and dubs them "three Furies, three Graces, three Fates" (51). Their tripartite dance is objectively less self imperiling than the skating party held by Sethe, Denver, and Beloved at the beginning of the "mad" section three in Beloved: Morrison's characters are beginning winter with an empty larder and no source of basic physical needs in view. Yet John Christopher's thrice-triple description of his daughters suggests that they appeal to a sensibility in him that does not conform to logic, and against its seductive power, he cannot or will not construct defenses.
The daughter Cynthia Jane, speaking later as a nun from her convent to the incest-daughter Johnnie, confirms this sense of power: "[W]e were . . . three powers, three goddesses or three witches dancing. We knew things when we were together. We understood the conjunctions of time and we were important together, we were a part of what was to happen" (200). But do the daughters actually have the foreknowledge about the "conjunctions of time" that this passage proclaims? Could they have foretold some future disaster -- and by that foretelling, averted it? On this, the text is as silent as it is in the other two novels in confirming or denying Beloved's ghostliness and Sestra's corporeality. If the three sisters' vaguely mythical power is indeed a real phenomenon, then it seems to offer the hope that the reader may have similar powers to avert the coming race war, which forms the novel's chronological terminus. But unconfirmed by other events or passages in the novel, their claim here seems delusional, one worse than powerlessness in its capacity to mislead through distortion.
One "conjunction of time," to use Cynthia Jane's phrase, occurs during a single day to disrupt the boundaries within the family structure between father and daughter. Their incestuous relationship commences during John Christopher's visit to San Juan, to attend the funeral for the first patient who has ever died under his scalpel. At the same time his faith in the rules of science has collapsed, so, too, has his relationship with his traveling companion and daughter, Patricia. Their sexual encounter is both pleasurable and shame-ridden, joyous and hideous, enraging and loving, erotically pleasurable and anguished, playfully spontaneous and studiously rehearsed. The narrative voice refuses to draw boundaries, to provide one set of correct emotional responses. The same kinds of multiple tellings of one event and the disjointed causal sequences which appeared in Beloved and Fish Tales also accompany the ambivalent, conflated, "mad" sets of emotions invoked by the incest.
Their coupling is counterpointed by a bizarre coincidence: Another daughter, Eva, is raped on the streets by a white man on the same day. As a consequence, Eva must be restrained in the psychiatric ward of a hospital and doped with the numbing anti-psychotic drug Thorazine. Eva has become temporarily mad, chaotically drifting in and out of the ability to construct rational cause-and-event sequences. However, the rape is explicitly described as such, with no ambivalence. Eva views the experience as an act of violence, rather than a consummation of desire.
Eva’s rape serves as counterpoint, because no such closure is available to Patricia. She feels longing and revulsion; she anticipates and dreads her subsequent sexual encounters with her father. In torment, she eventually commits suicide by drowning herself in the Potomac River (undoubtedly an allusion to William Wells Brown's antislavery novel Clotel [1853], whose sexually violated heroine chooses the same fate). Her suicide leaves Johnnie, who is both Patricia's daughter and sister, to retreat into a small, isolated apartment by the year 2000, in the face of a raging race war.
Herron does not let this story remain one family's curse, one family's horror. The final chapter provides as much of an orienting point as the novel allows via a fable or legend, told by the female descendant of Patricia's closest friend and lover, Diotima (daughter of Patricia's Greek language instructor). As if to emphasize vertiginous repetition, this griot descendant of Diotima is also named Diotima, the name of the wise woman of Plato's Symposium (416 B. C.). Diotima tells of Johnnie's great-great-great-great grandmother, an enslaved African, and her half-white daughter who has been forced to service the sexual desires of both her father-master and his legitimate son. Clearly, like Beloved and Fish Tales, Herron's Thereafter Johnnie would make its readers aware of the horrible intergenerational legacies of racial and sexual abuse. In Thereafter Johnnie, genealogical lines that prevent incest are confused, blurred, overridden by lust, or subject to a cursed revenge. The fable provides not only family history, but also a generalized social history wearing only nominally personalized faces of slavery's particular curse for black women.
Johnnie's incestuous personal origins seem to provide a thematic parallel to this broader history in Diotima's fable. One reviewer, David Sexton, seems to have had such a tight allegorical reading in mind when he accused Herron of providing a cheap "rationale" with Diotima's tale. The fable about slavery does appear at the novel's conclusion, a coda which seems structurally placed to comment upon the main plot. However, it is offered more as a juxtaposition rather than as a fully articulated thematic parallel or explanation. Johnnie's role in the fable remains figurative, a "chiaroscuro" figure seen "whispering into each window awakening the children" of Washington, D.C. in the year 2000. But Diotima undercuts any certainty by concluding the sentence with questions: "[D]id she whisper these words? Is it true? Did it happen?" (241). Additional elements cast the literal truth or thematic significance even further into doubt. The fable is told to an unspecified audience, is begun with a frame narrative starting "Once upon a time" (231), and continues in the stylized diction of fairy tales or myths. Finally, the fable remains a meta-"conjunction of time," without the possibility of logical cause-and-effect sequences which would allow the narrative to draw sharp, crisp boundaries and chronologies. In all three novels, the literal plot remains questionable, at best.
Rethinking Madness and Sanity
These three novels are unsettling precisely because they leave us without a comfortable orientation to the narrative voice, and to the facts the novels seem to present. We are frequently in doubt about what literally happened. Boundaries between characters or interpretive choices are blurred, if not collapsed. Of course, taxonomies of madness have been blurring all throughout the past few decades, too. Late twentieth century discourse on psychiatry tends more and more to see "madness" as an artifact, a human creation, defined by arbitrary social constructs based on social-use value or chemical discovery. Some of the most popular exponents of this view include theorists like Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1965), and Peter Kramer in the best-selling Listening to Prozac (1993). The smug convenience of psychiatric labels also has provided a strong foundation for the so-called "anti-psychiatry" or "patients' rights" movement, developed in works such as Thomas Szasz's The Therapeutic State (1984) and Seth Farber's Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels (1993). Labels have become arbitrary. The recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-IV (a veritable bible of psychiatric labels), occasioned squabbles over inclusion of such categories as "borderline personality" or ''dystonic homosexuality," suggesting the very arbitrariness of these boundaries.
And yet, these boundaries allow us to feel that our world is comfortable, predictable, classifiable: in a word, "sane." Even if we know it to be a fiction of convenience, sanity is exactly what these three novels of madness withhold as final verity. The legacy of the slave narrative is that portraying a black self as "mad" -- as either irrationally angry or insane -- is taboo.
The influence of the slave narrative genre upon contemporary African-American autobiography and novels has been traced in a number of books and articles. (Several excellent recent compilations have been edited by William L. Andrews, Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, and the late Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Several slave narratives even have been "queered," following the latest critical fashion, by Maurice Wallace.) The slave narrative was ostensibly a first person representation of a life, often partaking of the literary devices of genres that were its contemporaries: novel, autobiography, conversion narrative, and captivity narrative. Harriet Jacobs, for instance, uses the conventions of sentimental romance as a hook in 1861 to intrigue and create sympathy in her target audience, Northern white women.
Yet as dressed-up (or trickstered-out) as the slave narrative may have been in the clothing of literary devices, it still needed to serve a primary purpose of furthering the abolition movement's goals. Clearly, the aesthetic function of rhetoric needed to be subordinate to the function of creating and retaining reader sympathy. Thus Harriet Jacobs pleads, "Pity me and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave . . ." (55) as she narrates her fall into sexuality. Frederick Douglass constructs elegantly balanced pairings, the most overarching of these chiasmus devices perhaps being the claim that "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (294). These rhetorical flourishes furtively influence the reader, with Jacobs casting admiring glances at her readers' virtue, and Douglass assuming readers to be intelligent enough to be able to distinguish between his figuratively-laden terms "slave" and "man." In addition, they occur at the most disgusting, dehumanizing moments in the authors' lives: Jacobs is about to reveal her choice of fornication to escape outright rape, and Douglass is about to describe how he was beaten and kicked bloody because he was unable to complete the physical labor assigned to him.
By employing all the eloquence they can muster, each deflects attention from personal shortcomings: for Jacobs, moral or female-coded ones; for Douglass, physical or male-coded ones. Further, both must have felt terrible, murderous rage at the people who had created impossible double binds, measures against which some form of failure was inevitable. Yet neither Jacobs nor Douglass could afford self-portrayal as mad, as insane, as angry, or as unreasoning in any way. To do so would be to condemn themselves as unworthy of freedom. In effect, they must show that slavery must be abolished because it makes sensible people crazy. Yet, in showing that enslaved people are sensible, and therefore deserving of liberty, each must prove that slavery has not had this effect on her- or himself.
In post-slavery literature by either African Americans or other authors, presentation of a black self as "crazy" also has been taboo. For instance, when white southerner William Styron published his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, narrated by a mentally imbalanced Turner (historical leader of a bloody 1831 slave uprising and revolt), critical uproar was perhaps even louder than that over the infamous Moynihan Report three years earlier. (A collection of responses to the novel can be found in the 1968 anthology by John Henrik Clarke.) Perhaps Styron's timing was off: Perhaps, if he had been an African-American writer, or if he had not published during the height of the Black Power Movement, the book might have been better received. But the intense disapprobation which greeted this work suggests the strength of the madness taboo.
Beloved, Fish Tales, and Thereafter Johnnie are unwilling to draw sharp boundaries between mad and sane. To do so, they would need to present a black protagonist as insane -- a move that the influential genre of the slave narrative prohibits. The dividing line between madness and sanity remains invisible, unspeakable. The sense of a stable, unified self to which madness "happens" as abnormality also is undermined.
I suggested before that white authors' psychiatric memoirs seek to prompt reader judgments on science, and on institutional and social structures generated by the concept of madness. Their memoirs seek to guide such reader judgments by drawing clear boundaries between a self displaying behavior-reasoning sequences that are mad, and a self displaying behavior-reasoning sequences that are sane. These three African-American novels treating madness destabilize such boundaries. Characters and events are enigmatic and open to a number of competing explanations, each of which is possible given the fragmented narrative voice. Just as the slave narrative forces readers to rethink the exact delineation of the line between slave and free, so, too, do these novels force readers to rethink the exact delineation of the line between mad and sane. To privilege one state or frame of mind over another in making sense of memories and situations, to resolve the tension by indulging in superficial labels, is to deny the power of these multivalent novels, and of experiential reality. In the three works I have discussed, experiential reality does not conform to the dictates of traditional novel genre. Rather, as a powerful legacy of the slave narrative, the genre of the novel is changed to conform to the dictates of experiential reality.
Author’s Note:
An abbreviated version of this paper was given at the October 1995 "American Women Writers of Color Conference" in Ocean City, Maryland, sponsored by Salisbury State University. I am grateful to Nancy Chick, who appeared on the same panel as I did, for bringing this paper to the attention of Barbara McCaskill of WTR; to Tanya Gardiner-Scott and Joyce Tesar for their thoughtful readings of this manuscript in intermediary draft stages; and to the anonymous reviewer at WTR whose generous, extensive comments were enormously helpful as I prepared a final draft.
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