Table Of ContentLITERATURES
OF MADNESS
DISABILITY STUDIES
AND MENTAL HEALTH
EDITED BY
ELIZABETH J. DONALDSON
Literary Disability Studies
Series Editors
David Bolt
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
New York Institute of Technology
Old Westbury, NY, USA
Julia Miele Rodas
Bronx Community College
City University of New York
Bronx, NY, USA
Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the
exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies
perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability the-
ory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience,
the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of
advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imag-
ination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward
disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both mono-
graphs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not
fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by
an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars special-
ising in disability studies: Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor
of Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA; G. Thomas Couser,
Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New
York, USA; Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished
Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA; Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University,
Atlanta, USA; Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor of English Emerita,
Miami University, Ohio, USA. For information about submitting a
Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact the series edi-
tors: David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J. Donaldson (edonalds@
nyit.edu), and/or Julia Miele Rodas ([email protected]).
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14821
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Editor
Literatures of Madness
Disability Studies and Mental Health
Editor
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
New York Institute of Technology
Old Westbury, NY, USA
Literary Disability Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-92665-0 ISBN 978-3-319-92666-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92666-7
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M P L M
ore raise for iteratures of adness
“Elizabeth Donaldson’s collection, Literatures of Madness, represents a l andmark
contribution to madness and disability studies. With attention to historical con-
structions of madness based upon gender, ethnicity, class, and nationality, this
collection considers these legacies through an impressive diversity of literary tradi-
tions and theoretical perspectives. From canonical feminist and l esbian fiction, to
indigenous texts, to Caribbean and Indian novels, contributors develop innovative
readings, grounded in knowledge of madness as a complex lived experience—as a
source of community, a crucible of survival, and form of resistance. This is a path
breaking anthology, a must-read for anyone interested in the complicated meanings
of madness in contemporary thought.”
—Michelle Jarman, Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the Wyoming
Institute for Disabilities, USA
v
a
cknowLedgeMents
Thank you first and foremost to all the contributors whose hard work
made this collection possible. And special thanks to those authors who
made it through some difficult and challenging obstacles to bring their
work to fruition. I deeply appreciate your commitment to this project
and I feel fortunate for having such a great group of people as collabo-
rators. My heartfelt appreciation to our external reviewers for their time,
close attention to, and enthusiasm for the manuscript. Thank you also
to my colleagues in the English department at NYIT, especially Amanda
Golden, who kindly read parts of this manuscript and whose expertise in
Sylvia Plath was a great resource to us. And thank you to the wonderfully
helpful JoAnn Politis in NYIT’s Interlibrary Loan Office.
My research into Mary Jane Ward was conducted at the Howard
Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and I owe a debt
of gratitude to Miriam Pepoon Cronin, Kevin Cronin, and Paula Haines
for their hospitality while I worked at the Mary Jane Ward Collection
there. Thank you, Peter Naccarato, for inviting me to share my Ward
research at the Conversations on Diversity and Social Justice speaker
series at Marymount Manhattan College. I also greatly appreciate Wilbur
Farley’s help in reviewing the Ward chapter, and for support throughout
the process of putting this collection together.
To all my family and friends, thank you for your patience with me
and for understanding the time commitments that this project involved.
An especial gracias to Kate Buck in Playa del Carmen for her amazing
friendship and hospitality over the years. Thank you to Kit Kincade,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Keith Byerman, and the English department at Indiana State University
for inviting me to share my related work on S. Weir Mitchell. My work
in disability studies wouldn’t be possible without the network of disa-
bility scholars who have given me an intellectual home and support,
especially my sister from another mother, Catherine Prendergast. My
warmest thank you to my Dante’s family and my Facebook disability
studies friends for the extended community that you give me. And a spe-
cial thanks to the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture,
and Society, founded by Rachel Adams, and presently chaired by Julia
Miele Rodas and Lotti Silber, with Liz Bowen as rapporteur.
Finally, thank you to my fellow Literary Disability Studies series edi-
tors, David Bolt and Julia Miele Rodas, whose friendship and early sup-
port helped make this book possible, and thank you to the great folks at
Palgrave Macmillan—especially Ben Doyle, Allie (Bochicchio) Troyanos,
and Rachel Jacobe—who have been a fantastic editorial team.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Breathing in Airless Spaces 1
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Part I Mad Community
2 Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled 11
Elizabeth Brewer
3 Going Barefoot: Mad Affiliation, Identity Politics,
and Eros 31
PhebeAnn M. Wolframe
4 “Hundreds of People Like Me”: A Search for a Mad
Community in The Bell Jar 51
Rose Miyatsu
5 Writing Madness in Indigenous Literature: A Hesitation 71
Erin Soros
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Mad History
6 “Is the Young Lady Mad?”: Psychiatric Disability in
Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction 91
Karyn Valerius
7 The Snake Pit: Mary Jane Ward’s Asylum Fiction and
Mental Health Advocacy 109
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
8 Alcoholic, Mad, Disabled: Constructing Lesbian Identity
in Ann Bannon’s “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” 127
Tatiana Prorokova
9 Seeing Words, Hearing Voices: Hannah Weiner, Dora
García, and the Poetic Performance of Radical Dis/
Humanism 145
Andrew McEwan
Part III Mad Survival
10 “My Difference Is Not My [Mental] Sickness”: Ethnicity and
Erasure in Joanne Greenberg’s Jewish American Life Writing 165
Gail Berkeley Sherman
11 Resistance, Suffering, and Psychiatric Disability in Jerry
Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom and Amandeep Sandhu’s
Sepia Leaves 183
Srikanth Mallavarapu
12 Mental Disability and Social Value in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng 199
Drew Holladay
13 It Doesn’t Add Up: Mental Illness in Paul
Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home 215
Jessica Gross
Index 235
