‘Terrifying Spectres’ from the Victorian Asylum to The Daily Mail: The Gothic Cartographies of Postpartum Psychosis Narratives
Georgia Poplett
MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (2024), pp. 41-50, doi:10.59860/wph.a6b38e2
Click cover to enlarge | A contribution to: Writing the Body Edited by Rachel Hayes and Caitlin Sturrock MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 19 Modern Humanities Research Association Abstract. Postpartum psychosis (PP) is a highly stigmatised and clinically complex mental illness, requiring inpatient psychiatric treatment. Its shifting diagnostic parameters have long resisted representation, challenging the construction of a continuous discursive history. Despite this, existing life-writing consistently stages encounters with confinement and body horror to narrate lived experiences of PP, using the enclosed and abject spaces of a gothic modality to describe an experience which implicates the body in specific ways. In the conventions of gothic literature, Carol Margaret Davison writes, ‘the potentially nightmarish, “dark side” of [...] motherhood is explored and exposed’ (2004). This resonates with narrative analyses of first-hand PP accounts, which make visible feelings of parental inadequacy and powerlessness during particular moments of psychosis and/or psychiatric admission. This article considers how contemporary UK media reporting on PP both aligns with — and deviates from — such a gothic modality, in dialogue with Laura Dockrill’s 2020 memoir What Have I Done?: Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me. The interactions between these sources illuminate variations in how lived experiences of mental illness are represented within/without the body under the conditions of PP, suggesting how public perceptions towards PP today may be influenced by gothic literary traditions in different ways. Importantly, this review of the gothic strains at work is aesthetic rather than historically grounded. These life-writings are not gothic texts by design; rather, they may articulate certain qualities of the Gothic via the aesthetic prism through which they are considered. What justifies this unusual (and contested) approach is that bringing these two literary forms into dialogue may draw the significant ‘gothic’ moments attendant on embodied experiences of PP into visibility, with implications for future representation, destigmatisation, and activism. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
