Mental Illness and the Mad/woman: Anger, Normalcy, and Liminal Identities in Mary McGarry Morris’s A Dangerous Woman

The article engages with the intersections of mental illness, anger, liminal identities, the feminist trope of the madwoman, and normative frames in Mary McGarry Morris’s A Dangerous Woman. Morris’s protagonist Martha Horgan responds to violence, to her liminal status, and to her ongoing exclusion from the dynamic frames that delineate social norms with expressions of anger that range from subtle to overpowering. Martha’s anger occurs at moments when this frame rearticulates to exclude her, and erases her suffering. Rather than function as a rejection of patriarchy or as a symptom of her mental illness, the article draws from feminist disability studies and Judith Butler’s theorization of normative frames to contend that Martha’s anger alerts us to the moments when normative frames rearticulate, foregrounding the violence liminal subjects like Martha endure.