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We do not fully choose our research, I believe. My interest in narratives of mental illness derives from my experience, as a twelve-year-old girl, of going with my father and younger sister to visit my mother in the psychiatric unit of the local hospital. Suffering from “a nervous breakdown,” she was admitted several times. I’ve forgotten (or blocked out) some memories of those visits, but will never forget the smoke—everyone smoked. Even my mother, who didn’t smoke, would puff away. Patients shuffled around in slippers, holding on tightly to their cigarettes and lighters. They played cards or watched tv or made instant coffee in the ward kitchenette; when visitors came they would all sit around tables and smoke. Some patients didn’t come out of their rooms at all. As I left the ward, I could see them lying silently on their beds as I walked past, turned away from the open doors. This paper bears witness to my mother’s experience. Within narratives of illness, hospitalization is often a central episode, one closely associated with the experience of receiving a diagnosis and hence a new identity of illness. In narratives of mental illness, it can be an especially crucial episode. Indeed, given the stigma still attached to a psychiatric diagnosis and, particularly, to admission to hospital for a psychiatric crisis, this critical stage in a mental illness “career” (Karp 1996, 55–57), when worked into a narrative, has the potential to repel a general reader. In this paper I focus on two such narratives of psychiatric hospitalization : Nancy Mairs’ essay “On Living Behind Bars” (from Plaintext, 1986), which recounts a hospital episode and reflects on the place of depression in the author’s life so far; and Susanna Kaysen’s book-length hospital 45 hilary clark Telling Trauma Two Narratives of Psychiatric Hospitalization narrative Girl, Interrupted (1993). Although men have written hospital narratives , too—most notably William Styron in his Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990)1—I am focusing on women’s narratives because depression and borderline disorder (Kaysen’s diagnosis) are more commonly diagnosed in women, and because both writers analyze their diagnoses and experiences of hospitalization within the context of their lives as women in a sexist society. (An earlier example of such analysis, although somewhat more fictionalized, is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar [1963].) Both Kaysen and Mairs look back on themselves as young women who signed themselves into a mental hospital for reasons they were unsure of and for a length of time they did not foresee. Both entered hospital in 1967, and both in Massachusetts—Kaysen signing herself into McLean Hospital (alma mater of poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath), and Mairs into McLean’s poor cousin, Metropolitan State. I will compare the rhetorical strategies in their narratives, looking at the means each writer uses to present the episode to her readers and move them to sympathy. Also of interest is how each writer sees the episode as relating to the ongoing story of her life. I will suggest that each presents her time in a psychiatric hospital as an inevitable consequence of the way her illness and her life were developing, yet also as a major disruption in her life—a traumatic hole she fell into, whose meaning she cannot completely discern. Both authors hedge on closure; the episode may be over, but there is no forgetting . Identity has been irretrievably changed; neither can reclaim what she has lost. Each author tells her own hospital story as a way of reclaiming the illness experience (Frank 1995) from the institutional discourse of doctors’ case notes and hospital reports. As well, each bears witness, offering a critique of the hospital experience and of biomedical accounts of mental suffering that would reduce it to a neurobiological disorder treatable by medication alone. In referring to the “rhetoric” of these hospital narratives, then, I am situating them as instances of therapeutic expression (catharsis ), but also more importantly as testimonies aiming to affect and persuade , and to find or create a receptive audience for their narrative of a highly stigmatized experience. They adopt certain strategies to achieve this end—often the use of humour or satire, with recognizable (sometimes almost stereotypical) situations and characters, along with references to the myth of the descent into hell and ascent back into the purgatory of everyday life—into a recovery both authors make quite clear is provisional and maintained with some difficulty, inasmuch as...

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