OUT OF HER MIND

A well-chosen collection of some of the finest women’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, on madness, reflecting the horrifying ways over the years that the condition has been defined and treated. The anthology, with an informative introduction by freelance writer Shannonhouse, runs the gamut from The Book of Margery Kempe (1436) to Allie Light (1999). The intervening 19 pieces—essays, letters, excerpts from fiction’share a common, if dispiriting, thread. Whether the diagnosis is chemical in origin, a current favorite, or anatomical—women’s sexual organs were once blamed for what was called hysteria—treatment has been obtuse and often cruel. Very few seem to have understood, or even listened to, the symptoms or the painful experiences these women were relating. Margery Kempe went “out of her mind” after her child was born, had to be forcibly restrained, but regained her sanity through religious beliefs, becoming a noted mystic. 19th-century social worker Dorothy Dix observed women in New England that were not so fortunate. Some were kept in cages, others whipped, and those thought to be sufficiently docile were auctioned off at an annual sale in which local citizens were paid to house them. As excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Mary-Jane Ward’s The Snakepit, and Light’s —Thorazine Shuffle— show, doctors, nurses, and therapists seem hardly more enlightened: Patients could not refuse medication even if it made them feel terrible, and, as part of her therapy, Light had to walk with a book on her head to improve her posture. Particularly affecting are Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s —The Yellow Wallpaper——both an anatomy of disorder and a portrait of a suffocating marriage—and —Searching for Mercy Street,— Linda Gray Sexton’s painful reminiscences of her poet mother’s breakdowns. Not a day-brightener, but a stirring anthology of the best and most searing writings that brightly illuminate the dark side of so many women’s lives.