Exploring Link Between Madness and Motherhood in Women Writers : Researcher Maintains Social Constraints Are Not to Blame

“There are things that drive us all crazy,” Marilyn Yalom says, “and there are things that are specific to men (such as war) and things that are specific to women.” She has become convinced, too, that there is one specific to women writers: maternity, or the potential for motherhood.

Yalom, for the last decade deputy director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Women, does not share the conclusion of most feminist scholarship that women are driven to mental breakdown by the social constraints placed on them by a patriarchal society.

Rather, she adheres to the genetic predisposition theory and within that framework focuses on the external pressures that contribute to mental breakdown, among these aging and death, isolation, restrictions on freedom and responsibility. These are, of course, common to women and men but Yalom’s research has led her to conclude, “The triggering agents are different.”

Triggering Agents

Women writers she has studied include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, Joanne Greenberg (“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”) and France’s Marie Cardinal, all of whom endured a psychosis. From their composite experiences, she has identified as triggering agents the trauma of childbirth, motherhood and its entrapment and ways in which ability to procreate stirs memories of parents’ deaths or creates fear of the death of one’s own child.

“I don’t want to end up giving the impression that all women go crazy because they have the potential of being mothers,” Yalom said in a recent interview in her Stanford office, but she believes that “for the female artist the conflicting pressures of art and maternity can be of such intensity as to add overpowering stress to any fissure that already exists in the psychic structure.”

One factor that sets women writers apart, Yalom thinks, is “their propensity for seeing their literary production as conflicting with, or substituting for, biological offspring.” As an example, she cites the French writer Emma Santos, who had a stillborn child and perceived this tragedy as a kind of payment for the book she was writing, the price of words.

Yalom has set down her theories in “Maternity, Mortality and the Literature of Madness,” published by the Pennsylvania State University Press.

In theorizing how maternity and motherhood form “a springboard toward madness,” she differentiates between the two, defining maternity as conception, pregnancy, delivering and nurturing of infants and defining motherhood as daily care of children and the lifelong role of mother. A central theme is “the female body as proving ground for the adult woman.”

Three 20th-Century Writers

Exploring mental breakdown in highly gifted women, her book focuses on three 20th-Century women writers--Plath, Cardinal and Canada’s Margaret Atwood, all of whom helped to create the subgenre of the psychiatric novel and, as Yalom observes, have “given it a distinctly female cast.”

Both Plath, who killed herself in 1963, the year of publication of “The Bell Jar,” and Cardinal, whose works include “La Souriciere,” a 1966 novel about a young mother whose depression ultimately leads to suicide, had long struggles with mental illness. “Les Mots Pour le Dire” (“The Words to Say It”), Cardinal’s 1975 autobiographical novel, a confessional account of a woman’s breakdown and her recovery through psychoanalysis, was a best seller in France (1.5 million copies). In his preface to the English-language edition, Bruno Bettelheim praises it as “the best” account of psychoanalysis as seen and experienced by the patient--”none can compare.”

Much of the protagonist’s analysis centers around her discovery, or remembrance, of being an unwanted child, one her mother had, in fact, tried to abort; this is the realization that helps her to go on to reform her relationships with her husband and children and, finally, to make peace with her mother.

Atwood’s novel, “Surfacing,” which traces the breakdown of a young woman alienated from herself and from society, represents the genre of what Yalom calls “visionary versions of derangement.”

Yalom included Atwood, she said, because she believes that valuable literary visions of mental breakdown are not always grounded in reality (Atwood has no history of mental illness) and she perceives Atwood’s use of madness less as “an artifact of personal experience than a symbolic paradigm of the quest for self-knowledge.”

These and other women writers, Yalom writes, have overcome a prejudice against “most other forms of female creativity except motherhood,” and “by dint of self-examination, self-torture, and an overriding desire to exorcise once and for all the demons of the mind” have re-created “worlds of suffering where no one who has been would go again by choice, worlds glimpsed only in nightmares by the rest of womankind.

“As artists, they unlock the madwoman within and give her voice, so that she speaks our hidden torments, our social indignations, our apocalyptic visions. . . .”

Yalom’s interest in “Maternity, Mortality and the Literature of Madness” was piqued by a classroom visit from Tillie Olsen (“Silences”), who observed that in her day (Olsen was born in 1912), one’s identity was conditioned solely by sex, race or social class.

Looking at works of French and American writers that “would somehow illuminate a female sense of identity,” Yalom discovered that “the issue of maternity was problematic for many. It appears over and over and over again.”

A Painful Choice

In “Silences,” Olsen documents in great detail that virtually no great women writers have been mothers. “Think of Jane Austen,” Yalom agreed, “the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, all of these women were either unmarried or childless.” She points to three 19th-Century exceptions--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Britain’s Elizabeth Gaskell (“Wives and Daughters”) and George Sand, noting that Sand had two children “but of course solved that problem by leaving her family half of the year and living alone in Paris.”

The clear indication, she said, is that “you couldn’t do both, whereas you look at Dickens and Tolstoy, they were the great paterfamilias but they had wives and they had servants.”

For some women writers, it has been a painful choice. Among them Yalom mentions Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose turn-of-the-century story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was based on her own experience of mental breakdown after she had a child; in the end giving that child up. “She simply couldn’t tolerate those two poles of her life,” she said.

It is too early to tell whether contemporary women writers will succumb to these pulls, Yalom said, “but I think the existential stresses will always be there. I don’t think it’ll ever be easy. And I don’t see at the immediate moment where society is going to change so radically (as to) make it possible for women to have babies with ease and to pursue a literary career.”

In the 20th Century, writing is at least a respectable career for females. Yalom thinks of poor Jane Austen--”I love and sympathize with the vision of her sitting with her needlepoint, which she would use to cover over her writing if anyone came into the room because it was not considered by genteel people appropriate for women to be writing.”

But the need for women writers to prove themselves both as women and as writers has continued to create inner conflict. “Sylvia Plath felt a real obligation to prove herself in the domestic as well as in the artistic sphere,” Yalom said. “Plath went into motherhood with a vengeance, criticizing the kind of woman scholars she’d known at Smith (College), the teacher-spinster.”

Yalom observed that women writers recognize in their own situation the story line in “The Bell Jar” in which protagonist Esther Greenwood struggles to “withstand the conflicting pressures of an artistic vocation, the surge toward sexuality, and the exigencies of marriage and maternity.”

In Yalom’s view, Plath had “obsessive maternal fears” and “a ubiquitous horror of babies” (though she had two children). In her psychosis, Yalom said, Plath “conjures up (images of) dead babies because she feels she, too, is a stillbirth, an abortion.” The “real threat” to Plath, Yalom suggests, was entrapment in a prefabricated motherhood. And Yalom asks, was death a symbolic act of defiance against this entrapment?

Deprived of Trust

“This whole stream (in Plath’s writing) of aborted babies, and babies in jars, and dwarfed babies expresses the very deep-seated fears she had about maternity, motherhood and children,” she said.

Plath’s father died when she was very young and, Yalom concludes, that loss deprived her of “a sense of basic trust” that might have grounded her.

“Whereas the father is the ultimate authority in patriarchal society, it’s the death that is really the significant factor,” she said. “You look at the death of the mother, say in Virginia Woolf’s life, that was equally devastating for her and it precipitated her first mental breakdown at the age of 13. We’re dealing with the fear of one’s own death and how that fear gets out of control when you have to encounter the death of a parent or a sibling at a very early age. Certainly, that’s one of the things that made Plath so fragile.”

Almost every one of the writers she has studied, Yalom said, has reflected on childbirth as an “alarming episode in their lives and a key factor in their mental illnesses.” Partially, she thinks, this is because childbirth, like death, is “a unique encounter with existential aloneness.”

‘No Parallel in Men’

Yalom said, “It is difficult to deny that procreation is of far greater significance to women than to men” and the relationship between parenting and madness “seems to have no parallel in men.”

From the onset of menstruation, she said, a female child is planted with “multiple seeds of anxiety”--they become aware both of their ability to reproduce, the ways in which that makes them vulnerable to men and, later, social pressures on them to reproduce. Depending on how their own mothers experienced motherhood and sexuality, the message may be either positive or fear-inducing.

“But men don’t have that kind of challenge,” Yalom said. “The proving point for most men is in a profession or a job. It’s an economic challenge. But even if a woman meets the economic challenges she is at some level of consciousness always being told that she’s got to meet the biological challenges as well. In almost every culture that’s the ultimate ordeal, or the ultimate test, for women.” (Yalom, who is married to psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, has four children.)

For those who opt out of motherhood, Yalom said, there is often guilt and/or envy. She spoke of Woolf’s enormous envy of her sister Vanessa, of whom Woolf said, “Vanessa’s the real woman because she has children.”

Putting Order Into World

Is this ability to create life, in conflict with other performance, more pronounced in women writers than in other creative women? “I could have spoken of artists, or composers,” Yalom said. “I’m sure it’s equally true for creative women of all kinds. But we have the verbal expression of writers.”

Does writing drive women mad or do they write because of their madness? “I don’t believe I could possibly answer that,” Yalom said. “But many writers, both male and female, use writing as a means of putting order into a disorderly world.” Some, including Woolf and Ernest Hemingway (who also killed himself) and Plath, found it therapeutic.

“Good writing has come out of this kind of struggle with the self,” she noted, “and bad writing, too,” but writing is one of the most available forms for dealing with personal loss and for finding release from grief, sorrow, pain and fear. “But for their writing,” she said, “Woolf, Plath and Sexton may have committed suicide even earlier.”

Yalom cites Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston (“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts”) as a “model of a writer who talked her way out of madness.” In her writing, she observed, “stories from a mythical China, where females were traditionally denigrated and girl babies often murdered at birth, prey upon her psyche and weave their shapes into phantasmagoric fables.” In her memoirs, Kingston wrote, “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me.”

One Exception

But writing is a lonely craft and, in the past, Yalom said, in the era of the nuclear family, there was little community for women who chose writing in lieu of marriage or motherhood. The exception, she pointed out, has been among black women who traditionally have a strong sisterhood. Yalom sees that reflected in the writing of black women, such as Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”) and Gloria Naylor (“The Women of Brewster Place”).

She relates a passage in the latter in which a black woman who has gone to pieces after the accidental death of her only child is taken in by an older woman who undresses and bathes her like a baby in a symbolic cleansing ritual designed to restore the woman’s sanity. Yalom writes, “In a world where there are precious few valid rituals and where men cannot be trusted, the mother-baby paradigm reasserts itself as the original symbol of charity and healing.”

‘Dominant Chords’

One of the common threads Yalom found among the women she has written about is “a morbid attachment to their own mothers,” often a love-hate relationship that either is never resolved or is resolved at the time of the mother’s death. “There seems to be a pattern of attachment and separation,” she said, the separation starting in the teen years and continuing into young adulthood, a time in which women “don’t want to be like mother.” For many, being mentally healthy seems predicated on coming to terms with the mother.

In her conclusions, Yalom writes that “the core concerns of maternity and motherhood, the existential realities of aging and death, the crucial influence of mothers and fathers, and the perennial conflict between creation and procreation constitute the dominant chords in the fugue to madness. . . .”

She emphasizes that this does not preclude lesser strains such as class and race, war and violence, social disintegration and global holocaust. But, she says, these are not the dominant chords she hears “when listening to the combined voices of women writing about madness in the second half of the 20th Century.”

What does it all mean?

For those concerned with the destiny of women, Yalom believes, “there is much to be gleaned from this literature of madness . . . insights into the female condition that may not yet exist in any other written form.”

She observed in an interview: “There’s been a real movement in the highest literary circles to think of texts only as texts . . . (to) undermine the notion that literature and life have some overlap. I’m taking the position that we learn a lot about life from literature. It’s an old humanistic position, terribly old-fashioned. But for me, literature is still a very great source of what I know and what I believe to be true.

“And I think that the writing by women who have had a mental breakdown, who are gifted writers, tells us something that we wouldn’t otherwise know. And we, I hope, will become not only more knowledgeable but maybe more compassionate, and even more wise.”