Literature and Medicine I

 16Yet, the novel’s verdict is neither that Agnes is a feminist heroine who has acquired a voice through hysteria nor, as in Human Traces, is she simply wrongfully diagnosed and labelled as mad. Agnes remains the madwoman of the story, not because of her outbursts or her neglect of her child, but because she is a religious fanatic. Raised first as a devout Catholic, her mother married a Protestant, Lord Unwin, after Agnes’ father had died. Not only forbidden to practice her faith but also forced to adopt Protestant beliefs and practices, Agnes reflects that “it all went wrong after that terrible day when Lord Unwin told her [...] there’d be no more Virgin Marys, no more crucifixes, no more rosaries and no more Confessions for her” (288). One of her diary entries at the time, addressed to Saint Teresa, emphasises the confusion over her father’s departure – which she does not yet recognise as death – and the linked loss of what she considers the true faith: I dont know know what is become of us because he [Lord Unwin] has forbiden us to go to Church – the True Church – and instead he has taken us to his church and it is a shameless frord. [...] Where has my own dear Papa gone and when am I to see him again? (528-29, emphases in original). As she grows up, Agnes’ idea of religion slowly but surely distorts. She becomes convinced that her imaginary Convent of Health does exist outside her imagination and that the nuns there possess her second and immortal body, meant for the time when her first body shows signs of age and decay. Emmeline Fox, a religious widow, hence receives the following desperate request from Agnes: “I happen to know that my Second Body is waiting for me at the Convent of Health. Please, please, please divulge to me where the Convent is. I am ready to go [...]. You are my only hope. Please grant me the Secret Knowledge I crave” (582).

17Agnes’ religious delusions become worse when she ironically mistakes Sugar for her guardian angel rather than her husband’s mistress. In her sympathy for Agnes, Sugar decides to enable her to escape from the Rackham home the night before William intends to have his wife taken to an asylum. Sugar sends Agnes on a train journey to the country side, where she is sure the young woman will find a convent, which Sugar promises is the Convent of Health. However, Agnes never completes this journey and is instead found dead in the river a few days later. A similar fate befalls the novel’s male religious character, William’s brother Henry. Convinced his large amount of body hair indicates he is a sexual, animalistic being and hence a sinner, Henry oppresses his feelings for Emmeline and eventually dies in a fire whilst dreaming of having sex with her. Significantly, it is Emmeline who is the only religious figure in The Crimson Petal and the White who does survive – and even overcomes tuberculosis. Unlike Henry and Agnes, Emmeline is a Christian who transforms her faith into activism, rather than passive devotion, by participating in various charitable causes, such as the Women’s Rescue Society. Wishing that “only it could be resolved once and for all where we come from: from Adam, or from Mr Darwin’s apes” (179), Emmeline is a strong and independent woman who is able to combine a modern common sense and rationality with her belief in God, making her a character the reader is undoubtedly supposed to (and most likely happy to) identify with. 

18Faber certainly voices the narrative of the madwoman without overwriting her story by medical discourses. Although the novel highlights various reasons and justifications for the deterioration of Agnes’ mental health (oppressive gender constructions, trauma and the brain tumour), her escape into religious hallucinations and passivity are not potentially feminist acts of resistance, but are instead portrayed as strategies which eventually render her just as voiceless as patriarchal society and medical discourses have made her. In writing Agnes’ hystory, Faber’s novel thus supports Showalter’s assertion that “today’s feminists need models rather than martyrs” (Hystories 61), activists rather than victims.

“Daughters who just don’t listen”: Policing Women in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

19O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox takes us away from the Victorians and the fin-de-siècle to the 1930s and the turn of new millennium. Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox focuses on the parallel and eventually converging lives of Esme Lennox and her granddaughter Iris Lockhart. A revision of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), which tells the story of Mary Lennox, a difficult child who is disliked by her mother and who, after her family’s death in India, comes home to Britain and flourishes under love and education, O’Farrell’s novel takes a sinister turn where its predecessor grants its heroine happiness. At the age of sixteen, Esme is admitted to an asylum in Scotland by her parents, who are thus ridding themselves of their rebellious teenage daughter. Erased from her family’s history, Esme is not released until sixty later, when the asylum is due to be shut down and her only surviving family member, her sister Kitty, is in care because she suffers from Alzheimer’s. Iris, until then ignorant of Esme’s existence, is asked and reluctantly agrees to take care of her and so uncovers her relationship to the woman whom she first assumes to be her great aunt, not her grandmother. The novel’s narrative is presented to us through a patchwork of Esme’s memories of her childhood, the fragmented and incoherent memories of her sister, and the story of Iris.

20As in The Crimson Petal and the White, the main reasons for the behaviour which constructs the novel’s madwoman as insane are trauma and the gender norms imposed by society, but this time the young woman in question, unlike Faber’s Agnes or Faulks’ Kitty, is both mentally and physically in perfect health. Esme first becomes a nuisance to her mother when during the early years of her childhood in India Esme’s little brother and his nurse die of typhoid. Her parents, absent from the house at the time, blame Esme for Hugo’s death and decide to return to their native Scotland, where Esme – unlike her older sister Kitty - struggles to understand and adapt to the new rules of femininity forced onto her. Before their departure on a shopping trip to Edinburgh, for example, Esme is astonished to find that “her sister is wearing a grey beret. Where did she get it from and how did she know to wear it?” (94). Whilst Kitty is keen to do her duty and find a suitable husband, Esme refuses to play her part in the patriarchal marriage market:

Every afternoon their grandmother gets them to dress in their best clothes and makes them walk up and down the sea front, saying how do you do to people. Especially families with sons. Esme refuses to go on these ridiculous walks. They make her feel like a horse at a show. Strangely, Kitty loves them [...]. Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn’t change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied, good, and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen. (129-30)

Like the garment which “looked like her blazer, it said it was her blazer but it wasn’t” (150), the role society tries to assign to Esme is too small and constraining for her, one in which “she could barely move, barely breathe” (150).