Literature and Medicine I

21Determined to make a respectable woman out of the daughter she perceives as a disturbance and embarrassment and who, above all, embodies the guilt she feels for having left her young son alone on the night he died, Esme’s mother is willing to subdue the rebellious adolescent girl by any means available. When James Dalziel shows an interest in Esme, Mrs Lennox becomes sure that “a few months as James Dalziel’s wife will be enough to break [Esme’s] spirit” (185). Dressing the lamb before the kill, a “vicious sweep through Esme’s hair” (185) accompanies her mother’s promise that “we shall make her look pretty, we shall send her to the ball, and then [...] we shall marry her off to the Dalziel boy” (185), words which function almost as a forecast of the sexual violation which Esme has to endure by James at the ball. Having kissed him in a back room, Esme soon finds herself being raped:

She said, no. She said, stop. Then, when he grappled at the neckline of her dress, kneading at her breasts, fury flared in her and fear as well, and she kicked, she hit out at him. He jammed a hand over her mouth, said, wee bitch, in her ear and the pain of it, then was so astonishing, she thought she was splitting, that he was burning her, tearing her in two. What was happening was unthinkable. She hadn’t known it was possible. His hand over her mouth, his head ramming against her chin. (191)

Later, Mrs. Dalziel saves her and her son’s respectability by telling Mrs Lennox that “Esme had had a wee bit too much to drink, made a fool of herself, and that she might feel better in the morning” (192). Unable to comprehend and process what has happened to her, Esme can subsequently not articulate anything but “a high-pitched noise that she couldn’t stop, that she had no power over” (192). Ignorant of what happened – and unlikely to change their course of action if they did know – Esme’s parents decide to admit their daughter to a lunatic asylum where, ironically, she – the rape victim – is supposed to “learn to behave” (196, emphasis in original), since her “mother was [...] sick to her back teeth of these fits of shouting and raging” (196).

22However, whilst it is this traumatic narrative which is misread and overwritten by medicine when Esme is diagnosed as a hysteric, it is not where Esme’s trauma ends. Kitty, six years older than Esme, is obsessed with the desire to become a dutiful mother and wife. Hence, she is jealous when James proves keen on Esme rather than her and struggles to understand how someone with no etiquette and no ambitions to marry can possibly appear more attractive than her, the woman who is eager to please and conform to any norms society creates for her sex. In her strife to live up to society’s expectations, Kitty finds a husband, Duncan, but both are as ignorant as Faber’s Agnes when it comes to conceiving a child. After a confused and unsuccessful attempt at the act three weeks after their wedding, Kitty visits a doctor and is told she is still a virgin. To his question “Have you not yet [...] had relations with your husband?” (246), Kitty recalls answering, “Yes. I said I had. I said I thought I had. Hadn’t I?” (246). Thus, when she hears that her incarcerated sister fell pregnant after having been raped by James, jealousy overcomes her once more, although Esme, meanwhile, is not even aware she is pregnant until a nurse tells her that she is “to stay until the baby comes” (239), to which Esme replies “What baby?” (239). When she gives birth to her son within the confines of the asylum, he is taken away from her against her will and, unknown to Esme, given to Kitty, who raises him as her child. Thus, Kitty utilises the consequences of Esme’s rebellion against Edwardian gender norms in order to compensate for what society considers her shortcoming – her childlessness – thus preserving her own propriety, her place in society, by exploiting a woman who has been banned from it. 

23Whilst the illustration of Esme’s memories provides the silenced madwoman with a voice, the novel also presents and critiques the processes and medical narratives by which Esme has initially been silenced and the consequences this silencing has for her. When Esme is due to be released from Cauldstone in the 1990s, Iris first believes she has been contacted by mistake, as Esme has been erased from her family so effectively that no one apart from Kitty knows of her existence, since – determined to keep her theft of Esme’s child a secret – she has told everyone, even Esme’s son, that she has no sister. “Mum says,” Iris explains, “that Dad was definitely under the impression that Grandma was an only one, and that Grandma used to refer to it frequently. The fact that she had no siblings” (57). At the asylum, Esme’s identity as her parents’ child and Kitty’s sister is literally eradicated along with the name her family and friends used to call her – Esme – which is replaced by her “official name, the name on [her] records and notes, which is Euphemia” (53). By becoming Euphemia, Esme ceases to exist in the world outside asylum walls, wiped from her family tree and reconstructed in the hospital’s medical records as first a hysteric and then a schizophrenic, who after sixty years holds “a variety of diagnoses from a variety of [...] professionals” (41). Even though Esme is depicted on a photo in Iris’ kitchen, Iris has never come to question who this girl on the photo standing next to her supposed grandmother is. Through her lack of existence in the family narrative, Esme is also made invisible to Iris’ eyes in the photo. Iris’ view of this unfamiliar woman is thus first one defined by the medical narrative which has defined Esme for the past sixty years. When Iris, still assuming Esme is her great aunt, first meets Esme, she is surprised not to find the asylum full of “gibbering Bedlamites [and] howling madmen” (49) and to see that Esme is not “someone frail or infirm, a tiny geriatric, a witch from a fairytale” (52). Iris’ stepbrother’s reaction when he hears that Esme is staying at Iris’ flat reflects a similar image of the supposed madwoman: “Jesus Christ, Iris,” Alex warns her, “you’re harbouring a lunatic you know nothing about [...] Iris, you don’t get banged up sixty years for nothing” (112).

24 However, Iris soon gains insight into the medical discourses and definitions which have predetermined her perceptions of Esme as a madwoman and finds that in Esme’s youth one could indeed be “banged up” indefinitely for nothing. Browsing through Cauldstone’s admission records, it quickly becomes clear to her that not only her relation but also many other women have been incarcerated for what appears to a late twentieth-century woman as common sense, intellect and a justified desire for independence and equality. Iris finds, for example, the record of “a Jane who had had the temerity to take long, solitary walks and refuse offers of marriage” (65) and further

reads of refusals to speak, of unironed clothes, of arguments with neighbours, of hysteria, of unwashed dishes and unswept floors, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way or seeking them elsewhere. [...] Daughters who just don’t listen. Wives who one day pack a suitcase and leave the house. (66, emphasis in original)

Similarly, Esme’s entry reads under reasons for admission that she “insists on keeping her hair long” and that her parents found her “dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother’s clothes” (67, emphasis in original). To Esme’s astonishment, women’s attempts to break out of the domestic roles society assigned to them are no longer equivalent to hysteria. As two similar characters, Iris’ and Esme’s lives thus differ significantly due to the time and society they live in. Like Esme as a young girl, Iris declares that she hates weddings, “hates them with a passion [...] the ritualised publicising of a private relationship, the endless speeches given by men on behalf of women” (21), and, like young Esme, Iris is not, and has no desire to be, married. To Esme, all the opportunities Iris takes for granted in her life as a woman are “marvellous” (126), such as the fact that she has her own business, that she is under no obligation to get married and that she has lovers.

25Although O’Farrell demonstrates how the narratives of women’s mental health have been rewritten and redefined in the decades between the 1930s and now, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox does not attempt to give us the illusion that after the sexual liberation of the 1960s women have been freed of all their problems. Iris’ love life and her relationships with men are complicated and subject to new, if other, cultural taboos and rules: She fell in love with her step brother Alex when they grew up together, and although both still seem to love each other and maintain a close relationship, Alex has married another woman. Iris’ lover, Luke, is married but claims he will leave his wife, although Iris does not appear taken by the idea and eventually finds out by coincidence that Luke’s wife is pregnant. Hence, the contemporary emancipated heroine still remains unhappily lonely, whilst the men she is attracted to live in traditional marriages.