Melancholy, much more than any other emotion, permeates so much of the poetry of the eighteenth century. And while William Wordsworth remains indebted to this mood, he takes his own turn at the loss of innocence through the transition from childhood to adulthood. Unlike some of his contemporaries—Thomas Grey comes chiefly to mind—in which his Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard, considered to be the “most popular poem of melancholy in the eighteenth century” (Quinney 132), Wordsworth inherits this poetic legacy while steering it in a new direction. Where Thomas’ focus was on the invisibility and anonymity of the narrator, living a condemned life in which the future has been “emptied out” (Quinney 132), Wordsworth relates to us a journey, one from childhood to adult, where the melancholy and loss of childhood is compensated by an heightened awareness and cognizance of maturity. The end of childhood is not the death of the self for Wordsworth, but rather the terminus of a stage, all bliss and felicity withstanding. It is in the fullness of intellect and its illumination of spirit that Wordsworth, as a grown man says, “And so I dare to hope, though changed, do doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills” (lines 65-67). In spite of the alienation he experiences in the transition from boy to man, Wordsworth sees the fully mature human being as the only one capable to synthesize the disparate images of nature, which he sees before him, and through “abundant recompense” (line 88) re-sacralize the world into a “sobre pleasure” (line 139).

In order to have a better grasp on both the transition to adulthood and the compensation had therein, it is necessary to take a moment and examine Wordsworth’s conception of childhood. For Wordsworth, childhood is a quasi-animal state, in which one (at least according to his experience) not only wonders at nature, but sees oneself as a part or extension of it. When Wordsworth visited Tintern Abbey as a young boy, he did so “like a roe”, where he, “bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams” (lines 67-69). These mosaics of natural phenomena are not simply landscape artifacts but interconnected entities that he visits in his time there. These “glad animal movements” (line 74) cement the boy of Wordsworth’s youth as an equally natural expression amongst the natural landscape.

The childhood that Wordsworth also describes is an un-nuanced and unarticulated existence. His boyish encounters in Tintern Abbey constitute more to do with raw emotion than intellectualized endeavors. When, as a boy, he thought of the mountains and woods, their appearance manifested to him as “an appetite” or “a feeling and a love” (line 80). Their forms appeared to him without the need of external influences. Having “no need of a remoter charm” (line 81), nature appears to Wordsworth solely based on his youthful sensorium, an ecstatic exchange, in which all of nature seems holy and sacred to Wordsworth.

It is necessary to expound on the nature of youth as Wordsworth interprets it in order to gauge and comprehend the alienation and loss he experiences in adulthood. And it is in adulthood that alienation, loss, and melancholy, are negotiated. Wordsworth’s urban experiences allude to this fact, where in “lonely rooms” and “’mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed them … and passing even into my purer mind” (lines 25-28) his sense of sorrow and alienation come to fruition. Here, the negotiation of child and man is rooted in memory and its ability to provide Wordsworth the basis by which he can measure and treat his loss. In summary, Wordsworth reckons childhood and adulthood as two disparate stages in which the defining characteristics of the first stage cannot be carried over into the second (Grob 35). This is clearly demonstrated in the poem’s narration of loss: the “glad animal movements”, “coarser pleasures”, “dizzy raptures” and the like. This loss, or alienation, is forever gone as Wordsworth writes, in the present tense, “I cannot paint what then I was” (lines 75-76). The passage from child to adult is permanent. The only recompense for this loss is the illumination that Wordsworth receives upon maturation, as I shall discuss shortly.

Despite the entranced nature of his childhood, Wordsworth satiates this absence in moving from what I will term the experiential-self (the child) to the knowing-self (the adult). It is the primacy of knowledge over enraptured enthusiasm that ingratiates his soul in its newfound context. While recognizing the “nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” (lines 34-35) Wordsworth makes his case for knowledge as that which brings man happiness: “of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, in which the burthen of the mystery … of all this unintelligible world, is lightened” (lines 37-41). This “serene and blessed mood” gives Wordsworth the peace of mind that will abide in him until his death (“until, the breath of this corporeal frame…” line 43).

Wordsworth’s knowing-self is also the means by which he is able to acknowledge and act upon the “other”. In specific, the “other” in Tintern Abbey is his sister and “dearest Friend” (line 116). When Wordsworth first visited the Abbey as a child, there was no mention of her as he “bounded o’er the mountains”. His time then was purely individual and self-experiential. In the bloom of adulthood, Wordsworth is able to articulate strong feelings for his sister; feelings previously reserved for his natural landscape. Amidst the myriad of emotions that Wordsworth conveys to us, compassion is one of the strongest amongst them. From here, Tintern Abbey takes on the role of didactic prescription, where Wordsworth attempts to administer the cure he found in his experience at the Abbey to his sister: “Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms … oh! then, if solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts of tender joy wilt thou remember me” (lines 141-145). Wordsworth is leaving his poem as an inheritance to his sister, where if she should find herself suffering from similar alienation or despair, she need only call on these “healing thoughts”. This is without a doubt one of the poem’s more strident empirical moments, where Wordsworth’s experiential-self and knowing-self, as subject and findings, are packaged and prepared for treatment on another individual, with expected success.

As I stated initially in this paper, Wordsworth shared the fixation on sorrow and disappointment with several other eighteenth century Sensibility poets. Some literary critics, such as Laura Quinney, have claimed it to be his favorite subject (Quinney 131). I do not seek to depart ways with the likes of Quinney in observation but in scope, for Tintern Abbey most certainly deviates from both Wordsworth’s past writings, as well as that of the Sensibility poets, favoring optimism over pessimism. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth is able to reconcile the experiential-self with the knowing-self. To articulate this plainly, I see Wordsworth’s take on the nature of both states, the experiential and the knowing, as an affirmation of life: it is neither devoid or flushed of meaning. This is accomplished by the experiential-self being assimilated by the knowing-self. The ingenuity of Wordsworth’s technique is accomplished by using the same source material as his predecessors: nostalgia, anxiety and regret (Quinney 131), and by synthesizing them into a new articulation out of that body of work; or as Mary Jacobus puts it: an “indiscriminate melancholy” (Jacobus 107).

Wordsworth’s approach to the self, by distancing and re-imagining himself from the Sensibility poets, allowed him to spark a new conversation on the nature of the self and how it might be approached. Where the poetry of his contemporaries frequently focused on the “inner erosion and failing” (Quinney 132) of the human spirit, Wordsworth’s perspective looks towards the future. He sees life, in the present tense, as “a moment”, where there is “life and food for future years” (line 64). This bricolage of old and new material left and leaves much to be inspired by. No doubt, such motifs have been applied by other great writers; Marcel Proust comes foremost to mind, in his use of memory as the vehicle, through which he explored all of his major works. I see Wordsworth’s evolution from boy to man, as conceived with and by the act of memory, a presage to Proust’s petites madeleines, in which they ignited the memory of the author’s protagonist, carrying the tea to Marcel’s lips (Proust 45). So too did Wordsworth employ memory as a vehicle, the Abbey here a stand-in for Proust’s madeleine. The indebtedness that modern fiction owes to writers, such as William Wordsworth, cannot be emphasized enough. Perhaps, through re-engaging with texts from a bygone era, we can benefit from the lyrical wisdom they house, versus common day philosophies that revel in their forward-looking stances, claiming that novelty, change, and innovation alone are capable of ascribing meaning to our context. Such systems of thought have a habit of “placing little or no value on the preservation of views or perspectives from the past” (Jackson 170). Wordsworth clearly demonstrates the value and contribution his works made and the potential to continue to speak to us more than two centuries later.

Citations

• Jacobus, Mary. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 107.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 259-262.
• Grob, Alan. “Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and the Search for Identity” ELH 32.1 (1965): 32-61.
• Jackson, Sherman. “Taqlid, Legal Scaffolding and the Scope of Legal Injunctions in Post-Formative Theory Mutlaq and ‘Amm in the Jurisprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi” Islamic Law and Society Vol. 3, No. 2 (1996): 165-192.
• Lau, Beth. “Wordsworth and Current Memory Research” Studies in English Literature 42.4 (2002): 675-692.
• Proust, Marcel, trans. Lydia Davis. Swann’s Way. New York: Penguin Group, 2002. 45.
• Quinney, Laura. “’Tintern Abbey,’ Sensibility, and the Self-Disenchanted Self.” ELH 64.1 (1997): 131-156.

The early part of the Twentieth Century saw England as the major super power in the world. During this time, England ascended to the height of its imperial powers, with its grasp and influence worldwide. A phrase was even coined in recognition of this fact: “The Empire on which the sun never sets”. And yet despite England’s great power, its citizenry was undergoing a dramatic paradigm shift on several fronts: religious, psychological, and epistemological, to name a few. Post World War I, life in England would never be the same as people came face to face with not just the imagery of war, but also living with its aftermath: the mentally and physically wounded. Writing from this era reflected the changing and uncertain nature of this time. Mrs. Dalloway showcases this conflict on both social and individual levels. From disenchantment of social expectations to the inability to see the good in humanity, Virginia Woolf demonstrates the loss of meaning through the internalization of the self, a literary process that confines the “knowing” aspect of the self to what lies behind the senses. In doing so, none of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway are able to find any transcendent meaning beyond themselves, instead succumbing to an anguish and lethargy which ultimately consumes them.

The notion of a lost self is readily immanent in Woolf’s story, for she titles the book, “Mrs. Dalloway”. Woolf’s purposeful omission of Clarissa’s first name in the title makes a clear statement on how Clarissa sees herself and how she has lost her autonomy as a person. She is exhibited as an addendum; a reference to her husband. In two short words, Woolf establishes the link between Clarissa’s role as wife and how that role defines her throughout the novel. Woolf’s choice of “Mrs. Dalloway” or “Mrs. Richard Dalloway” illustrates the loss of self that Clarissa has suffered (Forbes 39). To help elucidate, this short passage drives home the point: “She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown … this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 10-11). The last act that Clarissa makes as a fully-autonomous person was her refusal to marry Peter Walsh (Woolf 46).

The commentary in Mrs. Dalloway on the self is not restricted to its inability to act upon the world, but also looks at how the self, both by its inability to project itself on and in the world, suffers from isolation and despair. Perhaps the most tragic character in the novel is Septimus Smith, who is tortured by his wartime experience. Having seen the realities of war up close, Septimus’ view of humanity has become dark. Once an aspiring poet, he now sees human nature as bankrupt and cruel. However, the most unique aspect about Septimus’ view on human nature is its active observation. For Septimus, human nature is not a passive enterprise. It is, as he states, “Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you.” (Woolf 92). The viewpoint being expressed here, though dramatized through Septimus’ mental instability, sees human nature as not just predatory, but separate from humans themselves. According to Septimus, human nature is an entity unto itself, stalking man, and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. His character drives home the perception that the self is wholly separate from its environment and even from itself (human nature).

Woolf’s setting also articulate an atmosphere of isolation and solitude. This sentiment is expressed as a doom: “and yet … feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen” (Woolf 3). The preceding quote is in the opening dialog that is going on inside Clarissa’s head. It speaks to the isolation as expressed by Clarissa as well as Septimus, who feels, “quite alone” (Woolf 92). Often, this despair of isolation is expressed through the disjointed thoughts and ramblings of Clarissa. In one such passage, Clarissa begins by recollecting a time that she and Peter Walsh went in to London together but injects mid-thought, “It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; no knowing people; not being known” (Woolf 152). The same paragraph strays into thoughts about transcendental theories and how her soul might come to, “haunt certain places after death” (Woolf 153). This disjointed narrative style, reinforcing the isolation that Clarissa and the other characters experience, echoes what Erich Auerbach says about Woolf’s prose: “[It] is often something confusing, something hazy … [a] vague indefinability of meaning” (Auerbach 551). I will next demonstrate how Woolf’s stream of conscious contributes to the sense of pessimism and despair in Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf’s narrative style, stream of conscious, does not simply serve to provide an alternate form of writing dialog. It has a very precise purpose, namely the continued deconstruction of reality throughout Mrs. Dalloway. What I mean here is that the prose goes beyond just illustrating the words that Clarissa is thinking. By mixing all of her thoughts together – thoughts that include the recollected thoughts of other characters or even the thoughts of those characters (Septimus is one example) – the reader is never able to firmly establish any sense of reality outside of the characters. Reality has become firmly contingent upon the interlocutors’ circumstances and tonality, not, as Auerbach describes, “on form” (Auerbach 535). I see this as another literary technique to further distance the self from the world. In writing about twentieth-century art, Bryan Appleyard writes in his Understanding the Present, regarding this subject: “The symptoms of this lethargy are all about us. The pessimism, anguish, skepticism and despair of so much twentieth-century art and literature are expressions of the fact that there is nothing “big” worth talking about anymore, there is no meaning to be elucidated.” (Appleyard 11). What I take from Appleyard’s observation is thus: Woolf’s characters, while differing slightly from Appleyard’s observation (talking incessantly), are unable to come to any “continuity of action” (Auerbach 552); their dialog is helpless to affect or impact their world in such a way as serving any of the characters’ needs. What we are left with, as the reader, is only, “an appreciation of the multiple enmeshments of the motifs” (Auerbach 551).

There are numerous consequences of retracting the self from the world. One such example as expressed in the novel is the delusion of the self. This self-deception is more than a fabricated lie that the characters tell themselves, but rather the process of deconstructing and diminishing the possibility of any external reality. Ironically, this process relies upon the very same external influences it is trying to deny, by mimicking them for appropriate such notions of reality. To help clarify my point I will provide a few examples from the text. As Clarissa stands by herself one night in reflection, she imagines herself, as Deborah Guth declares it, “a martyr” (Guth 35). In Woolf’s words, she describes Clarissa as, “a single figure against the appalling night” (Woolf 30). In another instance, Clarissa recalls an instance when she was feeding ducks at the lake, where she, “stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them [her parents], grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life” (Woolf 43).

Perhaps the best example to illuminate this point is the death of Septimus. Clarissa absolves her grief over Septimus’ death by proposing some noble cause in his suicide. Her question, “did he plunge holding his treasure?” (Woolf 184), does not find any reference in the words or sentiments Septimus uttered in the storyline. In fact, it is entirely plausible to say that Septimus had not truly wanted to kill himself: “He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot” (Woolf 143). I say all of this in support of this theory: the retracted-self, in being incapable of seeing itself as a part of the external world, will seek to create an image of itself through the process of self-invention, not self-discovery. Clarissa, pondering if Septimus took his treasure with him, has more to do with her fear of death and her attempt to ascribe meaning on to both life and death. In other words, Clarissa seeks to use Septimus’ death, through the process of self-invention, to transcend the lack of meaning she is incapable of finding in the external world.

The retracted-self of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds its perceptions of the external world increasing inhospitable and incompatible. Where Clarissa was once a student of poetry she hardly reads at all anymore, “except memoirs in bed” (Woolf 8). Likewise, Peter Walsh’s early fascination with eighteenth-century rationalists (Addison, Pope) has fallen by the wayside. Again, the most convincing example is Septimus. For a man whose life was literature, and whose guiding purpose in volunteering for the war effort was, “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays” (Woolf 86). In their respective pasts, Woolf’s characters engaged their worlds and found some measure of meaning. In limiting their capacity to “know” – whether self-inflicted, in Clarissa’s case, or through the misfortunes of war, in Septimus’, is not important –they lost the tools that gave their lives and purpose and meaning. Turning to Septimus again, we can see that, in his insanity, he “becomes little more than a compilation of literary fragments culled from his voracious readings” (Wyatt 440). Without engaging the world and finding some meaning to contextualize the self, Woolf’s characters will have no other choose to react as debased, rootless individuals, reduced to living half lives as social cripples.

Clarissa’s separation from the world is marked by retreating to an imaginative space. There are several allusions to this process in the course of the novel. However, one specific instance stands out strongest. It is the passage in which Clarissa has retreated to the upstairs of the house. She likens this experience as “a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower … there was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room” (Woolf 31). Clarissa’s steady withdrawal of her “self” from the world creates a context that separates her knowing mind from the external world. All acts of knowing are reduced to internal processes, as Clarissa notes, “The, for that moment, she had seen an illumination … an inner meaning almost expressed” (my quotes) (Woolf 32). Indeed, the world takes on a dimness that enshrouds the three main characters of Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus. Retreated to a dimension that is incapable of providing the defining sustenance all three crave, their total actions fail to reach the world around them.

It is no coincidence then, after examination of the notes from Woolf’s diary, that we find Clarissa and Septimus sharing similar, if not identical values. Only their expressed methods differ. In fact, Woolf notes in her diary, that Septimus was created as Clarissa’s literary double (Leonard Woolf 56). The author even planned for Clarissa to kill herself (Samuelson 60) instead of the latter version, where Septimus takes his own life. This aesthetic technique sheds tremendous light on how and why Woolf made the two characters so empathetic towards one another. It also illustrates why both characters, possessing tendencies towards withdrawal from the world, share similar dilemmas of survival and finding meaning in the world. Both characters struggle with sanity: Septimus’ struggle being a public spectacle where Clarissa’s is internal, as demonstrated in Woolf’s notes. This duality of mental suffering is supported by Woolf’s above statement that both Septimus is Clarissa’s double. In the end, my case for both characters suffering from insanity is rooted in the aforementioned theory of self-invention. Essentially, neither character, despite unsuccessful attempts to innovate meaning, fall victim to a life devoid of any context and meaning.

Woolf’s claim that Septimus is the literary double of Clarissa, when examined from the context of the self separated from the world, is not without problem. What comes across to me is more of a parody, at times, than genuine similarities between the two characters. This brings me back to Clarissa’s grieving moment, when she hears of Septimus’ death. Woolf’s Clarissa projects a tragic sentimentality onto Septimus; a sentimentality he did not espouse. Again, I am brought back to the line, “Life was good. The sun hot” (Woolf 143). This seems to stand in contradiction to Clarissa’s, “did he plunge holding his treasure?” (Woolf 184). By ignoring Septimus’ admission that “life was good”, Woolf presents herself as ambivalent in regards to her desire in remaining aloof from the narration. In The World and the Book, Gabriel Josipovici states: “We have to ask, not: What do these words mean? but: What do these words when spoken by that person mean?” (Josipovici 21). What does these words mean to Woolf, who has omniscient knowledge of her characters? Clarissa claims to be cognizant of Septimus’ reality, yet, the above words do not reflect this. The conclusion I am left with is: cloistering of the “knowing self” leads to a lack of consciousness on the part of the characters’ surroundings in Mrs. Dalloway. I come to this conclusion through examining Woolf’s own statements, which attest to the duality between Clarissa and Septimus. A duality that I feel is at times duplicitous and unreliable. If Woolf’s literary aim was to state that one cannot extrapolate real meanings from the extant world, then she has succeeded. The results of such a cosmology support the theme throughout Mrs. Dalloway, that reality can only be observed, never outwardly experienced.
The fact that Woolf, a writer of some capacity, would choose to strip the characters in her novel of the means of defining themselves in the world, is as curious is it is fascinating. In his article, Dehumanized, Mark Slouka makes the argument for the importance of the arts and humanities in shaping and defining who we are. He sees the humanities as providing “a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value” (Slouka 42), a value that Slouka and Woolf would share, despite the decades that separate their lives. It cannot be coincidence then, that many of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway have purposely left those mechanisms which gave them meaning: Peter’s literate, Septimus’ poetry, and Clarissa’s reading and studies. The result is surrender to knowing anything about the world. Knowledge or affirmation is not a purely intern act. Incapable of finding joy or meaning in life, the cast of characters slides into a pessimism and a debilitating skepticism.

Accepting Slouka’s theory on “reckoning value”, I see no method for the characters in Mrs. Dalloway to adapt to the demands of a changing society. In this sense, Clarissa as well as many of the other characters in the novel, harbor hostilities to both change and tradition. For the latter, Clarissa’s opposed to tradition has stripped her of context and definition (Mrs. Dalloway versus Clarissa Dalloway). Similarly, for Septimus, the past is “an idyll contrasted with the present” (Wyatt 440). This further illustrates the defining force that literature had on Septimus. Without it, he is a simulacrum of his former self. For both characters, it is not the yearning for the past as much as it is a longing for pastoral themes or perceived images they conjure up. Change is also representative of the enormous challenge the characters face in their society. By accepting the validity that the self can only observe, and not affirm, Clarissa’s dilemma is that she is incapable of taking ownership of her own happiness. The result is a hostility towards those who possessed the ability to thrive, such as Hugh Whitbread, for who she stated had “the most extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for the British aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across” (Woolf 72). She began the soliloquy with, “Hugh she detested for some reason” (Woolf 72). This animosity concurs with Auerbach’s observation of Woolf’s literary style, in which he says that there is “something hostile to the reality which they represent” (Auerbach 551). I myself have also questioned Woolf’s literary motivations here, and in my conclusion, I can find no other viable alternative for the characters to act upon, given they have been put into a situation where the only outlet is something that lies between fatalism and nihilism. Examined in this light, Woolf’s transparency as an author, who seeks to withhold omniscient knowledge from the narrative field, begins to fail in light of her characters having few to no other options.

In conclusion, I find Wool’s writing to be highly explanative when seeking to understand many of the driving ideologies and popular philosophies of her time. Such philosophies have endured and have found their way into current forms of literate and popular discourse. The modern world still labors under the weight of truth and the search for meaning in life. Perhaps by examining in detail the writings and thoughts of earlier generations, we may find the necessary tools to answer these questions, if not for all humanity, at least of ourselves in our own time and space.

Citations

• Appleyard, Bryan. Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
• Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Forbes, Shannon. “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 38.1 (2005): 38-50.
• Guth, Deborah. “Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final Moment of Vision” Twentieth Century Literature 36.1 (1990): 35-42.
• Guth, Deborah. “’What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Fiction as Self-Evasion in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’” The Modern Language Review 34.1 (1989): 18-25.
• Josipovici, Gabriel. The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
• Samuelson, Ralph. “The Theme of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’”. Chicago Review 11.4. (1958): 57-76.
  Slouka, Mark. “Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 2009: 32-40.
• Woolf, Virginia, A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Mariner Books, 2003.
• Wyatt, Jean M. “Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor” PMLA 88.3 (1973): 440-451.

Self & Mental Illness

• Self is often implicated in mental illness
• The “illness” lies in a person’s failure to regulate their behavior according to social norms (malfunctioning of self-control)
• Mental illness in this case is regarded as a form of social deviance (pg. 221)
• The medical definition, however, stresses the clinical nature of mental illness

Problem with DSM Definition

“The concept of mental disorder, like many other concepts in medicine and science, lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations… Mental disorders have also been defined by a variety of concepts. Each is a useful indicator for a mental disorder, but none is equivalent to the concept, and different situations call for different definitions.” DSM-IV. xxi

What is Mental Illness?

• Disorders of the mind
• “Abnormal” behavioral malfunctions
  • “odd” - “bizarre” or “strange”
  • “bad” - “harmful” to oneself or others
  • “insane” - “out of one’s mind”
• Normative stigma
  • - e.g., psychotic neurotic

Limitations of the Theatrical Metaphor

“A character staged in a theater is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence [sic] man; but the successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques - the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” p. 254-5

Mental Illness

• What is mental illness?
• The medical definition
• The sociological definition
• Self and mental illness

The Real Self Can Be False

“While we could retain the common-sense notion that fostered appearances can be discredited by a discrepant reality, thre is often no reaon for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embrarrass… For many sociological issues it may not even be necessary to decide which is more real, the fostered impression or the one the performer attempts to prevent the audience from receiving… We will want to know what kind of impression of reality can shatter the fostered impression of reality, and what reality really is can be left to other students.” pg. 66

What Is Behind the Mask?

• There is no “real” self behind the mask: pg. 252
• The self is a performed character or a dramatic effect: pg. 252-3
• We are what we perform, and, in that sense, the mask is the self: pg. 253

Notes from Sociology of Self, S. Zhao - November 24th, 2008

Deviance Managment

• Two “verbal management” strategies
  1. Aligning actions - by the perpetrator
  2. Altercasting - by the perpetrated

Model of Altercasting

Altercasting

• A verbal technique that is employed to cast others into a particular role that makes them behave in the way the perpetrator wishes them to behave.
• This is accomplished in order to avoid formal confrontation and physical violence.

A young girl enjoys an ice cream cone.

She is observed by her younger brother, who desires to have some of her ice cream.

The mother interveines and tells the older sister to “be nice” and share the ice cream with her younger brother, thereby “casting” the older sibbling into the role of the “good sisiter”.

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It was no coincidence that jazz’s rise to prominence was at the juncture of World War II and the increasing demands for social equality from Blackamericans, many of whom including those that were jazz musicians, participated in the war and wanted their public and political due. These were the tumultuous times that would give birth to jazz, or more correctly, bebop. And from this unique American musical form would come a art form that would challenge and resist the status quo of dominant white thought regarding the inferiority of blacks as well as incubate new a consciousness of black intellectualism.

To appreciate bebop’s stance in history, one must observe the history that precedes jazz; specifically, the history of Blackamericans and their ascendance out of slavery and a culture that, as of the 1940’s, was still pro-Jim Crow, either de jure in the North or de facto in the South. For many black musicians, bebop was a means of both insulating and protesting against a cultural system that produced signs and signifiers of black inferiority. These sentiments were gelled in the minds of Blackamerican musicians after returning from World War II, a war that was supposed to have been fought against the notion of racism. And yet, many blacks felt that hypocritically, that same government that sent them off to war still perpetrated state-sanctioned discrimination against Blackamericans, and turned a blind eye to public hostility; both physical and psychological. Thus, it was no coincidence that bebop took musical form with high tempos and hard driving polyrhythms, characteristics that would define its sound, struck back against the ideology of the dominant white culture just as percussively and psychologically as they perceived themselves to be attacked.

Jazz’s musical roots come primarily from the blues, a form of folk music that has its roots in Africa, and secondarily, swing, big band and ragtime music, coming out of the early decades of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Much like its musical forefather, jazz lamented over its existential crisis of being subjugated by a dominant white power. Unlike the blues, however, bebop was not to remain a catharsis, sung in waiting for the hope of salvation through the benevolence of God. Rather, rather jazz sought to beseech the wrath of God, its music being fueled with the anger and rage of a people’s mistreatment for some three hundred-plus years. This anger was so prevalent in the music, that by the latter part of the 20th century, bebop and its alternate forms, such as post-bop and avant-garde, were perceived as “the angry black man’s music”. This collective anger is evident in the recounting of how jazz was perceived even as late as the 1970’s, by Ed Michel, a music produced for one of jazz’s most prestigious labels, Impulse!:

By the seventies “it seemed as though Impulse became the label characterized by the angry black tenor man,” .

Not content to site on the sidelines, jazz throughout its history would comment time and time again on social justice topics ranging from the plight of Blackamericans in the prison-complex system (such as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, an album in direct reference to the 1971 Attica Prison riots) to such lamentations of the past as John Coltrane’s Song For The Underground Railroad.

At the transition point between jazz and swing/big band music, was a desire on the part of these musicians to be taken seriously. Many felt that as members of swing bands, they were forced to take a back seat to the audience – a predominantly white audience at that. Their music was reduced to a sort of ambiance, where particularity of the musician was inconsequential. Billy Ekstine, who led one of the most famous jazz ensembles during the 40’s and 50’s, commented that many popular songs were re-arranged with fast tempos where the audience could not dance to them, forcing them to pay attention to the band as the primary focus.

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Human beings learn to act and behave in a variety of ways in society. The various modes of behavior depend on to whom one is speaking and what the objective is. This behavior is learned from nearly the cradle and is negotiated to the grave. In Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life, we see just how intricate and deeply ingrained this form of face-to-face interaction is between human beings. But is this necessarily how it needs to be and perhaps more importantly, what would it look like if face-to-face interaction operated in a different paradigm. Those are the questions we will examine here and now.

Before we can ask the question of what a different paradigm of face-to-face interaction would look like, we must first examine its mechanics and what it is made up of. To jump straight in, Goffman’s definition of face-to-face interaction is based on the use of the self as a tool in which we negotiate with others. When initiating this intercourse between others, the individual in question will wish to employ a number of tactics to achieve the desired goal. This may run the gamut of a calculative approach to a manipulative one. And while the situation and nature of the other may greatly influence the approach the individual takes, the objective is always the same: garnering a positive reaction from the other. From superiors, equals, and subordinates, the individual is nearly always seeking a positive reaction and reception of themselves from the other.

To grasp this agenda of the individual, we will need to flush out some of the terminology that Goffman uses to describe these kinds of encounters. In fact, encounter itself is a term Goffman uses to define the interplay between individuals when they are in one another’s immediate presence. Here, individuals ply their various techniques of influence on one another in a reciprocal fashion, in hopes of controlling the situation to give off the best possible impression.

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From its very beginning, the Nazi regime sought to engender a sense of purity and beauty, wrapped around and embodied within a race of people: the German people. Through the manifestation of this aesthetic through the German folk, the Nazis were able to completely dominate all definitions and concepts of beauty within German society. That which appeased the Nazi sensibility of beauty, aiding it in its objective of societal domination, would be appropriated as pure art or pure beauty (as was in their obsession with classical Greek or Roman art). And in a move of complete and total control, that which fell outside the pale of consideration was labeled base and deviant. Through examining the ways in which the Nazis appropriated art to further their cause we can learn more about the role that art plays in war and tyranny.

In many ways, one can simplify the approach that the Nazis took, in relation to the co-opting of art for their purposes, as a two-pronged approach. One involved the designation and appropriation of Greek, Roman and Nordic art forms. The Nazis had a fascination with antiquity and the ancient that would border on fanatic. But their association with these historical art histories went further than misplaced admiration. They saw themselves as the inheritors and benefactors of these great art and civilizational traditions. The second concerned banishing certain forms of art as deviant and abnormal. The Nazis even went so far as to suggest the modern maladies that society faced were in direct correlation to deviant art. Abstract paintings that might show a disjointed face was in fact a catalyst for mental health instability. This strain of thought permeated to all forms of human disfiguration. By having an iron grip on the possibility of aesthetics, the Nazis held total sway over the public discussion and consumption of art in German society.

The above statements illustrate the methods of how the Nazi regime held sway of the German conscience of art but the totality of how the Nazis saw themselves as a living aesthetic goes even further. With their chief ideology, Adolph Hitler, heavily influenced by other anti-Semitic artists such as Richard Wagner, Hitler borrowed many of the themes from Wagner’s operas, such as Twilight of the Gods, an opera that saw the death of its hero as an act of aestheticism. This would prove to be a haunting foreshadowing of how, in the final days of the Nazi regime, the Nazis would fall and more importantly how they would see their own demise as a list will and testament to beauty. There was a great deal of fetishism over the beauty of death in Nazism. From the above mentioned view on their own demise as a sort of Götterdämmerung, the Nazis took it a step further to incorporate this into their works of architecture. Many of the designs of buildings and structures were provisioned with age and decay, a longing for the Nazis and the German people to fade into antiquity much like the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Death was not the only sentiment the Nazis sought to evoke in their use of art. Another equally important notion was that of struggle and resistance. Despite their admiration of ancient Greek art traditions, such as statues, the Nazis saw themselves embroiled in conflict against the rest of the world and that manifested in their art. Unlike the Greek busts, Nazi statues were often portrayed with a sense of pain and anguish on their faces. Male bodies were overtly muscular. With these contorted faces and straining bodies, this art conveys a sense of intense agony and grimace. That, in an almost Calvinist work ethic, this anguish takes a pseudo work ethic.

Marxist analysts of culture, as well as sociologists, have always struggled with the problem of how to explain the social nature of art without making art into an appendage to ideology, that is an expression of class interests. Most Marxist art historians agree that reflection theory, i.e. artistic works a reproduction of the norms and values of a social group - such as the Boston elite for example - is a rather crude way of defining the relations between artistic production and social surroundings. Reviewing various Marxist approaches Janet Wolff tries to find a more subtle approach.

Wolff asserts that all art is ideological, in a broad sense, in that it is socially and historically situated, related to people’s material conditions.

“Works of art (…) are not closed, self-contained and transcendent entities, but are the product of specific historical practices on the part of identifiable social groups in given conditions, and therefore bear the imprint of the ideas, values and conditions of existence of those groups, and their representatives in particular artists” (49).

Marx himself has left ambiguous, contradictory statements on the relation of art to society. In The German Ideology, he affirms that ideas reflect material or class interests; that culture is a representation of the bourgeoisie’s, the ruling classes desire to organize society according to its interests. In Grundrisse (the draft version of his critique of the political economy), he explains the paradox that Greek art, though created by an economically backward people with a slave economy, still sets aesthetic standards and gives us enjoyment. Marx never wrote systematically on the topics of culture and art.

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I had the pleasure of being invited to Dr. Zain Abdullah’s course, Islam in Global Perspective, at Temple University. The course was welcoming a selection of Fulbright scholars from abroad to discussed a number of issues such as what is Islam to Muslims, how do Muslims relate and form identities in a global cultural context and how is Islam experienced [symbolism] by Muslims, to name a few.

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Well, I hope none of you plan to check out any books from the library these days. It seems that in response to the London Bombings, three Senate committees have passed hasty resolutions extending the power of the FBI to obtain library records without a subpoema. This done so under the Patriot Act. You know, I feel much, much safer knowing that the next sleeper cell or suicide bomber won’t be able to go to the library to check out books on bomb manufacuring (Bombs For Dummies?). This country continues to reach all-time high levels of stupidity. These folks are brilliant at playing the harp stings of the very gullible American public. It allows them to take the moral high ground - as if they’re the ones really championing something great and noble. Greg Palast writes, “What I want to know is, who at the FBI is poring over my choice of novels, how much do we pay this guy and why isn’t he reviewing Swiss and Pakistani bank transfer records instead?”. For more sad yet funny commentary check out www.gregpalast.com.