elliefunked-blog

[elliefunked-blog]

The importance of being earnest.

Throughout my life I have found that books have greatly affected me in many different ways. As a child I devoured them hungrily, yet as an adult, my consumption has slowed down profoundly - in line with the increasing severity of my ADHD Thinking on this, it’s made me wish to ponder on how mental health can be influenced by literature and on screen - for better or for worse - and how this is reflected in the works literature and their screen adaptations themselves. 

Two fine works which instantly spring to my mind with regards to these matters are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte & The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace. The characters of Bertha Mason, the “mad wife” of Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre & Anna, a main protagonist in the latter, are polarised. This is in the sense that Bertha is locked away in the attic of Thornfield Hall and Anna is sent away to the asylum Lake House. Both are incarcerated due to a desire of their husbands that they vanish from public view. Bertha Mason is regarded as suffering from an inherited propensity to mental illness (which is something that is briefly covered in Jane Eyre but more so in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys) & Anna is never diagnosed with any kind of mental illness - the asylum provides itself as more of a “holding pen” for the convenience of her philandering husband.

The inference in Jane Eyre that Bertha’s mental illness is due to her ethnic heritage is shameful in the extreme, but also reflective of a complete lack of understanding of mental illness triggers in the period. Many, many women were incarcerated forever in the 19th/20th centuries and prior for spurious reasons - these ranged in anything from enjoying novels to post natal depression & tertiary syphilis. For a woman to enjoy sex in that period & to openly express that was to be regarded by some as wanton - where in direct contrast it was seen as expected in a man.  A very clear example of the Victorian hypocrisy of this is Lady Harriet Mordaunt. Lady Maudaunt had a torrid affair with Edward VII and others, the resulting pregnancy & birth led her to confess to her husband as she believed an ailment of the child’s to be due to a sexually transmitted disease. A resulting divorce ensued, which involved Edward VIII being cited in proceedings. It was deemed preferable by Harriet’s family to have her committed to a series of private houses and  asylums for the last thirty six years of her life, rather than see her outed as an adulteress & woman of pleasure. 

I, personally, have always found literature to be a great comfort to me in times of strife. And in times of happiness. I’ve long had mental illnesses, to varying degrees, and the most prominent at this present time is my ADHD. So keeping track of a storyline, reading one book at a time & retaining what has been happening in them is a challenge, to say the least. I yearn for the sense of escapism in them, yet my mind is veering off in so many different directions at the same time when I do read that I end up putting the television on instead - as it can just feel so less daunting somehow. So, I do get very frustrated on that side of things, but on the other I have discovered a real love for short stories.

I’ve collected various works of horror, history, literature for many years, but one of my absolute favourites are ghost stories. You would think, perhaps, that to wish to be scared rigid would conflict immensely with a desire for escapism from ADHD, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I have many collections from the 1970s, for example, which contain stories of only a few pages, but which have impacted my imagination enormously. I have always felt that there is a lot to be said for anyone who can have such an effect on you with so few words. Mental health can be portrayed rather harshly in horror, as a method of fear, which is as shameful in my eyes as Bertha in Jane Eyre. But, I do feel that this method of provoking fear in others is evolving in modern works. A desire for shadows, for breaths being heard but noone being around to provide them. These are very much in the realms of EF Benson & MR James, and these are far more my kind of story. There are only so many “crazed” axe men that one needs to see in literature and films. And it’s possible to portray mental illness without lampooning it at the same time. Split is a very good example of this, in my eyes, as a film because it really does portray how psychiatrists do understand Schizophrenia, that personalities of many are fully formed & real to those who endure them - and not just “imaginary” as they’ve previously been perceived. Same for the film Identity, which also covers multiple personalities in a very real and perceptive way. Gothika also covers mental illness in a striking way, tapping into the real fear that many of us have that to be suddenly placed in a secure mental health facility could happen, without warning. And for there to be no escape from it.

I believe that works such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting have really shone a light onto important social matters such as psychosis that results from substance addictions & withdrawals. We live in times where the cause of mental illness may have changed slightly, but the effects on the most vulnerable concerned remain the same.  These involve a sense of shame that the substance addiction has occured in the first place, an increased desire to continue with it - in order to to facilitate blotting out the pain. A need to be seen, to be heard, to be helped. The root causes are very often the same over time - pain, trauma, bad company. And their need for true, fair & accurate representation in literature and on screen has not lessened in it’s importance, but flourished.