âAgainst the Assault of Withering Truthâ: Inconvenient Women and Co-Constructed Memory in Maggie OâFarrellâs The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Sebastian Barryâs The Secret Scripture

Maren Scheurer

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Chapter 11 âAgainst the Assault of Withering Truthâ

Inconvenient Women and Co-Constructed Memory in Maggie OâFarrellâs The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Sebastian Barryâs The Secret Scripture

äºThe Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

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Maren Scheurer

Maren Scheurer
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DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745247_013

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Abstract

Among a plethora of recent popular engagements with mental distress is a small but considerable corpus of texts that focus specifically on the wrongful institutionalisation of women under the rubric of hysteria and other gender-related diagnoses. These women are portrayed as âinconvenient people,â as Sarah Wise has called them, whose rebellion against rigid gender norms is stigmatised as mental illness well up into the twentieth century. This more recent history of psychiatry is the topic of Maggie OâFarrellâs The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) and Sebastian Barryâs The Secret Scripture (2008). Both texts dramatise the gender-biased institutionalisation of young women in the 1930s and 1940s, but they do so from a contemporary perspective: we encounter the protagonists, Esme and Roseanne, as old women, still institutionalised, with remaining family and psychiatric personnel struggling to reconstruct their stories. The chapter begins with a discussion of how gendered diagnoses have been used to marginalise and silence women and to âarticulateâ oppression and suffering in the context of psychiatric confinement in Scotland and Ireland. It goes on to analyze OâFarrellâs and Barryâs novels as explorations of the possibilities and contradictions involved in remembering âfabricatedâ madness and coercive psychiatric treatment.

Presenting conflicting records and opposing individual memories and collective memory, the novels insist on the history of institutionalisation as a long-lasting and still relevant element of the cultural heritage of psychiatry. At the same time, they stage and interrogate scenes of remembrance and reconstruction by the victims of institutionalisation, their family members, and psychiatrists as unreliable, multiple, and relational memory work. In both texts, this endeavor is further complicated by colonial counterpoints: Esme and Roseanne share a family history of colonial entanglements, but neither colonial and psychiatric heritage nor cultural and gender identity can easily be mapped onto each other. Instead, the texts investigate the intersections of various forms of silencing and suppression in an intertextual dialogue with the feminist and anti-psychiatric movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But instead of reiterating these earlier positions, the novels develop different approaches to forced institutionalisation, linking their critique to the present and making it impossible for readers to safely distance themselves from the ambiguity produced through competing acts of remembrance. Instead of merely criticizing psychiatric institutions as sites of Eurocentric and patriarchal coercion, the novels, in line with contemporary theories of therapeutic interaction and joined remembering, see them as potential sites of interactive memory production.

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

ä¸ç¼ï¼ Narratives and Mental Health, å·ï¼ 4

Cover The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

ISBN:: 9789004745247

åºçç¤¾:: Brill

å°å·åºçæ¥æ:: 13 Nov 2025

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Chapter 11 âAgainst the Assault of Withering Truthâ

Inconvenient Women and Co-Constructed Memory in Maggie OâFarrellâs The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Sebastian Barryâs The Secret Scripture

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