A Question of Degree

A final copy of my Lit X paper.

The definition of insanity is a very unclear one. The classic definition is “a severely disordered state of mind” (1), yet that definition has almost universally been deemed unacceptable. To individuals, madness has many definitions, from depression to schizophrenia. The cry that the insane are not as crazy as we think has been analyzed, pursued and reexamined, and that is not the goal of this paper. The goal of this paper is to put forward a concept of madness as defined by three works of literature: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, and Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown all similarly portray madness. That concept is that madness is the inability to distinguish between the mental and physical. An insane mind reacts to a mental distress in a physical manner, treating it as a physical thing, without the ability to distinguish between the sadness of a loved one dying and the pain of a broken arm.

Before delving into this topic, it is necessary to explain its origins. Stress, according to WebMD, can be an “emotional problem, such as unexpressed or uncontrolled anger, depression, guilt, grief or low self esteem” (2). According to Doctor Nieske Zabriskie, ND, things such as stress often manifest themselves physically, “in addition to insomnia, stress can play a major role in depression, cognitive dysfunction, digestive disorders, weight gain and muscle and joint pain” (3). Stress is like a microcosm of insanity, while extremely stressed people sometimes act insanely. Now, I know that stress is not insanity, yet almost all of these physical symptoms are demonstrated in the characters of The Bell Jar, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and Edgar Huntly, it is just a matter of intensity and scale. A question of degree. My conclusion is that all of these characters are insane because of stress, whether it be strong emotions, a traumatic experience etc., not only have caused the normal physical reactions, but led to an inability to distinguish between a mental and physical hurt. Whereas a sane person might become depressed or cognitively unstable, they would recognize these things as physical depictions of mental pain. To the insane, they are one and the same.

To start with, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a prime example of my concept of madness. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the main character, Chief Bromden is insane because of his inability to distinguish between the mental and the physical. One example is Chief Bromden’s inability to differentiate between actual fog produced by a fog machine, and the fog that he has imagined to surround him. When Chief Bromden mistakenly believes that Nurse Ratched has started the fog machine he becomes engulfed in the fog, and cannot “see six inches in front of [himself]” (7). The fog represents Bromden’s desire to be free of the asylum, and by hiding in the fog, he believes that he can accomplish this, if only for a few minutes. Often, when Bromden is in the fog, he is taken back to the home of his youth, and pictures his father standing up to the white man, or hunting. Of course, the fog is a mental construction that does not exist, yet Bromden believes that the fog is physically real enough for him to hide in, and he often does, “I’m glad when it gets thick enough you’re lost in it and can let go, and be safe again” (110).

Bromden also imagines other physical objects that are only present in his mind. For example, the machines that the ward uses. Yes, there really is a shock therapy table, but there different are machines, such as the fog machine, that Bromden has only imagined, yet he thinks that they are real. For example, Bromden thinks that Nurse Ratched has implanted tiny machines into all of the patients, to control all of them. Another example is the scene where an elderly patient dies in the night. Bromden awakes to a horrifying scene,
[The attendant] twists a knob, and the whole floor goes to slipping down away from him standing in the door, lowering into the building like a platform in a grain elevator!...It-everything I see-looks like it sounded, like the inside of tremendous dam. Huge brass tubes disappear upward in the dark. Wires run to transformers out of sight. Grease and cinders catch on everything, staining the couplings and motors and dynamos red and coal black (83-84).
When the patient, Blastic, is killed by an attendant, there is no blood or innards, “just a shower of rust and ashes and now and again a piece of wire or glass” (85). Bromden has imagined this mechanized world, because it represents the control that the ward has over everybody. Everybody runs like a machine, because they are too afraid of angering Nurse Ratched. The ward breaks down the human element inside everyone, making them cold and emotionless. To Bromden, they might as well all be machines, because no matter what they do, they cannot escape. Bromden’s dream, of which he thinks is real life, shows his insanity, because it shows an inability to distinguish from real life, and this cold world that his brain has imagined. It seems to Bromden as if everybody is actually a machine, that, like Blastic, if the nurse or any of the other patients were opened up, they would be made of gears, not fiber. Bromden is insane, however, because he does not just see how the ward mechanizes people, but be believes that they are actually made of metal, and are actual machines.

The last thing that demonstrates the insanity of Chief Bromden is his perception of size. To Bromden, people are sized based upon their power, not upon their actual size. For example, after the first of McMurphy’s many offenses, as the Nurse goes to reprimand him, she grows, “Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient...when she rumbles past she’s already as big as a truck...every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger” (93). Bromden actually sees this, instead of just thinking about it metaphorically. As Nurse Ratched reaches McMurphy, however, something changes, “Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips-stops her dead! She shrinks to about head high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down at her” (93). Bromden has also experienced a loss in size because of Nurse Ratched, and says that he used to be big, but is not any longer. Bromden cannot recognize that he has just been belittled in his mind, and while his perceptions about metaphorical size of other characters are correct, they are not physical changes. This confusion proves that according to my concept of madness, Bromden is undoubtably insane.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not the only literary work that fits the concept of madness through indistinguishability, indeed Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown is another such book. This book is slightly different from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because instead of having many different allusions to insanity and the mind and body relationship, this book has mainly one reference to a union of the mental and the physical. In Edgar Huntly, madness is exemplified by the sleepwalking of both Clithero and Edgar. Clithero, after having narrowly escaped accidentally murdering his fiance, traveled to America from Ireland. This voyage across the ocean, however, has not cured him of his guilt, and as a result, he has spent his nights sleepwalking through the wilderness of Delaware. It is important to remember that sleepwalking, although not legally viewed as a mental disorder, was one of the prime ways of showing insanity during the 18th century. There was very little information about what caused mental insanity, and to that time, sleepwalking was one of the most easily visible signs of insanity. Since there was no way of diagnosing mental insanity, physical signs were the only clues that doctors had. In Brown’s time, if one acted sane, then one was, but if one acted insane, then one was insane. Sleepwalking, especially to Charles Brockden Brown is the ultimate form of insanity. Sleepwalking is often caused by high amounts of stress, and Clithero’s sleepwalking proves that his previous life in Ireland has driven him mad. He tells Edgar that he is indeed guilty of a crime, and that by digging up his past, Edgar has ensured that Clithero will never escape his fate. Clithero has been driven mad by his past, saying, “Till consciousness itself be extinct the worm that gnaws me will never perish” (35). His guilt has suffocated him, and his sleepwalking is a manifestation of his madness. In sleepwalking, Clithero explores the woods, an unthinking act that is indistinguishable to him from his normal life. Clithero does not even know that he is doing this, and therein lies his madness.

In this same way, Edgar proves that Clithero’s story has driven Edgar mad when Edgar himself starts to sleepwalk. Edgar ends up walking to the cave that Clithero frequents, because he believes that he will find a way to help Clithero and relieve him of his guilt. Edgar feels such a strong sense of compassion of Clithero’s plight, and also some guilt for forcing Clithero to tell his story, that he falls to the same level as Clithero. Edgar proves his madness by waking up in a pit inside a cave, unsure of how he arrived or where he is, “I had determined to explore this cave on the ensuing day, but my memory informed me not that this intention had been carried into effect. Still it was only possible to conclude that I had come hither on my intended expedition” (156). To the characters in Edgar Huntly, madness is represented by their sleepwalking, and the minds inability to separate guilt and remorse from the physical actions that the characters act out in their sleep.

Finally, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath embodies the concept that people are insane because they have an inability to distinguish the difference between the mental and the physical. The book’s main character, Esther Greenwood, is undeniably abnormal. She spends time in multiple asylums and tries, unsuccessfully, to kill herself several times. However, the thing that makes her insane is her inability to distinguish between the mental and the physical, in this case, situations of pain. She associates and combines the mental with her physical body. There are several instances of this in The Bell Jar. A perfect example of mental pain being interpreted physically is in Esther’s hospital stay after her attempted suicide. She asks to look in a mirror, and describes the experience:
It wasn’t a mirror at all, but a picture. You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. On side of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was a pale brown, with a rose-colored sore at either corner (174).
In a superb example of mental pain represented physically, each different issue with Esther’s face can be used to represent something that has troubled her. To start with, the chicken-feather hair is a representation of the result of shock therapy, and the stress and pain that it caused her. Her facial discoloration also represents her pain. Her brown mouth represents the destruction of her sexuality and her idea of love by Buddy. She found his kisses to be uninspiring, and now her lips are dead to feeling. Also, the sores on either side represent the loss of her virginity, and the pain of that memory. The purple half of her face represents her experience in New York, and the mental bruises that have just started to heal. The “sallow yellow” represents the guilt of her lack of remorse towards her dead father. The green edges around the purple represent the attempted rape as a particularly scarring event in the city.

Another example of mental pain is the attempted rape of Esther by Marco. Obviously a traumatic experience, the attempted rape leaves Esther with torn clothes and Marco with a bloody nose. In this case, the madness is not in Esther, but rather in Marco. After he suddenly calls off his attack, he suddenly says, “Yes or no, it is all the same” (109). Esther thinks that Marco seems to be talking to himself, and later he crawls around in the dark looking for a black bag. Marco also drools and loves his cousin. All of these things would suggest that Marco is unstable, and it is illustrated when the emotional pain of his sexual and romantic advances that have been foiled result in his blood being spilled. Plath does a good job of showing how insanity is not just developed in Esther through indistinguishability, but that a confusion of the mental and the physical is a sign of insanity in any character. In Marco’s case, this means that the mental pain of his incestuous love of his cousin, coupled with the pain of failing to lead a normal love life, have driven him mad. He is mad because all the pain is flushed out in bloody nose, and the pain becomes both physical and mental to him. To Marco, his pains are one and the same. A bloodied nose and bloodied pride are the same thing, his failure to rape Esther is the same as his failure to love adequately.

There are several more, minor revelations that prove Esther’s insanity. One is during the pain of her depression, she thinks about converting to Catholicism, where she would be “dead white” (165) as she threw herself at the feet of the priest, asking him to save her. In general, as Esther’s condition worsens, her body begins to deteriorate, and only after she begins to recover does she feel like her old self. Although not a painful experience, at least in terms of confusing mental and physical, another example of her mental and physical unification is in her blood-letting. As she cuts herself, she feels a “deep thrill” and feels better as some of her emotional demons are exorcised with this physical act.There are many reasons that Esther’s peers view her as insane, but her confusion of mental pain as a physical thing proves that Esther is mad, not simply confused or depressed.

For the most part, the clinically insane have been treated deplorably throughout history, despite the fact that insanity is as much of a disease as cancer. Often feared, always misunderstood, insanity has never been clearly defined. I offer up one qualifier for madness, as supported by the literary works One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown, and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. These three works support the idea that insanity comes when an individual loses the ability to distinguish between the physical and the mental, the real and the conceptual. Madness cannot be given one definition, because there are so many different cases and ways that in reveals itself. If madness were correctly defined, then one would find that everybody is mad. Clearly, by the fact that we are all different, it is inevitable that people will do things that others view as eccentric, or strange. By Miriam Webster’s definition, it would be easy to label everybody insane. There are so many cases of madness, and so many different types, that one has to draw the line between sanity and insanity. By labeling the insane as people who have an inability to distinguish between the mental and the physical, it becomes easier to correctly label the insane. Of course, there are minor cases, just as in the law, and to make a choice one way or the other, it becomes a question of degree.