Sandy Jeffs and Madness Reclaimed


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Tülüce M. U.

16th INTERNATIONAL IDEA CONFERENCE: STUDIES IN ENGLISH, Nevşehir, Turkey, 24 - 26 April 2024, pp.121

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Summary Text
  • Doi Number: 10.35250/kun/9786054448791
  • City: Nevşehir
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.121
  • Ankara University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Published in 1993, Poems from the Madhouse includes a collection of poems based on the Australian poet Sandy Jeffs’ complex experience with schizophrenia. Jeffs’ poetry not only offers an insight into this mental condition, but it also problematizes the connotations of madness, which loaded the word “mad” with various meanings and introduced many interchangeable words that both simplify and undermine the severity of this mental disability. Jeffs employs the medium of poetry to change and reclaim the word, and becomes the voice of people living with this illness. However, while her works show her struggle against social and cultural inscriptions of madness, there are also poems that express her own personal disconcerting experience with being hospitalised due to schizophrenia. Thus, her poems not only depict a struggle for social awareness for people suffering from mental disabilities but also maintain her process of reclaiming her identity as a “mad” woman. In this way, her attempt to reclaim the word “mad” does not reflect solely her own medical condition but opens up room for debate about the long history of madness. Taking Foucault’s and Showalter’s works to demonstrate how the connection between madness and women is established, this study examines the subversive content of Jeffs’ poems in the context of écriture féminine, and analyse how her work reclaims “madness” and lays bare the social construction of madness through the aesthetic power of poetry.