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