Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Congress on Women's Studies , Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Aralık 2024, ss.41
Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest (1954) dives into the traumatizing psychological treatment of a twenty-three-year-old isolated woman, Elizabeth, by a Victorian-minded psychiatrist, Dr. Wright. Falling into the hands of her phallogocentric doctor, Elizabeth, with her fragmentation into three distinct personalities as Beth, Betsy, and Bess, is considered as a blockage to the operation of the social codes and also to her established role as the Woman. Not caring the reason behind the outburst of her disintegration, Dr. Wright, as the patriarchal Father incarnate, sets out to erase Elizabeth’s distinct personalities to turn her into a “vacant landscape” to be re-filled with his own Words as a phallocrat. Considering Elizabeth’s distinct voices as a kind of trouble afflicting the narrative of the Woman, Dr. Wright homogenizes or totalizes her under the pretence of curing her mental illness. In this sense, putting a particular focus on that behind Dr. Wright’s oppressive attitude towards Miss Richmond lies his desire to eliminate her authentic voice or to turn her into a silent listener of the Man, the present essay argues that Elizabeth’s cure(!) at the end of the novel portrays nothing but the (re)integration of a nonconformist woman figure into the codes of the established discourse. Resembling a Barthesian text with her multivocality embedded in the distinct voices of Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess, as the study further contends, Miss Richmond is transformed from a text into what is termed work by Barthes, given the closure and resolution she is exposed to at the hands of Dr. Wright, who takes on the role of a realist writer as evidenced in his blind desire to dissect and articulate her. Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s ideas on the relation between women and madness and linking Elizabeth’s experience to the story of a similar female figure addressed by Felman and labelled mad, Stéphanie from Balzac story “Adieu,” the essay points to that what Elizabeth is diagnosed with, multiple personality disorder, is actually her authentic heterogenous nature, which is deemed dangerous for the operation of the narrative of the Man, and Dr. Wright (as the mouthpiece of patriarchy) wants to silence her heterogeneity to put an end to her menacing state.