“The sick body has its own narrative impulse”: contemporary Irish illness narratives and institutions of care

ABSTRACT

The perceived social liberalisation of Irish culture over the past ten years has significantly impacted Irish writing, resulting in discussions of formerly tabooed topics like psychosis, menstruation, and infertility. This shift is particularly evident in the recent rise in public interest in creative non-fiction writing. This article examines the rise in popularity of illness narratives: tales of patients’ and care-takers’ embodied experiences of mental and physical ailments in light of Irish medical-historical developments. Focusing on chapters from recent Irish essay collections by Emilie Pine, Sinéad Gleeson, and Sophie White, this article considers how writing about the gendered experiences of women in Irish medical and mental institutions can shape political action and contribute to the formation of radical new cultures of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Illness narratives
• cultures of care
• Irish institutions
• medicine
• mental health
• women’s studies

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge a generous visiting fellowship awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at the Maynooth University in 2022 which enabled this research to be completed. The first part of the title of this article is from Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations, 175.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Other notable examples of this genre include: Fanning, Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery; Brown, Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays; Grealy, Autobiography of a Face; and O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.

2. I have deliberately used the phrase “mental asylum” here to refer to the history of the so-called “district lunatic asylums” that were built in Ireland between 1810 and 1870 to accommodate what was perceived as a growing need to house the seemingly increasing population of mentally ill individuals. Elsewhere, I have used the phrase “mental hospital” to refer to psychiatric hospitals since this is the term Sophie White uses to describe the institution where she was treated.

3. For further reading, see Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Kleinman, The Illness Narratives; and Charon, Narrative Medicine.

4. Cleghorn, Unwell Women, 12.

5. The more popular of this writing includes Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, a non-fiction autobiography about an American neurosurgeon’s experiences with stage four metastatic lung cancer, which was a New York Times bestseller and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Notable examples include Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir; Ikpi, I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying, among others.

6. Jurecic, Illness as Narrative.

7. In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag famously observes, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship/Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick” (1).

8. Gleeson, Constellations, 175.

9. The rendering of personal experiences of bodily experiences political calls to mind the feminist slogan that the personal is political, a phrase coined by American feminist Carol Hanisch that became influential in second-wave feminism. The concept can also be seen in earlier classic feminist texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and influenced later feminists like bell hooks. See: Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Hanisch, “The Personal is Political;” and hooks, Feminism is For Everybody.

10. Gleeson, Constellations, 175.

11. For further examples of critical essays and creative writing describing women’s experiences of illness see DasGupta and Hurst, Stories of Illness and Healing.

12. For a comprehensive overview of the history of denial of women’s pain see Cleghorn, Unwell Women, 89–104. In the United States, it has been observed that the denial of women’s pain has disproportionately affected black Americans. See: Hoffman et al., “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment.”

13. Gleeson, Constellations, 175; 177.

14. For the most influential work on the topic of bodily pain see Scarry, The Body in Pain. For more recent scholarship on this topic in an Irish context see Dillane, McAreavey, and Pine, The Body in Pain in Irish Literature.

15. Jurecic, Illness as Narrative, 10.

16. Heavey, “The Irish Healthcare System,” 278.

17. Ibid., 280.

18. Ibid., 278.

19. The Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment was co-founded by Sinéad Kennedy and Ailbhe Smyth and was composed of 100-plus organisations. For more information, see Fitzsimons with Kennedy, Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight.

20. Gleeson, Constellations, 207.

21. Ibid., 219.

22. Pine, Notes to Self, 5.

23. Ibid., 27–28; 31.

24. Ibid., 99.

25. Cleghorn, Unwell Women, 128.

26. Barr, “Repealing the Eighth”.

27. One of the key aspects of the Repeal the Eighth campaign’s success was the incorporation of Irish women’s narratives about their own experiences with abortion, including the effects on mental health through social media sites such as the Facebook page “In Her Shoes” which offered a safe and anonymous space for women to share their abortion stories. Classic accounts of the literary associations between women and madness include Showalter’s, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980.

28. This requirement was implemented in Irish mental asylums from 1 January 1846. See Reynolds, Grangegorman.

29. Kelly, “Searching for the Patient’s Voice,” 87.

30. White, Corpsing, 4.

31. Ibid., 40.

32. Ibid., 42.

33. Ibid., 10–11.

34. Ibid., 44.

35. Ibid., 99.

36. See Kelly, Hearing Voices, for further reading.

37. White, 106.

38. Ibid., 106.

39. Ibid., 289.

40. Stella Bolaki argues that the study of illnesses narratives needs to be expanded from the focus on the literary to include other visual media. She credits Jo Spence’s photography with creating “opportunities for the proliferation of feminist subjectivities.” Bolaki, Illness as Many Narratives, 48.

41. Ehrenreich and English, Complaints and Disorders, 153.

42. See Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”.