Using fiction to tell mad stories: a journey into historical imagination and empathy

ABSTRACT

In this article, the author explores larger themes of empathy, imagination, and the historian’s craft through her process of writing a novella entitled The Red Chair. This historical fiction is about the psychiatric patients at the Brockville Asylum (Brockville, Ontario, Canada), and explores the daily lives of many inmates. It emerges from her Master’s Research Project, where the author sought to center emotions as a means of knowing. Reflecting on the process, she argues for a larger presence of historical fiction in academic scholarship to engage both with the past and the historian’s craft. The author argues that the expansion of disciplinary boundaries should include fictional conventions, which might assist in telling more difficult stories, and in her case, challenge the biomedical dominance of asylum histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Mad studies
• public history
• historical fiction
• narrative
• empathy
• imagination

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the community of people who have contributed to the making of this article. This includes but is not limited to the anonymous readers, Sammy-Jo Johnson, Jon Sufrin, Ailsa Smith, James Miller, John C. Walsh, and Patrick Finney.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. My research agreement prohibited me from using any patient names, and making their identity knowable to the public. For this reason, I treat all pseudonym as if it were their actual name. I do not make a distinction between the fictional Julie and the Julie whose documents appeared in the archive as a reflection of the slipperiness of identity and writing.

2. My project emerged out of the Public History program at Carleton University. Throughout this program, it left me with many considerations on the ways we may need to think about the various publics who are engaged with the past, and how it is represented in the public (Dean 2018, 2). This resulted in me turning to fiction as a means to attend to how novella writing could be used to create compelling and effective histories (De Groot, 2014, 605). The program also brought up issues around accuracy and authenticity that fundamentally shaped how I approached my writing of The Red Chair.

3. There are already several examples of authentic and rigorous historical storytelling in graphic novels, which all make important and memorable interventions on different narratives. For example, there are many Indigenous graphic novels emerging from Canada that include, Louis Riel (1999) by Chester Brown, This Place: 150 Years Retold (2019) by a collection of authors, A Girl Called Echo (2017) by Katherena Vermette, and The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book (2010 & 2021) by Gord Hill. Each of these novels contribute to popularizing historical narratives in an accessible format while maintaining historical rigour. They also tell stories that have been overlooked or deliberately ignored. To read more about history and comics see, Sean Carleton’s article ‘Drawn to Change: Comics and Critical Consciousness’ (2014), or Sarah Henzi’s article ‘“A Necessary Antidote”: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Indigenous Writing’ (2016).

4. There are many historians who have engaged in research that would fit within the affective or emotional turn, which studies the emotions of past lives (Eustace et al. 2012, 1487). Robert Boddice has written extensively on the history of emotions and feelings, and how emotions have been historicized (Boddice 2014, 2017, 2019). Other historians who have taken up the study of emotions include: Barbara Rosenwein (2006), Jan Plamper (2017), Joanna Bourke (2014), Eugenia Lean (2007), Nicole Eustace (2008), and William M. Reddy (2001). Their studies all address emotions and feelings within their respective areas of research by finding ways to discuss emotions and history under an academic approach. While there are some parallels to my fictional methods to history with The Red Chair, I am specifically stepping outside of the traditional academic realm to consider how fiction might add to understanding emotional pasts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kira A. Smith

Kira A. Smith is a PhD. candidate at York University in Critical Disability Studies where she currently researches the experiences of children in Canadian Asylums under the supervision of Geoffrey Reaume. She specializes in Mad Studies and Public History. In her free time, Kira contributes to the mad community as a board member for the Psychiatric Survivor Oral History Archive and the Critical Disability Studies Student Association. Her work on the Brockville Asylum and fictional methodology has been presented various conferences across the globe.