Sous la cloche de verre : analyse des métaphores récurrentes de textes féminins de l’internement

This thesis reflects on the particularities of the use of language, especially in terms of recurring metaphors, in the texts of women writers who spent a part of their life in a psychiatric hospital. I question the texts of Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Unica Zürn, Emma Santos and Susanna Kaysen. Some other women writers are also examined, to a lesser extent. It shows that the fact of having lived an experience, which I would qualify as physically and psychologically extreme living conditions, affects these writers’ mind, the self-perception and their textual representations. It also shows how one’s relation to writing and literature is changed by this situation. Undergone, imposed, selected or created metaphors are born, are shown or repeated in those texts. They detail both how these women lived and processed the effects associated to this life, as well as how their writing of these experiences reflects general aspects of literary discourse. This thesis is divided into five main ideas concerning the singular relationship that bonds madness, writing and the experience of living in a psychiatric ward. In the first chapter, I analyze the bell jar figure and its variations according to different writers. This strong metaphor, which is incredibly efficient to translate the internee’s state of mind, helps me explain the functioning of metaphor and the crucial role it plays in the writing and human thought. The second chapter looks at spatial metaphors and spatial representations of the mind. It shows how, while the self and its corporal images are becoming more fragile because of the imposed treatments and living conditions, there appears the necessity of a real or figurative space from which to write. This space is in relation with writing, but also with the mere possibility of human thought. The third chapter builds on the notion of abjection. These women were considered and treated as animals, excrements or waste, and they came to see themselves as such. I analyze those representations and also how they figure the dissolution of the limits to one’s subjectivity that occurs during the internment. The fourth chapter draws on the object notion and the reification of human existence, through processes of subjective reification, which lead the narrators to perceive themselves as objects rather than people. I also examine the relation we can posit between the mind, the objects it chooses to consider, and how they affect the mind’s reflexive operations. The fifth chapter reflects on the use of language, according to the theories developed by these women writers. It also looks at the importance of the female body and femininity in the production of the texts and the ideas fostered by these concepts. My thesis demonstrates how literature gave them a space to analyze and structure both their self and thought. For these women, literature was also a place to speak from. This possibility emerges from the use of language and from the interactions between the mind, language and the world.

Keyphrases: Abjection, Metaphor, Internment, Madness, Woman, Abjection, Object