Abstract
In Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen recounts her traumatic experiences in the women's ward of a psychiatric institution in the USA in the 1960s. The institution was more prison than refuge for Kaysen, who felt the experience denied her her subjectivity. Significantly, as she reworks the memories from her traumatic adolescence, Kaysen does not depict her young self as a psychopath, whose identity is defined, diagnosed, and interpreted as fractured and unstable by medical professionals. The novel provides a way of exercising the agency denied to her as a young adult and in it she rebuilds an image of her traumatised self as an active agent. She endows her persona with the rebellious and subversive power to resist patriarchal medical authorities and, in a broader sense, to disrupt the dominant sexist cultural pedagogies imposed on young women in the late 1960s.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call