Madness, Authorship, and the City: Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay is a reading of Elvira Navarro’s globally acclaimed novel A Working Woman, offering to open up Navarro’s text to what Robert McRuer calls “cripping” – a form of reading that raises awareness of mental illness and indeed privileges such positionality. Since the novel’s publication in 2014, a majority of its critical readings have focused on the text’s description of the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008 and its discussion of the physical and psychical displacement of Spanish citizens into spaces of precarity. However much critical potential such reading of “madness” offers, metaphorizing mental illness weakens the narrative’s potential. I propose to move away from the metaphoric and into a more literal reading of mental illness and disability; and to redress the lack of literary representations of mental illness, expressed over the last two decades. I read the central theme of madness along the lines suggested by the proponents of Mad Studies, and I argue that the novel can be read as a critique of the medicalization and pathologizing of the stigmatized non-normative body, which is placed within the economic and socio-political context of neoliberalism, regulating the existence of non-normative identities.