Narrative as mould, narrative as modulation: Marie Cardinal, Simona Vinci, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s narratives of Illness and Healing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), a memoir that has been mostly read as an “iconic text which encapsulates the disillusioned and cynical tone of Generation X literature and culture” (Wall 2019, 1), has been understandably placed, by literary critics, in continuity with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), an influential account of mental illness penned by an illustrious predecessor. Without necessarily challenging these current critical trends, this article aims at situating Wurtzel’s memoir within a wider context in order to contend that ‘unchained’ from its usual collocation as a generational ‘transgressive’ manifesto, and divested of its sensationalist aura, Wurtzel’s memoir comes to light as a thoughtful personal account of struggle across individual as well as generational barriers that mirror momentous changes in the current social order, its forms of social control, and the collective perception of subjectivity. To argue this point, this article will make Prozac Nation dialogue with two European counterparts: The Words to Say It (1975), the diary of a therapeutic process authored by Marie Cardinal, a French writer of the same generation as Plath, and Parla, Mia Paura (2017), an autobiographical tale of depression as well as a generational portrait penned by Italian author Simona Vinci.