On Not Performing Madness Rachel Fensham (bio) We should always remember that there are two ways of looking at madness; it can be observed from the outside or experienced from the inside. The difference between experience and observation is always passed over in silence and the hidden story of madness is never told. The pages which follow try to listen to that silence and to hear the stifled cries within it. —Yannick Ripa, Women and Madness (5) The double process Yannick Ripa describes, of listening and hearing in order to re-tell the hidden lives of “mad” and “bad” women, informed a performance project I undertook with a group of theatre students in 1994. The performance investigation was itself part of a larger museological project called Absence of Evidence that involved twenty women artists responding to the history of a site that had been a nineteenth-century asylum for the insane. 1 In her history of French asylums, Ripa considers the social formation of madness and its effect on women’s lives in the nineteenth century as the product of two convergent but different systems of containment: scientific discourses that needed to secure definitions about “normal” behavior and bourgeois discourses that sought to establish proper boundaries for women’s place in society. Both these discourses attempt to normalize understandings about the human condition and to regulate individual behaviors accordingly. In making a theatre piece, we wanted to observe the effects of these processes of “containment” upon the female patients during the Fremantle Asylum’s existence from 1857 to 1901 and as wel as to listen and to hear the silence and mutterings of those women who lived with the experience of being labeled or incarcerated as “mad.” The result of this work was a theatre show called The Worst Woman in the World, or The Case of Rebellious Susan, or the Girl Who Wrecked His Home (The Worst Woman in the World, for short.) 2 Fremantle in Perth, Western Australia was an isolated colonial outpost during the late nineteenth century; here most settlers were faced with the harshness of daily life in a land with limited resources (physical, emotional, monetary, intellectual) at a great distance from the moderating influences of [End Page 149] urban culture. In a community of few women, any female subjects belonged to men either as wives or servants, and as such they were often expected to act as the moral guardians of a fragile social structure. With nowhere to go and often no escape from desperate circumstances, a large number of women were locked away in the local asylum or nearby prison, both managed by the colonial authorities. In the leap of imagination we undertook in The Worst Woman in the World, these questions arose: what if the “sins” of a colonial morality are not forgotten? What if the sins are the product of social forces molding the female character? What if the madness of women could be located in the shape of these narratives of social constraint and condemnation? How was the project to proceed? The answers seemed to lie in the bodies of madwomen, both the historical subjects written into the records of the asylum and the counterversions of mad female characters in melodrama. In this article, I discuss how we approached the theatricalizing of madness in relation to the lived realities of women in this specific nineteenth-century institution through the contrast to female stereotypes of “madwomen” in melodrama. From the perspective of acting, both these forms of madness provided a corporeal sign-system that performers could use—not to reproduce or imitate madness, but as a way of “not performing” madness. The “Sensibility” of the Body During the initial research phase, the students and I read the archival material associated with the Fremantle Asylum and a recent thesis on the asylum’s history (Megahey, “Social Construction”). The daily records of the matron and her assistants revealed that the women in the asylum were continuously subject to scrutiny. In those records, corporeal signs—the fixing of facial expressions, bodily gestures that went too far, a reach of the body that cracked against a wall or another body, unexpected sudden movements, or sheer immobility...