She Herself is a Haunted House (A Novel): A Creative and Critical Exploration of Representations of Postpartum Psychosis and the Gothic

Abstract

This thesis brings together the innovations of creative practice and the critical medical humanities to investigate representations of postpartum psychosis and the narrative paradigms of literary Gothic.
Part One, She Herself is a Haunted House, is an intergenerational Gothic novel about two women’s experiences of postpartum psychosis within the same family home. Set in the Weald of Kent, an area known for its Anglo-Saxon barrows, the novel takes up the spectral and confined spaces of the Gothic haunted house as imaginative entryways into representing experiences of postpartum psychosis. Its two timelines alternate between 1920 and 2020 by way of poetic fragments inspired by Anglo-Saxon childbirth charms. These fragments—voiced by the forgotten ghosts of women buried in a nearby barrow—connect the modern narrative strands to earlier understandings of postnatal mental suffering.
Part Two develops a novel methodological framework through which to investigate twentieth- and twenty-first-century experiences of postpartum psychosis, examining the nightmarish emotional and textual worlds of Gothic fiction alongside contemporary life-writing insights into postpartum psychosis. As I will show, interdisciplinary analysis of both genres’ respective differences offers rich creative possibilities. I propose ‘surveillance Gothic’ as a way of understanding heightened anxieties that are common to postpartum psychosis and that were exacerbated by recent COVID-19 lockdown birthing conditions.
In Section One, ‘The Cultural History of Postpartum Psychosis’, I introduce a working definition of postpartum psychosis, tracing its kaleidoscopic clinical picture over time and positing continuity in its literary representations, from medieval manuscripts to Victorian asylum case-notes and modern-day life-writing, via attention to historical ‘lying-in’ practices and related experiences of confinement. My primary concern is with the different narrative frameworks attendant on articulating first- and third-person encounters with postpartum psychosis, and their entanglements with the Gothic novel form.
In Section Two, ‘The Gothic Literatures of Postpartum Psychosis’, I explore clinical frameworks in dialogue with domestic Gothic as a genre notable for its power to disturb and unsettle. The specific nexus of circumstances clustered around postpartum psychosis lends it a discursive opacity indexed to the murky emotional landscapes inhabited by the nineteenth-century literary figure of the ‘madwoman in the attic’. From Jane Eyre (1847) and The Woman in White (1860) to The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and The Upstairs House (2021), the incarcerated madwomen and veiled spectres on show in these Gothic novels and their cultural descendants may seem, at first glance, hyperinflated caricatures of a genre that trades in the sensational, with all the attendant ethical tensions. However, I argue that in its experiments with terror, the uncanny, confinement, and insanity, the Gothic produces a distinct literary vocabulary for postpartum psychosis, which opens up new directions for creative practice.