I just finished listening to the audiobook of Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl. I recommend it. As a group of personal essays/memoirs go, it may be a bit jumbled, but I like it. She groups incidents and insights topically rather than sequentially. At about 3/4 of the into it, she focuses on how crazy she felt growing up: dealing with hypochondria, obsessions with sex and death, OCD behaviors, and more. Our childhood’s were nothing alike. We shared no similar circumstances or types of family or friends or environments or traumas. She’s not even 30 years old, and I’m rapidly approaching 50. Yet, as I listened, it resonated with me. My inner hum attuned to her narrative. I, too, felt crazy – often still do – because a surplus of feelings and unavoidable contemplations. I’m more equipped to deal with this now, but when I was an adolescent, I had no idea that I was not singular in these feelings.
Then my freshman year in high school I read and immediately re-read Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. I read it again and again almost to the point of memorization. This led to a discovery of other female authors/musicians who wrote about being crazy: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dory Previn. My participation in the high school speech team gave me the opportunity to read these works aloud or act out parts that had been written about these women. I at once felt apart of something and pride in my ability to portray so easily these women’s trials.
At university my obsession curbed a bit, but I still found myself finding crazy female roles to play. I excelled at portraying the unraveling female character. My own forays in creative writing circled round the subject repeatedly, but I was better at embodying someone else’s writing than capturing it myself.
Now after years of therapy and medication, but most importantly meeting other seemingly normal women with emotions seeping out of their pores, I know that I am not alone in feeling insane even while functioning. I am curious though. Why is the canon of classic literature so replete with ill or mentally ill women? From portrayals such as Shakespeare’s Ophelia to autobiographies such as Anne Sexton’s? I know more women with sound minds than I do without. Alternatively, why are so many classic female characters ill? In real life, women have greater longevity. Is it that women and their easy access to emotions made society so uncomfortable that emotional characters must be cast or characterized as crazy? Women were gas-lighted into believing that to feel beyond what is rational was to be mad? Or if not insane, then disempowered through illness to the point of dying?
Of course, Dunham’s essays come from the perspective of today’s (almost) thirty-year old female. It is possible that today’s thirty year old female is less influenced by reading Shakespeare than by watching Woman Woman. Contemporary characterizations of women often include powerful, rational women in complete health. (Excepting, of course, the quirky/clumsy/endearing romantic female role that never seems to go out of style.) While strong, impenetrable female characters are empowering, they can also be intimidating. We’ve gone from classic media (meaning literature/film/art) portraying women as mad (bad) while men are rational (good) to contemporary media portraying women as powerful (good) and as rational (good) as men. This leaves those of us living real, feeling-filled lives left all that more isolated.
Perhaps that’s why I like that Dunham portrays women (and men) actively wrestling with their feelings. Moreover, I appreciate her candor as she covers a variety of topics in themes using her own experiences as fodder. Both in her film/tv work and in her book, you will find no gas lanterns: only solar powered LEDs shedding as true a light as possible on a spectrum of emotions.