What do Girl, Interrupted, American Horror Story, and the work of Sylvia Plath have in common?
Aside from being my teenage favourites, they all lay their scenes in mental health institutions during the 1960s. You’d think that this makes them all relatively similar works but the setting in these three works (and those associated) is complicated by genre and gender. For each of these works, there are what I’m calling ‘firsthand participants’ - the speaker or character the audience allies themselves to when first reading or watching - and ‘secondhand participants’, who hijack the text and manipulate thematic elements to benefit their directorial lens. In these instances, it just so happens that the firsthand participants are women (Susanna Kaysen, Lana Winters, and the speaker in Plath’s poetry) who have occupied the 1960s Asylum setting against their will. Can you guess from the title who the secondhand participants are?
The 1960s asylum setting is fundamental to the second season of American Horror Story and is not exactly concerned with historical accuracy, as you can tell from the following endorsement from The Guardian: “Ask 100 people what scares them and you'll get 100 different answers. This show aims to cater for every one of that hundred, and many more besides, by throwing a dizzying variety of horror at the screen”. Obviously, there’s a number of speculative elements introduced into the setting which have to work within the context of the horror genre so the asylum becomes a place of abuse, mistreatment and dread rather than one of recovery care. In doing so, the audiences attention is draw towards Nazi doctors, aliens, and demonic posession instead of focusing on character experiences and what a modern audience would consider the actual horrific elements to be: electro-shock therapy, conversion therapy, medical malpractice by the Church, and lobotomising patients against their will. In addition to this, sex and sexual
violence are used to further the plot without any investment in the repercussions. The main example of this is Lana Winters storyline, in which she is falsely imprisoned in Briarcliff Manor, then falsely imprisoned again when she tries to escape with her psychiatrist, the Bloodyface killer, who involuntarily impregnates her. As a result, her character undergoes round after round of mental, emotional and sexual trauma and the repeated violation of the female body to the extent that it becomes near impossible to separate womanhood and brutality. Carol Clover suggests that “if it is [...] the case that the act of horror spectatorship is itself registered a “feminine” experience - that the shock effects induce in the viewer bodily sensations answering the fear and pain of the screen victim - the charge of masochism is underlined”, which suggests that the price of prioritising the female narrative and firsthand participant is excessive violence as an unavoidable rite of passage. In doing so, series creators Murphy and Falchuk compound the liminality of the asylum setting with gendered trauma to divert the audiences’ attention away from the missed opportunities to discuss the ‘real life’ horrors in favour of the speculative ones.
Unlike American Horror Story: Asylum, Girl, Interrupted straddles the line between memoir and narrative non-fiction as Susanna Kaysen recounts her lived experience of being institutionalised in McLean Hospital. Somewhat similar to Plath’s the Bell Jar, this is told through a series of pseudo-biographical vignettes where the author plays the role of subject and surveyor. However, the film adaptation restructures the source material in favour of plot and psychological drama and the fact that Susanna Kaysen herself remarks that “Girl, Interrupted is material [she] never wanted to fictionalize” implies that the film manipulates the past for the sake of profitability. The 1999 film takes the ‘series of narrative snapshots’ and creates a story that features Kaysen’s real friendships during her time at the institution, rather than revolving around them. One would think that by not choosing to capitalise on the acclaim attached to McLean Hospital - where the likes of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Ray Charles and James Taylor all spent time - the director, James Mangold, would apply the same level of respect to the real patients and friends Kaysen wrote about. The casting of well-known actors also detracts from the vivid authenticity that the memoir was praised for, as the reader notes the impact and influence the patients have on each other throughout their stays because they’re ‘unknown’. While “Kaysen acknowledged that the change of her story was necessary for the change in medium”, the casting of Angelina Jolie - an undoubtedly international sex symbol - is almost disruptive and contradictory to this perception of the group as a whole, rather than Susanna and Lisa as main characters with A-List actors. The film adaptation almost does things in reverse in this sense: the asylum setting in the memoir is pre-established and the reader becomes aware of its notoriety while the ‘characters’ are remain ‘characters’ to the reader, as told by Kaysen herself. James Mangold’s adaptation springboards off of lived experience and, though you could argue that Susanna Kaysen does the same by monetising her account and the accounts of others, she does not employ hyperbole or fabricate events to do so. Her firsthand experience of the 1960s asylum is subsequently hijacked and overshadowed.
With Sylvia Plath’s work, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish her personhood from the subject of her work due to the nature of the confessional poetry genre. The use of vivid allusion and metaphor sometimes make it difficult to establish Plath’s work as anything but autobiographical, especially when it comes to how her work revolves around her relationship with her father, Otto, and her husband, Ted Hughes. Parvin Ghasemi even suggests that ‘her work [...] exhibits a rebellion against the confinement of ‘self’ in the bondage of conformity and subjection and suggests an outlet of expression which indicates the individual’s struggle to liberate ‘self’ from the bondage of social conformity and dispossession.’. However, I believe this passes the buck back to Plath herself as the only agent and executor of her own discontentment, when in reality this would be a naive suggestion to make in light of more modern understanding of mental health and institutionalisation. The year leading up to Plath’s suicide was particularly tumultuous, with her husband embarking on an affair with another woman while she was left to be a single mother. Despite this, Ted Hughes controversially inherited her assets and legacy as they were legally married at the time of Plath’s death and there is some argument to suggest that this enabled Hughes to doctor her works, letters and legacy to remove any allegations of wrongdoing on his behalf. The poem, Daddy, is often signposted as a conduit for Plath’s personal turmoil:
‘But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you,'
This stanza briefly takes us through Plath’s life to the writing of the poem; the speaker’s suicide attempt is foiled as she is revived by doctors (‘they’) and apparently repaired, provoking her to replicate her complicated father-daughter relationship through her romantic relationship. The speaker recounts their life story, and it becomes apparent that their agency is dominated and therefore hijacked by two prominent authoritarian male figures.
In summary, I would contend that the recounts of ‘first-hand’ participants in American Horror Story: Asylum, Girl, Interrupted and Plath’s confessional poetry are marginalised for the purpose of male gain. Though gender is an active factor in the way these depictions of 1960s asylums are presented, the second-hand accounts of setting bulldoze over ‘lived’ experience for profitability and reputation. In addition to this, it is particularly ironic that these accounts were taken during a crucial point in the Feminist Liberation Movement - when women were raising their voices for equality and intersectionality - yet still buried or piggybacked off by men in the decades to come. So while it is true that the 1960s asylum setting functions within multiple genres, it is hijacked by men for convenience and profit because, to the capitalist patriarchy we continue to exist in, the stories of women in crisis are more attractive than the recovery and rehabilitation of the women themselves.
Further reading
Primary Sources
American Horror Story: Asylum, FX. October 2012 –January 2013
Girl, Interrupted, dir. James Mangold (Columbia, 1999)
Kaysen, Susanna, Girl, Interrupted (Virage Press Ltd, 2003)
Plath, Sylvia, ‘Daddy’, in Ariel. Faber and Faber, 1965.
Secondary Sources
Clover, Carol J. ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, in Men, Women and Chainsaws (B.F.I. Pub.) 1992. p.61
Danker, Jared. 2003. ‘Susanna Kaysen, without Interruptions’, The Justice < https://www.thejustice.org/article/2003/02/susanna-kaysen-without-interruptions > [accessed 22 September 2023]
Ghasemi, Parvin. 2008. ‘Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry’, CLA Journal, 51.3: 284–303
Johnson, Alex. 1994. ‘A Conversation with Susanna Kaysen’, Agni, pp. 99–107
O’Neill, Phelim, ‘American Horror Story – Box Set Review’, The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, 2014)
<https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/15/american-horror-story-box-set review> [accessed 16 September 2023]
I never got into AHS asylum after the first season but might give it a rewatch after reading this. Very insightful article!