Academic Papers

Analysis

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          For my short essay, I chose to do a reflection on a hybrid medium of art that was both a poem and an art installation using paper, ink, and paint. Titled “Loose-Leaf Pages Torn from Notebooks Decades Old,” it is an exploration of the legacy of “despair” inherited through written suicide letters, starting with my grandfather's before I was born. The art piece is centered on the turmoil and feelings of chaos that was the direct result of being swept up by the letters: my grandfather’s suicide note, his children’s letters to him after his death and my uncle’s suicide note, all of which I had direct access to as a child; along with exploring my own traumatic experiences as I started penning my own suicide letters before I was nine. Furthermore, the poem and art piece explore how that literary history within those very letters was the central starting point for my own journey as a female author that included my anxieties over the ownership of my words, which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explored.

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          To begin, the poem is about mental health, a theme that we discuss to great length in class, and it links the course subject matter to both my familial history and own experiences. The focus is around loose-leaf papers where many of my first writings, including my own letters, were created. The poem holds a duality of meaning that can be determined as both a positive, as the papers provided me with an outlet as a female author, and a negative, as those papers were a place to hide the invasive thoughts that were deemed as not socially acceptable. Particularly, the narrator urges the person to only write out “your hopes; your dreams; your passions” so that only positives are presented outward while the negative is swallowed inward. However, it is important to identify later in that stanza the line, “when society sets fire to those pages,” is an understanding that the dreams and passions of a young female author is not always accepted within a patriarchal society. In fact, when looking at it from the critique of a female author, society has reduced her to “extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) [that] drastically conflict with her own sense of self” (Gilbert and Gubar 48). The poem is a reflection of the “effects of socialization” (Gilbert and Gubar 49); however, by the end of it, the central character within the poem “redefines the terms of her socialization” (Gilbert and Gubar 59). Instead of the legacy she inherited, she leaves a narrative to be remembered as a “foremother[s] who could help them [future female authors or her children] find their distinctive female power” (Gilbert and Gubar 59) through their own reframing of her stories.

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          Furthermore, the poem and art piece are a critique of the idea of “normal,” specifically when you start life in a family that has mental health disorders. For me, growing up meant learning that “the ways of knowing and being” (Fullagar 39) within our family was both “regulatory and normalising, as well as resistant and subversive” (Fullagar 39). While we spoke about the suicide of family members, it was juxtaposed against the fabric of societal normalcy where suicide was a disease. In fact, it was an “infection” in the sentences that were written by both me and others and one that branches down my family tree as depicted in the artwork. In addition, the art piece casts a lonely figure in that swirling mass of loose-leaf papers to reflect how those who have a legacy of mental health disorders often feel disconnected and alone from society. Instead, there is a conflict within the duality of society that includes presenting outwardly but feeling inwardly the confusing messaging of sane/insane, normal/abnormal within societal power relations (Fullagar 40). The figures in the poem and the art piece are conflicted by the very society that is setting the discourse around suicide and mental health.

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          As a female author, my literary history is one of suicide letters. Some of the first pieces I read were penned by my grandfather and his children, and my own writings were filled with the “traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that [I] inherited from them” (Gilbert and Gubar 46). This created an “anxiety of authorship” (Gilbert and Gubar) as a young, emerging writer that came through the line of “For that is the legacy I give to you, young one” as I explored my own experiences of writing “those darker things that shimmer like blood red rubies on the page” and critiquing if, perhaps, the words were never mine but, instead, my grandfathers. Like Dickinson, my own “anxiety of authorship was a “Despair” inherited not only from the infections” (Gilbert and Gubar 53) of my own mental health struggles but also from the “literary” grandfather whose final letter was poetic in its own way. I was “lied” to by someone through the distance of “notebooks decades old” of my own abilities as an author and artist, which is represented in both pieces.

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          The papercuts both on the art piece and in the poem reflect both the familial harm and societal harm that is done; however, it also reflects the self-harm caused by depression and despair. In the very act of swallowing the paper, and the act of “[stuffing] that paper in as you stuff all that truth deeper” identifies the responsibility of women to be, “morally responsible for everything within him [her] that may disturb morality and society” (Foucault 246). It pushes women to censure themselves in both their art and how they deal or present mental health challenges. This is shown in the artwork as the face of the woman is completely covered with the pages and her mouth is stuffed with them to prevent her from saying or being anything more than society has decided.

          Finally, the end of the poem gives a nod to the feminist act of reframing narratives and creating safe spaces within society while still challenges patriarchal views. In addition, by allowing a space for a reframing, through creating happier stories for my own children, the poem ties into that idea presented by Gilbert and Gubar of redefining “the terms of her socialization” (46) by not accepting the legacy of despair that my patriarchal lineage has given me.

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          In conclusion, the piece is both a critique of my personal and familial legacy of mental health disorders while creating a space to both shed that legacy and the despair that was so often captured in “loose-leaf pages torn from notebooks decades old.”