Analysis 6: Femininity, Identity, and Mental Illness in Girl, Interrupted

The sickly woman has been a common feature of the patriarchal society putting women in their place for centuries, whether by describing them in vague terms as emotional, unstable, hysterical, or else ascribing to them particular diseases. As psychology expands, its terminology grows, and the discourse used to define us becomes more specific – bipolar, schizophrenic, anorexic. For Susanna Kaysen of the film Girl, Interrupted, these labels become a struggle of identity, as she must come to terms with being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and confined to a year-long stay in a mental hospital. “I don’t want to end up like my mother,” she tells her college counselor at the beginning of the film after declaring that she will not go to college and wants rather to become a writer. “Women today have more choices than that,” the counselor tells her, to which Susanna replies, entirely unbelieving, “No, they don’t.” Thus, in the 1960s society in which she lives, Susanna finds herself defined by her disorder, a kind of job title that lets her at the very least be able to distance herself from the traditional role of homemaker that she fears being forced into, like her mother before her.

“Such traditional, metaphorically matrilineal anxiety ensures that even the maker of a text, when she is a woman, may feel imprisoned within texts…which perpetually tell her how she seems” (Gilbert and Gubar 1931-32), and herein lies Susanna’s ultimate dilemma. Her text is her mental illness, and throughout the film she is confronted with the conundrum of deciding whether or not she writes this text herself, chooses not to get better – in a sense, her disorder is a liberating kind of identity that she clings to. And yet, it is also something that has been given to her by an outside source, a diagnosis placed upon her, something that imprisons her and tells her who she is.

The women of the mental hospital where Susanna is staying sneak away one night to have a look at their records, and Susanna gets to read her diagnosis for the first time. “Oh, that’s me,” is her first reaction upon reading the description of her disorder, to which her friend Lisa replies, “That’s everybody.” Although Susanna seems to find her diagnosis quite fitting, part of her also takes Lisa’s comment to heart, putting into question again what it means to be truly mentally ill. Susanna has been thrust into this category of the sick, the abnormal, and it’s something she is acutely aware is being used to define her in different ways than it would define a man. Upon learning that part of the symptoms of her condition include being “sexually promiscuous,” she asks her therapist, “How many guys would I have to sleep with to be considered promiscuous, textbook promiscuous? …10, 8, 5? And how many girls would a guy my age have to sleep with to be considered promiscuous? 10, 20, 109?” Susanna sees that, although her disorder may have a lot of truth to it, it is still something being used to put her in her place as a woman, using symptoms that would not necessarily earn a man the same title of being mentally ill, things that for a man could often be considered normal and natural.

“It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (Gilbert and Gubar 1932), and it is this dichotomy that Susanna sees all around her. Her choices are limited by the patriarchal society in which she finds herself, and she is all the more exasperated to see the women around her – the heads of the hospital, her school, her mother – behaving as though this is the way of the world, and there is nothing particularly wrong with it. Although Susanna finally comes, by the end of the film, to recognize that she is holding herself back and can overcome her mental illness, furthermore gaining independence and strength by doing so, she never stops seeing that a diagnosis is something imposed by society as a means of control, whether for women or anyone else. “Crazy isn’t being broken, or swallowing a dark secret, it’s you or me, amplified,” she tells us as the film closes, reaffirming this belief that being mentally ill is not so different from being normal, and thereby continuing her fight against a society in which binaries unfairly define the world – sane and crazy, normal and abnormal, man and woman.



Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1926-38. Print.

Girl, Interrupted. Writ. Susanna Kaysen, Lisa Loomer, James Mangold, and Anna Hamilton Phelan. Dir. James Mangold. Columbia Pictures, 1999.