Everybody's Protest?: The Ambivalent Madwoman in Harriet Prescott Spofford's 'Her Story'

Jessica Horvath Williams (UCLA) takes up Harriet Prescott Spofford’s little-known short story, “Her Story,” to revise many feminist and disability readings of nontropological female madness as critiques of oppressive... [ view full abstract ]

Jessica Horvath Williams (UCLA) takes up Harriet Prescott Spofford’s little-known short story, “Her Story,” to revise many feminist and disability readings of nontropological female madness as critiques of oppressive social structures. Rather, she argues, many stories are critiques and collusions, critical of the status quo but ambivalent about the physical and social structures they imagine as origins for insanity. “Her Story,” a first-person narrative of an institutionalized woman, is part autopathography of the narrator’s illness and part hagiography of the husband who committed her. The story combines flights of visual and auditory hallucinations with internally consistent, lucid chronology. Because Spofford inscribes mental illness into the very discourse of the narrative, Horvath Williams argues that the narrative itself becomes disabled: fragmented, open-ended, lacking closure. Through this disabled narrative process, the story’s etiologies of madness – climate, patriarchy, orphan status, isolation, unfaithful husbands, dependency, genetics, and domestic spaces – remain entangled and in flux.