This Monstrous Madwoman

I’d like to point out that this post contains spoilers for the film Your Monster, the graphic novels Seance in the Asylum and A Guest in the House, as well as the novels Yellowface and Jane Eyre. I sincerely hope I am not spoiling the latter for you, though…

It started this way. My sister always wants me to watch movies with her. She’s one of those who eats Hallmark cinema like others munch on potato chips: mindlessly and unhealthily. (I swear, I still love you!) Overthinker, connoisseur and goth that I am, I just can’t. I can’t ease my mind enough for bland verisimilitude, and end up poking holes in every modest romance. So, I spend most times engaged in something else, ignoring her movies.

A few weeks ago, she repeated her usual refrain. “Why don’t we watch a movie together?” I frowned but decided I was going to be a much better person and meet her halfway.

“Fine, but can we watch something we both might find interesting?”

Enter Your Monster (2024), what we both thought would be a humorous play on the horror and romance genres, my sister considering her spicy contemporary novels, me remembering the joys of Lisa Frankenstein. Still reeling from a breakup, I shrugged my shoulders and gave the screen some casual side eye.

An hour and some change later, I had not left the couch, and was more intently fixated on the screen. It caught my attention, similar in some ways to Lisa Frankenstein, with is interesting color palette and its more macabre themes, but it soon diverged from the former.

To summarize the plot of Your Monster, a young actress, Laura Franco, returns to her family home, reeling from the twin life upsets of a cancer diagnosis and a breakup. The two occur simultaneously, her boyfriend kicking her out of his apartment while she seeks treatment.

Returning to her family home, she wallows in the breakup, becoming a sort of melancholic goo that slides down the eccentric furniture in her late (?) mother’s house. Abandoned by friends and former lover alike, she continues her cancer treatments, constantly sick and starved for human company.

Enter the Monster.

It is not long before another occupant of the house gets fed up with her antics and takes her to task, demanding she move from her family’s home, for his own peace. The creature, we find, is the monster that has inhabited Laura’s closet for years. Shenanigans and a sweet love affair ensue, even in the midst of machinations against Laura’s former beau.

To understand the majority of the film, you don’t really need to know much more. It watches like your average romcom, but add in an uncouth and violent-to-others monster.

Until the end of the movie.

Laura spends lots of time thinking and obsessing about her ex, playwright Jacob Sullivan. As someone still working through a breakup, I honestly get it. It’s a thing some of us do, because we both want what was and resent what isn’t. But Laura makes many really bad moves.

She forces herself into the musical Sullivan had written with her in mind for the main role. She tries to ingratiate herself to him, and imagines him sleeping with the actress who got the part. At one point, she has sex with the ex in a pitiable last ditch effort to get closure, jeopardizing her relationship with her new monster boyfriend.

The Monster (he doesn’t get a name other than this) is delighted to take a part in her vengeance plot, and opens a trapdoor at one point, to orchestrate a nasty fall with the ex, Sullivan, as he is seen in flagrante delicto with a woman during a Halloween party. The adrenaline rush from this consummates the relationship for Monster and Laura.

By the end of the movie, Laura is sad to see that her betrayal of Monster with Sullivan causes the creature to leave her life. She resolves herself to make her vengeance worse, secretly taking over the new actress’s part in the musical, which she turns into a creepy spectacle.

By the end, we see her standing on the stage, face to face with Sullivan, juxtaposed with snippets of Monster looming. Something bad is about to happen. Laura and Monster seem to reconcile as, on the stage, she draws nearer Sullivan, confronting him. She screams that she wants to “rip his fucking throat out” and it is not long before we, and the audience, see Sullivan’s lifeless body in a pool of blood, Laura finishing a final number, murder weapon in hand.

It had all been in her head. At the end of the day, she was the one who did it. There was no Monster, only odd figments of romance that danced in a head plagued by illness and something wrong. We then realize that we need to reassess the narrative here, as it was, throughout, unreliable.

It was all in her head.

Women and Madness in Gothic Horror

I want to state here that I did some academic work on women and the gothic for an academic conference. Madness is often written as a way to escape the patriarchy. We can read the disobedient madness of Bertha Rochester, or the frail and creepy madness of the protagonist of “The Yellow Wall-paper” as a last resort women make to escape the clenched fist of the patriarchy. Lose your mind to find yourself.

And perhaps the writer and director Caroline Lindy can identify with this in this film. After all, there is a reason why the old Lifetime series about women who did violent things was called Snapped. It makes sense, given mainstream ideas about women and their relationship to violence, to turn that relationship on its head.

Women tend to be more often victims of violence rather than the perpetrators. A friend and I, for instance, looked at lists of mass shooting perpetrators in the United States. Wikipedia itself reiterates the New York Times in saying that the vast majority of mass shooters simply are men.

We can argue about why this is all day. I know many who have their own theories about serial killers in the 1970s, for instance. I would argue this is, in a large part, from a cultural perspective, too. Women are raised to be gentle and nice. Even a raised voice can be seen as aggressive in a woman. Violence is a living part of boyhood, in contrast.

This is why we assume that any woman who would commit violence to herself or another would be mad. It is abnormal, according to our gender roles and society. Madness itself, in horror in particular, seems to be inextricably tied to violence.

Consider Bertha Rochester, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre. When we compare her to the sprightly and small Jane, she is big, hulking, and bestial. Possible racism aside, the madness within her turns her into not a human but a beast. A monster.

When her brother visits, Bertha bites him viciously, forcing Rochester and Jane to take care of him until they can get a doctor. She is a vampire, a ghoul, a thing. And the madness itself makes her this way, gives her that aura.

In the 19th century, differences in behavior were not widely accepted. If you had a relative who had physical or verbal tics, who was too depressed, didn’t behave politely, etc., you could do one of two things. You could confine them to your house much like a prisoner, almost walling them up “Cask of Amontillado” style. Or, you could send them to an asylum.

Institutions, asylums, sanitariums, have a dark reputation in the horror genre, because they are dark. The history is simply wrong. It has little to do with the people who were housed there, and more to do with the way they were treated. Only look to the former Central State Hospital in Georgia, which houses the largest burial ground of disabled people in the world, and you will understand why this, rather than the ailments of its occupants, is the scary thing.

The horror, therefore, is not in the illness, perhaps, so much as the abhorrent way patients housed here were treated. We would do well to never forget this.

As I grew older, this knowledge changed the way I saw Bertha Rochester, but also Mr. Rochester as well. When before I saw him as a broody main character with an odd charisma, who loved Jane very much, I have long begun to see him as an inhumane jailer who cared more about being duplicitous than kind. Not a good book boyfriend.

For the gothic writer, mental illness, insanity, or madness, proved a way to add in some jarring imagery. It’s fair, because it can be scary to be around someone who makes abrupt noises, for instance, unbidden. It can be scary to see your friend’s behavior change drastically. But this isn’t the whole picture.

“It Was All in Her Head…”: A Damaging Trope

When the first gothic novels of the late 1700s predated the birth of psychiatry in the late 19th century, it makes more sense for people to observe or hear about people with behaviors that do not conform to conventional standards, to hear of someone’s “lunatic” cousin who was taken away to Bedlam, perhaps, so that her family don’t have to deal with her unsightliness. Mental illness was shadowy and inexplicable, in many ways, so made for a good gothic convention, even after the beginnings of psychiatry, as Renfield in Dracula.

This is by no way an excuse for depictions such as Bertha Rochester, the dirty beast of a fleshy woman depicted in Jane Eyre. But those with mental health conditions endured a reality better explained in Mag Segrest’s Administrations of Lunacy (a book I can’t recommend enough if you’re curious about American institutionalization).

What makes now different, is that we have over a hundred years of better understanding of how people experience chronic mental health conditions, how to treat them, and where they come from. We are still learning more about genetic and trauma components of mental conditions that can be as disabling as physical conditions.

And of course, the best thing about the 2020s is a new lease on the conversation around mental health. Even in the 90s, no one talked about having a condition. You did not disclose to work and only disclosed to good friends. You kept your illness to yourself, lest you lose your job, friends, or opportunity. Those of us who have a mental disorder call this the stigma around the topic. The creepiness, the discomfort that probably stemmed from those 19th century asylums, kept us locked away in other ways.

But this decade the conversation really started to open, and to change, in the most hopeful of ways. With the advent of content creators and the normalization of seeing a therapist, talking about having mental illness and advocating for basic rights became healthier, especially among younger people. Not only can you go online to look up quality information, but you can also see infographics on self-care, and interact with people with the same conditions.

Colleges and universities started prioritizing programs for young adults with mental health obstacles. Mychal Threets and other public figures opened up about their struggles and were not shunned for it. For those of us with these conditions, there seemed to be a light on the horizon.

But this is where the trope of the female unreliable narrator, takes us back to the dark period before our attempts to destigmatize mental illness.

It’s all in her head, the narrative triumphantly proclaims, a smirk on its ambiguous face. Laura never had a Monster boyfriend. She attacked her ex on the stage because she was nuts. Or at least, is fantasizing about it, because she’s nuts. Who knows!

This is not limited to Your Monster, however. I have encountered this in R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a fascinating look at a woman and her motivations when she steps on everyone else and assumes another culture in the process. The narrator here girlishly titters about seeing her now-dead friend’s manuscript, and just browsing through it. Her thoughts are jarring, sickening, and we find out very early on that she’s been seeing a therapist. But she’s hideous, violent, racist. She’s telling a story to fuck with us because she is crazy.

I’ve encountered two somewhat recent graphic novels in the past year that do the same thing, in the horror genre (though, let’s be honest, the publishing industry is its own horror). In Seance at the Asylum, a young medium is sent to an asylum to train the patients in the art of channeling spirits. It’s fascinating and frightening to think of administrators of asylums wanting to test pseudoscience on their patients, and a unique and compelling narrative. However, it ends with the medium herself a patient. It was all in her head.

Similarly, A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll offers a triggering story of a woman stuck in a nowhere town, who agrees to marry a man who lost his first wife. Following Abby, we become convinced this man, bland and not demonstrably worse than others, has offed his wife and perhaps intends the same to Abby. Abby, meanwhile, sees the ghost of the ex, falling romantically in love with her and ultimately convinced to kill her husband.

Delusions, all. There is no ghost, and the ex-wife appears at the end, to take her child from a living situation she had scoped out and found unsafe. It was a divorce, not a death.

A Guest in the House, while demonstrably creepy in very triggering ways, seems to assert that closeted queer people with mental health conditions (Abby suffers from body image issues and freezes when having sex, for instance) could end up murdering their partners for a freedom that doesn’t seem very much like freedom. Abby is left in the dust, with the cops to figure out what happens.

It’s Not as Feminist As You Think

To turn this to the beginning of our essay, this link between mental illness, violence, and altogether bad behavior in women is not the feminist symbol people seem to imagine. In Your Monster and A Guest in the House, the female antiheroines use violence as the means for escape. This sounds like a good metaphor for a way to escape the patriarchy, perhaps. But it’s not a good look for women, and especially for women with mental health issues.

Let’s talk mental illness and violence for a second. This is super important to think about. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), around 23% of the US population has a mental health condition, as of 2022. That’s a pretty big size of any population, nearly one fourth of everyone in the US. If one out of every four person has a chronic illness of this sort, you are more than likely to come across a person with mental illness, or be one yourself.

The American Psychological Association (APA) states that, among people with more severe mental illness (viz., the people we might deem violent, such as the narrator from Yellowface), violence is not as common as we would think. I invite you to look at this article to better understand the statistics and their explanations.

While gender roles demand that women be nonviolent, women who are violent are cast as “crazy,” “unhinged,” or other unappealing words. The violence and “craziness” in the psychiatric world becomes visible in such films as Girl, Interrupted. If you are violent, then you are crazy. You are crazy, therefore you must be violent.

But is violence the flex it seems? Why do we have to get a point across by way of violence and murder? In a dramatic work, it certainly makes a point. Seeing Laura with the ruler, the fresh corpse of her ex pooling blood on the stage is certainly an emphatic image. But these images, while meant to be, in some ways blithe and some ways symbolic, are damaging to those of us who do have what the APA terms “serious mental illness.”

The term is used for people who have chronic cases, from depressive disorder to schizophrenia. As someone who lives daily with bipolar disorder and PTSD, the idea that someone might think I could just lash out violently at any time is awful. A vegetarian and almost fanatical pacifist, I would much rather work things out through a dialogue than get into a shouting match.

This is by no way unique to me. Even in psychiatric hospitals, most of the patients are just people on the worst days of their lives. Most of us who have a chronic issue

spend out days trying to manage our symptoms, taking our medications, and seeking talk therapy to give ourselves a better outlook and take care of ourselves. While it can get dark in a brain that suffers differently, few of us are living lives so deluded that we’ve imagined boyfriends and have unalived our exes.

When I was diagnosed with depression at the age of 16, some 25 years ago, the mental health community was nothing like what it is now, and there were many talks about the stigma of mental illness, the stereotype that walks with you everywhere you go, to the point of being unable to talk about the fact that you live with this chronic condition every single day. I don’t walk with a monster that wants to kill people. I walk with a condition that makes certain things more difficult to do.

In college, the diagnosis settled with bipolar disorder, but for over 20 years (probably my entire 41 years of life, to be honest) I’ve walked with this disorder, this illness, this condition. I am glad to finally be out of the shadows, to talk about it once again after sealing that door shut for so many years. But I refuse to perpetuate stereotypes, even if they think they are doing something in the name of feminism or in the name of being creepy.

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