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Registro: 1
Título: "Divided down the middle": A cure for The Journals of Susanna
Moodie.
Autores: Smyth, Jacqui
Fuente: Essays on Canadian Writing. Fall92, Issue 47, p149. 14p.
Tipo de documento: Literary Criticism
Descriptores: *BOOKS
Revisiones y productos: JOURNALS of Susanna Moodie, The (Book)
NAICS/Códigos del sector: 451310 Book stores and news dealers
451211 Book Stores
424920 Book, Periodical, and Newspaper Merchant Wholesalers
414420 Book, periodical and newspaper merchant wholesalers
Resumen: Presents the arguments of Jacqui Smyth on the afterword of `The
Journals of Susanna Moodie,' by Margaret Atwood. Paranoid
schizophrenia of Susanna Moodie; Paradox of Moodie losing her
personal identity and inheriting the national identity.
Recuento total de palabras: 5276
ISSN: 0316-0300
Número de acceso: 9308175454
Base de datos: Academic Search Premier
Sección: 1991 WICKEN PRIZE WINNER
"DIVIDED DOWN THE MIDDLE": A CURE FOR THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA
MOODIE
MANY OF THE INITIAL REVIEWS and the later critiques of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of
Susanna Moodie make reference to the author's afterword without questioning its status in the text.[ 1]
The afterword not only functions as an additional body of information, but also (often simultaneously) as
a substitute for the poetic sequence. The value of the afterword is not considered until 1983, when
Diana Relke suggests that it be simply discarded. Relke states that the "reissuing of the entire text [in
Selected Poems] minus the 'Afterword' invites an examination of the Journals on its own terms" (35).[ 2]
I will argue that the poetic sequence included in Atwood's Selected Poems is not the entire text of The
Journals of Susanna Moodie, despite assertions by Relke and by Sherrill Grace, who writes that
"Atwood has given [the Journals] her own endorsement by including it, in toto, in Selected Poems" (33).
This endorsement is not given by Atwood, however, but by Oxford University Press: the cover blurb
claims that the text of the Journals is "reproduced in full." I will further argue that the afterword is an
integral part of the text.
Perhaps, for the critic, one way of reading the afterword in relation to the poetic sequence is to view it as
a Derridean supplement. [ 3] The French word supplement means (according to Larousse) both "Ce
qu'on ajoute pour suppleer, completer," and "Ce qu'on donne en sus." The afterword is, therefore, at the
same time an addition to, and a substitute for, the poetic sequence. While the unconscious critic may
read the afterword literally, and may thus see it as supplanting the poetic sequence, I propose that we
treat it as a creative text.
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The "paranoid schizophrenia" that Atwood discusses in the afterword is not confined to the poetic
sequence. I am interested in how the doubleness of the supplement, or afterword, connects it with the
paranoid schizophrenic state that it purports to analyze in the poetic sequence. In the afterword, Atwood
writes,
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid
schizophrenia. Mrs Moodie is divided down the middle: she praises the Canadian landscape but
accuses it of destroying her; she dislikes the people already in Canada but finds in people her only
refuge from the land itself; she preaches progress and the march of civilization while brooding
elegiacally upon the destruction of the wilderness; she delivers optimistic sermons while showing herself
to be fascinated with deaths, murders, the criminals in Kingston Penitentiary and the incurably insane in
the Toronto lunatic asylum. (62)
Although the label "afterword" and the afterword's formal structure initially distinguish the afterword from
the poetic sequence, the text's paranoid characteristics become evident on closer examination. Under
scrutiny, the content of the afterword and the "other voice" that emerges within it cause the boundaries
between the afterword and the three journals of the poetic sequence to dissolve. From this perspective,
the entire text, like Canada and Mrs. Moodie, becomes symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia.[ 4]
Diana Relke suggests that
Although paranoid schizophrenia, "the national mental illness," is offered in the "Afterword" as the
reason why "Mrs. Moodie is divided down the middle," this appears to be a reductive interpretation of all
the varieties of doubleness that inform the poem. (37)
In her essay, Relke explores three aspects of doubleness, but she does not attempt to place this
doubleness within a psychoanalytical context; rather, she represses not merely the text's paranoid
schizophrenia, but the entire afterword, claiming that "if the 'Afterword' has not actually destroyed the
work, it has done some violence by diverting attention from it" (47). Relke's repression of the afterword is
unsuccessful, because the afterword continues to surface throughout the body of her essay. In fact, at
least one aspect Of Relke's reading depends on the afterword and Atwood's illustrations. Relke quotes
Frank Davey's statement that the Journals "envisage a Moodie very much like Atwood" (35). It is this
linkage, Relke argues, and the "many direct references to doubleness in the poem [which] are crucial to
the exploration of a more important story that lies like a near mirror image just below the surface of the
narrative." The "more" important story" is that "all the historical and quasi-historical events which
organize the surface of the text are Moodiesque literary anecdotes which serve as metaphors for
Atwood's own experience of being both a woman and a poet" (37)- It is at this point that Relke aligns
Moodie with the paranoid schizophrenic of the afterword: "as Atwood's poetic persona, Moodie suffers a
further doubleness by sharing her identity with the poet" (37) -But while Relke offers one of the few
complete readings of the Journals, she still remains caught in Atwood's surface intentions; she does not
explore the implications of the fact that a reading of the poetic sequence that is not somehow influenced
by the afterword seems inescapable.
The book is framed by a representation of Moodie on the front cover and one of Atwood on the back.
Moodie's image is framed by an oval, which suggests both a portrait and a mirror reflection. Atwood's
image is white on black, which suggests that it is the negative that produces the image of the more
complete persona of Moodie. The collages interspersed with the poetic text remind us of Moodie's (and
Atwood's) double role of writer and visual artist. Just as Moodie exists as the literary double of Atwood,
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the afterword exists as the textual double of the poetic sequence.
Published in 1970, The Journals of Susanna Moodie depicts a madness that had been described in the
writings of R.D. Laing and Norman O. Brown. Gloria Onley has noted that "Like Laing, Atwood seems to
believe that schizophrenia is a form of psychic anarchy: a usually involuntary attempt by the self to free
itself from a repressive social reality structure" (31). My discussion of the persona of Susanna Moodie is
informed by the writing of Brown and Laing, whereas my discussion of the text is informed by the more
conventional psychoanalytic writings on paranoid schizophrenia.[5]
When framed by these conventional psychoanalytic texts, which were written in the 1960s, The Journals
of Susanna Moodie reads like what Laing would consider a successful case of schizophrenia. Moodie
(Atwood's other voice) journeys from the Old World order of the conscious mind into the New World
chaos of the unconscious mind. Her (both Atwood's and Moodie's) return to consciousness is by way of
the afterword, which holds memory traces of the journey recorded in the journals. According to Laing,
schizophrenics would be better serviced by society if they were guided "into inner space and time, by
people who have been there and back again. . . . ex-patients helping future patients to go mad." The
journey "into inner space and time" is characterized by "a voyage from outer to inner," "from life to a kind
of death," "from going forward to a going back," "from temporal movement to temporal standstill," "from
mundane time to aeonic time," "from the ego to the self," and "from being outside (post-birth) back into
the womb of all things (pre-birth)" (106). The journey back out is, more or less, a reversal of the above
process.
Laing also maintains that "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through" (110).
Norman O. Brown expresses the same concept in Love's Body:
In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for
those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is
to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we
can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. (161 )
On the conscious narrative level, it is the persona of Moodie who journeys from the exterior to the
interior, and the persona of Atwood who journeys from the interior back to the exterior world. On the
unconscious level, this distinction is not as clear. If the afterword holds memory traces of the journey that
is recorded in the journals, it is equally true that the poetic sequence holds memory traces of the
afterword. The latter relationship is made evident by certain shared elements: the dream(s)and the "littleknown photograph" (63), which becomes "Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age," for example. The text
exists in a constant state of split consciousness; boundaries are established only to be dissolved. By
placing herself in the role of analyst, Atwood necessarily places herself in the role of patient. Laing, as I
noted earlier, believes that it is the ex-patient who is best fitted to become the analyst, and, according to
Freud, in any analyst-analysand situation the process of transference will necessarily take place.
The afterword is an explanation of the poetic sequence, but not of itself. Atwood writes, "These poems
were generated by a dream. I dreamt I was watching an opera I had written about Susanna Moodie. I
was alone in the theatre; on the empty white stage, a single figure was singing" (62). Although the
poems evolved from a dream, there are few direct correlations made between the poems and this brief
description. Nonetheless, it is fitting that the poems are generated by a dream, because this serves as a
possible explanation not only for the existence of the poetic sequence, but also for the paranoid
schizophrenia that characterizes the text as a whole. In The Interpretation o[ Dreams, Freud posits two
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possible connections between dreams and mental diseases:
dreams are represented as the aetiology of the mental disorder; but we should be doing equal justice to
the facts if we said that the mental disorder made its first appearance in dream-life, that it first broke
through in a dream. (120)
The opera dream not only generates the poems, but it also generates the schizophrenia. More
importantly, it generates the initial symptom: Atwood claims that she is "alone in the theatre," yet she is
also watching "a single figure . . . singing." Jes Simmons suggests that "The 'single figure' in the dream
is Susanna Moodie, is Canada, is Margaret Atwood" ( 151 ). The identity of the single figure is not clear,
but its function is. Within the context of the dream, the figure acts as a projection of the "I" watching who
is also another unconscious projection of the "I" writing.
One of the intriguing features of this dream description, which comprises the first paragraph of the
afterword, is the way it holds traces of the previous poems. In the afterword, the "I" is depicted as
watching, but does not appear to hear the opera. Similarly, in "Disembarking at Quebec," the first poem
of "Journal 1 18321840," the "I" portrays herself in visual terms only to wonder if it is the visual
representation that "this space cannot hear" ( 11). In both instances, cognitive processes are split.
Moodie (whom I will name the "I" of the poetic sequence), created by the Old World order, cannot cross
the boundary into the New World. She remains "a word / in a foreign language"; nonetheless, she does
retreat from the symbolic order she so clearly represents in the first stanza. She retreats into the preOedipal phase, where there is no identity, and where the "moving water will not show me / my reflection"
(11).[6]
The images that Moodie projects onto the landscape are like the "empty white stage" of the afterword;
they are images of death:
these vistas of desolation,
long hills, the swamps, the barren sand, the glare
of sun on the bone-white
driftlogs, omens of winter,
the moon alien in day-time a thin refusal (11)
Moodie is the "single figure" articulated against the chaos. As her "own lack / of conviction" suggests,
the boundaries between inside and outside rapidly deteriorate. In her critical study Survival, Atwood
writes that poetic landscapes are often "maps of a state of mind" (49). The fact that Moodie's reflection
does not appear in the moving water suggests that she has the potential to be remapped or recreated.
In "Further Arrivals," Moodie journeys further from the safety of the Old World's "civilized / distinctions"
into "a large darkness," which she identifies as "our own/ignorance" (12). In "The Planters," this
darkness, possibly another form of "lack" (11), will become "the dark / side of light" (17)- R.P. Bilan writes
that
Although at this point Moodie perceives the natural, the wild, as "dark," she is on the verge of a different
and more complex perception. The line break produces another surprise; it conveys her realization that
it is "the dark / side of light." The oxymoron indicates that Moodie's original, Victorian categories, which
make a sharp separation of darkness and light, are beginning to break down. ( 3)
This "break down" is also representative of the breakdown of the distinction between the conscious and
unconscious mind, between Laing's ego and the self. It is also a breakthrough, because when it
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happens Moodie is able to recognize that "darkness" and "ignorance" give her a different perspective
from which "to see / the truth" (12, 13). Moodie is also able to recognize her paranoia and allow
boundaries to dissolve. She is "surrounded, stormed, broken / in upon by branches, roots, [and] tendrils"
(17).
Without the "civilized / distinctions" that enable her to identify herself, Moodie refuses to look into a
mirror; she is in the position, as she is in "Disembarking at Quebec," of not knowing what she is looking
for. Without Old World (or conscious) props, she is only "darkness." If she were to look into the mirror
before firmly locating herself in the unconscious, she would see a representation of the self that belongs
only to the symbolic order. By refusing to look into the mirror she refuses to see her self whole, but, at
the same time, she refuses to see her self split in two.
More than transformation, the first journal is about Moodie's loss of identity. The extent of her erasure is
revealed in the first stanza of the final poem, "Departure from the Bush": "I, who had been erased / by
fire, was crept in / upon by green" (26). The erasure of her identity by fire causes another self to surface.
In "The Two Fires," Moodie reveals that "Two fires in- /formed me" (23); but, as soon as the process
ends in the formation of identity, it becomes part of the conscious experience. By the end of the first
journal, Moodie believes that "There was something [the animals] almost taught me / I came away not
having learned" (27). This last stanza has been generally interpreted as depicting the end of Moodie's
interior journey. Grace writes that it becomes "sadly apparent that Moodie has not quite completed her
journey of discovery" (36). I would argue that this final poem could also be read as Moodie's expression
of her awareness of the impossibility of arriving at her destination. Moodie's journey is one of process:
repeated acts of erasure and formation.
The poems in "Journal 11 1840-1871" suggest a continuation of the journey. The first journal consists of
chronological events, whereas the second consists of aeonic revelations. In the afterword, Atwood
writes that "Journal IX contains reflections about the [Belleville] society Mrs Moodie finds herself in, as
well as memories of the years spent in the bush" (63). The memories are characterized by death and
dreams. Jes Simmons points out that Belleville "symbolizes the important midpoint in Moodie's attempt
to synthesize her conscious and unconscious. Belleville is a middleground, a place which is neither
London nor the wilderness" (146). In the second journal, the unconscious mind haunts the conscious
mind. Immediate experience is repressed, and dreams and memories preside over the poems. Even the
idea of the journal -- a one-dimensional piece of writing without reflection -- is turned upside down:
written mostly in the past tense, the second journal primarily concerns dreams and memory.
Another memory trace of the opera dream is found in the three dream poems ("Dream 1: The Bush
Garden," "Dream 2: Brian the Still-Hunter," and "Dream 3: Night Bear Which Frightened Cattle"). Each of
these poems/dreams becomes symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia. The poem titles themselves
establish a split between dream and poem (in the larger context of the text such a split occurs between
journal and journey, journal and poetry), and between the two obvious layers of narrative: the
unconscious dream and the conscious recording. The criticism written on the dream poems, particularly
on "Dream 1: The Bush Garden," reflects the schizophrenia embodied in the poems. Jerome Rosenberg
argues that Moodie dreams, finding herself back in "The Bush Garden," where she had attempted to
cultivate the soil. The fruit does not shrivel in the dream. Rather, far worse, her attempt to impose order
on the land reveals itself as a terrifying nightmare. The vegetables, large and luxuriant, become animals,
whose flesh is torn violently by the human hand as it pulls them, "red and wet," from the earth. (43-44)
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Similarly, Grace finds the dream of the garden "violent [and] repulsive" (38). Bilan offers another view,
which opposes that of Rosenberg and Grace, and which, I believe, is far more accurate. Bilan maintains
that the poem reflects Moodie's ambivalence:
This surrealistic image of vegetables turning into animals is grotesque, yet is also positive as the land is
coming alive. . . . But the concluding stanza of the poem reveals a very different attitude: "In the dream I
said / I should have known / anything planted there / would come up blood." . . . the dream poem shows
that in [Moodie's] unconscious, to some extent, her fear and revulsion remain. (7)
In actuality, the poem reads "anything planted here" (34), not "anything planted there," as Bilan quotes it.
Although this misreading could simply be a printing error, it is likely that it originated in Bilan's
manuscript.[7] This parapraxis reflects the opposing views of the two other critics. The bush is relegated
to the unconscious, but it is depicted as something separate, existing over there. No doubt both views
are present as Bilan does argue, but it is equally true that the duality in this particular poem is often
repressed by critics.
Moodie's paranoia, which creeps up in two-line stanzas throughout the Journals, is also realized in the
dream poems. "Dream 2: Brian the Still-Hunter" contains an eerie paradox that could be interpreted as
either paranoia or mysticism: "There was no wind; / around us the leaves rustled" (36). In the context of
the writing done on schizophrenia in the 1960s, this would be a sign of the mystic. As she is when she
experiences the dream of vegetables turning into animals, Moodie is at a moment in time (or
timelessness) when boundaries are dissolving. Having recently moved to Belleville, she represses all
that has surfaced on the bush farm in the first journal. The dreams are not only an outlet for her paranoid
schizophrenia, but they are also an outlet for what Laing would describe as an "Experience [that] may be
judged to be invalidly mad or to be validly mystical" (108).
This division of realities is characteristic of the Journals; nevertheless, it does not have to represent, as
Atwood puts it in the afterword, "a violent duality" (62). Brown claims that
The reality-principle says, if here, then not there; if inside, then not outside. The alternative to dualism is
dialectics. . . . reality is unification: reality is events (not things), which are prehensive unifications;
gathering diversities together in a unity; not simply here, or there, but a gathering of here and there
(subject and object) into a unity. (154-55)
The final dream poem is again reminiscent of the afterword. Atwood records in the afterword that having
read Moodie's two books about Canada she felt that "The prose was discursive and ornamental and the
books had little shape: they were collections of disconnected anecdotes" (62). It is not the surface
narrative, not Moodie's "conscious voice but the other voice running like a counterpoint through
[Moodie's] work that made the most impression on [Atwood]" (63 ). Unlike Moodie's books on Canada,
the Journals only rarely use chronologically organized anecdotes as their structural framework (despite
Atwood's assertion to the contrary). When they are used, such anecdotes take on mythical dimensions.
If anything, The Journals of Susanna Moodie is an attempt to make that "other voice" conscious. To do
this, Atwood creates an unconscious for the character of Moodie, and, by extension, for the country of
Canada.
In "Dream 3: Night Bear Which Frightened Cattle," Atwood aligns "the surface of [the] mind" with
"anecdote," and the "beneath" of the mind with "stories" (38). These juxtapositions reveal conscious and
the unconscious as two different layers instead of as existing on a continuum. But this initial duality is
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undermined when the unconscious and the conscious are seen as working together dialectically. Atwood
recognizes this interaction when she describes, in the afterword, the unconscious voice as "running like
a counterpoint" to Moodie's conscious voice (63). The final dream poem also suggests this dialectic:
I lean with my feet grown intangible
because I am not there
watching the bear I didn't see condense
itself among the trees, an outline
tenuous as an echo (38-39)
In this stanza, Atwood's technique becomes mimetic of the mind, of the dissolution of boundaries that is
symptomatic of schizophrenia. The unconscious and conscious engage in a dialogue. Moodie affirms
that which she has denied, while simultaneously denying that which she has affirmed. In the next
stanza, the conscious mind takes over when it acts to organize the unconscious into something that is
understandable by "daylight" (39). By the final stanza, the unconscious has been reduced to "a mute
vibration passing / between [Moodie's] ears" (39)
The collage that fronts the second journal suggests the act of burying the consciousness. The small
square frame of the picture (even the shape suggests order) houses a bread-making scene which is
itself housed within a hill. The figure crawling on top of the hill is possibly an image of the night bear
(28). In the poem, unlike the collage, Moodie perceives the bear as being not out there, but "here":
. . . heavier
than real I know
even by daylight here
in this visible kitchen (39)
The ability to confront the conscious and unconscious
simultaneously is a breakthrough.
Such a breakthrough does not occur in "The Double Voice," the much-critiqued poem that concludes the
second journal. The standard critical approach to this poem is typified by Barbara Hill Rigney's
observation that "Susanna Moodie, too, is doubled and divided, perceiving her world as dominated by
terrible polarities" (58). The cognitive dysfunction embodied in the first stanza -- "Two voices / took turns
using my eyes" (42) -- has generally been ignored. Grace, although she cites the line, unsuccessfully
explains the split, writing that "the poem itself is both aural and visual. . . . its balanced structure
succeeds aloud as well as on the page" (40). The split also occurs earlier, in "Disembarking at Quebec,"
and later, in the afterword. The recurrence of this symptom of dysfunction is the manifestation of the
"other voice." A number of critics, Grace and Rigney among them, read "The Double Voice" as
conveying Moodie's new-found wisdom; however, that wisdom is simply the expression of Moodie's
recurrent "other voice," a voice that continues to sing of the sights of Canada. The taking of "turns"
suggests that one voice can only exist by repressing the other; they cannot exist simultaneously. In the
third and final journal, the "wisdom," Moodie's unconscious voice, dominates her conscious one.
Although Atwood writes that the "poems were generated by a dream" (62), the third journal seems, more
specifically, to be generated by a photograph. Atwood writes that "Most of Journal Ill was written after I
had come across a little-known photograph of Susanna Moodie as a mad-looking and very elderly lady"
(63). In the third journal, this image, the "Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age" (48), is linked to Moodie's
other voice. It is an image of the Moodie who is "fascinated with deaths, murders, the criminals in
Kingston Penitentiary and the incurably insane in the Toronto lunatic asylum" (62). It is of the Moodie
who becomes increasingly like the persona who governs the afterword.
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The poem "Visit to Toronto, with Companions" is central not only to the third journal, but also to the
entire text. Bilan suggests that, by this point in the narrative,
Moodie herself is now apparently "mad"; there is certainly a suggestion of controlled madness in her
seemingly inappropriate gesture: "I sat down and smoothed my gloves." But this is "madness" as close
to a breakthrough as to a breakdown. (10)
In this poem, Moodie's Laingian voyage, which also forms part of the substructure of the text as a whole,
is enacted with the street and the three floors of the lunatic asylum representing its salient stages. On
the first floor, Moodie encounters "women sitting, sewing; / they looked at us sadly, gently, / answered
questions" (50). This floor and the women who inhabit it are connected to Moodie's Old World self.
Moodie's "bag with knitting" (II), which she carries off the boat, links her to the sewing women. These
women, although depressed, are able to answer questions because they remain logical.
On the second floor, Moodie finds women who are in the midst of their journey. They are like the
immigrants who "leap" and "shout / Freedom!" (II), and who "threw off their clothes/and danced like
sandflies" (12) -- except that on this journey, the women are not celebrating freedom but demanding it.
They are shown "crouching, thrashing, / tearing off their clothes, screaming" (50). These are women
who, like Moodie in the first journal, confront existing systems of representation; however, their madness
has no mediator. Without mediation, their retreat from the symbolic order results in a state of psychosis.
Their freedom is without meaning.
On the third floor, Moodie experiences her breakthrough as she walks "through a glass-panelled / door
into a different kind of room" (50). She walks beyond the mirror, the other side of the looking glass. This
third floor is a higher form of madness that is not without communication or representation. Moodie,
while understanding the desires communicated by the "three faces" she sees on the third floor, cannot
"hear" "The landscape." By refusing to return to the exterior, to "where there were streets and / the
Toronto harbour," Moodie refuses to return to time and the symbolic order. Here, she is in a constant
state of becoming: "the air [always] / was about to tell [her] / all kinds of answers" (51). The "glass" in
this room will never show her a fixed identity, she will always be in flux (50).
In the final poem, "A Bus along St. Clair: December," Moodie, who has become the wilderness,
becomes also the unconscious of Canada. In this position, she is in a constant state of almost vanishing.
When the narrative moves into the twentieth century, an urban setting replaces that of the wilderness.
Moodie is "buried" in the poems, but she does not vanish (60). The foundation of the country and of
Moodie's persona will always be "the centre of a forest" (61); likewise, the afterword will always lead the
reader back into the poetic sequence.
Here, then, is the paradox: just when Moodie is freed from her personal identity, an identity which, in
many ways, is the cause of her paranoid schizophrenia, she inherits the national identity. Nonetheless, it
is this identity, whether it be personal or national, that keeps Susanna Moodie from vanishing altogether.
The mediator between the conscious and unconscious is the persona of the afterword, and it is
according to this persona that Moodie becomes "the spirit of the land she once hated" (64). To eliminate
the afterword from the Journals is to eliminate the mediator that organizes and helps illuminate the
paranoid schizophrenia of the poetic sequence. Furthermore, it eliminates the other voice that
contributes to the schizophrenia of the text as a whole. The cure for The Journals of Susanna Moodie is
to read the poetic sequence and afterword simultaneously, rather than repressing one at the expense of
the other.
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NOTES
1 I wish to thank D.M.R. Bentley who guided me through earlier drafts of this paper.
2 The collages of the cover design (both done by Atwood), too, are absent from the Selected Poems.
Other first editions have had their original graphics deleted in later, less expensive editions, but The
Journals of Susanna Moodie continues to be reissued, 19 years later, with its original graphics, cover
design, and afterword.
3 In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida writes that the supplement "adds only to replace. It intervenes
or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image,
it is by the anterior default of a presence" (145).
4 In the study done by Blatt and Wild, paranoid schizophrenia is described as
struggling actively to maintain boundary differentiations . . . The exaggerated cognitive control,
heightened perceptual articulation, and hyper-alertness of paranoid patients, as well as their
guardedness, suspiciousness, and interpersonal distance, may serve partly to maintain boundary
differentiation and to ward off feelings of merging, dissolution, and annihilation. (67)
5 There are many different theories of schizophrenia, none of them conclusive. Laing's studies have
developed from existential psychiatry. This paper is informed by existential theories, psychodynamic
theories, and, to a lesser extent, cognitive theories.
6 Melanie Klein equates the terms "schizoid" and "paranoid" with the pre-Oedipal phase because, in
this stage, "the mechanisms of splitting internal and external objects, emotions and the ego" are
present (qtd. in Cutting 359).
7 In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud discusses the possibility of treating mistakes made
by copyists and compositors as psychologically motivated, that is, interpretable (178).
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~~~~~~~~
By JACQUI SMYTH
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