Chapter 10: The Madwoman in the Attic’s Ultimate Apocalyptic Reading List

As I type this, I am lounging, Paolina Borghese-like, on the counter next to the window in my kitchen, in my flat, on the highest floor of a student hall in Cambridge; that’s the sort of anti-social behaviour one can indulge in when one is living alone in the middle of a lockdown.

There are nine tiny rooms in my flat, all of which were full until - what? Six weeks ago? (Time has merged in my solitude.) Now they are all empty, except for mine. As the world turned on its head, everyone left the building, but I had to stay. How many people around the world are just as lonely, and lonelier still than I am right now? At least I can make myself use technology, from time to time, grudgingly, to reach out to friends and family, and I have my books. I am lucky, I know I am. I do sometimes feel like I am going a little bit mad - in the absence of yellow wallpaper I have began eyeing with suspicion the pink roses with which I fill the flat these days - but at least I have the consolation of literature. As the rest of the world is discovering, there is a strange pleasure in finding one’s sorrows and anxieties mirrored in fiction.

I haven’t read only stories about solitude, madness and sickness since the lockdown began: I also read Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead, which is about animals killing hunters in revenge for their cruelty (although, now I think about it, the protagonist is a slightly deranged woman living in almost complete isolation on a mountain in Poland …). Perhaps it’s not so much about the books I read as it is about what I made of them. Of Rebecca West’s The Judge, I keep seeing Marion’s candle-lit cold empty rooms full of moths. Of the five hundred pages and more of Virginia Woolf’s Selected Diaries, the words that haunt me refer to the solitude of her mental breakdowns, and the tensions of the war. I’ll admit that The Yellow Wallpaper, about a woman who goes mad after she gets shut by her husband and his sister in (the irony!) an attic, was an indulgence of my sanity to my insanity. So was reading Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of Mrs Rochester, the original Madwoman in the Attic after whom the 1979 feminist literary theory book takes its title. Austen’s Sense and Sensibility may seem like a healthier choice than all that came before; yet, for the first time since I was twelve or so, I found myself waiting with bathed breath for Marianne’s unchecked displays of sorrow, for Elinor’s rare but powerful concessions to emotion (yes, I guarantee they are there).

This morning I was listening to a podcast on reading War and Peace during the lockdown. The person who had started the trend said she did because, apart from being a wonderful work of fiction, it reminds us that life goes on even in these trying times (surely I am not the only one who has come to loathe this sentence). I didn’t choose my reading with any such lofty theory in mind, or any theory in mind at all. Only writing it down now something resembling a line of thought emerges - that trying to stay completely sane right now, at least for me, is not only not an option, but (perhaps) not even completely advisable. Woolf wrote about one of her breakdowns: “Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain. Then suddenly something springs … and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me; ideas rush in me.” If the world can be compared to anything right now that has beauty and meaning, is a chrysalis, all inward darkness and expectations. And I suppose one must hold on tight through one to fulfil the others.

Or, to put it in Jane Austen’s words (which is always a good idea): “run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint.”