Dancing with Ophelia: Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love

Dancing with Ophelia narrates an extraordinary month in my thirtieth year during which I experienced a mental health crisis and recovery that jump-started my creative life and triggered my conversion to Christianity. Describing disabling distress as “madness” rather than “mental illness,” I seek to recover a premodern understanding of the experience, in order to discover how poetic thinking might help improve long-term outcomes for people who experience crisis. To understand the connection between madness, poetry, and love, I use Shakespeare’s portrayal of madness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a starting point to discuss the role of madness in the lives and creative processes of modernist literary women. I devote special attention to the surrealist painter-writer (and paramour of Max Ernst) Leonora Carrington, whom I interviewed for the book. I detail that interview experience, along with my own creative and religious growth process. My experience producing the award-winning short film The Clockmaker’s Revelation provides a case study of creativity in a discussion that combines personal experience, literary interpretation, and visual analysis of paintings. Reading allegorically, as always, I unearth the hidden meanings of paintings, novels, stories, and even psychiatric symptoms.

“I use the term ‘madness’ rather than ‘mental illness’ not to insult anyone and not to be deliberately unfashionable or unscientific, but to restore the millennia-old associations between madness and various forms of intellectual and spiritual power. Shakespeare, whose plays frequently portray madness, wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The lunatic, the poet, and the lover are of imagination all compact.” Shakespeare’s line connects madness with love and creativity--this is the connection at the heart of a poetic understanding of madness.”

“In our fascination with the chemistry of madness, we tend to ignore the poetics of madness--the connection of madness to beauty, truth, creativity, spirituality, and the sublime. In the three millennia of literature and philosophy that preceded psychiatry, madness was associated with all these things.”

“Romanticizing madness too much can result in failure to provide medical care and personal safety for persons suffering madness. De-romanticizing madness too much can lead to oversimplification--reducing the experience to a chemical reaction that we try to subject to chemical control while ignoring its social, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions.”

“As literature, philosophy, religion, art, and history suggest, when someone appears mad, he or she may be struggling to integrate an intense surge of creative energy, having a spiritual awakening, expanding his or her self-awareness, or undergoing dramatic but necessary life change. If we don’t balance our well-meaning scientific approach to ‘mental illness’ with an awareness of the developmental functions served by madness, then we cannot respond effectively to what has become a public health crisis of epidemic proportions.”

What readers have said about Dancing with Ophelia:

“Dancing with Ophelia is . . . a deeply spiritual book that grapples with love, courage, ambition, and the idea of God.” —Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God: A Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bible.

“This book offers an interesting and engagingly written exploration of mental distress that draws on a range of literary and scholarly sources in combination with personal experience. It sits within the small, but growing, body of work that interweaves personal narrative with an academic analysis of “illness” or “disruption.” --Deborah Bowman, coauthor of Informed Consent: A Primer for Clinical Practice

Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith

My work on allegory and religion began with this book, which deals with contemporary rather than ancient allegory. Unless they are reading the Bible or studying mythology, most people these days encounter allegory in movies. You are dealing with an allegory whenever you see a movie that features a hero questing through a dream landscape, trying to understand what is real and true. Iconic virtual reality movies like Total Recall, The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Inception rely on allegory. This book contains a chapter on virtual reality movies, so fans of The Matrix and The Truman Show will find something interesting here. But buyer beware: this book contains heavy-duty scholarly language that only literature specialists and the most devoted nonspecialists will want to tackle. Diehard fans of feminist fantasy novels, experimental cinema, and American Indian novels might find it worth their while to wade through the academic jargon to hear me talk about how allegory works in those genres. If academic jargon puts you off, wait for the next book. Jargon-free! My last chapter, on postmodern culture, religious fundamentalism, and violence should have something to interest all readers. I was young—and a functional atheist—when I wrote this. My last chapter goes too far, insisting that to avoid violence we must reject dogmatic belief and embrace religion-as-experience. But hey: that’s why there are second, third, fourth, and tenth books. So we can correct those excesses of youthful intellectual bravado.

“There is never anything ‘religious’ about violence except the rhetorical trappings used to sell wars. Still, people fighting over land, resources, and power try routinely to bestow legitimacy and weight to their campaigns by invoking religion and/or the name of God.”

“[M]ost of the personages credited with generating modern religions appear to have communicated using only allegorical utterances; they are reported to have communicated in gnomic statements or fanciful stories whose meanings were obscure and . . . multiple.”

“When liberal thinkers, in their quest for sensitivity and correctness, refuse to talk about religion, morality, and truth, they leave the field wide open for those whose rhetoric and thought fail miserably to do those subjects justice.”

"As a genre, postmodern allegory reveals with particular vividness that the search for cosmic order, numinous insight, and genuine value continues to animate the post-sixties cultural scene, despite crises of faith in reference, representation, and narrative. . . . What becomes evident through analysis of allegory after allegory is that in the late twentieth century, texts of all kinds repudiate faith in language and knowing in order to fashion new kinds of faith.”

Women and Experimental Filmmaking

Before I made allegory the focus of my work, I edited this anthology of film scholarship about experimental cinema with the noted film scholar Virginia Wright Wexman, Ph.D. This book contains heavy-duty scholarly language aimed at film buffs and other specialists. The introduction gives an overview of women’s contributions to experimental film traditions. Several of the essays in this collection, including mine, explore religion and spirituality in experimental film. My essay discusses a film by Israeli-American director Nina Menkes--Magdalena Viraga: Story of a Red Sea Crossing.

Beyond Babel: Reading the Bible and Modern Literature

Despite the supposed secularization of culture, modern and postmodern authors have never stopped mining the Bible for symbolic language with which to explore perennial human concerns: language, nature, creativity, self, family, ethnicity, governance, trauma, healing, history. By reading the Bible alongside modern literary works that draw from the Bible’s well of imagery and themes, we can better understand the modern works while generating new insight into biblical narrative. Another important benefit of reading the Bible and modern literature is the opportunity such reading provides for religious and nonreligious readers alike to consider matters of shared concern. Drawing on ten years of the author’s experience teaching the Bible as Literature at a secular college,“Beyond Babel” explores how a diverse range of writers--Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Anna Akhmatova, Wilfred Owen, Djuna Barnes, Anne Sexton, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and others--engage with the Bible. Reading these authors alongside their biblical sources enables religious and nonreligious readers to bridge the ideological divides that might separate them, and join in productive conversation about being human.