Essay Prompts

ASYLUMS
The prompts below pose questions to get you thinking.  The paper should be on literary or filmic treatments of the Asylum, but will, of course, call on your building knowledge of the asylum’s cultural history in the US.  You don’t have to answer all of the questions in the prompts below. They are simply points of departure. I’m open to papers on other books or movies about asylums, but you should talk to me before choosing that route.

The essay should be 5-6 pages long.

Be sure to have a thesis and a well-organized argument that relies on a sophisticated reading of the text.. You’ll need to attend to the specific language and action of the books in question.
The papers are due by 4pm on April 23.

Some Prompts:
1) Published in 1962, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest appears at a particular point in the complex history of the asylum and mental illness. Mental hospitals are still recovering from exposes published in the near aftermath of WWII and are also transitioning away from radical, experimental, and generally discredited treatments such as lobotomy and shock therapy. Nurse Ratched, for instance, notes repeatedly that the ward where she works functions differently from hospitals in the past, even if they continue to deploy some of their treatments. How does this novel understand the newest version of the psychiatric hospital? Is it, for example, primarily a place of retreat and recovery or something else? As the novel presents the mental hospital, what purpose does it serve for society at large, the world outside the institution itself? Different characters in the novel have different ways of seeing the ward they inhabit and its contrasts and continuities with the world outside, so be certain that you present some of the complexity of the novel on this subject.

2) What is the nature of “mental illness” in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Characters discuss repeatedly the boundaries of such diagnoses and calibrate in some detail the nature and intensity of particular disorders. What sort of coherent vision of the distinction between mental health and mental illness can you see developing in the novel, or does the book simply serve to question and obscure those distinctions? If it blurs the boundaries, how and where does it do so?

3) How would you describe the interplay between the documents from Mclean Hospital that Suzanna Kaysen presents in Girl, Interrupted and the larger text of the memoir itself? You’ll need to consider specific questions about the nature of authority, creativity, and distance over time, among other matters as you address this question.

4) If the ward in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a distinctly male environment set off from the rest of the world, the ward in Girl, Interrupted is equally and intensely female. How would you say that the depiction of these wards is driven by their nearly complete gender exclusivity? Do the books tie particular forms of pathology or social order to gender, or do they undermine such linkages? What role do the primary narrative voices of the books play in creating or undermining the “maleness” and “femaleness” of the two wards. Consider Bromden’s language and perspective on the world as opposed to Kaysen’s, or compare the two most conspicuously rebellious characters (Randle McMurphy and Lisa Rowe) to one another.

5)  You may write about other books or movies centered on Asylums, but we should talk before you do so.