Swimming in the Deep Waters in Charlotte Jones’s Airswimming: Exploring Female Madness and Female Solidarity in a Psychiatric Hospital

Throughout the centuries, madness has been the historical label applied to female resistance, female power and female liberation. It has been imposed on society by patriarchy as a phenomenon or an illness peculiar only to women. Its ultimate aim is to subjugate women to the patriarchal world order. Women, challenging patriarchal ideology in the way of their sexual choices and their lifestyles, have been labelled as insane and confined to the psychiatric hospitals in order to be silenced. In this way, psychiatric hospitals have become spaces that institutionalize women with mental illness. Patriarchy has taken advantage of these institutions as a tool to discourage women from acting freely and achieving personal development. In the twentieth century, when feminist movement come to life, many feminist playwrights specially tend to investigate and write on both mental illness and psychiatric hospitals as a means of male oppression used against women. Their essential motivation is to question the social and historical dynamics behind the labelling of women as insane and imprisoning them to the psychiatric hospitals. Award-winning playwright Charlotte Jones (1968-), one of the towering names of contemporary British theatre, focussed on caged two women in a psychiatric hospital, named St. Dymphna’s Hospital, in her first play Airswimming (1997). She puts these women subjected to imprisonment as victims of patriarchal hegemony and their deplorable living conditions in psychiatric hospital in the center and argues the power of female solidarity against patriarchal persecution. This paper aims at exposing the systemized male oppression of women by psychiatric hospitals and the power of female solidarity against this oppression by focussing on the image of the ‘madwoman’ in Jones’s Airswimming.