ABSTRACT
Delusional narratives offer an allegedly safe temporal distance between the reader and the observed experience of clinical schizophrenia, the fragile result of which is supposed to encourage empathy. The question with which this chapter is concerned, however, is the extent to which McGrath’s early novel Spider (1990) problematizes its own portrayal of mental illness. This is not to say that McGrath’s Spider ought to be considered therapeutic, at least not in any kind of immediate didactic way, although the corporeal representation of madness in McGrath’s novels does frequently suggest a hesitancy toward psychiatric institutions, and, as a result, McGrath’s readers find themselves drawn into the contemporary normalizing strategies, paradoxical discourses, and cultural anxieties surrounding an ongoing deinstitutional movement. This chapter will, then, identify how the gothic mode itself presents a new critical paradigm for reading madness.
