Topic
‘And the skies it gave me!’: The Mental Asylum as Urban Extension in Patrick McGrath’s Spider (1990)
Following the violent murder of Mrs. Cleg in the family tenement home in London’s East End of the 1930s, her 13-year-old son Dennis, the madness-stricken narrator of Patrick McGrath’s 1990 novel Spider, spends the following 20 years of his life incarcerated in the Ganderhill county asylum. Located fictionally in Sussex, yet broadly modelled on the architectural features and (mis)treatment practices of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (est. 1863), Ganderhill serves as a vessel through which to write Victorian psychiatric establishments into late 20th-century city literature. Infamously, throughout history, the ‘total institution’ of the asylum has been designated the role of receptacle for those members of society deemed mentally deviant and socially intractable. Moreover, the psychically perturbed, have been routinely omitted from urban plans and excised by the city to the ec-centric edifices of the mental hospitals, often subjecting them to dehumanisation and abuse. However, as Spider plumbs the tribulations of a mind in the midst of sundering, plagued by fragmented memories, phobias, and hallucinations that London ‘constantly arouses’ in him (McGrath 13), Ganderhill’s spaces do not afford solely punishment and humiliation, but also opportunities for domesticity and refuge, and ironically, expansiveness and freedom. More specifically, Dennis’ extended incarceration outside of the city proves life-saving during the World War II air-raids over London that cause the annihilation of his East End home. Thus, by tracing the interlinks between the East End home and the asylum cell, the London potato allotment and the Ganderhill vegetable garden, and their respective sensory landscapes in Dennis’ experience of madness, the chief aim of this paper will be to examine the capacity of the mental hospital in McGrath’s Spider to transcend its clear separation from the urbanscape and emerge as an ex-urban space in a dynamic and intricate relationship with the city evincing even life-affirming potential.
Marija Spirkovska (Chemnitz University of Technology)
Marija Spirkovska is PhD candidate at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her research sits at the interstices between literary criticism, urban studies, and psychology, and draws strongly on phenomenology and geocriticism. Her PhD project investigates perceptions of space during bouts of mental illness in the context of representation of urban modernity and aims at establishing a poetics of urban psychopathology in urban literature. She has recently published “’Not-All-There’ in the Necropolis: Afterlife and Madness in Urban Novels” (2023) in the journal Religions.