Word: madnesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second emphasis, in its examination of insanity, The Four-Gated City offers one such vindication. For Lessing, the Coldridge townhouse is an elaborate metaphorical conceit--at its base, in its cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha...
...LESSING, those that society has labelled mad are actually those super-perceptive, rare individuals whose natural telepathic and extrasensory powers have not atrophied. Martha, in her role as a letter-day Mrs. Dalloway peering into the crevice that separates two eras, discovers that she shares certain affinities with Linda. From that point, it is not long before Martha is voluntarily undergoing harrowing experiments in order to determine the limits of her consciousness. As the novel closes, she is stranded off the Scottish coast, England having been decimated by poison gas and radioactivity. She has also become a member...
Linda, who was as mad as they come, and showing more strain with every day that passed, did not strike anyone as more than engagingly different...
When Britain's King George III died in 1820, he was blind, deaf and apparently mad. His physicians, limited in their medical knowledge and hindered by protocol in examining their royal patient (they could not inquire how he felt unless he spoke to them first), had long since concluded that the King was "under an entire alienation of mind." George III went down in history as the mad monarch, a judgment accepted by generations of historians and buttressed by psychiatric studies...
...given up causes, and in Mark's wife Lynda lies the key to her new radical direction. As the book progresses, Martha becomes more camera than character, and Lynda takes over as the book's imaginative center. It becomes clear that she is not mad at all but maimed-by a troubled childhood, by marriage to Mark, by years of corrosive drugs casually administered in mental hospitals. She is also a mystical speaker of truth whose hallucinations are eerily accurate. She hears voices, consults cards, studies astrological charts. She and Martha sit down and reread the classics with...