Sovay Muriel Hansen: Madness and Desire—Teaching Virginia Woolf alongside Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Other Artists

Those of us who study Woolf tire of the popular fascination with her mental illness. This may be because we feel that her health is merely one facet of a complex person and artist—a single aspect that seems to eclipse everything else about her in the popular imagination. That Woolf was mentally ill and took her own life seem to be the two factoids about her that people are most likely to know. For Woolf scholars, this feels somehow unfair or shallow, perhaps even gratuitous. I also think that many of us feel protective, feel jealous of other people thinking that they know her. This is how I feel about all the artists I study; I am embarrassed to admit: I want to keep them to myself.  

But I must also own that Woolf’s health challenges fascinate me endlessly, endear her to me; they make her—a most intimidatingly brilliant and prolific writer—feel closer to myself and my own human challenges. And the truth is that such facts about Woolf’s mortality fascinate students, too: these human struggles bring her down to earth and give students something with which to identify while reading this new kind of writing that can feel disorienting and etheric.  

And since open discussions of mental health are in the zeitgeist (especially since the pandemic), I designed an Honors seminar that focused on such considerations. I titled the seminar, “Madness and Desire,” and created a reading list that spanned centuries and genres. I wanted students to learn to close read literary texts that discuss madness and desire in some way; I also wanted students to consider how these ideas often intersect in literary texts written by women and to wonder about why that may be.

I assigned texts with female characters who struggle with mental health challenges and whose struggles seem entwined with coming up against the limits that society has placed on what women may desire from life.

We began with the unfinished novel of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), published posthumously, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). The eponymous protagonist is incarcerated by her husband in a privately owned asylum because she wants to leave him. I wanted my students to read an older account of the way women have historically been categorized as “mad” for simply desiring something contrary to what the men in their lives want. I impressed upon my students the history, the tradition, of this fact. Alongside Wollstonecraft’s novel, I assigned the bell hooks (1952–2021) essay, “Understanding Patriarchy” (2004), to establish an understanding of the way patriarchy organizes and poisons the lives and identities of everyone, not just women.

Next, we read short stories by Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) written in the second decade of the twentieth century. In many of Mansfield’s stories, her female protagonists quietly struggle with the boundaries drawn around how women are allowed to be in the world—we witness these characters privately wishing for more beyond their domestic lives, something that is never achieved. 

Because it was a 1-unit seminar with limited time, I assigned just the first 20 pages of Mrs. Dalloway. The first sentence of the novel alone provides a rich opportunity to discuss narrative presence: when and to whom did Mrs. Dalloway say that she would buy the flowers herself? And, why? What does it matter that she “would” buy the flowers herself? And does this statement of Clarissa’s desire, from the first sentence, point to the centrality of her desires throughout the novel?

To emphasize the ongoing salience of considering women’s desire and madness, I did something in this seminar that I have never done before in a literature class: I assigned texts by contemporary pop stars to consider alongside the literature. We read some sections of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me (2023), and listened to Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” (2023). These texts’ thematic parallels with Wollstonecraft’s novel and Mrs. Dalloway, respectively, are notable: Spears’s memoir recounts not only her own experience being confined to her home and rehab facilities by her father, but also her family history of women being driven “mad” by abusive patriarchs. Cyrus’s song is about a breakup and the chorus begins with the line “I can buy myself flowers,” words that the class connected to Clarissa’s famous declaration. Together, we mused on the capaciousness of such a gesture, of such a statement: a woman deciding to buy herself flowers, to buy the flowers herself, seems to carry infinite poignancy, even a century apart.

In one of the final weeks of the semester, the Arizona Supreme Court allowed an almost total abortion ban to take effect—the same week I assigned Roxane Gay’s “The Alienable Rights of Women” (2014), an essay that contemplates the history of abortion restriction. My students remarked that the timing of our reading of the essay and the court’s decision was chilling and in their final written reflections for the course, each of them contemplated their new understanding of the seemingly endless history of women’s bodies and desires being policed.    

Dr. Sovay Muriel Hansen is a writer, literary critic, and Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. in Literature with a minor in German Studies. Sovay’s scholarship focuses on the way female desire is represented in modernist literature. Her recent article on Weimar-era novels and fashion was published in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945. Sovay’s book chapter, “Katherine Mansfield’s Desperate Housewives and Metonymic Desire,” was published by Edinburgh UP in 2022. In addition to writing literary criticism and creative nonfiction, Sovay is also working on her first novel.