SOURCE: Kritzer, Amelia Howe. “Madness and Political Change in the Plays of Caryl Churchill.” In Madness in Drama, pp. 203–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Kritzer analyzes the theme of insanity in relation to self-identity and oppression in Churchill's Lovesick, Schreber's Nervous Illness, The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, and several other plays.

‘The unitary self,’ as Toril Moi observes, is ‘the central concept of Western male humanism.’ Moi argues that this concept is ‘in effect part of patriarchal ideology,’ because it constructs the ideal self as ‘a phallic self … gloriously autonomous, [which] banishes from itself all conflict, contradiction and ambiguity.’¹ This patriarchal ideal of unitary identity, of course, provides the foundation for the concept of sanity in western societies, as is emphasized in the common description of one major form of insanity as split personality. Thus, definitions of madness and normality function within...