Shattering paradigms, embracing uncertainty: female mental illness in contemporary fiction (2000-2020)

Just as canonical stories of female mental illness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) - reflect the concerns and controversies of their respective eras, so too does the fiction of today; yet, contemporary depictions are more diverse than those of any previous historical period, with recent novels touching upon a multitude of issues - medicalisation, institutionalisation, self-care, identity, recovery - that expose an unparalleled range of inquiry into mental health.

This thesis investigates how fiction written between 2000 and 2020 represents female mental illness, tracing a shift toward open-ended and often chaotic portrayals that resist reductive stereotypes. I argue that these narratives contribute vital perspectives that complicate and enrich dominant scholarly understandings of mental illness, expanding conversations beyond clinical and sociological frameworks. Drawing on disability studies, feminist theory, cultural criticism, Mad Studies and the growing field of medical humanities, I examine how recent novels intervene in debates about diagnosis, treatment, recovery and the medicalisation of emotion, while also confronting the intersections of mental illness with race, class and sexuality. In doing so, this thesis highlights the critical role of women's writing in reshaping how mental illness is conceptualised, represented and experienced in contemporary culture.

After evaluating the literary history of female mental illness, my analysis focuses on the following contemporary works: Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Lucie Britsch's Sad Janet (2020); Poppy Shakespeare (2006) by Clare Allan and Rabbits for Food (2019) by Binnie Kirshenbaum; Jacqueline Roy's The Fat Lady Sings (2000), Mira T. Lee's Everything Here is Beautiful (2018) and Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005); and a selection of Young Adult novels including My Heart and Other Black Holes (2015) by Jasmine Warga, I Was Here (2015) by Gayle Forman and The Summoning (2008) by Kelley Armstrong.

I show that these novels - with the exception of YAL - provide a wealth of representations that are finally beginning to reflect the true diversity of mental illness while simultaneously providing a social commentary that links to timely issues within the mental health landscape. These are novels that don't end with cure, that don't hinge on tried-and-true treatment methods, that don't mask the messiness and chaos of mental illness; they present protagonists who self-medicate, or conversely, resist treatment altogether, women who don't want to get better or cannot get better, characters who choose to live alongside their mental illnesses rather than treat them as life-limiting disease that must be eradicated. These are novels that challenge established health discourse by offering glimpses into often occluded, non-normative experiences. I argue that this is a welcome trend that has the power to ameliorate stigma and foster social equality by offering additional routes of recognition, education and compassion, and perhaps even more significantly, position mental illness front and centre in a way that demands - and deserves - to be heard.