ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The purpose of this paper is to examine Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted to deepen our understanding of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and explore the confluence of the medical and cultural discourses. Girl, Interrupted written by Kaysen, a patient with BPD, is a valuable memoir about her experience in Mclean Hospital. Unlike other medical narratives which view a patient as the passive and silent others who necessitate medical treatment from medical professionals, Girl, Interrupted as a memoir, problematizes the conventional hierarchy between the medical professionals and patients to prove that medical practices relating to the diagnosis and treatment of BPD patient are poorly defined and practiced at the cost of the patient’s freedom and affected by the cultural prejudices toward the female patients. For Kaysen, her life is suddenly “interrupted” as in Vermeer’s painting ‘Girl, Interrupted at her Music’. As her resistance to the interruption, she attempts to interrupt the conventional relation between the doctor and the patient by questioning the reliability of the doctor’s diagnosis of her as BPD. Cross-examining the medical documents from the hospital with doctor"s and her memories, she interrupts the doctor’s decision to put her in the mental hospital. In her interruption, she notes that the description of BPD in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not provide the sufficient and persuasive description of BPD. Further she refrains from emotional inflation of her case, and presents the readers a perceptive analysis of the contradictory nature of medical practices from the perspective of the patient. Crossing the borders between doctor and the patient, between freedom and captivity, and between power and powerless, Girl, Interrupted becomes the cultural interruption to what people think as normalcy in medical practices and provides the different sets of paradigm of illness narrative.