Madness in Linda Bouchard’s Black Burned Wood

Abstract

With its images of paranoia, anger, resignation, and infantilism, Linda Bouchard’s Black Burned Wood may easily be aligned with musical representations of madwomen. The text, a cycle of eleven poems collected under the title “Sara Songs” takes the form of a rambling monologue in which Sara struggles to come to grips with her role in an unspecified but horrible act. Although the syntactic structure and verbal content of the poems place Sara in a state of derangement, it is the musical setting that is responsible for the instantaneous and overwhelmingly raw portrayal of Sara’s madness. This paper explores the use of fragmentation, non-linearity, musical fixation, and dissonance to musically represent Sara’s madness.

Résumé

Par ses images de paranoïa, de colère, de sacrifice et d’infantilisme, Black Burned Wood de Linda Bouchard peut facilement s’inscrire dans le sillage des représentations musicales de la folie féminine. Le livret, un cycle de 11 poèmes réunis sous le titre de « Sara Songs », prend la forme d’un monologue décousu dans lequel le personnage de Sara peine à accepter son rôle dans un acte incertain mais horrible. Bien que la structure syntaxique et le phrasé des poèmes montrent le déséquilibre mental de Sara, c’est la musique qui est responsable de la description instantanée et incroyablement à vif de sa folie. Cet article explore l’utilisation de la fragmentation, de la non-linéarité, de la fixation musicale et de la dissonance pour représenter musicalement la folie de Sara.

Notes

• [1] The author suggests that Sara may have killed her parents. Liner notes, Dora Ohrenstein, The Urban Diva, CRi CD 654.
• [2] For literature on madness, see Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); and Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
• [3] Ohrenstein is vague about the link of these pieces to an intended representation of madness, but it is evident from the liner notes that she is aware of the character’s wild behaviour.
• [4] Ethan Morrden, Demented: The World of the Opera Diva (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984).
• [5] For literature on madness in music, see Catherine Clément, Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Susan McClary, “Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen,” in Feminine Endings, Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 80–111 (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Ellen Rosand, “Operatic Madness, A Challenge to Convention,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher, 241–87 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mary Ann Smart, “The Silencing of Lucia,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 2 (1992): 119–41; Alan E. Williams, “Madness in the Music Theater Works of Peter Maxwell Davies,” Perspectives of New Music 38, no. 1 (2000): 77–100.
• [6] McClary, Feminine Endings, 81.
• [7] Carol Thomas Neely, “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1991): 323.
• [8] As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore in nineteenth-century literature by women, concepts of nature are often constructed as female, and as the polar opposite to culture. See The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); for more on embodiment, see Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
• [9] See especially Showalter, Female Malady, 139–42.
• [10] See especially Smart, “Silencing of Lucia”; Rosand, “Operatic Madness: and McClary, “Excess and Frame.”
• [11] Smart, “Silencing of Lucia,” 137.
• [12] Rosand, “Operatic Madness,” 242.
• [13] Smart, “Silencing of Lucia,” 131. In this case, Smart is discussing the shift from scena to slow movement, as “a deliberate flouting of formal convention.”
• [14] Rosand, “Operatic Madness,” 264.
• [15] McClary, Feminine Endings, 86–7.
• [16] Roger Savage, “Le Marteau sans Maître and the Logic of Late Capitalism,” Ex Tempore 11, no. 2 (2003): 26.
• [17] Davies as quoted by Williams, “Madness,” 81. For Williams, Maxwell Davies’ use of the anti-musical in his compositions is directly linked to a modernist critique of the musical establishment.