Sometimes an overgrown grave is the most relief a woman can get. “OLD MAD MOLLY HAWES WHO WAS TAKEN TO COLNEY HATCH ASYLUM IN A TINKERS CART STRAPPED IN SHE LOOKED AS IF THE DEVIL HAS CHASED HER THREE TIMES THROUGH THE FLAMES OF HELL FIRE AND TURNED OUT THIS HIDEOUS WILD BROWN EYED OLD WOMAN,” reads a line in all capitals, on one of a number of embroidered samplers by Lorina Bulwer, a needleworker incarcerated in the Female Lunatic Ward of Great Yarmouth Workhouse from 1893 to her death in 1912. Her words read like something from a fever dream—a fever dream that was actually a life, a life in dream, spent dreaming of a life: “Unlock the west fort / Let us go free,” exclaims one line. Streams of unpunctuated and capitalised writing take the form of excessive diary entries, autobiography, exasperated monologue, small-town gossip, protest, jokes, psychogeography, insults and accusations, poems and song; all occur simultaneously, coming together to create a sense of dislocated time. There is a narrative to Lorina’s accusations of fraud, physical abuse by a doctor, emotional and material deception—directed at those with status and power in the town and workhouse—that cover the embroidered samplers; but it is a linearity that is constantly being interrupted, ruptured, broken into and shuffled, split apart, spread across strips of different coloured cotton fabrics, possibly gleaned as scraps in the workhouse. “I HAVE WASTED TEN YEARS IN THIS DAMNATION HELL FIRE TRAMP DEN OF OLD WOMEN OLD HAGS,” read another line.

The root of the word ecstasy is originally from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside of oneself”. There is a sense of the ecstatic in Lorina’s words, as well as the inevitable, the unavoidable; what can be summarised in a single line from Sarah Kane’s poetically bleak play Crave: “I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling!”. It was a character in that same play who declared, “What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief. ” In Lorina Bulwer’s samplers, grief-ridden gossip and supposition functions as a kind of anti-surveillance, an alternative administer of knowledge and truth to the entrenched authority of medical, church and state institutions that wield their power over her. Over a century on from Lorina’s incarceration, what’s clear is that madness is political: a social and cultural phenomenon as much as a biological or medical one. It’s also an incredibly reasonable response to the current state of things - the unfreedoms of everyday life, the overworked and underpaid hours, the violent hierarchy of nation states and the deadly borders they impose, the denial of affordable or safe housing, the institutionalisation and exploitation of loneliness; all which gather momentum like a ball of thread ricocheting across the earth to culminate in unnecessary suffering, that is in turn depoliticised to appear individual rather than structural. A society where the only defense for not cutting down trees full of starlings is that they may benefit the local economy; the whole of life can be summed up as this. How to be “well” in a world that wants us if not dead - deadened, obliging, accepting, indifferent? And when wellness means all those things, shouldn’t we be more concerned with the horrors of going sane?

Many incendiary women throughout history, such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich—both from East Anglia—and Joan of Arc, who during her trial in 1431 said that her guidance came from a source she called voices, moved, whether freely or forced, towards ecstatic and cerebral obsession: a lifeforce, that offered a chance for waywardness, and presented time for intellectualism, reflection, solitude and deep engagement with the world and oneself; an escape from the curfew of everyday life, when, regardless of class, women’s options outside of marriage, relentless childbearing, and hard physical labour were incredibly limited. Religious visioning, or madness, or witchcraft, or poetry have all offered openings to be able to follow desire over duty, like a match struck in the dark—to make your excuses and get down from the tired table of domesticity: sink full of dishes, umbrella shaken open, a dying pot of rosemary on the windowsill, fridge left ajar, breaking lilac and shuttered light, curtained rooms, bellyache, sounds of a distant house party... What Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford described in NO FEE: A LINE OR TWO FOR FREE in 1979:

the houses are murmuring with many small pockets of emotion

on which spongy ground adults’ lives are being erected & paid

for daily

while their feet and their children’s feet are tangled around

like those of fen larks

in the fine steely wires which run to & fro between love &

economics

affections must not support the rent

I. neglect. the. house

What is the weight of fabric? I recently rewatched A Question of Silence, written and directed by the Dutch filmmaker and feminist Marleen Gorris in 1982. Three women, strangers to one another, collectively and wordlessly kill the male owner of a clothing boutique in Amsterdam—who confronts one of them for shoplifting—with the stilettos and coat hangers and mannequins that adorn the shop. We watch as they return to their domestic and working lives: a child-laden housewife, a waitress, and a secretary, and are soon arrested. They do not protest their arrest, nor do they speak to anyone about the murder: not the cops, not family and friends, colleagues, or the female psychiatrist, Dr. van Den Bos, who is appointed by the state to determine why they acted. As Amelia Groom wrote in an essay accompanying an online screening of the film by Another Gaze, “In the beginning, the women are all isolated in their varying conditions of silence - but the silence gradually becomes more collective, and more like an active practice.” Silence can force visibility as much as participation in the discourse it offers brief relief from; particularly now, when to refuse to speak—speak up, speak to, speak about, speak for—publicly (and by that I mean virtually), whether about your own personal experiences (e.g. during the Me Too movement), or in the form of resharing infographic posts about Palestine on Instagram inbetween skincare routines and cat selfies, is to be seen to skulk in the chorus. But in A Question of Silence, the three women do not hide in the chorus, but construct their own: shared, tightly-coiled in its intimacy.

At their trial, the three women in the film remain silent throughout the proceedings—faraway looks of boredom on their faces—when the male prosecutor asserts that gender is irrelevant to the act: of course, it would have been the same if three men had killed a woman, he says. At this, the women on trial begin to laugh - a laughter that ripples across the room, spreading to every woman in the courtroom, including the female witnesses in the public gallery who have refused to testify to the murder. It is not provocative or brazen laughter, nor is it bitter, aghast or the cynical laughter that comes from assumed moral superiority; it is not laughter that can be explained or appropriated to justify or defend a position - in the same way that Dr. van Den Bos tries and fails to pathologize their action: their fathers did not beat them, they are not working from any identified ideology, no one man has gravely wronged them in the past. It’s hard to articulate exactly what kind of laughter it is—almost joy, the thrilling violence of clarity—that reverberates throughout the court, the law, this site of language’s authority: there is nothing to do but laugh. Because, as Dr. van Den Bos tries to explain to the confused male judge: “It’s really quite funny—”; but the room is so loud with uncontrollable laughter he cannot hear her. Laughter ruptures time; interrupts it, relinquishes progression - but ‘progress’ is premised on patriarchal time. The three women on trial are eventually removed from the court, still laughing, while the other women in the courtroom walk out together, leaving the baffled men to continue with the trial on their own.

The judges at Joan of Arc’s trial insisted on knowing the story of the voices: they wanted descriptions and names, identifiable proof, and a narrative - one that insisted on the affirmation of conventional time, a life presumed directional rather than dreaming: we grow old, hot water grows cold, we awake to find ourselves in the morning, still alive, saying, I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling! But for Joan of Arc, the voices—which could be another word for desire—had no story: they were at once as tangible and intangible as Lorina Bulwer’s embroideries, as her words, as her grave, now overgrown and neglected, not far from the old workhouse site. The immediacy of her stitched words, her ability to work fabric into rage, was just one way in which she defied what attempted to contain her; as Joan of Arc’s response to the judges when they asked her, “In what language do your voices speak to you?” and she answered, “Better language than yours,”; as the woman walking briskly down King Street in Great Yarmouth being told the CeX electronics shop was on fire, for her to simply answer “GOOD!”. 

This lived contradiction—between speaking and silence, between the tangible and intangible, between our experience of time and the patriarchal time-narrative imposed on us, between madness and the horrors of going sane—are held together in the palm of a poem by the late Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert, called Rings of Ash, which I will read here now:

It’s my voices that are singing

so the others can’t sing —

those figures gagged grey in the dawn,

those dressed in the rain like desolate birds.

There is, in this waiting,

a rumor of breaking lilac.

And there is, when the day arrives,

a division of the sun into smaller black suns.

And at night, always,

a tribe of mutilated words

looks for refuge in my throat,

so that they won’t sing —

the ill-fated, the owners of silence.