Asylum by Patrick McGrath Essay PDF

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An analysis of the novel "Asylum" by Patrick McGrath....

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name Mara Reisman ENG 430C 27 September 2018

Asylum Patrick McGrath’s novel Asylum is a story about a woman named Stella, the wife of a psychiatrist named Max, who has a passionate and destructive affair with a patient named Edgar. This affair has detrimental effects on her marriage and her relationship with her son Charlie. Stella’s relationship with Max is the definition of dried up. It is an unpassionate relationship, and Stella is a passionate woman who does not fit in with this at all. Max’s very job as a psychiatrist calls for him to be as dispassionate as possible. The state of their marriage at the beginning of the novel is one of obligation. From Max’s point of view, the relationship fulfills the gender roles of the time. When Stella fails to fulfill that role as a wife, he begins to hate her. As the family structure is upheaved, Stella stops cleaning, cooking, taking care of the house, Max loses all interest in her. When Edgar comes along, Stella’s pent-up passion is released completely. After spending so many years living an unpassionate life and being around an unpassionate man, she can’t help but be consumed by it. While I did judge her to be reckless, I still understood her feelings and motivations. Her emotions were so thoroughly conveyed that it was hard not to sympathize with her. She sacrifices so much for her relationship, she even goes so far as to leave everything behind to pursue a passionate life. When Stella is with Edgar, their relationship is vastly different compared to her relationship with Max. It is fiery, all-consuming, and eventually violent. Both relationships had possessive qualities to them, but Stella’s relationship with Edgar is radically so.

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Edgar sees her as an object, a possession of his that he can’t bear to let anyone else have. This is expressed when Edgar makes a drawing of Stellas’s head. “What I don’t want,” said Edgar, “is to see you—” … “To see me how?” “As you see you. As others see you. As a desirable woman, a beautiful woman, I’m not interested in any of that. I don’t want certainty. I just want to get a likeness.” She didn’t understand. “As a stranger then?” Now he too was frowning at the drawing and impatiently tapping his pencil on the table. “Not even as a stranger.” “As an object?” (105) Here the reader can see how possessive Edgar is of Stella and how he sees her as an object. He appears both intimate and disconnected in this relationship. Stella fills the role of possession and tool for Edgar’s use, manipulating her need for passion and love to get what he wants. Stella’s relationship with Charlie is simple in the beginning but transforms into something more complicated after her affair. The depth of their relationship doesn’t surface until Stella abandons Max and runs off to London. She has to keep herself from thinking about him as she leaves: “For a moment or two she stood rooted to the spot as she thought of what would happen to Charlie, and she almost changed her mind. But she didn’t, she pushed the thought away” (101). As time passes, she begins to miss Charlie deeply. “So the days passed, and all her efforts went into keeping Edgar steady, though when she went to bed, and he went back to his clay, her mind would turn to Charlie, and she wept silently into her pillow” (125). In a compelling passage near the end, her relationship with Charlie culminates into an intense climax when she leaves him to drown. This was a moment that completely shocked me and it raises the issue of how Stella has projected her problems onto Charlie. Charlie was in deeper water now, trying to scramble upright and flailing around and shouting, and something in his shouting brought her to her feet. She stood in the gusting wind and rain with her shoulders hunched up tight and watched him for a few moments. Then she turned her head to the side and brought her cigarette to her lips. The edges of

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her head scarf fluttered wildly about her face; the waves were almost gone. She turned back and dimly saw a head break the surface, and an arm claw in the air, then go under again, and again brought the cigarette to her lips. (200) I believe she does this not because she saw Edgar in him as she later claims, but because she could still only see Max. She hated Max so much and was still so in love with Edgar that she had to get rid of anything resembling Max, including her own son. Overall, Stella’s relationships with others are motivated by her desire for a passionate life. She needed a relationship that was exciting and emotional, that made her feel intimate with the other person. After being deprived of this for so long, when she finally has a passionate relationship, she throws everything away to keep it no matter how dearly she holds it, including her own son.

Works Cited McGrath, Patrick. Asylum. Penguin, 1997....