5 - The Unmapped Country: Unravelling Stereotypes of Madness

Summary

Writing the Mind

In his critique of Tripticks, Robert Nye had written: ‘It can still be hoped that Miss Quin will chuck the box of tricks away and sit down one day to write a whole book in which observation of the heart's affections is allowed to predominate and inform.’ This gendered and patronising review, and the distinction between a so-called box of tricks and the ‘observation of the heart's affections’, which he saw as her writing's main strength, nevertheless stung Quin into response. She wrote to Boyars: ‘Am also well into another book – another journey of discovery/rediscovery and taking Robert Nye's criticism seriously: writing/dealing with “matters of the heart”.’ But rather than narrating the ‘heart's affections’, what both the unfinished and unpublished short story ‘Matters of the Heart’ and incomplete book The Unmapped Country narrate are their protagonists’ experiences of madness and subsequent incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. After the Mediterranean train journey quest of Passages and chase of the American road trip in Tripticks, The Unmapped Country is Quin's final search narrative, a largely interior one into the landscapes of the mind and psychiatric institution. In The Unmapped Country Sandra is asked by a psychiatrist to ‘Tell me about the journey you took’, and in ‘Matters of the Heart’ Linda says, ‘This is, I suppose, the first stage on the real journey.’

The title of The Unmapped Country is inspired by a particular moment in Daniel Deronda which considers the possibility of writing the elusive and perhaps even unknowable ‘unmapped country’ of the psyche:

But that movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, […] was more peculiar, and what would be called less reasonable. It came from that streak of superstition in her which attached itself both to her confidence and her terror – […] It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to take this action about the necklace. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Gwendolen Harleth, Eliot's complex female protagonist, feels compelled to keep ‘the necklace’ she had previously attempted to pawn, a necklace she rightly suspects Daniel Deronda of recovering on her behalf.