4-48 Psychosis Sarah Kane Analysis

“4.48 Psychosis” is Sarah Kane’s last play before she committed suicide. Simon Hattenstone in her article published by Guardian weekend states that she admitted herself in the Maudsley Hospital in Londen and spent her last days there. She refused to take her pills as her agent said. She was constantly talking about wanting to be dead there. As her acquaintances state she hanged herself following taking overdose in the bathroom of a hospital (Hattenstone). It can be interpreted in a way illustrating her depression and illness and the tragedy in her mind, because it is her last work. David Tushingham accepted her “as a mental patient” dramatist whose illness is not very “exceptional” (125). This play is illustrating the distraught mind of a woman …show more content…
However, it might help the self, resist surrendering to the repressive forces in one way or another. Apparently, when it comes to Sarah Kane (1971-199) this desire for destruction is embedded in her abnormal life as well as her extraordinary style. Amongst all her plays, “4:48 Psychosis” is the best emblem of Kane’s life, death, and style. It has violently subverted the dramatic constructions and reconstructed a dramatic language so that we can claim not only it does touch upon Kane’s darkest part of the psyche but also her new dramatic aesthetic functions as a resistance tool against the clinical medicine as well as the repressive …show more content…
.. /I can't make decisions /I can't eat /I can't sleep /I can't think /I cannot overcome my loneliness, my fear, my disgust/ I am fat/ I cannot write /I cannot love (4). Supposedly, the broken, strange, and intersexual “I” cannot bear the dark parts of her psyche, because the “I” does not fit in taxonomic classifications and categories. In this case, the abjection of self is certain. Julia Kristeva confirms that “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules? The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The self and its social context should be isolated from the normal people and prescription of lunatic asylum benefits. In fact, confinement or omission of the madness has got a long story and is incorporated with a host of religious or socio-political practices. In the 15th century “ships of fools” allegorically implied that there is no country for the madman whose is nothing but the crime of social norms. “why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame. /Shame, shame, shame / drown in your fucking shame (Kane 7)”. This shame is more or less rooted in a judgmental view of the other. Indeed, without the other, the “I” would not have come to terms with the process of medical treatment.” To win the