Airless Spaces

 ABSTRACT: In Airless Spaces (1998), Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of

Sex (1970), narrates her experience as an in-patient in a mental institution and the first

months after the institutionalization. Unlike the traditional autobiographical account, the

narrative is constructed by interconnected short-stories focusing on different people the

narrator had contact with in the hospital. There is no direct identification between the

name on the cover, the narrator and the main character, as posed by Lejeune in the

“autobiographical contract”, but subtle references to the author’s experiences are

noticeable throughout the narrative. The aim of this paper is to investigate both the

construction of the autobiographical narrative and to reflect on the account of an

institutionalized woman and her understanding of the status of mental patients in the 20th

century in regards to class, gender and race. This analysis is based on the works of

Lejeune (2008), Arfuch (2010), Smith & Watson (2010) and Kirk and Okazawa-Rey

(2010).

KEYWORDS: Life writing; mental disease; Shulamith Firestone