Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows

Year, pages: 2023, 44 - 55

This article posits that Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows (2014) introduces a critique of how neoliberal visions of resilience have permeated medical discourses on mental health, resulting in a perceived moral imperative over the patient to improve, which the author counters with a model of resilience firmly rooted in interdependence and the social potential of vulnerability. Toews’s focus on the narrator Yolandi’s struggle with the aftermath of her sister’s suicide also troubles the concept of resilience by introducing the idea of assisted suicide as a possible iteration of a “good death”, completely circumventing any possibility of recovery or adaptation. What holds the key for Yolandi’s recovery and happiness, Toews seems to imply, is accepting her sister’s rejection of resilience as a viable option.

López-Serrano, L. 2023. Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows. In World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no.2, pp. 44-55. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.4

López-Serrano, L. (2023). Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows. World Literature Studies, 15(2), 44-55. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.4

Publisher: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, v. v. i.