A writer's suicide: On creativity, mental health, gender and ethics

The correlation between creativity and mental illness has been at the centre of ongoing debates for quite some time. This has its roots in the Romantic era (late 18th to mid-19th century), when melancholia and madness were considered to be the signs of creativity and genius. Because of this, writers like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and many other prominent creative minds have been represented in popular narratives as having reached the heights of their creative careers while struggling with their mental health. This paper addresses the need for moving away from Romantic era notions of the relationship between madness, genius, and melancholia that reinforce the inseparability of the writer and the text, thereby trivialising the real causes and effects of mental illness. The paper also addresses the need for a health humanities intervention within the Indian literary public, using examples from the existing narratives on the late Malayalam writer Rajelakshmy ‒ an established woman writer in the 1960s ‒ who died by suicide in her mid-thirties. This paper will also reflect on the author's own experience of reading and working with Rajelakshmy's writings over the years.