The Romanticisation of the Tortured Artist

For a long time, I remained convinced that the only difference between myself and others was the permanent scowl I carried with me everywhere. The turmoil of my internal state and several failed attempts to deal with it were expressed outwardly as extreme introversion. In the process, I actively forged the impression that I was always huddling over some book, some thought, always thinking. Always, for better or for worse, romanticised by those around me. Nothing unusual. Except that it was. But by then, my refusal to engage in socialising became endearing.

A genuine incapability to show interest in anything, in anyone, became a quirk. My opinions now held the “alright, here’s the deal…” kind of bluntness that vaguely resembled some form of enlightened objectivity. I was always explained with a shrug, a “she’s just weird” and a laugh, an “oh yeah, she’s a real tortured artist.” But I basked in the glow of that last one: the Tortured Artist. I wore the title proudly. I draped it around myself and watched delightfully as the reality of my situation melted away, giving way to me dramatically writhing around on the floor as I grappled with intellectually debilitating passion for books and poetry and art and life. I loved my tortured artist because she softened the reality of my experience. The endearing nature of the label itself overrode the difficulty and the messiness and the unendearing nature of its reality. The tortured artist cleaned up my mess: folded anxiety into a neat little package, stretched my depression into a winning, signature scowl. She normalised mental illness; made it acceptable, necessary, even; as part of being misunderstood and as part of being creative.

But this conceptualisation is an illusion, and this illusion shatters in the face of its ineffectiveness. I learned this the hard way, where the label itself wore thin as I pulled and tugged at it, attempting to encompass the full throttle of my experience. Exasperated, it eventually became easier to perpetuate the air of inexplicable inevitability that surrounded the mental illness/creativity dichotomy, than to try and understand the intricacies of the individual stories contributing to it. For myself, for others. Taken together, and on a much larger scale, the tortured artist becomes a trope. It becomes a trope saturated in the glorification of mental illness. It feeds a collective insensitivity and masquerades as a ‘Nice Thought’. To problematize the tortured artist, then, becomes difficult. To do so would require an entire reconceptualisation of what the genius-madness link denotes – to consider the skeleton of the relationship before it became full with fantasy.

This skeleton is propped up largely on the notion of the genius, which, in itself, follows an illustrious history. “Genius,” for example, was originally used by the Ancient Greeks to describe a demon: an external entity, a gift from the Gods, a source of divine inspiration which was handed down to only a select few, and without whom the individual would be rendered simply mediocre.[1] For a long time “genius” communicated the understanding that it was not the individual who possessed the talent, but rather the talent which possessed the individual, and the significance of this definition is made clear when considering the dramatic shift it underwent during the Romantic era, where “genius” became a resource dissociable from its possessor – claimed by man, straight from the hands of the gods.

For writer Elizabeth Gilbert, this anthropocentric redefinition of the term directly impacts the creative individual in that it introduces a plethora of responsibilities – responsibilities that might have otherwise been placed on the demon, such as failure, carrying the weight of the world’s expectations and demands. A push further entrenching the term into anthropocentricism would, therefore, be inevitably met with an even harder push back, a push down, onto the creative individual, where ultimately, the genius must create and work endlessly, even through (especially through) the perpetual ache caused by the to-and-fro of these newfound pressures. And, it is precisely because of these pressures that the nature of the genius-madness link becomes such that one slip of the foot would be enough to catalyse the inevitable descent into madness.

A wealth of psychological literature exists here to support this suggestion. All consider the commonalities between the genius and the madman. Hans Eysenck (1995) found genius to be in close relation to Psychoticism (risk-taking and impulsive behaviour, as well as deviance from social norms).[2] Similarly, he found that both held ideas that were “novel, unconventional and grandiose,” and were “workaholic, ambitious, narcissistic and self-promoting”.[3] Another study demonstrated further similarities in cognitive styles.[4] Both the genius and the madman were found to share a compromised ability in filtering thoughts, resulting in “irrelevant associations” that were characteristic of thinking seen in schizophrenia.[5] Both were also observed to share an enhanced ability in making logical assumptions and connections, which, while useful when drawing a connection between apples falling from trees and the motion of the planets, was also identified as characteristic of schizophrenic thinking.[6]

The list goes on. And the further down the list we go, the less the genius-madness link resembles a dichotomy and instead a two-sides-of-the-same-coin situation. We might be exonerated of the collective insensitivity charge, then, when the scientifically proven closeness of the genius and the madman appears to reinforce so strongly our ideas about creativity and mental illness relying on one another in some way. As if it can’t be helped. But nowhere in the literature has it been suggested, nor demonstrated, that mental illness is a direct cause of creativity. Correlation has been criminally twisted into causation. And it’s not just society doing the twisting. In a particularly compelling study, a number of writers were measured and scored on clinical scales, such as depression and hysteria. The results found that both the successful and the highly creative writers all fell somewhere between the control (normal) group, and the group consisting of patients with psychosis. The highly creative writers – the geniuses, the highest creative achievers of all the participants – were not deemed completely mad (they had not yielded scores nearing the levels of the patients with psychosis), but it was still suggested that they were ultimately on a steady decline towards insanity.[7] Considering the situation of these “potentially crazy” individuals and their genius, the researchers concluded that it “helps to be slightly mad.”[8]

The choice of words is enticing. It feeds into our Nice Thought. But, at the crux of this assertion is a misinterpretation. It’s a tortured artist. It’s being told that teetering on psychosis is, if not thrilling, then helpful to creativity – but only if the teetering is slight. That’s important. Correlation’s newfound interchangeability with causation encourages a realisation of one’s potential to be “crazy,” over one’s potential in general. The reality of mental illness is diminished, minimised in favour of the promises it carries for those who should live with it. It smoothens it out, folds it into little packages, romanticizes the experience so that an entire generation of geniuses is produced, all attached to their mental illness.

They’ll hear a Nobel prize winning mathematician stating that he “wouldn’t have had such good scientific ideas” should he have “thought more normally,” and grow ever more attached to their bouts of psychosis. Or they’ll listen to a 32-year-old director of one of Australia’s leading TV stations saying, “When you’re on a high, you feel you can do anything…. There’s no stopping you. It’s an exciting state to be in”, genuinely believing their most productive self exists only in periods of manic highs.[9]

The tortured artist sweeps everything else under the rug – potential treatment included. At some point, however, the ache of genius becomes too much. The to-ing and fro-ing of the ever-increasing pressures placed on creative individuals would, with enough time, become nauseating. To create in spite of this would be intolerable. But the false inevitability perpetuated by the tortured artist, the correlation-cum-causation, the overwhelming glorification of the madman in the genius-madness link – it’s all a Romantic myth born and bred by society and one of the major reasons artists become so reluctant to seek help.[10]