S Y N A P S I S

Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license.

Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine cannot describe” (Frank 2000, 135). This blog post examines how two illness narratives—Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America and Hilary Mantel’s 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost—use supernatural elements to articulate the disruptive power of illness.

As a psychiatrist, the question of how to respond to “the experience that medicine can’t describe,” particularly when that experience invokes the supernatural, is important. How should I, a medically literate reader, respond to stories about ghosts and angels without pathologizing these storytellers? Perhaps this scepticism is why Frank advocates keeping professionals away from illness stories, as a way for wounded storytellers to avoid being “diminished by illness” (vii).  His suggestion seems to be that scientific scrutiny will devalue illness narratives. 

In this article, I would like to illuminate Frank’s statement by offering “paranoid” and “reparative” readings of the ghosts and angels in these texts, to use two terms first defined by American academic and queer activist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her 1992 paper “White Glasses,” Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote of her desire to “constantly question and deconstruct the sick role, the identity of the “person with life-threatening disease”  (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1993, 201).  This is reminiscent of Susan Sontag, who wrote her essay Illness as Metaphor after being diagnosed with breast cancer (Sontag 1991). Sontag’s polemical work is an argument against the myths of psychological and moral causes of disease, by interrogating and challenging illness metaphors including, especially, “burning passion” for tuberculosis, “invasion” for cancer, and “plague” for AIDS.

Kosofsky Sedgwick similarly perturbs us with her concept of “reparative reading” in her provocatively subtitled paper, “you’re so paranoid, you probably think this paper is about you,” a critique of what she termed “paranoid reading” (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1997, 16). Kosofsky Sedgwick defines paranoid reading as rigid and reductive (8). It is, she writes,  “reflexive and mimetic,” and she criticizes it on the grounds that it fixes notions and ideas in place, calling it “the kind of reading that ensues when we parse prose through a theoretical mill” (9). She argues for a more generous mode of reading, “a reading of surprises, creativity and love,” which she calls “reparative” (25).

Through “paranoid” and “reparative” readings, as defined by Kosofsky Sedgwick, I explore ghosts as metaphor, migraine aura, literary device, and psychosomatic symptom, and angels as religious allusion, wish fulfillment, and hallucinatory experience.

Illness and the Supernatural: A Liminal Space

Both Giving Up the Ghost and Angels in America depict characters grappling with chronic, life-altering conditions. Mantel’s memoir recounts her childhood, misdiagnosed endometriosis, and subsequent infertility, while Kushner’s play is set in 1980s New York, during the height of the AIDS crisis. These works suggest that illness is not just a medical condition but a state of liminality—a threshold between health and disease, life and death, reality and hallucination.

Frank’s concept of “the wounded storyteller” suggests that chronic illness damages not just the body but also the voice, making it difficult to articulate suffering within the constraints of biomedical discourse. This wounded voice finds expression through the supernatural: Mantel’s ghosts and Kushner’s angels.

Mantel’s Ghosts: Metaphor, Migraine, and Memory

Mantel’s memoir opens with a ghostly encounter: “I know it is my stepfather’s ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I know it is my stepfather’s ghost.” This moment signals the memoir’s thematic tension between the rational and the inexplicable. Mantel repeatedly acknowledges her visions as “seeing things that aren’t there,” yet refuses to dismiss them as mere hallucinations.

A paranoid reading of Mantel’s ghosts offers several interpretations:

1. Migraine Aura Phenomenon – Mantel’s migraines cause visual distortions, blurring the line between neurological symptom and supernatural vision.
2. Metaphor for Loss – The ghosts represent Mantel’s lost fertility and unborn children, echoing her chosen epitaph: “My children who won’t hear. The night full of cries they will never make.”
3. Gothic Literary Device – Mantel employs elements of “homely gothic,” a genre juxtaposing domesticity with the uncanny. Mantel’s gothic haunted-house memoir has echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s epistolary protest story, The Yellow Wallpaper, which chronicles her postnatal psychosis and is as critical as Mantel, of her male psychiatrist (Gilman and Dock 1998).  
4. Psychosomatic Symptom – Psychoanalytic readings suggest the ghosts symbolize unresolved childhood trauma, particularly linked to her family’s unconventional living arrangements.
5. Reparative Reading: The Ghosts Are Real – Mantel invites readers to accept the ghosts at face value, challenging the medical tendency to pathologize experiences beyond scientific explanation.

Kushner’s Angels: Hallucination or Revelation?

In Angels in America, the protagonist, Prior Walter, encounters an angel, who declares him a prophet. Prior’s struggle—between embracing the angel’s message and resisting his impending death—mirrors the broader AIDS crisis, where illness is both a sentence and a transformation.

Possible interpretations of Kushner’s angel include:

1. Biblical Allusion – Prior’s favorite Bible story is Jacob wrestling with an angel, an apt parallel for his battle with AIDS. Like Jacob, Prior is marked by his encounter, walking with a limp.
2. Nurse as Angel – The same actor plays both the Angel and Prior’s nurse, blurring the boundary between divine visitation and compassionate care.
3. Wish Fulfillment – Freud described wish fulfillment as the satisfaction of deep-seated desires. Prior’s sexual encounter with the angel, a hyper-feminine being, may symbolize his internalized struggle with his sexuality and society’s condemnation of AIDS as a “gay plague.”
4. AIDS-Related Hallucination – From a psychiatric standpoint, Prior’s visions align with symptoms of HIV-related mania and neurological complications.
5. Reparative Reading: The Angel Is Real – Kushner refuses to dictate how his supernatural elements should be interpreted. The play’s dreamlike structure—evident in a scene where Prior and Harper meet within each other’s hallucinations—suggests a reality where supernatural visitations are valid experiences.

Illness as a Queer, Liminal Experience

Both texts depict illness as inherently “queer”—not solely in terms of sexuality but as a transgressive, destabilizing force. Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that illness disrupts linear narratives of the self, making embodied experience strange and unfamiliar. Prior’s journey, from AIDS patient to unwilling prophet, and Mantel’s memoir, haunted by lost futures, exemplify this notion.

Supernatural phenomena in these texts challenge the authority of biomedical discourse. The wounded storytellers of Mantel and Kushner articulate an experience that is, as Frank puts it, “not easily told, nor understood.” By employing ghosts and angels, these authors resist the reduction of illness to clinical terms, offering instead a deeply human, emotionally resonant narrative.

Conclusion: The Supernatural as Narrative Necessity

Why do Mantel and Kushner turn to the supernatural? One explanation is that illness, particularly chronic and life-threatening conditions, resists simple description. The supernatural provides a means to articulate experiences that medicine cannot define.

Susan Sontag described illness as a “foreign country” requiring a different passport (p37). Frank’s “remission society” similarly suggests that those with chronic conditions exist in an in-between state, neither fully healthy nor terminally ill (p68). Kushner’s angels and Mantel’s ghosts inhabit this liminal space, refusing easy categorization.

By reading these works both “paranoidly” and “reparatively,” I gain a fuller understanding of illness as a disruption not only of the body but of the self. Kushner and Mantel’s narratives do not merely describe suffering; they transform it into a language of ghosts and angels, allowing readers to glimpse the ineffable aspects of embodied illness.

In the end, as Mantel and Kushner remind us, some experiences remain beyond the grasp of science. The supernatural in illness narratives is not just a metaphor—it is a vital, necessary means of storytelling, granting voice to those whose suffering defies conventional explanation.

References & Bibliography

• Dosani, Sabina. “The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: a gothic story of postnatal psychosis – psychiatry in literature.” The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2018; 213 (1): 411-411. doi:10.1192/bjp.2018.63
• Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Gilman, Charlotte P, and Julie B. Dock. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.
• Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: Millennium Approaches & Perestroika. NHB Modern Plays, 2017.
• Mantel, Hilary. Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir. Fourth Estate, 2013.
• Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Duke University Press, 1997.
• Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “White Glasses,” in Tendencies, 252-266. Duke University Press, 1993.
• Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor: And, AIDS and Its Metaphors. Penguin, 1991.