For months, I searched across downtown Toronto for a copy of one of Margaret Gibson’s books. It had become a habit of mine to check for her work whenever I passed by a shop and had a few minutes to spare. Gibson was a Scarborough-born writer of mostly short stories and one novel. Given that her work was often set in Southern Ontario, naturally, I thought one of her books was bound to turn up in a dusty stack or dollar bin at some point. Yet I had no luck. Neither at the chains nor independent fronts. Until one day, in the narrow aisle of a used bookstore on Bloor Street, I had decided out of frustration and curiosity, to peel behind a shelf stacked end to end. And there, hidden behind more familiar titles, was a copy of Gibson’s first and only novel, Opium Dreams, for $7.99. I bought it, happy to take home what I felt was an underappreciated part of Toronto’s literary history. But later that evening, I didn’t launch into the book so much as stare at it. The cover depicts a sepia-toned close-up of a young woman’s face crossfaded with bare woodland. I regarded the book as if it were in a museum artifact, wondering more about the life around the piece than the piece itself. Gibson has been understood as an author whose mental illness launched and defined her literary oeuvre. And I bought her book in part out of fidelity, not to the fiction alone per se, but to what circumstance the fiction had been borne out of – Gibson’s illness and precarity. Three years after the start of the global pandemic, as my thirtieth birthday and tenth year of living in Toronto loomed, this all giving me a keen sense of my own fragility, I felt soothed by what I thought the book signified. That Gibson was someone close to home, whose incandescent mind had suffered, yes, but survived to make art. But her work has now become buried in a second hand shop’s inventory, if even there at all to begin with.
Margaret Gibson (1948 -2006) is at risk of becoming a forgotten writer. Her debut collection, The Butterfly Ward, released in 1976, saw immediate acclaim, with Gibson sharing a City of Toronto book award with Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle. The film Outrageous, adapted from the story “Making It” featured in the collection, was produced the following year to a wide release. Gibson’s fiction was emblematic of the 60s and 70s movements that sought to expose the disjunction between institutional claims of equality and the reality of lived experience. Her debut explored the relative truth of terms like normal and crazy. She wrote from out of a marginalized group, those living with instability and trauma, alternating between poor urban spaces, sterile suburbia, and the revolving door of psychiatric clinics. It’s a class of people Gibson saw as deprived of community and story, of fictive imagination and meaning, and considered herself a part of. In an interview with Eva Tihanyi, she says, “there’s a whole group out there, the lost, the disinherited, that nobody cares about, that nobody gives a goddamn about, that nobody writes about. So I write for them. I write for myself too.” Yet today, Gibson’s work has fallen into the very marginality she sought to recognize. Despite the initial recognition, her debut book, along with much of her work, has gone out of print. Copies are increasingly rare to come by. And there is only one edition of The Butterfly Ward available for reference, but not to check out, from the Toronto Public Library.
Given Gibson’s artistic purview, “the mad and the damned” as a Sunday Star review put it, was her literary ambition fraught from the start? Her voice was raw, balancing alchemical descriptions of madness with brutal, at times curt, prose. The juxtaposition of these opposing forces, of stoicism and frenzy, is expressed neatly in her debut’s title; the lyrical beauty of a butterfly versus the harshness of the ward. In response to her debut, as much as there were critics who hailed Gibson’s portrayal of the reality of mental illness, there were others, like John Hofsess writing for Canadian Magazine, who thought her stories too “uncompromisingly bleak” to achieve wide readership. Throughout her career, Gibson’s lack of commercial appeal was balanced with the authenticity of her perspective. In critics eyes, Gibson’s
separate diagnoses of epilepsy, schizophrenia, and autism, as well as her hospitilizations and poverty, gave her real authority in her writing as social outcast. The subtitle to the same profile by Hofsess reads “Margaret Gibson’s journey from ‘hopelessly crazy person” to admired new writer”. An obituary in the Toronto Star is titled “Demon’s Drove Gifted Writer’s Career”. A 1997 Globe and Mail profile, in the lead up to her first novel’s publication, summarizes Gibson’s work up to that point as providing “sporadic snapshots of the many indignities she’s endured”. Gibson’s work was framed by her condition. Her writing was taken as testimony to her experience by way of that thin veil of fiction. And many of her protagonists were women, writers too, whose slender frame, large piercing blue-green eyes, and love of cigarettes would often match the author’s photo on the book jacket. If Gibson’s life was one of being misdiagnosed and misunderstood, then wouldn’t her fiction, apparently written in the margins of her own breakdowns, fare much the same?
There is “semantic damage” being done here, to borrow a term from William Styron’s Darkness Visible. There is a distinction to be made between framing Gibson as an ill woman who wrote versus an author concerned with how to represent illness. When we read her work, are we interacting with Gibson the once and former patient, or Gibson the writer of serious fiction?
Perhaps it’s coy to propose one frame over another. And after all, it feels affirmative to uphold Gibson’s writing as an act of survival. To bear witness to trauma in such a way. But then, if it’s her life experiences being assimilated into the stories, the stories inevitably become assimilated into Gibson’s personal identity. Or rather, some semblance of it. As a consequence, what matters is not the structure of Gibson’s work but its uniformity with her perceived trauma and instability. Understanding how she formalized, say, an emotional breakdown in her writing is less important than knowing that Gibson herself, at some point in her life, broke down. But this constrains what Gibson actually achieves through her fiction. Even from her debut collection, Gibson’s characters often let readers in the most intimate spaces of their minds, a place beyond the physical environment and diagnostic criteria, where no one but the reader can enter. They are minds both disturbed and sublime, embedded in a social dynamic defined by its very alienation. Her characters wrestle and clash with their fellow patients, with doctors, and with family. The writing lives in the gap between realist and modernist conventions. It features terse description juxtaposed with ekphrastic flourish, creating the portrait of a boundless unconscious in highly confined spaces.
“Ada”, the first story in The Butterfly Ward, takes place in the women’s division of a psychiatric hospital. The relationships between the women are intense, at times hostile. Ever present is the threat of an abusive, dehumanizing procedure ordered by the asylum staff.
The story’s fractured, hazy structure mirrors the fogginess from ECT 29-year-old narrator Jenny is recovering from. At first, she seems like an outsider amongst the other patients, noting the women’s unkempt hair and rough appearance. But after being at the ward for several years, Jenny recognizes she’s “one of those women too”. As Jennt tells her mother on one of her routine visits, “we’re all isolated cases here”. The patients are an uneasy collective, a community defined by their estrangement from the outside world.
Jenny’s narration, though weary from treatment, has a stoic self-reflection that reads like resilience. It’s a consistent feature of Gibson’s prose. Jenny is surviving, still alive and still capable of thinking, a nurse tells her, unlike fellow long-time in-patient Ada.
Ada had been prone to violent outbursts like shouting lines of poetry in the halls and biting other patients. The hospital staff decided to lobotomize Ada in an effort to curb her difficult behaviour. But the procedure appears to have been too effective. Before the surgery, Jenny and Ada had bonded over a shared loved of literature. But that version of her friend is gone. There is only “poor Ada” now.
The conflict of the story is not built around some Randall McMurphy-like redemption. The antagonist is not the institution exactly, who Jenny mocks, but the hostile new admit Alice. Alice taunts Ada, calling her an “invalid” who “isn’t even alive” while acting as a model patient whenever the doctors are watching. The women think Alice is lying about her condition.
In a group therapy session, Alice expresses that she sees the ward as the ‘ultimate trip’, likening it to a psychedelic experience and site of some mystic revelation. Jenny calls her out as a voyeur of the ‘crazies’. Essentially, Jenny accuses Alice of disguising her morbid fetishizing as insight. That she has playacted her breakthrough on the pretense of a breakdown. It’s a searing critique of those who flatten people’s suffering only to sermonize about it later. In the first story of Gibson’s debut, the reader is being asked to reflect on narrative tropes around mental health. It’s a point that still stands today, in debates around how trauma has become a narrative catch-all, a motif that can narrow character and plot as much as it may reveal it. But Alice has not merely been a little reductive here. The women of this ward illustrate what Northop Frye would call the unity of dissent. Though they as patients may share a common status, as Jenny told us, they are all unique, varied cases. But instead, Alice embraces a cliche of insanity that applies a uniform experience to all mentally ill people while betraying her underlying contempt. Alice’s empty revelation denies the women their dignity in much the same way here bullying dehumanizes Ada.
In the climax of the story, Jenny awakens to the sound of Ada quoting the Harold Monroe poem “Living”. She discovers that Ada has murdered her tormentor Alice, the latter’s hope of finding the ultimate trip realized with violent irony. Ada is not the petrified shell of a person everyone thought she was. Notably, the catharsis of her outburst has given way to the impassioned lyricism of Monroe’s poem:
What have I done that I should be alive?
O, can I not forget that I am living?
How shall I reconcile the two conditions:
Living, and yet – to die?
Slow Bleak awakening from the morning dream,
Brings me in contact with this sudden day.
I am alive- this I.
Ada’s mind may be inhibited but words still come to her in dreams. Amidst the mayhem, Jenny recognizes that Ada’s literary soul still lives. The final hope of the story is that we, like Jenny, may be able to listen to Ada’s poetry for a while. And that in listening, we may perhaps reconcile divisions like the Ada that was and the Ada that is, the isolated case and the in patient group, or the sane and the crazy.
Gibson’s debut would no doubt strike modern readers as treading in well-worn motifs of 60’s/70s anti-establishment literature. With its dour sanatoriums and the threat of abusive treatments, it’s difficult not to have flashes of Kesey, Plath, and Sexton recur. Her contemporary critics were also quick to deem Gibson derivative of such artists. Hofsess’ 1977 profile was entitled “One Flew Over the Butterfly’s Nest” after all. But the breadth of Gibson’s work, even from her debut, is not prey to the shock and awe of The Snake Pit.
The titular story of “The Butterfly Ward” explores where an inexplicable condition lies within the mind. Set in the neurological division of a Toronto hospital, our narrator Kira has been undergoing a series of surreal tests to diagnose her epileptic seizures, which no anti-convulsant medication can quell. The tests are a tortuous type of Electroencephalography where patients are immobilized, with the sides of their jaw pinned shut, to undergo a lengthy scan of the brain’s activity. Kira likens this procedure to being fixed to a butterfly board where she is “pinned, probed, sticked”. Far from being tyrannical Nurse Ratched types, the doctors in Gibson’s stories are mostly unavailing and faceless. The well-reputed neurologist Dr. Carter only wants to discover the truth of Kira’s condition. Yet their rigorous testing illuminates nothing. The truth of Kira’s epilepsy remains a mystery to everyone. Except for Kira. Only she can access the truth of her mind.
In order to escape the pain of being a test subject, Kira retreats into the infinite interior of her mind.
“I crouch in the mists of my nebula where it is beautiful and everything is calm, safer somehow in that beautiful misty space” (129).
Kira has something of a love affair with how her mind allows her to escape not only the pain of her pinning but the tedium of the outside world. The revelation of Kira’s interiority correlates to the narrowing of her environment. She never used to think of her brain until the nebula moved in on her and caused her to seize. And she has found a disquieting stoicism as the butterfly.
But it is only through Kira’s use of metaphor that the truth of her mind has been refracted. The boundless imagination and formless unconscious are harmonized and given shape as a nebula. It is through this language that Kira’s condition is made into a “truth”. Her description of her pinning is a moment of ekphrastic grace:
“…in a few more minutes I will be the butterfly, wing tip to wing tip pinned on the giant board” (133).
Kira has had a slippery relationship with the truth since the onset of her condition. She used to be a normal, happy young woman. For Kira, there is no Truth, just as there is no epistemological center revealed in the brain scans. Kira lets us into a private space where fictive truths can be arrived at. But these are no less real for only occurring in the mind. They are not immaterial, shadowy gestures. If not for her narration, the way she formalizes her experience, Kira would be a dead, objectified insect. Instead, Kira is very much alive, listening to herself, searching within her own mind.
After the publication of a second short story collection, Considering Her Condition, Gibson underwent a sixteen-year hiatus. The notion that Gibson’s literary success and artistic potential faded over time can likely be attributed to this prolonged gap. For instance, the subheading to a 2006 obituary reads how her output was “sidelined by the march of mental illness”. When Gibson did return to publishing new material in 1993 with the collection Sweet Poison, her ideas around madness, the unconscious, and survival had matured. While her fiction had never been exclusively confined to the asylum, her subjects now appeared deinstitutionalized, so to speak. The tension of her stories is no longer between a patient’s private world while under a hospital’s regime. And those private, inaccessible spaces of “sane” and “crazy” are not the only realities Gibson contends with.
The story “Sweet Poison and Other Songs” is narrated by Elizabeth, a single mother living with her young son Mickey. Suburban motherhood has isolated Elizabeth and she drinks and abuses medication inside their sterile Scarborough condo. There is a near post-apocalyptic ere about the text. Even the decor of flower boxes is dead. And Elizabeth tells us “There are just the two of us now. Me and the Baby” (Gibson 83).
As Elizabeth recounts her life and the relationship that led to Mickey’s birth, reads at first as if Elizabeth lacks agency. But gradually, there accumulates a sense in the story that there was never such potential for freedom of action and thought. The fleeting moments of Eliabeth’s first romance fizzle and phase into the purgatory of motherhood. But like her flowers, she is unable to truly grow. All a character may choose is how they confront such ‘death’.
Then mid-way through the story, Gibson enters new terrain in her fiction. Elizabeth tell us “I admit, although not easily, that I lie, mostly to myself about the Sleeplessness and the Death and the scotch drinking, and the sweet poison, lie because to face it…to face it…” (103). There is still the tension between an oppressive exterior world and a frantic interior one, but what Elizabeth cannot face is her son Mickey. His bright spirit overwhelms Elizabeth for its naivety to the death she perceives all around them. She depersonalizes her son by not referring to him by name. And it’s when Elizabeth can no longer detach from Mickey that she has her most profound realization:
“The Baby’s other arm is flung protectively over his batted grey suitcase. Suddenly I see The Baby as enormously brave, a world traveller, yes, and brave with it all. My eyes fill with sudden tears” (114).
Though she turns her head away to hide, in recognizing her son’s own reality, Elizabeth approaches redemption. The tone may be just as stark as her earlier work but the pathos of Gibson’s fiction is no longer solely reserved for her character’s distorted, dream-like self-reflections. She would go on to further synthesize this mixture of family drama and the startling unconscious in her kaleidoscopic major work, Opium Dreams.
The novel follows Maggie Glass, a 40-year-old short story writer who watches her ailing father Timothy succumb to Alzheimer’s as she tries to piece together their fragmented histories. Spanning four decades, the perspective shifts between Maggie’s narration of her own life and that of her father’s, weaving together an Ontario farm, Maggie’s hospitalization at 15, and Timothy’s traumatic plane crash as a tail gunner in World War Two. Having taken its name from the drug Timothy smokes while stationed in Turkey, there is a murky, at times nauseous haze to the narrative as he and Maggie alternate between the roles of child and parent. Scenes phase in and out within the corridors of hospitals and childhood homes while Timothy and Maggie part and reunite in crisis.
The novel distills all the elements of Gibson’s previous work. Maggie is a keenly sensitive, hyper-descriptive force who must write the truth so as to stop the shattering noise inside her head, much to her family’s distress. Despite the fragmented structure, it contains some of Gibson’s most lucid descriptions. One passage in particular could be read as an ethos for her entire literary project:
“The Daylit sky is a fraud, fragmented like a broken mirror, shattered by darting flying birds, bits of leaves and twigs caught in an updraught of wind, pieced like a poorly stitched quilt with cumulus clouds and white tails of cloud or roiling grey clouds, dust motes spinning, distracting the eyes, distracting mystery.
It is the night sky filled with Dark and the un-earthly light of the moon and the stars and the endless Infinity that is filled with the mystery meant there, Galaxies and God.
I look for a God in that night sky, what with Daddy and all” (33).
For a story trapped in the elliptical nature of the past, the writing feels among the most free of Gibson’s career. The text is loaded with moments equally austere and tranquil across the wreckage of time. After Timothy’s squadron crashes into the sea and is rescued by an allied ship, he looks out at the water that hours ago was the scene of so much carnage and death, only to find a “smooth plate of glass”. But rather than looking out at the water, he must look inward, into his opium dreams. Maggie thought her writing had freed her from the Glass House for good, but she too is culled into these dreams with her father. We discover that characters are not alone in their minds. These strands are all threaded together. Timothy hears the screams of a falling girl, Maggie, as he drifts backward through time. Maggie’s son writes a poem that inexplicably describes her sexual assault in detail. It’s as if Maggie’s attempt to formalize the pieces of her father’s life has revealed another, discordant strand in her son’s writing. It’s a startling mystery that would otherwise remain hidden if not for this interwoven dream.
Building on themes of her most recent collection, such revelations in Opium Dreams are always rooted in the family. Throughout the course of the novel, Maggie and Timothy realize they share a unique inner connection. Timothy sees himself in his young daughter’s eyes. And both were traumatically separated from their families at a young age. Previously in Gibson’s fiction, this sort of personal space was the site of endless self-reflection, inaccessible to anyone else. Here, it has led Maggie back to her father.
The twenty-two-page epilogue is among Gibson’s most brisk, accomplished writing. The dying Timothy continues dreaming backward to when, as a “sickly child”, he was sent by his family to work on a farm. The climax of this short section occurs when Timothy, now a young man, must shoot an elderly horse. Overcome with shock and grief at the sight of life draining out of the horse’s eyes, Timothy charges into the nearby lake.
“he flings the gun with a mighty sweep of his arm into the swim hole and keeps on running into the water runs until the water is knee deep, thigh deep, waist deep, chest deep, neck deep, where he throws his head back and howls and weeps under a moon as shiny and cold and hard as a dime. Timothy Glass scoffs at God.
Timothy Glass rails against God.
Timothy wants God.” (237).
The novel ends in much the same way it begins with Timoyhy losing himself in a reflection of the endless night sky. The loss is juxtaposed with Gibson’s bravadic description. Throughout the book, images recur and interweave, taking on a musical texture, a kind of polyphony between Timothy’s flight, Maggie’s search, and the torrent of memory between them.
Gibson was not skittish about the authenticity of her work. The novel’s dedication reads “For Dane Gibson, the fly boy”. There is a picture of a young fare haired boy, Gibson’s father, looking about ten years old, seated on a wooden fence with acres of farmland in the background. With the inclusion of this photo, the same photo that Maggie discovers in the text, Gibson wants to encourage the auto biographical implications of her fiction. In many ways, the bent of her work has always been to acknowledge the inner complexity of those we dismiss as “crazy”. Consider what Gibson writes in a special 1993 op-ed to The Toronto Star:
“Years ago when I wrote my first book, The Butterfly Ward, I considered it a book about people and emotions, people coping with their lives however odd those lives might appear to someone else, but nevertheless people moving in and out of each day as we all do. I was somewhat surprised and bemused to be told I wrote books on madness.”
Gibson has never been out to deceive readers or disguise the potential for an autobigraphic framing of her work. In Opium Dreams, she evokes this for particular resonance, as if Maggie and Timothy are but another thread in some vast, synchronic moment beyond the text. Gibson, like Maggie, did struggle deeply with her mental health, had been institutionalized, was assaulted, and did write to survive. Even as a child, she had a uniquely sensorial relationship to words. She would spend time in gardens, rhythmically coiling rope around her hands and improvising a story. According to an interview from 1977, it was a doctor at a psychiatric instititue who, after reviewing the long notes she would compose, suggested Gibson become a professional writer. But over time, these experiences unique to Gibson compounded into a fixed identity that became ubiquitous with her fiction. In the end, reading Gibson’s work as a conduit for her various personal traumas probably illuminates more about the reader than Gibson herself. But framing Gibson as churning out her personal history risks anonymizing her authority as a writer. Because there is something in Gibson’s writing beyond the vapor of the author’s trauma and indignities. There is a there there. A restless an ecstatic mind. A stoic shock. It crackles with emotional and moral life. Sometimes there is a tension in whether the prose can hold. Or even pain at its very assembly. This pain often gives way to grace.
Once I started Opium Dreams, all estrangement from the text lifted. Over twenty years ago, Gibson had revealed in Maggie Glass’s search for her father the harmony and dissonance of how our narrative frames reveal and fade over time. I am grateful I reached behind the wall to find it.
Texts referenced:
Dunphy, Catherine. “Demons Drove Gifted Writer’s Career.” Toronto Star, 10 Apr. 2006, p. B05.
Fraser, Marian Botsford. “Short Forays into a Nasty, Brutish World SWEET POISON: A Collection of Stories.” The Globe and Mail, 13 Nov. 1993, p. C.24.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden : Essays on the Canadian Imagination. [Toronto] : Anansi, 1971. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/bushgardenessays0000frye.
Gibson, Margaret. Opium Dreams. McClelland & Stewart, 1997.
—. Sweet Poison. HarperPerennial ed, HarperCollins, 1993.
—. Sweet Poison : Stories. Toronto : HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/sweetpoisonstori0000gibs.
—. The Butterfly Ward. Oberon Press, 1976. Bennett Family Foundation Canadian Literautre Collection.
—. “Writing, like Mental Illness, Can Be: Blinding with Its Visions.” Toronto Star, 19 June 1993, p. G1.
Globe, ELIZABETH MITCHELL Special to The, and Mail. “Waking up from a Nightmare: IN PERSON.” The Globe and Mail (1936-), 5 July 1997, p. C11.
Hofsess, Jon. “One Flew Over the Butterfly’s Nest.” Canadian, 13 Aug. 1977, pp. 16–17.
Maynard, Rona. “Margaret Gibson: A Survivor’s Story.” Chatelaine, English Edition, vol. 70, no. 11, Nov. 1997, pp. 78–79.
Opium Dreams – Quill and Quire. https://quillandquire.com/review/opium-dreams/. Accessed 29 June 2023.
Page, Shelley. “Making Art from Madness: Author Margaret Gibson’s Real World of the Mentally Ill: [Final Edition].” The Vancouver Sun, 28 Mar. 1998, p. F9.
Rumens, Carol. “Poem of the Week: Living by Harold Monro.” The Guardian, 7 Dec. 2009. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/dec/07/poem-of-the-week-harold-monro.
Styron, William. Darkness Visible. 1st Vintage Books ed, Vintage Books, 1992.
Tihanyi, Eva. “The Only Skin She Was given: Eva Tihanyi Speaks with Margaret Gibson.” Books in Canada, vol. 26, no. 9, Dec. 1997, p. 2.
Warwick, Susan J. “Margaret Gibson.” Profiles in Canadian Literature 8, Dundurn Press, 1991, pp. 92–99, https://books-scholarsportal-info.ezproxy.lib.ryerson.ca/en/read?id=/ebooks/ebooks0/gibson_crkn/2011-04-29/1/9781550021462#page=92.