The Family Plot by Clair Wills: A triptych of compelling, if unsettling, essays

“Development … is central to our understanding of human relationships … all the narrative genres … depend on events occurring, change happening. What are we if we are nothing but time passing, without the possibility of change, without choice?” Clair Wills’ brilliant triptych of essays focuses on “the encounter between vulnerable human bodies and the institutions that have been designed to contain, regulate and control them … the systematic violation of the right of women and girls to bodily autonomy, and the abuse of children and the mentally ill.”

This containment is justified by storytelling, “all the structures I consider here share a need to cloak their operations of power in the guise of moral purpose … storytelling was always central to how these institutions gained legitimacy.” There’s “always a gap” between the truth and “the story. There isn’t another way to tell stories, except as a form of betrayal … one of my concerns in these essays is to try to identify what is being betrayed.” Wills explores a wide range of “plots” from art, literature and film, including the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes report which informs her first essay, Architectures of Containment. Her clarity and compassion are badly needed as this makes for painful reading with justice still withheld as recently as 2021, “Reparations are judged according to a sliding scale of harms because otherwise the cost of redress schemes might get out of hand. More damaging still is the commission’s failure to honour the good faith of survivors’ testimonies.” Wills points out “the affinities between religious and secular total institutions should remind us that arbitrary rules for deciding which lives count and which don’t are not derived only from divinely ordained ideas of family and citizenship. Modern states create rationales to justify who’s in and who’s out …”

There is no sense that the horrors of 20th-century institutions are past. One might be surprised to read in the thorough, exacting How to Plot an Abortion, “Abortion is not legal in the UK, it is justified by a story. Everything depends on an ‘if’. What you are doing is wrong but we’ll allow it ‘if ‘…” And indeed Justice Pepperall recently sentenced a woman to two years in prison for procuring drugs to induce an abortion after the legal limit. As Wills writes “When you access an abortion, you are asked … to tell a good story … if you try to fit your experience to a legal definition of rights, you are going to be telling the wrong story.”

Life Pushed Aside deals with mental asylums — in particular, Netherne psychiatric hospital where Wills’ Irish mother worked as a psychiatric nurse, where “my grandparents worked before that … where I spent a great deal of time when I was young … I never went into a locked ward when I was a child … I remembered those corridors well … and how much I disliked them.” Here the reader follows directly in Wills’ footsteps, a deeply personal journey for Wills and for us too.

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[ Clair Wills: seeing the unseeable, saying the unsayable ]

Wills’ mother was an extra in Out of True (1951) an NHS instructional film made to destigmatise mental health. When the cigarette-puffing psychiatrist reassures a nervous husband about his wife’s electric shock treatment, “It will make her more herself”, this feels like the darkest noir. These eerie corridors leading to Bluebeard’s locked room are so familiar in literature and film from Jane Eyre to The Shining.

And these corridors are particularly relevant to Irish readers because “For much of the 20th century the Irish population was probably the most institutionalised in the world … the highest admission rate to mother and baby homes in Europe … by far the largest percentage of the population in psychiatric hospitals … the numbers institutionalised in the Church … Some seminaries took children from their parents at the age of eleven … reformatories, industrial schools, boarding schools … to a unique extent Irish children were not at home with their parents … Arguably the rhetoric of the Irish family was a smoke screen for the absence of the family as a private sphere of emotional and affective ties.”

The Family Plot has the grimmest subject matter yet the most compelling, vital narrative, illuminated by Wills’ intelligent, witty pursuit of the truth throughout the twists and turns of the labyrinth. “We are now turning a blind eye … to the detention of the unwanted … the undocumented … society’s vulnerable have to create a new life story through a bureaucratic process … to be classed as fully human. In Ireland, refugees may be housed in the buildings that once served as mother and baby homes and asylums. There, like their predecessors, they are both kept in and cast out. And in case we don’t notice, these are people claiming asylum: even the word is the same.”