Mental Health and Being a Man: Depression and Gender in "Guilty/Not Guilty"

This paper will explore how disability, or more specifically depression, informs selfhood in dialogue with the individual’s relation to gender in “Guilty?/Not Guilty” from Stages on Life’s Way. This imaginary psychological construction offers a first-personal account of the narrator’s inability to fulfil his own, and society’s, expectations, describing the fact that his depressed nature prevents him from taking up the roles that befall a man—to become a husband—but also his complex relation to outward performance of gender norms through masking. Behind the stereotypical depictions of masculinity, however, lies a deeper concern: a concern with the possibility of being and making oneself understood, and of the possibilities for true connectedness and sympathy. Through a dialectics of negativity, the text offers an intricate understanding of the interplay between the inner and the outer, and the ways in which gender and selfhood are constructed through public presentation and social interaction.