Critically Examine Swift's Presentation of Madness in Waterland.

Madness can be seen to be a state when someone experiences disorder in the mind, or more loosely, the state of mind when people do things that are bizarre and weird. In Waterland, Graham Swift presents madness through the characters Sarah and Ernest Atkinson, and Mary Crick, and while the experiences of Mary Crick seems to show the negative aspects of the state of madness, other incidents in Waterland appear to negate that, for being mad does not necessarily spell doom.

Firstly, Graham Swift presents madness as a result of Mary Crick’s way of coping with reality, the reality that it was through Tom and her actions that resulted in the death of Freddie Parr, Dick and their unborn child, and the fact she was now unbarren. Mary’s way of coping with these unpleasant realities was to escape it and not to think about it; she “finds work...concerned with the care of the elderly”. Through this, Mary “mark(s) time”, neither “looking back or looking forward”, because it is as though the elderly’s “lives have come to a virtual halt” and they are just living day by day; every day is the same. This allows Mary to esca pe from all her sins, because with time being stopped, it is as though her “here and now” would not be affected by what happened in the past. This coping mechanism is contrasted with Tom’s, whereby he “made do...by making a profession out of the past”, “look(ing) back in order to look forward”, to search for answers. With different coping mechanisms employed by the couple, Graham Swift then seems to show that escaping from “the empty space of reality” would not be a good method, for after many years, Mary suddenly “stops work with her old people”, announcing to Tom that she was “going to have a baby. Because God’s said I (she) will”. Mary has turned mad, and she does not just stop with this rambling; Tom comes home from work to find Mary “waiting for me (him)...with a child in her arms”. What’s more, Mary was not “wearing the looks of a villainous...