My Claustrophobic Happiness
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My Claustrophobic Happiness

Jeanne Randolph

  • ISBN-13: 9781927886410
  • PRICE: $18.00
  • Paperback, 104 pages
Vibrantly crafted vignettes presenting both a farce and a prophesy of the self-imprisoned mind.

In My Claustrophobic Happiness, psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph offers La Betty, a cloistered mega-wealthy condo inhabitant.

La Betty is repeatedly beset by supernatural entities beseeching her to cease her consumerist commodity adoration and engage in the active world of ordinary life. Lush and playful descriptions of La Betty’s possessions and her surreal psychological space enfold a series of conundrums about identity in relation to consumerism.

Randolph approaches La Betty’s psyche with a distinctively transcendent wit, unveiling the unstable and absurd fragility of La Betty’s compulsive denial.

Jeanne Randolph

Jeanne Randolph is one of Canada?s foremost cultural theorists. She is the author of the influential book Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming as well as Symbolization and its Discontents, Why Stoics Box, Ethics of Luxury, and Shopping Cart Pantheism. Dr. Randolph is also known as an engaging lecturer and performance artist. In universities and galleries across?Canada, England, Australia, and Spain, she has spoken on topics?ranging from the aesthetics of Barbie to the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Reviews

By Marisa Grizenko

The Capilano Review, February 3, 2021

In a scene reminiscent of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Mrs. Ramsay admires the artful composition of a fruit bowl, La Betty constructs her own mise-en-scène. Noting the beautiful colour produced when the rosy light of dawn graces her silver coffee tray, she makes adjustments to her room, “push[ing] one of her Osvaldo Borsani tables just a little closer to the window” to better appreciate the “evanescent marvel, silver plus pink.” Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, though, whose aesthetic pleasure is firmly grounded in her family’s domestic life, La Betty inhabits a world devoid of other people and largely of meaning itself; to La Betty, “superficiality is ecstasy.” And while she’s mastered the superficial life, she rarely gets the opportunity to fully enjoy it—busy as she is with near-constant spiritual combat. [Read the full review at The Capilano Review]

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