Bleak House in Jim Steven’s “Schizophrenia”

“A Personification,” Alison Booth writes, is “sometimes called anthropomorphism, attributing human qualities to objects or animals” (311).  In his poem “Schizophrenia,” Jim Steven uses personification to describe the house that has suffered just like a human because it lost its feeling of happiness.  The people who live in the house, a husband and a wife, do not communicate properly using words.  They walk with their “angry feet scuffing the carpets” (2), their “dishes slammed onto the table” (3); all their activities are described by using evocative personification.  For example, “the house came to miss the shouting voices” (9). It shows that the family is communicating using their negative attitudes and behaviors by screaming at each other instead of listening to each other first.  The conditions between the husband and wife in the house have degraded into internal conflict because they do not speak to each other effectively and tenderly.  Even small problems tend to become huge because the relationship is in a bad condition. 

To describe the house as the mental illness schizophrenia, Jim Steven uses another figure of speech, allusion, which Michael Meyer defines as “a brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature” (697).  Steven not only uses the house, which has been driven insane, as the physical personification of schizophrenia, but he also uses it as an allusion.  As we know, the disease of schizophrenia is a disease of delusion, hallucinations, and identity disorder, and is used to describe the house where a husband and a wife have claimed spaces for themselves by fighting so extremely and so full of anger, until they only communicate by slamming doors.