"Toxic Certainty and its Capacity to Inflict a Brush With Madness"

2019

Even though men didsuffer from mental illness theirs was considered a disease that required to be cured while madness or deviant behavior in women was considered something demonized, wicked and dangerous. The aim of my dissertation is to critically examine Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, focusing on the depiction of madness as form of revolt against the patriarchal oppression, with particular emphasis on the textual construction of female madness in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and re-construction of it by the Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. In the introduction, I will offer a brief history about madness, where female madness shall be emphasized; in the following chapters I shall look closely into the novels, exploring the depiction of madness in both the novels, focusing on the protagonist, whose madness is not hereditary, rather constructed and imposed upon her. I therefore argue, that the protagonist, nonetheless, is labeled as a stereotypical madwoman, who is supposedly wild an...

2021

This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from its origins in etiological myths—situating women as dangerous, irrational, and subordinate to men—through modernity and the waves of feminism, as seen through the following works of narrative fiction: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Black Swan dir. Darren Aronofsky, and Midso...

Mostariensia

Madness, as one of the most controversial and challenging Renaissance topics, was not only deeply influenced by its mediaeval heritage but also the mediaeval perceptions of dominating masculinity and subordinating, vulnerable femininity. Thus, the numerous Renaissance treatises feverishly tried to explain various and, often identical, mental disorders. However, this was done with difficulty. The aim of this paper is to analyze and discuss the gendered perception of two of these mental disorders, namely female hysteria and male melancholy. Hysteria was primarily aestheticized and eroticized, while melancholy was intellectualized. As a man of his time, Shakespeare had surely been familiar with the gendered perception of madness. His portrayal of women in tragedies abounds in varieties due to his direct questioning of these categories. His first hysterical character, Ophelia, is unquestionably conventional while lady Macbeth challenges the established gender roles. King Lear, on the ot...

ESIDRP Proceedings, 2020

This paper focuses on the female elements found in the literature of the gothic and the fantastic with a primary interest in the female madness present in Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea through the character of Antoinette/Bertha Cosway Mason. More specifically, it discusses the premises that there is a missing (or latently present) sub-element or a sub-characteristic which is an integral part of the shared, common features that the gothic and fantastic elements of the literatures of the English-speaking world have in common. The female madness, which sporadically appears in the literature of the gothic and the fantastic along with the night, the past, the enclosed space, the ''damsel-in-distress'' or the endangerment of the individual notion, and the last segment, the so-called entrapment/deceit and the atmosphere of the magical and the impossible, is the feature that enables a novel way of experiencing the (Postcolonial) gothic or fantastic literature. Thus, in continuation, this paper suggests that along with these widely accepted, generally omnipresent components that the gothic and the fantastic share, in reference to time, space and narration, one must not disregard the topos of female madness, which although out of the canon of the literary theory, yet it projects the notion of an inevitable presence, of disturbing existence and a feminine reality in these particular genres.

Journal of Philology and Educational Sciences, 2023

This paper explores the representation of mad women in literature through the lens of psychoanalytical feminism. It focuses on analyzing the decades-old patterns of female objectification through the male gaze, and their being ruled as 'mad' or 'psychotic' for demanding equal rights as men. Through the use of psychoanalytic feminism theory, the paper studies the literary works of the late 1800s and early 1900s. And in relation to the birth of the feminist movement; it demonstrates how within the literature of that period, more often than not women were depicted as mentally ill and condemned to mental hospitals and psychotic institutions in order to receive extremely harsh treatments for illnesses that they do not have. The analysis will be performed on two literary works, that have been selected and seen as fitting for the topic, and they are: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. With the leading characters of these two novels being female, and extracted from society for being ill-fitting, they become the perfect examples for describing the main points of this paper.

'There is a joy in fear'. This is what the main eponymous character of Joanna Baillie's 1812 tragedy, Orra, says, when her ladies attendants notice the physical appearance of fear on her body while she is listening to a ghost story told her by Cathrina, and this short sentence can probably be considered as the gist for the whole play; thus, the apparently unexplicable sense of peace acquired through fear. The play was conceived as being part of a series of plays, the Plays on the Passions. Orra belongs to the third and last volume of the project, released in 1812. [...] Joanna Baillies's plays can be considered as experiments applied to the field of acting on how a passion shows itself and its evolution influences the development of the whole play enacted, as explained by the author herself in her 'Introductory discourse' to the first volume of plays, published anonymously in 1798, called 'A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind'. Baillie's philosophical notion of the sympathetic curiosity is an ethic manifesto, it evokes J. J. Rousseau's notion of pity, and it is an invitation to find in ourselves, as spectators, the very curiosity that will make us be as lucid as viewers to perceive the otherness, and the feeling of the other people around us.

International Linguistics Research

This paper is an attempt at objectively and critically examining the value of stylistics in literary understanding and interpretation. Literary text is language with its form, purpose, and meaning. In addition, this set of standards in literary text varies according to style. So, stylistics in literature, as another category of linguistics, has been the center of this analysis to solely determine the place of interpretation of literary texts. This literary text analysis is anchored on stylistics and objective criticism to determine, understand and interpret the relevance of the text with regard to its form, purpose, meaning, and style. This attempt is a text-based analysis which examines the literary features of the poem “The Tale of Love and Madness”.

TRANS - Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenchanften, 2021

Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2013

The present paper discusses the types, functions and limitations of the madness narrative, a particular type of text dealing with a popular research topic: mental instability, within the larger contexts of women’s autobiographical writing and illness-based writing. The overview aims to provide the theoretical framework necessary for the further analysis of specific madness narratives.