Faculty of Humanities
Department of English
Literature and Culture: Specialisation
English
Gendered Madness: The Role of Female
and Male Characters in Madness as
Represented in 19
thCentury Literature
Masters Diploma Thesis
By:
Sanja Vlaisavljevic
Thesis Supervisor:
Dr. Jane Lewty
Student no. 10390790
28 June 2013
Table of Contents
1.
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Overview
1.2 The Method of Madness
2.
Chapter Two: The Madwoman’s Plea
2.1 The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman
2.2 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary
Wollstonecraft
3.
Chapter Three: The Madman’s
Rights
3.1 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky
3.2 Diary of A Madman by Nikolai Gogol
Chapter 1:
Introduction1.1 Overview
The aim of this research paper is to provide an exploration of the
significant role of gender within the representation of madness and, as a result, provide an understanding of the greater relationship between madness and literature. Critical theorists such as Shoshana Felman, Lillian Feder, Louis A. Sass and Allan Thiher have extensively discussed this particular field and have attempted to contribute the discourse of madness towards the narratological theory of literature. Lars Bermaerts, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, in their essay “Narrative Threads of Madness”, tell us that: “Although the research on madness in fiction is anything but defective and scarce, questions of narrative form and its function still have to be brought into play” (286). The research here hopes to provide a stepping-stone into the development of such a theory. Is madness represented and, as a result, perceived equally within both male and female characters?
This topic is of particular interest to me because the notion of madness can be embodied and perceived rather differently when it is symbolised within a female or male character respectively. One main concern here is that madness is negatively perceived when it is depicted through a female character. Women are often understood to be more
prone to insanity and this is reflected as part of them discovering their identities. Karen S. Stein states in her work Monsters and Madwomen,
Changing Female Gothic that:
These heroines experience madness as a stage on the journey toward self-knowledge. In these inner journeys – the female
equivalent of male adventure – the heroines learn to identify with their hidden selves and to reaffirm the values which had previously been denied. By this means they reintegrate split selves, restore their fragmented identities and return to sanity and social
acceptance with open-ended possibilities before them. (124)
Stein’s remark on the relationship between madness and women is very relevant to the literary representations of the two. Most often than not, mad women reflect inwardly and question themselves more than their place in society, and as such attempt to reconstruct (or even deconstruct) their identity in order to cure their madness. One such example is Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; Maria’s fate is one of cruel betrayal when her husband imprisons her in an insane asylum and takes her child away from her in order to claim her inheritance. While in the asylum, she reflects back on her marriage and to an extent her identity as she tries to find reason in his actions.
Similarly Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short-story The Yellow Wallpaper represents the heroine as a woman locked up in a room with yellow wallpaper, slowly delving into madness. For the narrator here, the
wallpaper symbolises a form of a mirror and by studying it she ultimately studies herself.
On the other hand, when a male character steadily delves into madness, or is mad, we often find the readers’ response to be that of concern and denial. The male character invokes sympathy and the reader often desires the character to avoid such persecution of the mind and seeks justice of any mental instability. This idea can be heavily illustrated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment; Raskolnikov is perhaps one of literature’s most famous mad male characters. His story is one of hatred, condemnation and confusion, and the novel achieves to successfully establish his madness as a result of a higher intellect. Not once do we as readers get the sense that he is questioning himself, or his identity, but instead Raskolnikov portrays a man with firm determination and awareness of who he is, and particularly, how he wants the world to be. Perhaps this determination and blind belief is what creates the
illusion that male madness should be respected and, to an extent, is the seed of creativity.
Nonetheless, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman illustrates tendencies of a “fragmented identity” yet while in his delusions, the protagonist Poprishchin is not so much questioning his own identity as he is applying a new one, that of believing himself to be the heir to the throne of Spain, and again, with as much determination as Raskolnikov’s coldly calculated reasoning to murder.
The medical understanding of insanity changed drastically within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and particularly within the
twentieth century with the emergence of Sigmund Freud. Around 18th
century, mental illness was established as lack of reason and due to the lack of medical understanding, it was considered to be a manifestation of evil. This realisation also relies heavily on religion as a strong enforcer of such a belief, concluding that mad people are “full of the devil”, as the saying goes. However, with the turn of the 19th century and the
progression of medical science, mental illnesses soon became understood as social and physiological conditions. By that, I mean that for women, for instance, madness was understood to directly relate to their bodies, and more specifically, their reproductive systems, as Elaine Showalter explains in her book The Female Malady:
That women were more vulnerable to insanity than men because the instability of their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual, emotional, and rational control. In contrast to the rather vague and uncertain concepts or insanity in general which Victorian psychiatry produced, theories of female insanity were specifically and confidently linked to the biological crisis of the female life-cycle – puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause – during which the mind would be weakened and the symptoms of insanity might emerge. (55)
This in turn shows us that even on a scientific level, gender
differentiation was emphasised when it came to understanding madness, portraying women as sensitive to madness due to their unstable
emotional states resulting from their unstable bodies. Showalter continues to explore this medical understanding of female madness, providing further proof that literature could not avoid to represent madness differently in gender, as the scientific understanding of it itself was already gender differentiated.
Furthermore, I must raise the question of how madness is relevant, or even why it is important, to literature. Why is it important to discuss madness here not just as a concept on its own, but also more specifically the question of its representation in gender? As stated in the essay
“Narratological Threads of Madness”: “Studying madness in fiction can yield insights into the work of a particular author, into the psychology of literary characters, into standards of normality in a certain time and culture, and into creative processes” (285). So, madness can provide the means to understand not only the literary work of the art studied, but also a deeper insight into its characters, the authors’ frame of mind and most importantly an insight into the social and cultural customs of its time. As such, in terms of gender studies, analysing gendered madness can deliver further information and a means for feminist literary theory to include a better understanding of literature. Shoshana Felman claims that madness found its voice in literature after centuries of submission and silence, and that the two (madness and literature) are inseparable:
While it was through literature that madness became the order of the day, now it seems that literature itself has been dropped from the agenda. While madness has finally been recognised as a
burning contemporary question, it is as though the question of literature has become anachronistic and irrelevant. (15, Writing
and Madness)
Felman’s claim that as madness has been liberated through literature and found a voice in literature to express all the repressions society has bestowed upon it, at the same time it has paradoxically limited literature to a more political discourse. Despite the contradictory theory of
madness and literature, one cannot claim they are not intimately related – “Between literature and madness there exists an obscure but essential kinship; a kinship entailed, precisely, by whatever blocks them off, by that which destines them alike to repression and disavowal” (16).
My hypothesis for the inequality in the representation of madness results, like most gender-related issues, from the idea that men are superior to women and this superiority is always incorporated in their madness as a reflective state of higher intelligence. Unlike men, women are considered to be emotive because their state of mind is connected to their emotions (or what 19th century psychiatrists would argue, their
reproductive systems) and not their intelligence, resulting in a negative manifestation of their madness because emotions lack reason. I will approach this topic by firstly examining the definition of madness within literary circles but also philosophical and psychological; this in turn will allow for the exploration of the medical/psychiatric understanding of madness during 19th century and hopefully will provide a base upon
of literary characters can occur resulting in the demonstration of gendered madness in literature.
1.2 The Method of Madness
Madness can be defined in many ways and from many disciplines: psychological, physiological, philosophical, literary, scientific and even religious but they all seem to stem from a similar basic principle – madness is a manifestation of internal confusion and a skewed
perception of reality, it illustrates the mind that stands outside the social norm. It is this understanding of madness as the outside that Shoshana Felman articulates philosophically in her book Writing and Madness – “Madness usually occupies a position of exclusion; it is the outside of a culture” (13). Is the definition of madness enough to state it as the
opposite of reason? Is madness the lack of reason? Or is it a reasoning on its own; one without language? Let’s consider Felman’s albeit long, but relevant statement to our questions:
What characterizes madness is thus not simply blindness, but a blindness blind to itself, the point of necessarily entailing an
illusion of reason. But if this is the case, how can we know where
reason stops and madness begins, since both involve the pursuit of some form of reason? If madness as such is defined as an act of
faith in reason, no reasonable conviction can indeed be exempt
inextricably linked; madness is essentially a phenomenon of thought, of thought which claims to denounce, in another’s thought, the Other of thought: that which thought is not… The question of madness is nothing less than the question of thought itself: the question of madness, in other words, is that which turns the essence of thought, precisely, into a question. (36)
Though Felman chooses to repeat much of what Foucault expresses in his book Madness and Civilization, this particular paragraph puts us on a path to understand madness as another form of reasoning, and not abolish it and confine it to the connotations of the immoral and the unreasonable chains. Like Foucault, Felman chooses to believe that madness deserves its own voice, its own language which, as stated
above, has found a way to accomplish this through literature – “Madness is, primarily, a lack of language, an ‘absence of production’, the silence of a stifled, repressed language. Accordingly, our historic task would be to give madness a voice, to restore its language: a language of madness and not about it” (14). If we accept this philosophical definition of madness, though brief but effective, we can begin to understand Dostoyevsky’s protagonist Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment much better, and furthermore begin to grasp that his “reasoning to murder” is not necessarily immoral or insane but, just as Dostoyevsky attempts to convey in the novel, a questioning of thought. Raskolnikov’s actions challenge the social norm of thought, the acceptable and conformist, by
posing the question (or rationalisation) of murdering a human being for the greater good. But we will get to this analysis later on.
Instead we will now focus on the idea of “a language of madness” that Foucault has spent extensive time trying to uncover. Literature has become the platform for the language of madness, issuing many diverse characters across authors, all attempting to convey this “Other thought”. According to Felman, “if one turns now to literature in order to examine the role of madness there, one realizes that the literary madman is most often a disguised philosopher: in literature, the role of madness, then, is eminently philosophical” (37). Though I find this claim to be quite bold, there does ring a certain truth to it as well; for as stated previously, if the madman considers his reasoning just that, reason, it becomes his own philosophy on the state of truth. The madman’s perception of reality is thus not wrong or immoral, but is simply a different (if not opposite) reality to the more conformed, accepted social norm. Nevertheless, my understanding derives from a more psychological discourse (something I am sure Foucault would most disagree with as plausible) and to place such value of madness on philosophy seems limited. Other factors play a role in madness, especially in relation to literature, most notably nature and nurture, and the way a madman defines his reality is through
observation of his environment and eventually reaction, as we will later explore with Raskolnikov. In this examination, the attempt to locate this “voice of madness” will manifest itself through the idea of gendered madness which will help provide at least a more specific localisation of
this language of madness, and perhaps aid in the overall debate on the subject.
Meanwhile, to move away from the philosophical definitions to more relevant literary, Lillian Feder elaborates my above claim on the factors of madness a little better in her book Madness and Literature by stating:
In fact, recurrent literary representations of madness constitute a history of explorations of the mind in relation to itself, to other human beings, and to social and political institutions. The madman, like other people, does not exist alone. He both reflects and
influences those involved with him. He embodies and symbolically transforms the values and aspirations of his family, his tribe, and his society, even if he renounces them, as well as their delusions, cruelty, and violence, even in his inner flight. (4-5)
Feder continues to explain that madness as a theme in literature has been used in order to understand human behaviour, societal and political influences and that literary madness allows questioning various
assumptions of their time.
In terms of narrative form and madness, Felman offers an analysis on how the two intertwine and coincide to function symbiotically, and that is through the notion of the symbol – “Madness is, before all else, an intuition about the functioning of the symbol, a blind and total faith in the revelation of a sign which, although spawned by chance, harkens to a
necessity, a fatality” (71). Thus the madman operates on the faith of the symbol, on the signs that appear and provide him with the truth upon which he can react to; if we apply this to Raskolnikov and even
Poprishchin from Nikolai Gogol’s short-story Diary of a Madman, the theory can be supported as each protagonist sets his actions based on the symbol of his reality. For Raskolnikov that symbol represents the murderous righteousness and justification to purify society, and for Poprishchin the symbol takes form of his unnamed love interest, the daughter of the Director, as well as his need to prove himself
authoritative. These symbols are what drive the madmen with
determination to accomplish their set goals or imagined realities. As in the words of Diderot – “To deviate from reason knowingly, in the grip of a violent passion, is to be weak; but to deviate from it confidently and with the firm conviction that one is following it, is to be what we call mad”. Again, this seems to support our theory that madness, in particular male madness, is driven by a sense of determination, confidence and
intelligence that is often admired.
Madness is the illusion of being able to salvage something from time, the belief in the possibility of eternity, of the absolute: in love, or in God. Madness, then, is illusion as such, belief inasmuch as it is always credulous; it is the loss of perspective, the relative
Finally, for the sake of concluding this Felman/Foucault definition, they both agree on the fact that madness as a theme enables the reader to explore the “Other thought” and perhaps even find truth in it – “As a ‘lyrical explosion’, insanity, in nineteenth-century literature, is given as a ‘theme for recognition’, a theme in which the reader is called upon to recognize himself” (51, Writing and Madness). As such, this can also explain madness as a form of knowledge, what it means to know, or as Felman tells us – “That is why madness is conceived all along as a mode of transgressive knowledge; transgression, a breaching of the mystery beyond the limits of what is known or allowed” (72). Accordingly, Feder’s assumptions on madness and literature coincide with Felman’s
philosophical explorations in ways that allow madness to be recognised as a discourse of knowledge that can challenge grand theories as well as inform future generations of the limitations or explorations of earlier times across various fields.
How is then madness perceived in literature? As stated above, Lillian Feder likes to acknowledge it as a means to explore various statements across fields of psychology, sociology, politics, medicine and many more. Whereas Felman chooses to acknowledge madness in
literature as: “Madness is there to demystify the formidable mystification of our civilization” (106). Felman opts to define madness in terms of language and speech, whereas Feder pursues an understanding of madness within literature as a theme and states:
I define madness as a state in which unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them and determine perceptions of and responses to experience that, judged by prevailing standards of logic thought and relevant emotion, are confused and inappropriate. (5)
This is a very common understanding of madness and it clearly derives from a psychological background, but how does it provide the means to explore gendered madness? Well, to begin with, like most of the
protagonists that will be explored here they seem to create actions based primarily on such thought-processes (derived from the ID, in Freudian terms), but as will be revealed later on, the female counterpart is rarely represented to lash out on such perceptions but often becomes more introverted, like the protagonist in Gilman’s novella The Yellow
Wall-Paper who shuts herself up in the attic as her mental state declines.
Feder continues:
Imaginative literature, in turn, provides remarkable clues to the mental processes that produce the actual symbolizations of the psychotic, for the poet, dramatist, and novelist explore and
illuminate psychic conflict and confusion through the very symbols they employ to depict these states. (6)
In a way, what Feder claims here is that literature can provide as much information to psychology as psychology has to literature. Accordingly,
madness should be allowed the same recognition of importance within literature as discourses such as the sublime or the Gothic.
It is important to elucidate the impact of psychoanalysis and psychology emerging during this time (18-19th century) on literature, as
their findings were often used as a means of symbolisation and methodisation of madness, in particular the behaviour of the mad
character. As mentioned briefly earlier, there was already a manifestation of selective understanding when it came to female maladies,
appropriating the madness to female reproductive systems. As such, much of Victorian literature that depicted female madness often
symbolised the madness through the body, sexuality and even food. On that note, certain foods were considered to be causalities of madness for women and thus were avoided, as well as certain dietary practices were conducted in order to relieve madness, ultimately creating the
correlation between madness and food in literature. Elaine Showalter tells us in The Female Malady – “This connection between the female reproductive and nervous systems led to the condition nineteen-century physicians called ‘reflex insanity in women’” (55). Surely a term like that says it all! In accordance to this, Feder similarly states: “In much of twentieth-century imaginative literature, overt psychological and
psychoanalytical allusions are commonplace, often referring to particular Freudian, Jungian, or Laingian theories, which actually become part of the symbolic structure of novels, plays and poems” (11-12, Madness in
Literature). Despite Feder’s focus on a different century, same logic can
Felman’s philosophical understanding of madness is in order to
determine the root of its meaning, the psychoanalytical background helps provide the understanding of the symbolisation of madness, and how it is manifested in literature. Feder elucidates this idea further by claiming:
Feelings of love and aggression, whether assumed to be instinctual in origin or entirely acquired, are dominant subjects of literature; in the literature of madness the symbolic expressions of such feelings in hundreds of intricate ways are the surest clues to the mind in confusion or conflict. (19)
And here finally we have reached a certain point where the literary and philosophical, with a tinge of psychological, definitions have enabled us with the means to explore the idea of gendered madness by investigating such “clues” of emotion that will provide the symbolisation of male
“deterministic” madness, and female “identitarian” madness. What I mean here is what I have already explained above, such as male madness often comes in the form of confidence and determinism that allows the mad character to pursue his reality, his thought as reason, whereas the female character often shuns away from society (or is forcibly removed from it) and contemplates her identity in an introverted fashion. Once again, to illustrate Diderot’s earlier claim, female madness may as well be the madness of passion and, as a result, perceived weak.
2.1 The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Elaine Showalter explains in her novel The Female Malady: Women,
Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 that:
Even in the novel, the madwoman, who started out confined to the Gothic subplot—to the narrative and domestic space that Charlotte Brontë calls “the third story”—by the fin de siècle had taken up residence in the front room. Thus, by the end of the century,
women had decisively taken the lead as psychiatric patients, a lead they have retained ever since, and in ever-increasing numbers. (52)
It is no secret that in the 19th century, mental institutions and asylums
were crawling with women and that the number was far more significant than their male counterparts. According to Showalter there were “1182 female lunatics for every 1000 male lunatics” and that by 1872 “out of 58,640 certified lunatics in England and Wales, 31, 822 were women” (52). With such an astounding number, not to mention, a drastic
difference in gender population, it is easy to assume that women seemed more prone to mental afflictions, whether serious or minor. The problems of the psychiatric developments at the time was that even the most minor afflictions, such as nervousness or anxiety, were considered
serious mental ailments and as a result women were often confined in the asylums by their families (or husbands), shunned away from society for “treatment”. Furthermore, Showalter provides us with the knowledge
that not only were these mental institutions populated prominently by women, but on top of that they were all run by men; attempts to
implement more female workers (matrons) in the asylums for equality purposes but also to aid with the female patients, were often subverted and disparaged by the medical society, leaving women’s health in male-dominated hands.
In the effort to upgrade the status of the psychiatric profession, some doctors denigrated the supportive work done by women in public administration… Matrons, female nurses, and attendants were paid on a much lower scale than male workers, were
regarded as less reliable, and were subject to more rules and
restrictions…Any effort to equalize their status encountered intense opposition. (54)
Gilman illustrates one such matron in her novel The Yellow Wall-Paper with her character Jennie, John’s sister and the sister-in-law of the narrator. Jennie helps care for the narrator and takes on the role of a nurse but with equal strict rules and prohibitions towards the narrator as John – “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!” (135). In a way, Jennie represents the women who remained loyal to the patriarchal society by conforming to the domesticated house-keeper role and asserting patriarchal control. In the words of Catherine J. Golden: “Jennie embodies society’s construction of domestic femininity
and embraces her domestic role absolutely… Jenny buys into the
traditional male model that the writing makes the narrator mad, and she monitors her sister-in-law’s rest cure for her brother” (147, The YWP,
Golden ed.).
What Charlotte Perkins Gilman successfully achieves with The
Yellow Wall-Paper is that she provokes the psychiatric trend of that time,
and in particular the notion of the “rest cure” invented by the physician Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who treated Gilman himself, by creating a story where she criticizes the confinement of women to small places, such as asylums or attics, and the prescribed idea of minor physical exertion, no intellectual stimulus and plenty of bed rest. Accordingly, Gilman attempts to voice the idea that such confinement and limited intellectual exertion further aggravated woman’s mental state, one that is already subjected to oppression from a patriarchal society and marriage – “John is a
physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind –) perhaps that is one reason why I do not get well faster” (1).
Much like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman,
The Yellow Wall-Paper criticizes the institution of marriage and the
oppressive demands on women from a patriarchal society, illuminating the repercussions on women through exploring the mental decline of her nameless female protagonist. Gilman was a force to be reckoned with in her time as an active feminist, author and publisher of her own magazine
The Forerunner where she expressed most of her feminist and
the “Afterword”: “The story is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual
politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship” (90, The YWP,
Golden ed.).
The story follows the female narrator and protagonist who has come down with post-partum depression after giving birth to her baby. She is ordered by her husband John, who is also her physician, to
undergo the rest cure upon which she is prohibited from reading, writing or going outside; instead she must remain confined to a room in a
secluded house that contains the yellow wallpaper, the centrepiece of the story. As days pass, the narrator gradually grows obsessed with the wallpaper and begins to lose her grip on reality, becoming ever more paranoid, introverted and fragmented. The story ends with the narrator crawling along the walls of the room, having stripped it of its wallpaper, shouting she has finally got out.
The Yellow Wall-Paper definitely expresses some of the elements of
female madness discussed above such as the dietary trends,
confinement/patriarchal oppression and unstable self-reflection. The inactivity the narrator is subjected to points to the limited understanding of human mental health at the time, and the limitations of psychiatric treatments; the lack of intellectual activity shows the degradation women had to endure, minimising their capabilities and opportunities for
pursuing work and providing an overall contribution to humanity. Gilman states in her article “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’?” that: “I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again – work,
the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite” (46, The YWP,
Golden ed.). Such representations of madness, as stated above, invoke
negative assumptions and associations with the female characters
because they are exemplified as weak, obsessive, irrational and unstable. Let’s look at perhaps the one that is most relevant and prominent in this discussion and that is the notion of a displaced, or as Karen S. Stein likes to call it, fragmented identity. She states in her work Monsters and
Madwomen: Changing the Female Gothic that:
The women who have been most acceptable to patriarchal culture are those who have been powerless; passive rather than active, self-sacrificing rather than self-assertive, meek rather than bold… To win social acceptance, many women have sought, consciously or unconsciously, to be the virgin, the angel, to hide or disown the traits which might be seen to threaten their acceptability… At some point the mask is no longer a convenient defense but a trap; the woman is then confronted with her own terrifying split between “monstrous” inner drives and “nice” outward appearances. (124-125)
This description can be applied to both of our female characters chosen for this discussion, because as they are forced to behave a certain way, restricted from intellectual and emotional expression, they become trapped within their own minds and unavoidably develop nervous
dispositions. Such is the case for our unnamed protagonist in the The
Yellow Wall-Paper as she struggles to overcome post-partum depression
but is unable to see her children, or any social contact what-so-ever apart from her husband John and his sister Jennie, the protagonist gradually begins to lose contact with reality and develops a second identity by transferring her emotional turmoil to the yellow wallpaper.
The unnamed narrator disputes this idea of the rest cure, openly criticising it in her writing but cannot voice her concerns to her husband because not only does he dominate her activities but is also her physician – “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures
friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?” (1). Incapable of voicing her own concerns, the narrator spends her time writing them down and contemplates on her current situation in silence while attempting to portray a calm disposition, leading to this split identity that Stein remarks on – “But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (2).
She continues to voice her foul situation – “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my
condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (2). The reader can sense the protagonist’s riotous relationship with herself; on the one hand she validly reasons against the rest cure, but as soon as she considers it John’s voice echoes in her head and she changes her mind; that even in
her secret writing she accepts John’s demands to an extent despite it going against her own ideas. This disassociation from herself, partly blamed on John and his patriarchal rule and partly on the social conventions of her time, creates the illusion of weakness and an irrational mind. It creates a character who’s madness is rationalised merely due to her being a woman and unstable, but also a madness that is ignored and therefore less important, as John makes it out to seem: “He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures… You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (1).
As she moves on to describe the room she occupies, her attention focuses ever so more on the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of the entire room. Her initial description of it resonates a certain connotation to herself, as if she is describing her own inner ineptitude and failure:
The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. (3)
We are well aware by now that the narrator continues to develop a relationship with the wallpaper over the course of time, but this initial description provides us with a founding understanding of her madness – that of her vast insecurity and fragmented identity. She too is stripped in
parts, removed from her children, removed from society, and even removed from herself, trapped in a room she despises and even fears – “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (5). Initially the narrator strongly opposes the wallpaper, but slowly she begins to personify it – “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (5). It is here that I believe she begins to transfer her mental afflictions, her fears and desires, onto the wallpaper in an attempt to relieve her mind, and therefore, in a way, creates a schism between her real self and her imagined self – “the Other of thought” as Felman states, that thought which is not, or more concretely, the thoughts that are captivated in her mind as much as she is in her yellow wallpapered room. This schism not only dissects her individuality, but also the readers’ reliability in the character; showing this double side of herself, fragmented and
incoherent attributions that provide strong motivations for invoking a complicated relationship to the protagonist’s madness, one that is based on distrust and disdain. In her critical edition, Catherine J. Golden states:
Gilman personifies the wallpaper, which gains emotion and movement… The paper, as the narrator sometimes calls it, still allegedly repels her, though it fascinates the narrator more and more as she identifies a sub-pattern, and it takes on human characteristics. (148)
This personification further develops until eventually the narrator begins to see a human shape taking form behind the wallpaper, a human body that is trying desperately to get out:
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. (5-6)
It is interesting to note the symbolisation behind this “formless figure” and how it appears in the text; it is only in the parts where the wallpaper has not faded and the sun shines on it that the shape of the figure
emerges. If the stripped and broken wallpaper represents the narrator’s madness, then the whole parts of the wallpaper upon which the figure comes through represents her sanity. In other words, Gilman creates this imaginary figure in the narrator’s mind’s eye by symbolising it as her true and sane self, but again utilises Stein’s idea of a “fragmented identity” to signify the characteristics of female madness.
Towards the end, the formless figure takes the shape of a woman that the narrator believes crawls out during the day behind the wallpaper and walks around the house – “I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud in a high wind” (13). The narrator by this point also becomes far more introverted, paranoid and
removed from reality and on the last day in the room, she completely gives herself away to the wallpaper. Believing she is helping the woman behind the wall to come out, she begins tearing and stripping the paper until the bear walls remain left. As John walks in, he finds her crawling on all fours along the walls shouting: “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (15). Now, certain critics have argued that the narrator goes completely mad whereas others such as the iconic feminist literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar believe that she has finally liberated herself from her patriarchal shackles. Whatever the interpretation may be, one thing is for sure: the protagonist’s madness is reflected in her inability to differ reality from unreality, and develops a split identity through the symbolisation of the yellow wallpaper and the formless figure behind it by identifying with it, supporting this idea of
“identitarian” madness.
Finally, there is also evidence of the narrator’s fragmented identity and issues of gender in Gilman’s linguistics; avoiding naming the
protagonist and alternating between pronouns such as “myself, “me”, “I” and the generic “one” pushes the character into spheres of unidentified personae while the male counterpart, John, is always referred to by name. This play of language to invoke gender issues allows this paper to also perceive the protagonist’s inability to define herself and therefore raises doubts to her mental state among readers. As Catherine J. Golden says:
Readers might profitably consider if the narrator’s namelessness contributes to her sense of fragmentation while her reliance on vague self-references, qualifiers, and rhetorical questions indicates her perceived social inferiority to her physician-husband from whom she hides her writing. (146)
For the purpose of this paper, I choose to see it as such.
There is a twofold force that degrades her mental state: one is her own inability to reason for herself due to her insecurity and fragile state, and the other is the oppressive and demanding voice of her husband John – “John does not know how much I suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (3). Let us quickly observe how this
patriarchal control can demote the female madness to insignificance, if not inferiority, in comparison to male madness that we will discuss later on. Patronising language takes shape in this discussion as John often refers to his wife in terms that diminish her independence and
individuality such as “little goose” (4), “little girl” and in a condescending tone – “’Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug, ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases!’” (9). John seems to take her illness rather light-heartedly though he makes an effort to keep her comfortable and at ease. It is somewhat difficult to blame John for forcing his wife to seclusion and inactivity for he merely represents, in Gilman’s text, the imperfections of the psychiatric movement of 19th century; however, his unflinching
words, according to Golden: “These terms not only render a woman endearingly brainless but deny her sexuality and responsibility” (147).
The narrator’s incapability of expressing her own thoughts is almost entirely John’s fault, for every time his “reasoning” creeps into hers, and because she is already so fragile, she is forced to question her own reasoning and believe in John’s:
At first he was meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on… But he is right about the beds and windows and things. (4)
The above passage is crucial in this discussion for it not only represents the struggle between her reasoning and his and her giving in to his, but it also shows how John trivialises her madness as well as her. Ignoring to believe that the wallpaper actually is aggravating her situation, he
chooses instead to place her logic on the basic understanding that women are foolish and obsessive, directing the reader to reach such a conclusion as well by demoralising his wife – “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (2). Somehow his reasoning rings more true than hers, and for the purpose of this discussion, I choose to attribute this tone of the text to John’s persistent
attempts to destabilise the narrator’s thought and logic. It is the mystery of the narrator’s logic that loses its credibility as reason; it is again that otherness of thought that is ignored because it is unexplored,
misunderstood and represented symbolically rather than directly. His patronising tone pushes her to doubt herself and ultimately become more fragmented – “I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!” (3).
Despite John’s earnest endeavour to help his wife, Gilman equally criticises the equilibrium of their marriage and John’s persistent
dominance; both physically and mentally, his persistence to control her environment only further aggravates the narrator’s madness. Fearing to express her thoughts, she turns to the wallpaper and instead connects emotionally with it. At one point she attempts to utter her fears but John again dismisses it as unreasonable:
I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished. (7)
Eventually, as the protagonist slips ever further in her delusions and paranoia, she begins to question John’s motives (to what Gilbert and Gubar would state is the beginning of her mental liberation) and calls him “queer”. This is at the point where she has established a strong
emotional and mental connection with the yellow wallpaper and the woman-figure behind it – arguably herself.
It is the situation the protagonist from The Yellow Wall-Paper is in that arguably also sets the tone of her madness; the utter hopelessness she experiences in this room (until she goes entirely mad) associates her madness to negativity and despair. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to argue that as she moves along the story and becomes more intrigued with the wallpaper, that her identity also begins to restore; when she finally tears it all down and shouts “I’ve got out at last!”, she has achieved, in the words of Karen S. Stein, to “restore [her] fragmented identit[y] and return to sanity and social acceptance with open-ended possibilities” (124).
2.2 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Much like Gilman’s short story, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria resonates many themes explored in The Yellow Wall-Paper in which Wollstonecraft attempts to convey her dismay at the politics of marriage and promote a better life for women. She achieves this by exploring the treatment of mentally ill patients in asylums, particularly women, through her protagonist Maria.
Wollstonecraft herself has expressed her definition of madness in another famous piece of work written by the celebrated feminist, A
Vindication of the Rights of Men, a statement that reminds us much of
The ruling angel leaving its seat, wild anarchy ensues” (27). Here again, reason and madness are portrayed as two discourses, twirling on the same axis but on opposite sides. There seems to exist an underlying necessity to define madness as the opposite of reason, albeit Foucault in
Madness and Civilization provocatively suggests that madness is not the
opposite of reason, but instead is a reasoning of its own, as we have previously established. For Wollstonecraft, reason represents intelligence and without this, one is lost; in the words of Patricia Cove in her essay “’The Walls of Her Prison’: Madness, Gender, and Discursive Agency in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of
Woman”: “Her decision to frame reason as a “ruling angel” privileges its
role in the human intellect, while her definition of madness as “the
absence of reason” reinforces its position as reason’s opposite and, in the context of the “ruling angel” metaphor, demonizes mental disorder” (672).
It is important to mention this because Wollstonecraft’s definition falls in the lines of eighteenth-century theoretical assumptions of
madness (that of a binary, though opposite, relationship between
madness and reason) and, in turn, will help provide a base for exploring gendered madness. If Wollstonecraft assumes all madness is demonic, as Cove seems to perceive it as such, then female madness is even more intolerable due to the understanding that women’s mental abilities are tied to their emotions rather than intellect. According to Cove, “Female reproductive biology, in this formulation, combines with women’s
instability” (673). As such, together with this biological insistence on the female reproductive system as a cause to madness and the assumption that the female mental frame is overly sentimental and unpredictable, forces one to assume that in their madness women are equally
demoralised.
In her yet another famous piece of work, A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argues that:
Woman in particular, whose virtue is built on mutable prejudices, seldom attains to this greatness of mind; so that, becoming the slave of her own feelings, she is easily subjugated by those of others. Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains. (176)
Meaning that Wollstonecraft places the blame of women’s “sensibility” on the lack of proper education and oppression. Maria attempts to achieve her mental “restoration” through reading the books Jemima brings her, a symbolic metaphor to prove that proper exercise of the mind breeds reason. Much like the narrator of The Yellow Wall-Paper, writing and reading is introduced as means to overcome these women’s mental
sufferings and prove to the patriarchal community the value of exercising intellect, whether for women or men:
The books she had obtained, were soon devoured, by one who had no other resource to escape from sorrow, and the feverish dreams
of ideal wretchedness or felicity, which equally weaken the
intoxicated sensibility. Writing was then the only alternative, and she wrote some rhapsodies descriptive of the state of her mind. (7-8, The Wrongs of Woman)
Through literary exercise, Wollstonecraft emphasises the importance of education and intellectual stimulus to eradicate women’s mental
sufferings. Patricia Cove states: “Most importantly, however, Maria’s literary project…creates a forum in which she can vindicate her reason and assert her sanity” (681). Though she strongly opposes the medical discourse’s characterisation of women as entirely physical and emotional, Mary Wollstonecraft nonetheless utilises the symbolisations of female madness for her protagonist Maria such as a fragmented identity, dietary trends and patriarchal oppression which we will explore further.
Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman exposes the extent of the female
malady brought on most prominently by male oppression, and also provides a powerful commentary on the degrading social status of women. With a long history of male dominance and a lack of education (or an education in propriety rather than intelligence) gave rise to female repression of split identities; The Wrongs of Woman successfully
represents the idea that female madness is part of the search for their identities, identities that are subdued and oppressed by a patriarchal society. To reiterate Stein’s conception of the monstrous woman: “At some point the mask is no longer a convenient defence but a trap; the woman is then confronted with her own terrifying split between
“monstrous” inner drives and “nice” outward appearances” (124-125). On a philosophical level, Felman offers us a different perspective on this dichotomy of identity by suggesting that the woman scorned, becomes the woman who scorns; or in other words, the action of her becoming a monstrous self occurs because she is treated like one:
Beneath the mask of accusation, the accused becomes the accuser, pointing his finger at the exposed faces of the “fools”: madness designates as its opposite not sanity, but stupidity. It is as though reason did not exist at all, or existed only as a term of negative comparison. What enters into opposition are two ways of being
opposed to reason: either through pettiness, which characterizes
the “category of fools”; or through greatness, in the case of “category of madmen”. (82, Writing and Madness)
In the case of Maria, such pettiness reveals itself at one occasion when she comes across a new female inmate and the issues of madness and reason are portrayed; or in Foucault’s words, the silence between the two discourses is exemplified when Maria reacts to the ravings of the
madwoman:
She began with sympathy to pourtray to herself another victim, when the lovely warbler flew, as it were, from the spray, and a torrent of unconnected exclamations and questions burst from her, interrupted by fits of laughter, so horrid, that Maria shut the door,
and, turning her eyes up to heaven, exclaimed—“Gracious God!” (13)
Here Wollstonecraft utilises this silence by showing how Maria opposes madness perhaps because she believes herself to be sane or perhaps because she fears she will eventually reach that mental state herself; Wollstonecraft toys with the relationship between madness and reason, evoking Foucault’s definition of the relationship between the two
discourses as “deaf to all exchange, and as though dead to one another” (ix, Madness and Civilization). Patricia Cove suggests that: “The
incomprehensibility of the madwoman’s “torrent” of speech, then, results from Maria’s inability to identify with experiences outside of rational norms as well as the inmate’s determination to express the “exclamations and questions” that characterize her unreason” (684). Despite
Wollstonecraft’s subtle suggestions that her protagonist Maria is not mad, she nonetheless makes use of certain symbolisations to display Maria’s madness and even more so, as I will show, as an unequal gendered madness.
Let’s begin with the protagonist’s name, Maria; Felman argues that the name is significant – “Maria – a rhetorical inscription, an inscription in the signifier both of desire and of the law, because the name Maria encompasses both the mother – Mary, the Virgin Mother – and the name-of-the-father – mari (husband), mariée (married), the forbidden” (88). In other words, Wollstonecraft’s protagonist by name already demonstrates this idea of a split identity, a fragmented individual, one who is expected
to be virgin-like and a mother, but also one that is a wife and owned by her husband. According to Felman, “The madness of the narrator is first of all negatively defined: it is a name for his being-other, his difference from the world”; indeed the mad person will always be described as being-other because his/her reasoning will always stand outside the standard norm, however I do find this notions that it is “negatively defined” to be insufficient to describe the madman’s tale. Instead, it seems more befitting to the madwoman’s for as we have seen with the narrator of the The Yellow Wall-Paper, and in Maria’s writings, the madwoman’s reality is almost always neglected and cast aside into the confinement of solitude and banishment – “The lamp of life seemed to be spending itself to chase the vapours of a dungeon which no art could dissipate.—And to what purpose did she rally all her energy?—Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (5).
So goes Maria’s struggle as Wollstonecraft identifies her
protagonist to be powerless though not unintelligent. As Maria attempts to outwit her husband, Mr George Venables, (at one point decides not to tell him that her uncle gave her more money) and runs away, she moves away from the standard norms of behaviour for a woman, is labelled mad and is institutionalised by her husband. In the asylum she reflects back on the events, often reproachfully remembering her behaviour towards her husband as he wrongs her repeatedly, and in a way rediscovers her identity as she moves along with the story.
It would be thought equally unreasonable to insist, [under penalty of] forfeiting almost every thing reckoned valuable in life, that he should not love another: whilst woman, weak in reason, impotent in will, is required to moralize, sentimentalize herself to stone, and pine her life away, labouring to reform her embruted mate. (75)
Maria, though trying to hold on to herself, begins to unravel ideas about her marriage and about herself that eventually question her situation and identity, echoing Stein’s remark “restoring their fragmented identities”. Maria goes on to say: “When I recollected that I was bound to live with such a being for ever—my heart died within me; my desire of
improvement became languid, and baleful, corroding melancholy took possession of my soul. Marriage had bastilled me for life” (76). Though
The Wrongs of Woman explores the relationship between madness and
reason, Wollstonecraft applies more emphasis on the devastating repercussions of patriarchal control and female oppression on her character as a means to demonstrate her fragile state and inability to identify herself with her surroundings. According to Cove,
Wollstonecraft’s choice of expressions such as “women born slaves” and “marriage has bastilled me for life” “link the madhouse with the evils of slavery, women’s position under patriarchal power, and the wrongs of marriage law, as well as with the Bastille itself, the symbol of old-regime oppression” (676). Patriarchal control and the confinement of the
madhouse play an enormous role in defining Maria’s madness as one of passion and insignificance.
Similarly to the role of Jennie in The Yellow Wall-Paper, Jemima is a matron in the asylum, one of the rare few women who were allowed to work in such environments, and initially is portrayed like a woman who conforms to the patriarchal conventions of her time and doubts Maria’s pleas that she is not mad – “Nay, the very energy of Maria’s character, made her suspect that the extraordinary animation she perceived might be the effect of madness” (9, The Wrongs of Woman). As time passes, Maria becomes more introverted and occupied with reading and writing so much so that she begins to unravel her inner fancies – “She was, earnestly as she had sought for employment, now angry with herself for having been amused by writing her narrative; and grieved to think that she had for an instant thought of any thing, but contriving to escape” (10). Slowly she begins to demonstrate different sides of herself, perhaps what can be argued as subdued passions, especially when she
romantically fantasises about Darnford.
The madhouse plays an active role in Maria’s gradually altering state of mind as confinement and lack of exercise grow wary on her mind, allowing her, much like our unnamed narrator in The Yellow
Wall-Paper, to develop inappropriate thoughts that provoke sentimentality. As
such, a display of sentimentality and emotionality is what I argue to be the weakness of her madness because it shows a reasoning based on the fancies of the heart rather than the calculated ideas of the mind, as we will see with Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov.
She was ashamed at feeling disappointed; and began to reflect, as an excuse to herself, on the little objects which attract attention when there is nothing to divert the mind; and how difficult it was for women to avoid growing romantic, who have no active duties or pursuits. (13)
Wollstonecraft directly attacks the convention that “man was made to reason, woman to feel” (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) by demonstrating the effect of confinement and solitude, not to mention what lack of intellectual exercise leads to. Therefore, Maria’s emotional connection to Darnford purely exists because, to put it bluntly, she is bored. The narrator explains: “What chance then had Maria of escaping, when pity, sorrow, and solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic wishes, and, from a natural progress, romantic expectations” (24)? Like John who refused to believe that his wife’s health was deteriorating in the yellow room, so does Wollstonecraft accuse all men of their belief that women need to be confined to small tasks and meandering experiences to suit their capabilities. To place a woman in such a position, whether sane or mad, creates the illusion that women are truly incapable of excess stimulus as if they are too fragile to handle it, and therefore will always be conceived as weak and
insignificant. In other words, Patricia Cove explains to us that:
Her emotional excess, however, develops as a result of her incarceration, rather than existing as an innate quality of her
femininity, indicating that the treatment of madness produces its symptoms. In her solitude, Maria reinforc[es] Wollstonecraft’s connection between the confinement of the mad and the limited sphere of women’s activity. (679-680)
Clearly, the patriarchal society expressed in Maria, or The Wrongs of
Woman and the domineering roles of men seem to be to Wollstonecraft
the clear reason to women’s fragile states, while at the same time allowing us to distinguish such causalities as symbolisations with equal perception of female madness. Maria’s sense of identity seems to
“reintegrate” itself as she becomes more emotionally involved with Darnford; in a way, she defines herself based on what she feels towards him instead of how she feels about herself, once again developing an unstable character – “A magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria’s prison, and fairy landscapes flitted round the gloomy walls, late so blank. Rushing from the depth of despair, on the seraph wing of hope, she found herself happy.—She was beloved, and every emotion
rapturous” (25). It seems that Wollstonecraft’s character cannot find her own language but is constantly defined by the men in her life, and thus offers to the reader the idea that her madness is an extension of her insecurity and dependence on others. What I mean to convey here, and in particularly Maria’s case, is that women’s madness, much like other aspects of their lives, are run by men; as such, even in their introverted and, to an extent, independent mental faculties, women will always be bound by the laws of man and will always be considered inferior, equally
so even when they are mad. Consequently, their madness cannot be appropriated to anything more because in their most fundamental
personae, women will always be perceived as of less importance. Let us consider this long passage from the novel:
To Darnford she had not shown a decided affection; the fear of outrunning his, a sure proof of love, made her often assume a coldness and indifference foreign from her character; and, even when giving way to the playful emotions of a heart just loosened from the frozen bond of grief, there was a delicacy in her manner of expressing her sensibility, which made him doubt whether it was the effect of love. (25-26)
It is this excessive exhibition of sensibility that places Maria’s madness within the lines of emotional female hysteria not to be reasoned with or taken too seriously. Her perception of Darnford is as skewed and
misplaced as her perception was of her husband, Mr Venables; being a woman, she seems to fall prey to the rulings of men and their emotions rather than to reason with herself and independently achieve liberation. Such a perception of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist forces Patricia Cove to argue that:
Darnford thus suggests both the risk Maria incurs by continually trusting men who manipulate her emotions, and the double-standard of the gendered discourse of madness that allows a
superficial Man of Feeling like Darnford to avoid sensibility’s taint of unreason while Maria’s emotional state in the madhouse only bastilles her further. (679)
Consequently, displaying such an insecurity and an inability to recognise herself or define herself gives rise to what we have established as
“identitarian” madness; an incapability to convey confidence in her
madness, like Raskolnikov does, together with symbolisations that derive from psychological assumptions in which women are recognised as
biologically weak leaves us with nothing else than to accept the notion of gendered madness, a discourse that once again undermines the value of a woman’s capability. Again, this echoes Felman’s statement that in “the literature of madness the symbolic expressions of such feelings in
hundreds of intricate ways are the surest clues to the mind in confusion of conflict” (19, Madness in Literature).
While in the asylum, Maria re-evaluates her husband’s character, questioning his identity that was so well disguised and that eventually obliterated hers – “George was by no means so great a favourite of mine as during the first year of our acquaintance… I heard with pleasure my uncle’s proposal; but thought more of obtaining my freedom, than my lover” (63). Maria then goes on to explain how her identity became “caught in a trap, and caged for life” as their marriage unfolded and George would often neglect her individuality – “I seemed gradually to lose, in his society, the soul, the energies of which had just been in action” (66).
Walking hand in hand with identity is the element of male oppression; discussed fairly above, it is the chief contributor to the
protagonists’ mental demise. George Venables physically and emotionally abuses Maria as he continues his life as a libertine. Throughout Maria, or
The Wrongs of Woman, Maria recoups her story in a form of a letter to
her daughter, at which one point she contemplates on whether things could have been different if she acted sooner – “Had I not wasted years in deliberating, after I ceased to doubt, how I ought to have acted—I might now be useful and happy” (49). With this, the reader experiences Maria’s attempt to “restore [her] fragmented reality” and regain her
independence and life, however because Darnford has now taken the role of her new interest (and because she is grieving for her lost child), Maria is incapable of achieving such a mental liberation.
In the final section of her story, Maria finally tells her story of woe after Jemima and Darnford shared theirs, and beginning at the beginning Wollstonecraft writes not only Maria’s failure in her romantic endeavors with men but also her mother’s. Speaking of her father, she explains the ruthlessness that can come from men – “He was to be instantaneously obeyed, especially by my mother, whom he very benevolently married for love; but took care to remind her of the obligation, when she dared, in the slightest instance, to question his absolute authority” (50). She continues to tell the tale of her brother from whom she never received relief from either, and who took on the role of the domineering man of the household as much as her father – “He seemed to take peculiar pleasure in tormenting and humbling me; and if I ever ventured to
complain of this treatment to either my father or mother, I was rudely rebuffed for presuming to judge of the conduct of my eldest brother” (53). Within this quote, Wollstonecraft allows the reader to understand that women’s plights can originate as much from established social conduct within families as the one that can be located in the husband-wife relationship. Moreover, the role of her mother proves what Stein claims as: “To win social acceptance, many women have sought, consciously or unconsciously, to be the virgin, the angel, to hide or disown the traits which might be seen to threaten their acceptability” (125). Fearing her husband and son, her mother fails to stand up for her daughter and instead teaches her to conform to the patriarchal society in which they exist. To this Wollstonecraft narrates: “By allowing women but one way of rising in the world, the fostering of libertinism of men, society makes monsters of them, and then their ignoble vices are brought forward as a proof of inferiority of intellect” (62).
Here I would like to add that this “proof of inferiority of intellect” in women transcends when madness takes hold, pushing the discourse to assume a gendered differentiation.
The final, and perhaps most impactful, representation of madness that these two novels (Maria and The Yellow Wall-Paper) share is the element of the body; this is manifested through food and sexuality. As stated earlier, female madness was considered to be caused by an
unstable reproductive system, as well as that much emphasis was put on a woman’s appearance in 18th and 19th century. It is by no chance that most literature exploring madness often depicts the female characters to
have some kind of bodily transformations such as anorexia, or other eating disorders and specifically repressed sexuality. Because women had to repress their inner desires and endure harsh male dominance, often the female protagonists would be exploring these desires imaginatively or even actively, which would then separate them from societal
expectations and label them as mad or monstrous.
I will briefly mention the references in both novels to the dietary trends that circulated at the time, believed to be remedies to mental dysfunctions or means to avoid the deterioration of mental faculties. Shamsoddin Royanian and Zeinab Yazdani argue in their essay
“Metaphor of Body”: “In the absence of any realistic possibilities to change their condition, women uttered their objections, frailty, and anxiety through their outlook toward food and, as a result, through their bodies” (1). Maria evokes this notion of starvation when Jemima brings her food, stating: “I have no appetite, why then should I eat?” and
Jemima replying: “But, in spite of that, you must and shall eat something. I have had many ladies under my care, who have resolved to starve
themselves; but, soon or late, they gave up their intent, as they recovered their senses” (3).
The narrator of The Yellow Wall-Paper utters similar indications to the body by explaining the diet her husband John prescribes her: “John says I mustn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat” (135). Conversely, these novels touch upon the psychological understanding between food and madness by briefly mentioning them as demonstrated.
Moreover, women’s madness was primarily indicated through food, and therefore further establishing this correlation between the female body and her madness, though these two novels, as we have seen, focus more on the correlation between identity and patriarchal control rather than food and the body, but I believe it is worth mentioning.
Chapter 3:
The Madman’s Rights3.1 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
So far I have briefly referenced to our male mad characters that of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov and Nikolai Gogol’s Poprishchin but now I will conduct a similar analysis of these two characters as I did in the previous chapter. Furthermore, I only want to establish in this chapter the madness portrayed as deterministic; what I mean by this is first and foremost the characters are not presented as insecure and
