Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

Introduction

In The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, the protagonists, Antoinette and Gilman’s unnamed narrator, are excluded from society due to their differences of opinions against their status quo. Antoinette was a love- depraved lunatic who became alienated by American society in the materialistic 1800s. The unnamed narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper was suffering from her unknown condition(s) which her husband thought her best treatment would be the “rest cure” which was a remedy commonly prescribed to women during the Victorian Era for having unexplainable mental illness. “Madness” was a popular generalization in literature as well as the interest surrounding the ‘mad’ women due to its captivating and sinister appeal. This renewed perspective set the scene for Gilman to write The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 and Jean Rhys rewrites the story of the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre into Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, after many assumed Rhys had died during World War II. The Victorian Era, which spans the late 1800s and early 1900s, is a period in which psychiatry still exhibited the views that “women were more vulnerable to insanity than men because of the instability of their reproductive system” (Showalter, 1987, p.55) even in puberty, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause and it was widely believed that this “interfered with their sexual, emotional and rational control” (Showalter) . Both of these female writers portray an image of women’s madness as a reaction to their respective society’s restriction of women’s ability to express their intellect. Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper , illustrates the narrator’s clear progression into madness as she becomes more consumed with the wallpaper. Whereas in Rhys’ novel, she depicts how the female protagonist’s madness was developed through social ostracism and ridicule. However, in both texts it becomes evident that their respective men were the catalyst and constant driving factor to their descent into insanity.

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