Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

Madness is a term that evokes unexplainable, unreasonable and unpredictable actions which go against the orthodox view of normal human behaviour. (Merriam-webster.com, 2018) Traditionally this is seen to be associated with women back in the Victorian Era as well as in present time where women did not have a social relationship and financial resources which caused them to live in a long period of stress with a dependency on the men in their lives. (Woods, 2018) These novels further question and explore this concept of the assumption that all women are mad and hysteric. The critic Clement stated women “[are] mad, full of badly remembered memories, guilty of unknown wrongs…”. In the point of badly remembered memories, the protagonist Antoinette in Jean Rhys’s novel, can be a good example. She is seen as a “mental” woman due to her past experience with witnessing her mother murdering her father due to her illness. Phyllis Chesler mentions about the correlation between women and madness; “women more than men, and in greater numbers than their existence in the general population would predict, are involved in ‘careers’ as psychiatric patients”. (GÜNENÇ 2015, cited in Chesler 1973, p.22) The protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, became delusional after being constantly mistreated by her husband and stripped of her identity. She was obsessed with realizing her dreams; for example, in the end of the novel she intended to burn the house down due to her prophetic nature of her dreams. In contrast, the unnamed protagonist’s husband, John, in The Yellow Wallpaper seems to be caring. However, he was overprotective and controlling by separating her from her newborn child and also forbidding her to express her feelings through her writing. Charlotte Gilman makes a strong statement about female oppression based on her life experience with mental illness. Similar to her character that she wrote, she struggled with bouts of depression ranging from mild to severe, in which she was prescribed with the “rest cure”. According to the author herself, she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin” but through a help of a friend she recovered enough to finally work on writing The Yellow Wallpaper . Gilman wrote this short story as a reflection and condemnation of how her

3