Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, had forbidden her from pursuing her passion for writing when she was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion. Not only does Gilman’s story depict her hatred towards patriarchy but it was also a message against Dr Mitchell’s impractical treatment whom refused to acknowledge Gilman’s story when she sent a copy to him. (Lavender, 1913) From the author’s personal experience, she was able to produce a very vivid representation of a woman’s journey into madness. (Lavender, 1913) Gilman writes about a woman who was restrained from expressing herself freely. Her husband, a doctor, prescribed her with the “rest cure” which “absolutely [forbids her] to ‘work’ until [she is] well again”. The narrator uses her story telling to relieve stress, but she must write in secret. However, Jean Rhys chooses to write Wide Sargasso Sea from a different presentation of madness in women. Jean Rhys did not like the portrayal of female figures, namely Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre , hence, she significantly rewrote the novel giving the readers a more in-depth background towards Antoinette’s (Bertha’s) progression to insanity. In Rhys’s novel, she depicts the multitude of factors that influence the protagonist into losing her mind, such as being abandoned by her parents, mistreated by her husband, and judged harshly by society. Similarly, as Gilman draws from her personal story, Rhys used her experience growing up in the Caribbean as half Welsh and half Creole, to write of Antoinette’s exposure to the cruelty and marginalisation of society. In both of these written works, the authors spoke about how madness was inflicted upon them rather than any inherent problem.

4