Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Incipient Female madness

particular inanimate object is important as it is a foil to the characters to show how they were discriminated back in the Victorian Era. Consequently, Jean Rhys and Charlotte Gilman have chosen different objects that best fit their protagonist to express the suffocating society that they lived in. It is evident that these two writers have agreed that ‘madness’ is gender inflicted, which readers could have deduced from the way these two protagonists were treated by the men in their lives. The explorations made throughout these stories revealed the character’s complexities through the lively images that Gilman uses, or the heart felt situation that Rhys’ protagonist went through when she lost herself in the process of trying to make her relationship work. Perhaps, the most intriguing thing these two texts show are Gilman and Rhys’ attitudes toward female ‘madness’ from their personal experience. It is reasonable to claim that these two writers’ point of view for female madness were purely detrimental and somehow the craziness is the characters’ only form of rebellion and imaginative freedom.

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