The Art of Madness

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

This paper looks into the lives of the female protagonists in Charlotte Perkins Gilman"s "The Yellow Wallpaper," Doris Lessing"s "To Room Nineteen," and Khairiya Saqqaf"s "In a Contemporary House" in an attempt to reach a better understanding of women"s "madness." To that end, this paper investigates the possibility of madness not being entirely a breakdown, but also a breakthrough, by analyzing the lives and experiences of the "mad" protagonists, as represented in the selected literary works, in light of R. D. Laing"s theories on the divided self and the politics of individual experiences. Despite the difference in time, place, and cultural contexts, all three women share the same experience of home confinement and domestication for different reasons that stem from patriarchal and social constraints. Such circumstances eventually lead these women to embrace forms of "madness" in ending a suffocating existence that does not allow them to connect with their inner-selves.

A Woman Against Patriarchy In The Victorian Age & The Yellow Wallpaper, 2018

Madness can be turned into a concept that is used by system in order to produce the stability of state. Social madness is related to fitting the social order than a pathological problem. The discursive construction of madness (especially as a female) is a common subject of the literary works of the Victorian Age. This paper tries to explain how a woman suffers because of not adapting to the social order, being defined as mad while she is not, how she becomes actually insane because of all these and old traditional treatments, the effects of gender roles on the imposed madness upon women, and inner conflicts of women by giving some examples from The Yellow Wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,1899.

Doğuş University 2nd International Conference on English Language and Literature, 21st Century English Literature - Full Text Conference Proceedings, 2024

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely criticized for its depiction of madness in nineteenth-century male-dominated Western society. Despite the ridicule directed at Gilman, notably by physicians, the text sheds light on one of the major concerns of the period. Because women are confined to the domestic sphere as angels in the house, writers of the age depict mental illnesses resulting from societal restrictions in their works. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Emily Dickinson, influential women writers associate womanhood with affliction. As a result, insanity comes to symbolize the imprisonment of the female gender. Unlike the general consensus, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” deviates from the traditional understanding of lunacy by presenting a female character who rejects social roles through her madness. Besides, it reveals the discursive practices produced by the opposite sex to control women. The relationship between the unnamed first-person narrator and her husband John illustrates this situation through their lack of communication. Although John is a respected medical doctor, his disregard for his wife’s wishes and needs leads the wife to search for identity. The more she isolates herself from society, the more passionate she becomes about her desires, which can be seen in her willingness to write and lie about what she does. This study aims to analyze the concept of madness in the light of Derrida’s deconstruction, where madness emerges as a strategy for the assertion of female identity rather than as a negative trait signifying women’s imprisonment. The study also examines the author’s use of the unreliable narrator and its role, since unreliability serves as a path to freedom, thus exposing the narrator’s sanity in the story.

Mental Health from a Gender Perspective. Edited by Bhargavi Davar, 2001

TRANS - Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenchanften, 2021

In his disbelief and outrage at Nora's claim to freedom and independence, her husband declares her mad, reproaching her for abandoning her sacred duties of mother and wife. He accuses her of her immorality, lack of principles, faithlessness, adding that she has lost all ties with rationality. Because Nora is "transgressive," she is labelled "mad," a recurrent label for "disobedient" female figures in a multitude of literary texts. A close study of these female images of lunacy reveals that the concept of madness is gendered and becomes synonymous with women. This paper aims to study cases of "mad women" in the short fiction of the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Turkish journalist and writer Mine Söğüt. Despite various different conceptions of mental disorders throughout its history, the following is a current definition in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern … associated with present distress (a painful symptom) or disability … Whatever its original cause, it must currently be considered a manifestation of a behavioral, psychological, or biological dysfunction in the person (xxii).

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics [ISSN: 0252-8169], 2021

This paper explores the theme of madness in two short stories by women writers. Mental ailments like 'madness,' 'hysteria' and 'nervous condition' are readily associated with women. This paper aims to go beyond the actual illnesses and socially constructed definitions to investigate the implications of 'insanity' and the causes that lead to a woman being labelled 'mad.' While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in the late nineteenth-century America, Pratibha Ray's story "The Eyes" is situated in Odisha in the late twentieth century. This paper would investigate the different yet related concerns that these two authors address.

This paper delves into the connection between female writers and depression, both historically and currently.