Goodman Summary

Páginas: 69 (17176 palabras) Publicado: 5 de febrero de 2013
Chapter four: Madwomen and attics: themes and issues in women's fiction

The female malady (coined by Elaine Showalter)

Alice and the Cheshire Cat is an example in which a female is labelled as “mad” based on language usage or mastery, reason and power. Other examples:

The Yellow Paper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman).
Much Madness is Divinest Sense (Emily Dickinson)

Male figures threatenwith the label “mad” to disempower females due to the male mastery of the language and their assumption of the right to designate correct use of language and rules for female behaviour.

Madness is gendered. Females are called mad by males.

Madness is not only common in fictional characters, but in real ones as well: See Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf's chronic depressions and suicides. Bothalso wrote about madness. Examples:
Plath´s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), her journals and her poem Lady Lazarus → dying as an art.
Louise May Alcott in her novel Moods and her diaries. She wrote about depressions linked to the struggle to balance domesticity and artistic creativity within the frame of associated expectations of women´s behaviour and roles.
“Madness” is notexclusively female → Ernest Hemingway. His suicide is rendered differently, as a heroic act, while Woolf's and Plath's suicides are associated with depression and neurosis. Suicide is also gendered.

Madness theme is often related to the conflict between artistic sensibilities and domesticity.

→ Discussion about the pictures of the Lady of Shalott (by Siddal).

The Lady is depicted workingon her loom. This type of work was not valued for being artistic but was one of the few types of work available to women in the period. She is working confined in her domestic environment without external inspiration (in solitude).
The cracked mirror can be rendered as the cracking sanity of the lady who is negotiating the role that she is expected to play (constrained of her freedom) with herown (sexual) wishes and desire.
The sentence in the poem “I am half-sick of shadows” can be understood as a declaration of mental instability and is related to the poem The Yellow Wallpaper.
Madness is socially and cultural defined. There is no complete image or definition of “Madness”. Madness will be studied as a scientific phenomenon with Charcot´s studies on hypnotism and later with Freud'spsychoanalysis.

Madness as a topic in women's literature (by Helen Small)

Many of the key texts of feminism have been linked with the phenomenon of the madwoman:
Jane Eyre
Mrs Dalloway
The Bell Jar
The Golden Notebook
The Madwoman in the Attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar; 1978)
Many female writer´s (Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame,etc.) have written about psychological breakdown from a first hand experience. Female writers experience intolerable pressures to fulfil their expected roles as women while exercising their literary creativity in a male-dominated world. Madness is the price they have to pay for not behaving conventionally.
Some authors presented a more positive view of madness like Janet Frame, who argues thathaving to remake her identity as a result of mental illness has given her independence from conventional views of the world.

→Is the sex of the author relevant when discussing insanity? Examples: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens.
→ How can we write about women or madness in the language which society gives us, a language which privileges men and emphasizes the value of reason?
(→ ShosanaFelman). Felman emphasizes the madwoman's doubly subversive literary potential (because she is mad and because she is a woman. In The Madwoman in the Attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) the authors question what difference the sex of the author makes when writing about madwomen. For them, the frequency with which women have written about madness is to be seen as one of the most revealing symptoms of...
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