Women And Madness

Reading Women: Genre and Gender.

CW2: Essay of 2000 words.

Question: What are the links between madness and the construction of femininity?

The Victorian era marks an important change in the discriminating

regimes that confined and controlled women. It was during that period that the close

association between femininity and madness became firmly established within thescientific, literary and popular discourse. As a result madness became synonymous with

womanhood and conceptualized as a mental illness. More importantly, it was during the

1950’s up to the 1970’s that clinicians were still being taught to view women as

naturally mentally ill. The woman who is positioned as mad find herself in the center of

many debates. This madness may take manyforms, have many roots, be manifested

through innumerable symptoms, be given different names, but they all share common

histories and common effects. It is rather frightening, that the woman herself is

stigmatized, feared and positioned as dangerous, because she is Woman and therefore

she is Mad.

The discourse that regulates women, madness and femininity is irrevocably linked,many critiques discussed that madness is not an illness but a social construction. In the

feminist analysis this social construction was seen to be a misogynistic or patriarchal

influence. Scientists analysed that women are victims of their biology, as madness seems

to be part of their brain, or that women are victims of an oppressive society, as madness

is socially constructed.In this essay I am going to discuss the three main ideas that in my point of view are the

main links between madness and the construction of femininity. In the first paragraph I

am going to discuss women and madness and its social link, then I will move on to talk

about women and madness as a biological problem and finally I will analyze women and

madness as stereotypes created bysocieties.

Madness and the construction of femininity can be analyzed as a social

authority. During the Victorian era (and still at the present time), societies were ruled by

men and called patriarchal society. In that sense men were the decision makers and hold

the positions of power and prestige to the extend that they could redefine reality. In

patriarchal cultures, womenwere always labelled as mad and constantly oppressed by

men. This oppression of women by men is seen as another form of misogynistic torture.

Misogyny makes women mad either by naming them “the Other”, by reinforcing the

phallocentric discourse or by depriving women of power, privilege and independence.

Wherever we look in, women are controlled very effectively, so that they nevergain the

status of being the ONE, men use madness against women to describe their fears, their

pain, or a label for their anger. Madness simply makes them “the Other” and prevent

them from challenging the ONE.

The challenge between “The Other” versus “The One” is mostly set and reinforced

through the use of Sciences. Women are positioned as “the Other” and labelled as mad,when they step out of the line; they are pathologized and thus dismissed. Psychologists,

psychiatrists, therapists, scientists all act as agents of the patriarchal discourse to

control women through their interventions and trying to convince them of the existence

of a disease they did not know they had. At that time it was very common to link the

male sex to Science and the femalesex to Nature. With sciences, men could uncover and

control nature and therefore control women. Through out the 19th century and into the

20th century a woman who was pregnant, sick, depressed or tired would no longer seek

help from a friend but from a male physician. Psychiatrists looked to extend their power

through widening their definitions of madness. The general belief...