Eljie Mae E.

Omandam
10 March 2019
English 147 WFV
SP3 (643 words)

My Ladies’ Malady: Examining the Conjunction of Madness

and Femininity in Women’s Literature

Language, as a tool for meaning-making, is a repository of power relations. With men

controlling the literary pen longer than women, that power inadvertently favors them. This is
evident in the gendered way certain words acquire conventional associations or connotations. For
instance, the word mad activates the concept of a woman as its potential referent more likely
than it is to conjure up that of a man. Femininity has become indispensable, in this sense, to the
interpretation of female insanity that in her book “Literature and Gender”, Lizbeth Goodman
dedicated a whole chapter investigating the theme. In reclaiming their control over the
representation of female insanity, according to Goodman, the featured women writers were able
to reject the common ascription of madness as simply an effect of female sexuality (120). It is for
this reason that I chose Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Anne Sexton’s
“Wanting to Die”, and Sylvia Plath’s “A Birthday Present”: these texts provide varied and
various narratives that give nuanced meanings to female malady, revealing its concomitancy
with other themes relevant to women such as anxiety of authorship, domesticity, and identity.

One danger of interpreting the recurrent theme of madness, however, is a possible

recourse to romanticizing the mental illness that ultimately took the lives of many great female
writers, especially when the rationale brought up for these suicides point to their sexuality. It is
important to assert that it was not their mental health problems that enabled the likes of Plath,
Gilman and Sexton to successfully produce an awesome oeuvre: it was their ability to represent
their experiences---of which many women can relate---and to express inexplicable feelings
critically through poems, essays, and short stories. By expressing their struggles through the use
of metaphors, haunting images, and unexpected choice of words in their poems, Sexton and Plath
regains control over a language that is bereft of specialized words for their illness, a language
that plainly calls them mad. As Sexton puts it: “Suicides have a special language.” It should be
interesting to explore the kind of language these two poets used to describe the theme.

Another approach for our interpretation is by looking at madness as “a divergence from

the value and practices of a hegemonic society (emphasis added) that demonstrates how the
triumph of sanity is ensured by the social nature of insanity” (Beattie 497). The prevalence of
women writing about madness reveals that it is their feelings of confinement and oppression, not
their sexuality, which becomes the impetus for their writing. Instead of assigning the unstable
femininity---much like male writers have done before---as the cause of the female malady, we
explore other possible reasons i.e. gender-based oppression that forces women into the domestic
sphere, as Plath says, “adhering to rules, to rules, to rules”. The effects of involuntary
confinement can be best examined through Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as the room in the
story is symbolic of the limited space women are expected or allowed to occupy, ultimately
causing one to lose grip of reality or fall into the abyss of depression.
 OMANDAM 2

Lastly, when we consider how these women writers eventually still took their own lives
despite the little freedom writing might have provided them, we can see how “madness” is
actually just another form of oppression. Insanity offered an escape for these writers and their
characters from the impositions of a hegemonic society, only to fall under a different oppressor
altogether--one that robs you of joy, of vitality, and of life. Mental illness is really social as much
as it is psychological and biological: a society that remains oppressive towards women
exacerbates the problem. Our consciousness of the patriarchy’s entrapment and oppression
unfortunately will not totally free us. The question, therefore, is how then do we free ourselves?
 OMANDAM 3

Works Cited

Beattie, Valerie. The Mystery at Thornfield: Representations of Madness in “Jane Eyre”. Studies

in the Novel, vol. 28, no. 4, 1996, pp. 493-505. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29533162.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Literature and Gender. Ed. Lizbeth

Goodman. Routledge, 1996. 348-359. Print.

Goodman, Lizbeth. Literature and Gender. Routledge, 1996. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “A Birthday Present.” Ariel. Harper & Row. 1965. 42-44.

Sexton, Anne. “Wanting to Die.” The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. Houghton Mifflin.

1981. 142-143.