Images of Female Lunacy in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mine Söğüt [1]
Dr. Ufuk GÜNDOĜAN (Dokuz Eylül Universität, Izmir – Türkei)
Email: ufuk.gundogan@deu.edu.tr
“What sort of madness is this?”[2]
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).
Specifically, the terms “lunacy” or “madness” have denominated various understandings of mental disorders throughout history. Michel Foucault puts forth an essential overview of the term in The History of Madness (1961), analysing the concept as a cultural construct, spanning a development from the Renaissance up until the modern period. Throughout its progression, madness began to be accepted as a disease and thereafter dragged into the area of science. Foucault asserts that a separation occurred between madness and reason, as expressed in the title of the first French edition of his book in 1961 Folie et Déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Although the conceptions of reason and madness were “reflections on wisdom” during the Renaissance (xv), in the Classical Age – the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – a separation occurred between reason and madness. In the modern “experience of madness”, starting near the end of the eighteenth century, the disorder is scientifically regarded as a disease. Foucault is adamant in his belief that madness and the ways it is treated form a particular means of social control. (xix)
Even though Foucault’s work shows important intelligent guidance for anyone writing about madness, he does disregard the gendering of this mental illness. Many scholars have uncovered the bias surrounding gender and mental disorder. Among various invaluable studies Jane Ussher’s The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience (2011) must be mentioned. Ussher examines literary and real experiences of women’s madness up until the twenty-first century and points out that “madness” “can be the defining point in a life; a diagnosis many women resist and escape in order to survive” (2). Ussher further adds that “diagnostic categories are social constructions reflecting beliefs about madness and sanity in a particular place at a particular point in time” (4). In many studies as Foucault’s and Ussher’s, a consensus exists that madness is culturally defined. On that note, questioning the “professional” psychiatric diagnoses that are considered factual and definite, renowned psychiatrist Thomas Szasz questioned the nature of mental illnesses in The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961). Szasz contributed to the idea that the (male-dominated) field of psychiatry and its theories and categorizations should not be taken at face value.
Tracing the development of mental illnesses, one can detect its gender bias that is reflected in literary history. Surveying reflections of male and female “madness” in literary texts in Early Modern Britain, one of William Shakespeare’s most popular female characters Ophelia in his tragedy Hamlet became the archetypal “madwoman” embedded in cultural depictions of mentally ill femininity. The forlorn and erotic portrayal of Ophelia, especially on the eighteenth-century stage, reveals the culturally constructed concept that the insane woman presented a threatening sexuality whereas mental disorder in men, epitomized in Hamlet’s character, existed in the form of melancholy and intelligence notwithstanding. Ophelia’s insanity is the outcome of her father’s pressures, using her as a means to decipher Hamlet who in his misogynistic way, prescribes how Ophelia should conduct her life.
Incidentally, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the flourishing of a peculiar “nervous condition” in women that would later be termed “hysteria,” derived from the Latin word for “womb,” positing a direct link between the disorder and women’s biological disposition to suffer from it. Nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) was responsible for the establishment of the term “hysteria,” used for women who showed signs of “unruliness and violence.” These symptoms were in fact reactions to nineteenth-century Victorian ideals used to control female sexuality and contain any disruptions to the patriarchal order. The nineteenth century witnessed crucial social changes, and the emergence of the “New Woman” demanding equal rights caused anxiety and threats toward the established social order. Within this logic, women were considered “sane” only if they adhered to accepted behavioural norms; if not, they got the label “hysterical” and needed to be treated. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), following in Charcot’s footsteps, claimed male and female hysteria was caused by trauma, but mainly focused on women patients, publishing his findings in Studies in Hysteria (1895). The tendency to view hysteria as a female disease persisted and after 1850, when public asylums were established, they housed mostly women, who were regarded as those who need to be tamed or domesticated,
Researching psychiatric developments and the established link between femininity and mental disorder, Elaine Showalter deduces that “in the most obvious sense, madness is a female malady because it is experienced by more women than men” (The Female Malady 3). In uncovering the reasons for this discrepancy, Showalter goes on to document statistics which show that in England in the seventeenth century, up until the nineteenth century, the number of woman patients doubled the number of men, and women made up the majority of patients in asylums. These women “complained more of stress and unhappiness in marriage, expressed more anxiety over their children, and suffered more from depression in their daily lives than their male peers” (3). Showalter claims that “women’s high rate of mental disorder is a product of their social situation, both their confining roles as daughters, wives, and mothers and their mistreatment by a male-dominated and possibly misogynistic psychiatric profession” (3). Many feminist philosophers and literary critics point out the fact that there exists an equation between femininity and insanity.
In explaining her usage of the label “female malady,” Showalter explains how due to “our dualistic systems of language and representation,” women have become nearly synonymous with “irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind” (4). Throughout history, the female sex has been delineated as “the other,” inferior sex. In her pivotal work The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir deduces that “the Other is passivity confronting activity, diversity breaking down unity, matter opposing form, disorder resisting order” (89). In this polarity, where the mind, reason, and rationality – symbolizing the Sun – are elements of the male domain, femininity is connected with, the body, irrationality and insanity – the inconsistency of the Moon. Even though the mental disorders tied to women have had different names throughout the ages, “the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant,” according to Showalter (4). Whether the person who suffers from mental illnesses is male or female, madness is “metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine” (4), a topic researched in various contexts.
In their study of woman writers and madness called The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out that social scientists and social historians have researched
the ways in which patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally. Hysteria … is by definition a ‘female disease,’ … because hysteria did occur mainly among women … and because throughout the nineteenth century this mental illness, like many other nervous disorders, was thought to be caused by the female reproductive system, as if to elaborate upon Aristotle’s notion that femaleness was in and of itself a deformity (53).
In their pivotal work, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the texts of nineteenth-century women writers that depict the different versions of Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason[3] . For Gilbert and Gubar, these “mad women” represent the anger and resentment women feel toward patriarchy. Studying the works of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, they realized the existence of coherent “theme and imagery … in the works of writers who were often geographically, historically, and psychologically distant from each other” (xi). Gilbert and Gubar claim that women experienced a “common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society” (xii). In addition to mentally unstable women, other suffered from “obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia” (xi).
One of the earliest texts depicting a woman’s “transgression” out of her oppressed life is Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House (1879), critiquing the Victorian era when the woman was glorified as the pure, immaculate housewife, as Coventry Patmore depicts in his poem “Angel in the House” (1852). Ibsen’s female protagonist awakens to the reality of patriarchal crimes inflicted on women and this awakening urges her to leave her children behind. Knowing she will have to struggle in a misogynistic world, she is ready for this in her quest for independence and identity. Ibsen’s Nora is one of the many recurrent literary female characters who express their revolt against a male-dominated world in different forms of escape, whether it is madness, suicide, or alternate lives, specifically in utopian works.
Another act of liberation occurs in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860-1935) short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” (1892) which presents a vivid portrayal of a female narrator who is stifled by her physician husband’s prescriptions. The story is a raw critique of the harrowing living conditions of women in the nineteenth century – conditions which have not altered remarkably in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Gilman offers a realistic depiction of woman’s life that, in a way, ends up “driving” her “mad.” The unnamed and isolated female narrator in this story represents all oppressed women in a male-dominated society; she is actually physically confined in an alien environment: a rented mansion where her husband believes she will recover by resting, where they reside “solely on [her] account” (167) and avoiding any outside contact. Gilman’s story is highly autobiographical as she herself suffered from post-natal depression after her daughter’s birth. Similarly, the story’s narrator suffering from “nervousness” and, in her “rational” husband’s words, “fancy” and “whims,” recently gave birth to their child, and is constantly reminded of her “duties” as mother and wife.
The husband assures her that by using her “will and self-control”, she can heal “for his sake” (173). The most frequently used words are “nervous” and “nervousness” in describing her ailment, as she ironically adds: “I suppose John never was nervous in his life” (169). An eminent physician, the doctor husband prescribes a cure for his wife’s “nervous condition,” which can be described as a “rest cure.” Gilman’s own doctor, Dr. Weir Mitchell, also named in the story, prescribed the exact same “cure” that led Gilman to a mental breakdown. Both the writer and the narrator of “The Yellow Paper” are forbidden to write, universally viewed by male authorities as “intellectual activity.” However, it was exactly that activity, in a manner of speaking “cathartic” for Gilman, which cured her depression. For Gilman, as she recounts in her book Women and Economics (1898), women should be given the same opportunities in attaining professions of their choice because she adamantly believed that being useful, contributing to society and being creative nourished the individual.
The female narrator in “The Yellow Paper” expresses her desire to write and partake in discussions about the creative act of writing with others and is strongly convinced that she would heal mentally if she were given the freedom to work. Unfortunately for her, her husband, as her brother who is also a doctor, and even her sister-in-law who was a “perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper” (171), discourage and forbid her from taking up a pen. Her intelligence and creative energy are stifled, she is alienated from her true self, denied the act of writing which for Gilman meant to express her true self. Doctor John patronizes his wife, forces her to stay in an unfamiliar setting, a room the narrator abhors: a barred room with awful wallpaper that has the ugliest yellow colour she has seen. Upon urging to stay in another room downstairs, the narrator is belittled by her husband who calls her “a blessed little goose.” Imprisoned in the disturbing room, she gradually reflects her changing mental state as she begins to discern a pattern in the wallpaper in which she sees other imprisoned women struggling to escape.
Throughout the story, the female narrator secretly pens her changing state, which was described by a doctor at the time as a realistic depiction of insanity. She is constantly assured by her husband that her health is improving, which she initially tries to refuse, realizing she must keep her thoughts to herself. “Resting” is obviously her husband’s prescription to force her into her conventional passive role of a wife who should at all times concur with her spouse: teaching her the proper place of an obedient wife as she humorously puts it: “[John] hardly lets me stir without special direction” (167). However, continuing to secretly write in her journal proves to be exhausting for her because she needs to be “sly about it” (167). Her conviction is that working, writing, will cure her, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (166). However, incarcerated and under constant control of her husband and his sister, she utters desperately, “But what is one to do?” (166) “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes … I think it’s due to this nervous condition. But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself – before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (167).
Madness and reason are presented as gendered; the esteemed doctor represents reason in contrast to his wife who is “emotional” and lacks the strong “will” to become better. The mentally suffering narrator relates her predicament: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?” (166). Completely isolated from any social contact, and only surrounded by epitomes of Victorian definition of the sexes, the narrator cannot find a way out except retreat into her own world. In 1913, Gilman explained in her account entitled “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” that she hoped her story could help other women who faced a similar form of entrapment in their lives. Gilman asserts that her story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” Gilman’s character continues to keep up the appearance of sanity around her husband and his sister until she cannot hide her true mental state at the end of the story. “Of course I never mention it them any more – I am too wise – but I keep watch of it all the same.”
Similarly, in Ibsen’s play, Nora confronts her husband, claiming they have been playing a role, and challenges him to throw away their masks which made them appear happily married. Throughout the play, Nora’s husband Torvald addresses her as “little featherhead” and “lark,” while Nora herself unconsciously displays her self-estrangement by referring to herself in third person as “your lark.” In the same vein, the doctor in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” never mentions his wife’s name, calling her “goose” or “little girl” in addition to referring to his wife in third person when he says “Bless her little heart! … she shall be as sick as she pleases!” (175) Both husbands display similar belittling attitudes toward their wives in nineteenth century Victorian fashion.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of the term hysteria diminished. The nervous female disorder had reached its end with WWI, when soldiers were observed showing similar symptoms, as Showalter calls it “male war neurosis” (168). The disorder was seen as “effeminacy” as these soldiers showing signs of hysteria did not hold up to the male ideal of courage. Later on, new forms of mental disorders were formulated, such as schizophrenia, neurasthenia, and neurosis in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to Thomas Szasz, “This alleged change in, or even the disappearance of, hysteria is usually attributed to cultural changes, especially to a lessening of sexual repressions and to the social emancipation of women” (The Myth of Mental Illness 103).
Specifically, after 1920, schizophrenia became the mental disorder affiliated with femininity, as American writer and poet Sylvia Plath depicts vividly in her first and only novel The Bell Jar (1961). In her highly autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Plath portrays her alter ego Esther Greenwood – a name borrowed from Gilman’s protagonist in her short story “Unnatural Mother” (1895). Endeavouring to become a writer in a misogynist world, Esther similarly struggles with roles that are available for, or denied of, women, which leads to her mental breakdown and her being labelled as “neurotic” because she wants the same privileges and opportunities available for the opposite sex.
Similar struggling women are depicted in images of “mad women” in the short story collection by Turkish journalist and writer Mine Söğüt called Stories of a Mad Woman (Deli Kadın Hikayeleri, 2011). In a haunting, dark and cynical tone, these stories present women driven insane through mental and physical abuse, coercion, trauma, rape, enslavement in marriages that have damaged their sanity. They seem to turn isolated and desperate, yet empowered by taking control of their own lives. The preface of the short story collection depicts her subject – victims of a sexist and misogynist society that condemns her to solitude, insanity and drives her to suicide:
I will tell you about an existential delirium cursed through womanhood.
I will walk you through a lonely, forlorn crowd
that consists of all that occurs between her hair and points of her feet,
she who is destined to give birth, and sealed to losing her children.
I will look in through the windows these mad women open up in their bodies,
These women hiding behind the doors that open into them.
I will again and again and again, jump out of those windows” (9) [4]
Intertwining cultural conflicts of her country in the first stories, Söğüt focuses mainly on the oppressive nature of the misogynist society these women live in. Their only means of protest against imprisonment is their madness. The following preface to one of her stories sums up these women’s predicament:
Let me tell you a secret.
It will always be the same woman who dies.
Always the same woman who gives birth.
Always the same woman who escapes.
It’s all one.
It’s all one.
It’s all one.
That woman … that same woman … is utterly insane. (31)
In Söğüt’s story “The Woman Who Carries in Her Something Like Fire,” the protagonist is a woman poet who lived in a marginal state, hating men because, as implied, she suffered physical abuse at their hands. The woman poet was first kissed by a man when she was a small child as the narrator later on reveals: a male doctor to whose care she was left by her trusting parents who could not figure out why she would get paralyzed and faint every time the doctor came to their house. The narrator further describes her as a woman “who didn’t like the Sun … hated men. She was a … jittery poet” (41). Because she was “sad, so sad,” the unnamed poet only went out at night, “she had inside her something like fire that made her, with her chiffon dresses, defy the aggressive winds of the night” (42).
Questioning her madness, the narrators ask:
“Was she aware that she was mad? …”
“Yes she was.”
“Didn’t she ever try to get rid of it … to heal?”
“No. She loved her madness too much.”
On her last night, she was wearing chiffon dresses of no particular colours – neutral colors – which emphasize the fact she was relegated to nobody in this life. Her death is brought upon by a male figure: “As life’s surprises will drive one crazy, they will also kill you!” (44) She commits suicide by cutting her arms, legs and throat with razors, which are given to her by this strange man in the street who confuses her for a prostitute. This is another labelling for a woman who happens to be outside at night time. She clarifies that she is poet, not a prostitute, accepting the razors he offers in exchange for a kiss. In her act of defiance, having struggled her whole life to be accepted as a poet, she is only able to take control by reclaiming her body and taking her own life. She is a woman with such imagination and talent, incompatible in the reality of the alien world, refusing to inhabit it, similar to Sylvia Plath’s experiences.
In another one of her short stories, “The Skilful Pink Hand,” the female protagonist is a wife and mother who believes she has a grey metal hook instead of a hand. A hook that “if it dangled on a man’s wrist could make him more powerful but if it is on a woman’s wrist … it can repel everyone” (57) reflecting again the existing dualistic world view. This woman became a mother because she was expected to, but cannot cope with the idea of surrounding her life around a child and sacrificing herself to the upbringing of another human being, buried under responsibilities and heavy duties.
“Is God mad at her?
No, he is not.
He put a hook on her right hand.
He put a baby in her belly although she did not want it.
He was responsible for the birth of the baby, prematurely, still very tiny” (58).
Despite all efforts, nobody can make her believe otherwise: that she has a normal functioning pink hand, not a hook, on her right wrist. Her husband, like Gilman’s husband doctor, endeavours to make her behave “normally” and rationally, warning her that their child will grow up believing their mother is crazy. “You do not have a hook, he says. It’s just a hand, he says. A skilful hand with a pink palm, five fingers … Just forget about forget about the hook he says” (59). At the end of the story, the narrator describes how her mother committed suicide by cutting her wrists with the hooks she took from her husband’s butcher shop. This the moment her husband understood she actually had a hook instead of a hand. The hook metaphorically stands for the self-destructive tendencies that people around her cannot understand. Instead of trying to alleviate her burdens, they wish she would act normal again.
The recurrent female images of lunacy in literary texts end up completely alienated from their surroundings like Gilman’s narrator, or choose to end their lives as Söğüt’s women. If refusing to conform to the dualistic and misogynistic society is called “madness,” the female characters prefer this labelling instead of conforming to it. Women are devoted to represent their real stories, and their portrayal of mad women, growing out of their real life experiences, manifest as their rebellious act of refusing to be typecast as stereotypical daughters, mothers, and wives. As a feminist protest, woman writers reclaim this labelling and redefine it. Refusing to be silenced or remain silent, they use their voice in drawing the readers’ attention to the case of madness, in which they rather expose the hypocrite and illogical patriarchal ideals, in the endeavour, as Gilman wished, “to save people from being driven crazy.”
WORKS CITED
American Psychiatric Association (APA) (2000) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental
disorders, 4th edn (DSM-IV). Washington, DC: APA.
Anderson, Sarah Wood. Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde, and Sheila Malovany-
Chevallier, 2010.
Busfield, Joan. Men, Women and Madness. Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder.
Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy, Jean Khalfa. Routledge New
York, 2006.
Gilbert, Sandra M., Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. Herland and Selected Stories. Penguin
Books, 1999.
—, “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” The Forerunner, October 1913.
—, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a
Factor in Social Evolution. Harper & Row, 1966.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House Trans. Charlotte Barslund and Frank McGuinness. London:
Faber and Faber, 1997.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar.
Showalter, Elaine. Hysteria, feminism and gender, in S.L. Gilman, H. King, R. Porter, G.S.
Rousseau and E. Showalter, Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 286-344.
—, The Female Malady. Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980.
London: The Penguin Group, 1985.
Söğüt, Mine. Deli Kadın Hikayeleri, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2011.
Szasz, Thomas S. The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and
the Mental Health Movement. Syracuse University Press, 1970.
—, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York:
Harper, 1961.
Ussher, Jane M. The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience. Routledge, 2011.
[1] William Shakespeare Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 5 l. 178 Laertes’ description of Ophelia. The word “madness,” and “ecstasy” as synonym, appear 25 times in the tragedy
[2] Torvald to his wife Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House
[3] Bertha Mason is the “madwoman” in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre
[4] All translations henceforth will be mine