This series of blogs is born out of both love and anger. It is with the utmost tender love and precious care that I weave these stories, yet I am angered that I have to. Beginnings are hard for me. I want to jump right into the middle of the action and figure it out as I go, but I am constantly reminded that you cannot build a house starting with the windows; the foundation has to come first. An introduction to this problem comes down to my realization that nothing has changed in the way society views and oppresses women ever. You can make the argument that women have the right to vote, they can get divorced, they can legally drink, they can drive, they can hold jobs and public offices. But what that argument is missing is the foundation: the beginnings of femalehood. As Western society settled and congealed into some semblance of order, women were ordered to the bottom–subservient to their patriarchal figures. Patriarchy does a good job at justifying its positions, by producing literature and scholarly thought on how a woman’s constitution was best suited for domesticity. This is where an artificial value system comes into play that makes women believe in their domestic duties as the place where they can achieve what their men are achieving in the public sphere. The traditional thought being if women feel they are appreciated and needed, they won’t be tempted to step out of bounds. Men get the social mobility that their sex allows them, while women chafe against the stifling boundary of confinement. The difference of a few organs should not be the reason for oppression.
A proper lady, the specifics of which changes depending on the time, was meant to wait, be sedentary until the man told them to move. Daya’s song “Sit Still, Look Pretty” could have been sung by Roman women in 509 B.C. The rights of women could only rise when they started below the bottom. How have things not actually changed you may ask? Well while women may have more rights today than before, those rights are conditional as are the public roles women can hold. Women are held to an impossible standard where they have to be enough but not too much. Sure they can work in an office, but how often are female CEOs challenged and undermined? How often are the sexual exploits of a young woman ridiculed and judged, or the lack of sexual experience mocked? Yes, we can vote, but our bodily autonomy is always on the docket to be cut. It’s maddening. Where my thesis comes in is to act as a moderator, an observer of this trend, and narrate it to a broader audience. Things can change but more people need to be as maddened as I am if we are to ever be able to have an actual conversation about what needs to change.
I find that the words of Mary Wollstonecraft pioneer what contemporary scholar Sara Ahmed calls a feminist killjoy. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, originally published in 1792, pointed out the ridiculousness of patriarchal oppression and called for actual education of women–not just in domestic duties. Wollstonecraft pointed out what I am arguing now in 2023 (231 years later), “I do frankly acknowledge the inferiority of woman according to the present appearance of things. And I insist that men have increased that inferiority until women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures”. Many can pretend that our society is equal now and we have come a long way, but until Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels stop relating to current attitudes, then we still have a long way to go.
I am not arguing that women have never had a voice or a sway when it comes to the way society works. I am arguing that those stories are often not telling the whole truth. Something happens between putting their pens down and someone else reading their words. For too long, their stories have been mitigated, translated, truncated, and censored, if they were even recorded at all before the world could hear them. What could women be writing that would be so threatening to incite such censorship? To a male-dominated world, anything that could disrupt their illusions of power is a threat. If a woman penned a narrative of her experiences in this world, or if she were to begin speaking on a new way of thinking that called for change, that must be stopped. The ultimate goal is to prevent women from writing or stepping out of their boxes before they even begin. This project could go on endlessly, but for the sake of the time I have between now and my graduation, I aim to focus on Western civilization and the dominant views of femininity and female gender roles. This will begin with some mythological beginnings and Christianity and then move through 19th-century literature where the madwoman had her heyday, into second-wave feminist theory and writers, and finishing with my contemporary observations and examples.
**Disclaimer: this blog explores the idea of motherhood, however, it does not condone or excuse any form of child neglect or abuse.**
Persephone’s story is so entwined with her mother, that it felt pertinent to include the mother’s voice in this healing and put them in conversation. What follows is a conversation between mother and daughter.
Shadows
Daughter: As a child, I relished in your light; the warmth that it brought me, the safeness. Perhaps I relied on you to guide me too much, for now, I have let your light shroud me in shadows.
Mother: My heart aches to think you have ever felt for one moment that you were in my shadow. When you were a small child I felt it was my job to keep you safe! Protect you from harm. From anyone or anything that could possibly do you any harm.
Daughter: But now that I have left our safe meadow on journey of my own, I realize that I have never stepped outside of your protection–I do not know where to go only this listless feeling of being stuck. What if all I can ever be is your daughter?
Being the daughter of such a sovereign woman creates a difficult-to-navigate path through adulthood. As a child, I imagine Persephone felt protected as if her mother’s power could weather any storm and she would never come to harm. However, we all know that she ends up in the Underworld without her mother for the first time in her life. We can only imagine how frightening and disorienting this must have been for her.
I think that is where some of my own mother wounding has come in. As I grew into my womanhood I found myself disoriented and lost. This was a new territory for me, away from the meadow of childhood. I looked to my mother for direction, but she was off tending to her domain, as I was expected to attend to mine. I was terrified which then grew to anger and resentment; festering into a need to protect myself and hide all the vulnerable pieces since no one was going to do that for me anymore. When it all crumbled around me I looked for someone to blame. Unfairly, I turned it towards my mother; why had she never prepared me for the Underworld? Where was she to tell me where to go and to direct my newfound power?
When I write I always like to allude to my personal life, but never delving into intimate details and I will never do that–those stories I keep for myself. However, this cycle of motherhood is not a unique experience. As we grow into our womanhood there is a friction between our childhood identity and our adult identity. When that friction sparks, we can get burned. In that hurt, we may look to those who have protected us and be angry when they did not intervene.
If we can take that anger and try to turn it to discovery I believe we can navigate into our power with more ease. We daughters must ask ourselves who were our mothers before, when they were daughters? What wounds do our mothers have that they never healed? Our mother’s scars inform how they then guide us. My mother used her scars to remind herself of the dangers in this world and attempted to shield me. Just as Demeter knew of the evils of Olympus and its deities, my mother chose to keep me protected in her meadow.
Instead of blaming her for this, I am trying to see her as a woman with her own power who did what she thought was best, and in turn, seeing myself as my own queen. I can take control of my domain and rule it how I see fit, but I will always be grateful to my mother for the meadow she provided.
If you want a refresher of Demeter and Persephone’s story please check out this PBS clip.
Few could walk my path, for it is soft as a petal, yet cruel as death.
I have not been completely honest with everyone, including myself–I have tried to bypass and pretend, to keep my smiling mask in place. I wanted to be perfect like everyone perceived me to be; that the bad things, the whispers, the rumors, did not scar me. I did not want anyone to see the vines of thorns constricting me. Be better, you are fine, keep going, don’t stop all things that whispered in the back of my head while I tried to slog through a mess. I thought that if I just ran a little faster, smiled a little wider, or posed just right then maybe I would believe the lies I was telling everyone else. That is when Persephone found me. She saw me crouched over the shattered pieces of my mask trying to put all the pieces back into the original form before anyone noticed. She knelt down with me and pulled my hands away from the shards before I could cut myself. Together we looked over what I would call my brokenness, my lack of perfection. She told me that this is just a phase–that by virtue of a woman’s natural cycle, we each have the capacity to morph and flow through life in such cycles. It is when we pressure ourselves and perceive pressure from others that we try to control the flow, that is when we fall. Life is a cycle where we go from the time of our safe meadows to uncharted underworlds, and then back again. We cannot bypass an underworld by sprinting to a new meadow. Persephone’s story and wisdom can guide us through this.
An Ode to Persephone
When we think of Persephone there are a few things that might ping in your memory. She is the wife of Hades, daughter of Demeter, maiden of spring, queen of the underworld. All of these qualifiers are true, but when we look at the myths her story is not truly her own.She is revered by some, pitied by others, and misunderstood by even more. *I need to pause briefly here to put a trigger warning for mentions of abduction, rape, and sexual assault*
One day Persephone was picking flowers with her friends. She was dazzled by a narcissus flower and reached out for it when suddenly, Hades erupted from the earth, snatching her away and taking her deep to the Underworld. Persephone screamed and “…cried with a piercing voice,” (“Homeric Hymn” line 20). This version, as the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” tells us is the most common and agreed upon story of Persephone, however this is not even her story.
When Hades takes his bride to the Underworld, Persephone’s mother, wreaks havoc on Earth refusing to allow any crops to grow and killing many mortals. The entire mid-section of the hymn details Demeter’s journey to find her daughter, but leaving out the crux of what happens to Persephone below. Writers have filled in the blanks on these events based on the nature of her entrance to the Underworld (i.e. assault, coercion, rape). A.E. Stalling’s poem, “Hades Welcomes His Bride” offers a dark and chilling account of what she endured. However, we cannot truly know what Persephone went through as she never tells her side of the story. Instead, her agency is further reduced until she is a victim, a helpless maiden. I do not aim to discount her suffering, rather I hope to empower her to share her story and her tools for self-empowerment in darkness. As the author Ellie Mackin Roberts writes in her (2020) novel Heroines of Olympus, “In her journey from barren, aggrieved and grieving maiden to ruler over the dead, Persephone was an emotionally complex goddess who is often reduced to the title of Hades’s wife or Demeter’s daughter” (p. 181). From her journey into her own sovereignty, we can glean some guidance–no matter who tries to tell your story or take your power, so long as you know your story you will never lose yourself in the Underworld.
This is merely an introduction to Persephone and the stories she has to tell. As I process more with her I will share with you all.
***Trigger warning: brief mention of sexual assault
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade I, like so many were gutted. Something as simple as choosing what goes on inside your body was now vulnerable, if not outright banned. I’m lucky, I live in New York which is a blue state, so my right to choose will likely not be revoked, but I am a minority. For so many women they have been reduced–their independence, their sovereignty disrespected. Yet again women are deemed less than; that they cannot make decisions for themselves. As a Lilith devotee I am outraged for my fellow women. Have we not fought tooth and nail to be treated even slightly equal as men? Have we not proven that we can “handle” ourselves? Again patriarchy needs to put women back under their rule.
Yes I am pro-choice. The choice to have an abortion is the choice to not be pregnant, to not bring life into this world, to honor yourself as a human being. In the case of tragedies and injustices of sexual assault, incest, and abuse, the punishment should not rest with the women should she become pregnant. Those who endure these traumas and find a lingering presence should be able to reclaim their stories. To me that is what being pro-choice means: the choice to write your own story; the right to control the way your life unfolds.
Those who argue against that choice claim that it is murder. That is one way to read that story, but I would counter that forcing someone into motherhood is it’s own kind of murder. Motherhood is an identity that many are privileged to don, but it can smother the woman who came before. That kind of shift in a story cannot be taken lightly and therefore should not be forced. It should be celebrated.
This contemporary moment holds so much fear. Project 2025 and conservative politicians hope to fully ban abortion, restrict birth control access, track reproductive health, and more. This would effectively plunge the US to Gilead. Our authorship over our lives would not be our own in this world; we would be at the mercy of those in power.
Life is a story that we get to write. There are so many turns it can take and combinations of plot points. To be in charge of your own story is to be human. If women cannot choose to whether bring a new character (a child) into their story or not then they are not human.
If you are reading these in chronological order, the first phase: “The Mythos of Lilith” was about reclaiming an ancient power. Unearthing that root and following it across the jagged lines of time, media, and location. Madness is in all of us. Anger/insanity are two sides of the same coin. While I am not closing that chapter, I do believe it is time to pivot slightly. I am a new person now. The author of the first blogs, is gone a mere hallucination. Now I am reborn and so too will my stories.
Stories; that is the next phase. From parts of narrative, to point of view, to real life tale spinners, that is where I am being drawn. Who tells stories? What do they consist of? And who’s stories do we believe? If we believe them does it make them true?
The idea of Phase 2 Storytelling, came to me as my dad was battling cancer. In his last 6 months of life, I tried to capture every detail and memorize it, so I could pass down those memories to others. I didn’t want my dad to die with his body. In gireving him, there have been a lot of stories shared between our circle. When I wrote his obituary I tried to construct a narrative that would let outsiders into the man that was my dad. The best human I had the pleasure of knowing my whole life. More and more people shared stories of my dad’s youth and misadventures; all with good intentions they were all grieving his loss too. And yet, it got my brain thinking, how are the stories we tell about loved ones any different than fairytales, than novels? And if I’m thinking that now then, what other stories were believed as fact when they were in fact fiction?
If all the past and present are is just stories, then we play characters. That means there is a hero, a villain, and a collection of side characters to round it out. I can also safely assume (and subsequent blogs will delve into this) that the stories of women are often used to paint them into boxes society can understand: innocent or villianous. Stories used to move pieces on patriarchy’s chess board where the king is protected and the queen sacrificed for the good of the kingdom.
To put this back to my life at the moment, I am heartbroken my dad passed. I miss him dearly every minute of everyday, grieving him has been the hardest thing I have done in this lifetime. BUT I am not empty, my life is not meaningless, I am not heart-empty. I was with my dad from diagnosis to his very last breath on May 22nd, and I know that he wants to watch me walk my path, to succeed, to push past all the naysayers and prove them wrong. He is guiding my purpose, and I know he is proud of me. If I tell well meaning people that, when they ask me how I am, that seems callous. If I tell them I’m actually doing quite well, they’ll think I’m a sociopath. It would make them comfortable if I fit into their narrative as the heartbroken daughter. If I broke down in tears and recounted his last days they would be accepting of that narrative. But the story of the young woman who loses her dad and finds renewed purpose and confidence in herself? Different story.
We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power
Audre Lorde “Uses of Anger”
The quote above comes from one of my favorite Audre Lorde essays. In “that “Uses of Anger” she argues that anger is a powerful force of energy that creates change. As Lorde explains, anger is a legitimate response to societal injustices and should be understood as such. Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed argues something similar with her term “feminist killjoy. Ahmed’s essay imagines someone pointing out a moment of sexism and racism (i.e., a joke) and being labeled a killjoy. Ahmed argues that yes, being a feminist means killing other people’s joy, but in the name of equality. The path of a killjoy ties into Lorde’s belief of anger as power. Situations of inequality and oppression create anger in the people who are paying attention. Still, those angered souls have to brave the resistance from others who would call them killers of joy. If anger is power for change, why are angered women often written off as ‘having a moment?’ If our society has come so far in the name of equality, why are feminist killjoys ostracized for calling for change? An angry woman is just another term for a madwoman. It’s maddening to see the world through this lens, but it is a long-lived reality. Euripides’ play Medea can be read as a document of both the ancient past and a present representation of the struggles of modern madwomen. Traditionally, it is a play about revenge and morality. I want to complicate that view and argue that Euripides’ play shows women’s unequal role and calls for radical change. The insane crimes that Medea commits are unredeemable for any reasonable person. Still, audiences are not meant to forgive her for her murders, only understand the position she was in and empathize. For its purposes here, Medea’s plight and the subordinate role of women in society is not a bygone relic of the ancient past.
Brief Exposition to Euripides’ Medea
A brief exposition of Jason and Medea would be helpful here, as its original audiences would have already been familiar with the connected myths before seeing the play. Jason’s father was the king of Iolkos, who was tragically killed by his brother Pelias. Jason’s mother hides him away before he, too, can be killed. Jason grows and trains, planning to return to Iolkos and challenge his uncle for the throne. When he arrives in Iolkos to avenge his father, Jason is tasked with finding the Golden Fleece. If he can return with it, Pelias will give him the throne, and Jason will have avenged his father’s death. What follows is a series of adventures that are too long to detail here. If you want the whole story, I recommend this episode of the podcast “Let’s Talk About Myths Baby,” created by Liv Albert, or read this brief PBS article. For this blog, all you need to know is that Jason recruits Medea to his crew, where she plays a critical role in Jason’s success. I would like to point out that her love for Jason led her astray; he talked a big game as a great hero, yet it was Medea who actually slew the serpent guarding the Fleece. Euripides does mention some of these events in Medea’s argument with Jason, including some of the horrible things she had to do to help her lover succeed. Medea deceived her father and allowed the murder of King Pelios by his daughters (Medealines 483-487). They find the Fleece, and Jason takes his throne, and they are presumably happy for a while. However, the locals dislike Medea’s status as a foreigner and her magic and run Jason and Medea out of Iolkos. The play begins after Jason, Medea, and their children have settled in Corinth. As the play unfolds, audiences watch as Medea takes her predicament into her own hands. She is a master at calculating and assessing risk as she constructs her revenge.
Medea Deranged Murderer or Feminist Killjoy?
Some have called Medea’s character “deranged and vengeful” (Hart), but that is precisely why I am drawn to her. Medea is a perfect combination of both types of madwomen: the insane one and the angry one. I want to focus on the cause of her deranged behaviors: anger. Her anger at the patriarchal forces in her life turns her to act in what a reasonable person would consider unstable ways. Murdering your husband’s new wife, her father, and then your two children is not what any reasonable person would consider sane. But if we really look at what Medea is communicating to us as modern audiences. She is mad, wholly and righteously, because of her place in a man’s world. If we consider anger as a legitimate response to injustice, then we would consider Medea’s anger at Jason’s betrayal reasonable. I am not arguing that murder is the answer to injustice but that Euripides’ play is a dramatized depiction of a woman responding to the unjust world around her. Medea’s righteous anger flows freely throughout the play; the word “rage” is repeated by the Nurse and the Tutor in reference to Medea’s emotional state quite frequently in the opening pages. The Nurse frets, “She’ll not relax her rage till it has found its victim. God grant she strike her enemies and not her friends! (lines 94-95). What Medea does with her rage, I think, is truly brilliant. To go back to “Uses of Anger,” Lorde writes that when anger is “focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (127). Medea’s anger is such a source of energy that she inspires the Chorus of Corinthian women to call for a gender recast. Yes, she is a murderer; she is a madwoman, there is no denying that. But consider that by the end of the play, she appears in a chariot pulled by dragons that carry her away. This is remarkable because a typical Greek play would have one of the gods coming out and setting everything right. But they don’t, showing that the gods are at ease with Medea’s actions.
Medea’s anger has been established, as is what she does with her anger, but what of Jason, the once-great hero? In today’s vernacular, we would consider Jason’s behavior as gaslighting. When Medea points out all she has done for him, he claims that it was not her doing but Aphrodite’s. Aphrodite made Medea fall in love with him, so everything she did out of love for him was caused by Aphrodite. Medea rightfully calls him out on that point. He even has the audacity to tell her to calm down. Jason says to her, “–you’ll change your mind and be more sensible” (lines 629-630). Jason’s behavior is just one in a long line of men then and now that have disregarded a woman’s argument because she was too emotional. The relationship between Medea and Jason in this play aligns itself nicely with the double-standard of anger between men and women. To historicize my argument, “within the long history of western civilisation, women’s anger has been construed as deviant, monstrous or otherwise taboo…” (Jilly Boyce Kay “Introduction: anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage” 591). Female anger is often seen as a sign of immaturity or unreasonability, but a man’s anger is justified as a sign of masculine power.
If you are looking for a modern example of this divide, I would guide you to the Brett Kavanaugh Senate Judiciary Committee hearings when he was accused by Dr. Ford of sexual assault. In this example, one of many, I would add, Justice Kavanaugh is seen having his moment. He is angry: cries, and shouts, all in the name of what he calls “a calculated and orchestrated political hit.” In other words, his anger is fueled by an injustice he feels was committed against him. Instead of disqualifying him for his emotional outburst, Kavanaugh was supported and protected. For a white man, anger is considered an emotion of power, but if Dr. Ford had given her testimony with the same level of emotion, she would have been considered hysterical and an unreliable witness. To return to Sara Ahmed for a moment, “we can hear what is at stake in how women who speak out are heard. To sound strident is to be heard as loud, harsh or grating” (Ahmed “Collection”). Women are not given the same privilege of self-representation as men are. To even command an iota of the respect that men are given, women have to stuff themselves into a calm and submissive package. Medea knows that her reputation is not for her to decide but for Jason to weave.
Though victimized, Medea is not the victim of this play. This play is her time to get angry, get even, and reclaim herself. Any moment she is on stage, Medea assesses the other characters around her and evaluates the best course of action to take. When King Creon approaches her to banish her from Corinth for his daughter’s safety, Medea assures him, “don’t let me alarm you, Creon. I’m in no position–/ A woman–to wrong a king” (lines 317-318). She continues to play-act this submissive woman until she has swayed Creon to allow her one more day in Corinth. When he leaves, she turns to the Chorus, saying, “Do you think I would ever have fawned so on this man, / Except to gain my purpose, carry out my schemes?” (lines 370-371). She recognizes her position and uses it to her advantage, lulling Creon into a false sense of security. If Medea is a murderess, the Chorus is even more bloodthirsty. They call for a complete gendered recast, “deceit is men’s device now…A time comes when the female sex is honoured;” (lines 416 & 419). The Chorus has recognized Medea’s plight and sees their own situations reflected back at them. These women have had it with being told they don’t matter, and they are calling for radical change.
One of the most remarkable things Euripides does with this play is that we can sympathize with Medea. Audiences are given her perspective and thoughts as she processes and plans her next moves. Not only that, but Euripides casts the Chorus as a group of Corinthian women who also empathize with Medea and express their dissatisfaction with their role in society. The audience and the Chorus see the turmoil she goes through and how she rationalizes her actions. We can understand why she is mad. To return to Kay’s commentary on mediated rage as a closing, “Women’s anger has for so long been cast as unreasonable, hysterical, as the opposite of reason; but actually, it is full of the power of insight and understanding” (595). Now is the time to express all our anger, break down all the patriarchal oppression holding us down, and like Medea, ride our chariots beyond it.
Work Cited
Vellacott, Philip, translator. Medea. By Euripides, Penguin Classics, 1963.
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press, 2007.
Kay, Jilly Boyce. “Introduction: anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage.” FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 2019 VOL. 19, NO. 4, 591–615, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1609197
When I first began researching madwomen, my search began in literature. I combed through books, short stories, and poetry across periods. I found so much madness not only in the characters but in the writers’ own lives. Writing, after all, is an extension of ourselves and our circumstances. If so many female writers were experiencing the madness of patriarchal enclosure, I began wondering how many other women were experiencing it, but not writing it down? How many were ‘mad’ in reality and not just fiction? There are very interesting parallels that can be drawn between fiction and reality. I want to refer to scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. Their research into the same topic is focused mainly on 19th-century literature authors and characters, but as I argue that sort of oppression has not changed. Gilbert and Gubar write in their Preface that women have often been, “enclosed in the architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society” (xvii). They are using the term architecture to describe the structural facets of patriarchal society. Women then are confined to the areas men have defined for them; that really gives the phrase ‘women belong in the kitchen’ new meaning.
Defining Spaces & Escapism
If patriarchy defines the spaces, then I can argue that women have had to find creative ways to rebel. Aside from active protests, there is passive activism that exists in works that include this madwoman character. These writers could have written these “images of enclosure and escape” (Gilbert & Gubar Preface xvii) as an act of both pointing it out and as an act of rebellion. Even though many women have been unable to shed the shackles of patriarchy, they were able to disguise their rebellion in their writing cleverly hiding their dissatisfaction and protests in their novels and poems. As Gilbert and Gubar point out, writings by and of madwomen have certain characteristics and tropes. The madwoman starts out as a “normal” woman and then for some reason she goes mad. Once she goes mad there is no returning to the genteel housewife. In this blog, I want to examine the similarities between a fictional short story and a real madwoman’s life story.
Picking at the Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (TYW) has been analyzed and examined since its initial publication in 1892. Authorial intent is not usually something that matters to me as an English grad student. I think that’s the beauty of literature: that you can interpret things in lots of different ways (provided you have actual evidence). For this text though, Gilman actually wrote about her reasons for writing the short story, and I believe those should be considered when this story is examined. After all, the text is based partly on her own experiences with postpartum depression. In the entry, she writes that she was given the same advice as the character in her story to rest in bed and never write ever again. She states that the advice from this “wise-man” sent her “so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over [it]” (Perkins Gilman). This was never meant to be a feminist tale (I think it still is though), instead it was supposed to be a cautionary tale. At the very end of the brief entry she writes, “It [TYW] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Perkins Gilman). For its use here, TYW offers an example of the madwoman character arc in literature, that takes its ideas from real-life.
The structure of TYW is a series of journal entries written by the wife as she spirals into madness. At the beginning of TYW, readers are informed that the wife has been advised, or should I say ordered, by her husband to remain locked up in an “atrocious nursery” (Perkins Gilman), after her mental health has taken a turn for the worse during her postpartum period. Her choices about her health and care are made by the patriarchal figures in her life, “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?” (TYW Perkins Gilman). As with the case of many madwomen, her husband decides to just sweep her off, away from prying eyes, away from the society she cannot conform to. It is not explicitly stated in the text, but it is implied that she will remain away from society until she is decent enough to rejoin.
Once they arrive at the mansion, her husband sets her up in the nursery. In this nursery, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room. Also in this room, the windows are barred and there are rings hanging out from the walls. Within the wallpaper she sees forms and shapes moving about until she believes it to be a woman trapped behind the paper. She watches the figure move “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (TYW Perkins Gilman). The woman believes that this same treatment happened to another woman before her; that the wallpaper swallowed her up and now it wants her too.
The patriarchal hold over her eventually breaks when she snaps, becoming utterly mad, peeling all the wallpaper off and pacing around the room continuously “‘I’ve got out at last,’ … ‘and I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Perkins Gilman). There is no going back to the submissive wife, she is a monster now, but literature is often conveying a message to its readers. With her transformation she surpasses the patriarchy, “now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall so that I had to creep over him every time” (Perkins Gilman). She physically and metaphorically tramples over the patriarchal hold over her.
This is often the point where critics argue this is not a feminist tale. They believe that because she spirals totally into madness with no hope for her sanity then it must mean that her husband was right; she was mad. I want to caution readers from rolling down the hill to that conclusion so quickly. As a cautionary tale, Gilman was attempting to warn other women about the treatment she, and her heroine, were prescribed. When she breaks out of the wallpaper she is utterly mad, but she is mad because she was enclosed both physically and societally. The patriarchal force in her life saw a woman as unable to perform her domestic duties so she must be reprogrammed and confined. Gilman takes that notion and shows how shutting a woman away does very little good for their sanity.
How Opinions Spell Disaster
If the fate of literary madwomen is bleak, the fate of real madwomen is bleaker. Historically the Victorian era saw the height of admissions to asylums. I say that it is sooner than that because people who differ from societal norms have always been excluded in some way. To focus on the Victorian era, 18th and into the 19th century, the emerging field of psychiatry was used to justify women’s oppression. Perhaps one of the most influential madwomen of this time is Elizabeth Packard. Packard was an advocate for the rights of women and the insane after her own time in an asylum. Kate Moore’s novel The Woman They Could Not Silence, chronicles the story of Packard’s experience of being condemned to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois in 1860 by her husband, Theophilus. She was put there not for the sake of her own mental health, but because of her outspoken differing opinions from her husband and his church. She would be there for three years before a jury took seven minutes to deem she was sane. During her time there she observed the doctors and attendants, their treatments, and the other patients. What she found was a large group of women as sane as she was, there for the same reasons she was: they were not perfect, quiet angels. When Packard is forcibly removed from her home Moore writes, “If she screamed, she sealed her fate. She had to keep her rage locked up inside her, her feelings as tightly buttoned as her blouse” (Moore “Prologue”). What Moore has done with this scene is perfectly capture the restrictive nature of patriarchy. Both her locking up of her emotions and also the “tightly buttoned…blouse” work together to convey how trapped Packard must have felt. If she let those emotions, presumably rage and hurt, she would play out the insanity her husband had prescribed to her.
As I read Moore’s novel I found so many aspects of Packard’s life that echoed the literary “Yellow Wallpaper”. While Gilman did not credit Packard’s story in why she wrote TYW, Gilman’s own experience lends itself to the historical medical treatment of women like Packard. There is a common theme of physical enclosure for both Gilman’s heroine, and Packard is a direct result of the ever-present patriarchy. In TYW, the heroine is locked away in a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate” (Perkins Gilman). Her description as a hereditary estate works not only to set the scene but also further embeds her in patriarchal control. Often hereditary estates were passed through generations by male heirs, women were used to merge estate holdings through marriage arrangements. In the very first chapter of Moore’s novel she describes Packard’s bedroom, “The morning of June 18, Elizabeth’s eyes were drawn again to the green shutters in her bedroom. There was a reason why they no longer let in light. Theophilus had boarded them shut” (Moore 15). Her husband has locked the outside world away in an attempt to keep her unsightly opinions away from others. Even after she is released from the asylum he locks her in the nursery and boards all the windows (Moore 290). It seems the literary madwoman is not as exaggerated as it is argued.
If the madwoman is so permeated into literature, why does it seem like no one is realizing its real-life implications? These madwoman characters were not meant to be understood as only villains, or antagonists to scare the heroine into the hero’s arms. These madwoman characters were cries for change, points of activism that fell largely on deaf ears. Historically in the 19th century, the medical wisdom of the age was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick. Women like Elizabeth Packard and Gilman’s character were physically shut away for their inability to conform to the idyllic angels they were told to be. I think that if we really look we will still find all sorts of different forms of confinement that exists over us today.
“Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman”
Virginia Woolf
Why blogs you might ask? Or why should I care about your blogs, Megan? Well I’ll tell you why you should care. There is a short, simple answer, and then the longer answer that ties neatly into the scope of my project. The short answer is because I like writing in this format. The tones I can use, the humor, and the language are more my style. For example, I can admit here that I really hate long and dry academic articles, and I did not want to write one. If I were, I would have to lie and discuss the new historicist lens that this can be viewed through, and the anthropomorphic nature of the bench does…blah blah blah.
That does not mean that I have not read and written some kick-ass academic papers, but those were few in a large pile of dryness. I guess I could have decided to write the traditional thesis paper and made it light and fun to read, but that leads us to the other part of the simple answer. Blogs are more accessible for people of any background to read and interact with. The stories I am sharing, what I am bringing to light, is something that should be shared with everyone regardless of academic standing.
When I started thinking about madness and researching how it is heavily applied to women as a way to undercut their successes, to silence them before they could ever speak up, I was so mad that I had to speak up for them. To be a voice for the voiceless. I wanted to do my part in helping to shed some light on a centuries-old, actually millennium years old problem, and writing about it was how I could do it. From that, I realized two things: I would never be calm enough to write a rational and cohesive single paper. I wanted to write about too many examples and sides to this topic that I would never have finished the project in one semester. I will never be done writing about the injustices that face all women, but with this format, I can come back to the conversation easier than if it was a static paper. This blog is alive and ever-evolving; the women I have written about and will write about have guided me and told me their stories; I am their humble scribe sharing their stories with a world that might finally be ready to hear them. And that was the simple answer!
The more complex answer is that I choose to do blogs because academia and all that comes with it is a patriarchal structure. Historically, the voices that get heard most often have been white men–who have always been given the privilege of self-representation. White men have written and read, setting a precedent for what “a thesis project “good literature” is, or who a “good writer” is. To that I say fuck that. I am charting my own course towards a more inclusive future. I set the precedence for what a digital humanities thesis project looks like. Not to take my own power trip, but this carries into the patriarchal world we have all grown up in.
Blazing my own path
White men have set the precedent for just about everything in this world, including writing. There is a long history of male writers being published and/or well-respected on the basis of their sex alone. Virginia Woolf wrote and spoke on this prolifically throughout her life. In her recorded speech, A Room of One’s Own, she talked about women writers. Specifically, how so many female writers have been silenced before they wrote a single letter that to talk about women and fiction, one has to acknowledge that fact first. Woolf writes extensively on this topic, but for brevity’s sake, I want to include this: “That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” (Woolf 52). Patriarchy made writing unnatural to women.
Along with that, most of what is considered a part of the Canon in literature was written by men or approved by men for public consumption. It would be easy to say that Woolf’s work changed everyone’s minds and patriarchal oppression is no more, but then I would not be writing this today. Theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have dedicated their lives to writing on this topic and documenting its history. In their trailblazing Madwoman in the Attic, their first chapter is dedicated to unpacking the male-dominated field of writing. Gilbert and Gubar explain the idea that to write is an act of creation (which it is), but creation is done by man. While this seems counterintuitive, because when has a man ever created anything, this idea stems from the Judeo-Christian belief of God being male and creating the universe. From then on, the act of creation has been deemed to be an act of male power. Gilbert and Gubar point out that “in patriarchal Western culture, therefore, the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis” (6). The act of writing a novel or an article then is an act of male power. Men decided that the only stories, the only analyses, the only facts worth listening to came out of another man’s mouth. To be heard over the sound of men, someone has to conform their ideas to fit the accepted narrative or get louder.
So back to the question of why I’m writing these blogs in the first place. I am writing these blogs because I want to speak (well type) louder than the centuries of men who have held women down. I want to shout over their comments about our appearances, opinions, and our emotions. I want my daughters and everyone else’s daughters to know they can enter any room and speak their minds without having to mitigate it to society’s norms about women. I want them to speak, write, sing, dance, create, heck even just breathe and not be fighting so hard to break a mold that they were born into. Hell, maybe that’s idealist of me to want, but it’s something I am going to dedicate my life to. I will always point out something that’s wrong or needs to be changed, and I really don’t care who tells me I’m too loud.
Gilbert, Sandra M. & Gubar, Susan The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press 2020.
Woolf, Virginia A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt Bruce Jovanich, Inc. 1957.
Any discussion of female oppression and vilification would be incomplete without including Lilith. You may have read of her as the villain, a succubus, mother of demons, a winged she-demon who preys on men and children, or a nocturnal force that delivers impure dreams. These are all stories of her, yes, but she started as a woman who refused to lay beneath a man on the grounds of gender hierarchy. In that context, Lilith was banished and punished for her refusal to submit to her husband, but she has been reclaimed and invoked often in the name of modern feminist power. In this blog, I will outline some of the mythologies of Lilith: where she came from, how she was viewed then, and where she ended up. It is vital that Lilith be included in this collection because she is the original madwoman. Her innate power and desire for equality are what led to her condemnation and usage as a warning to other women should they follow her path. To be reclaimed, she is a call to anyone who needs her. She is there to offer her power and strength to those who have had their power stagnated and suppressed.
Several realms of mythology include Lilith, either as the first woman or as a tempting demon. The most well-known in the Western world, from the Judo-Christian faith, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. In the story of Genesis, when God created the universe, he made both Adam and Lilith from the same dust, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). This is in the first part of the Genesis story; however, in the second part, there is a reference to Woman’s creation again. This time the woman is made from the man; this is agreed to be Eve’s creation. In Genesis 2:22, God removes Adam’s rib, “made into a woman and brought her to the man”. There is an apparent disagreement in the way that woman came to be. In one, she is man’s equal, and in the other, she is made from a piece of man and therefore belongs to the man. The Church leaders, all men, were then faced with the task of explaining this plothole in the Creation story. Their solution? Come up with a story about Adam’s first wife who had to disappear so that God would create him a new wife. This served two purposes: it explains why God made woman twice, but it also allowed them to educate women on their proper places by using Lilith’s fate as a cautionary tale. The same education is done with the end of Eve’s story. If their patriarchs do not properly dominate them, women become unruly temptresses that disrupt and destroy the social order. In her ancient origins, Lilith represents the aspects of the feminine that must be suppressed. Her innate sensual, sexual, passionate, mobile desires are dangerous to the patriarchy.
The Actual First Woman
While Lilith’s story as Adam’s wife is arguably the most canonical version of her story, her relation to a patriarch is not her own story. Lilith has a history before and after Adam, which I find more interesting anyway. Scholar Barbara Black Koltuv says of Lilith’s origins that she “arose from the chaos” (1). She is an ancient force of counterbalance, an opposition to the maleness of the early world. One of the most cited origin sources comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira. This is where the invention of her as Adam’s first wife is established. Kabbalistic myths of Lilith present her as the feminine aspect of God’s male-centric powers. In the Zohar, Kabbalistic work from the 13th century, Lilith emerges with Samael as God emerges with his female aspect Shekkina.
“…out of the dregs of the wine, there emerged an intertwined shoot which comprises both the male and female. They are red like the rose, and they spread out into several sides and paths…Just as in the side of Holiness, so in the Other (Evil) Side as well, male and female are contained in one another” (ZoharI 148a)
This Zohar passage continues to name some epithets for Lilith that I feel set up the ancient views of her: “Woman of Harlotry”, “end of All Flesh”, “Serpent”, and “End of Day”. Each of these names underscores her as an evil counterpart to the holy. There are even earlier mentions of Lilith-like figures from a Sumerian king-list dating back to 2400 B.C. where a she-demon called a Lilitu a vampiric succubus that could visit men at night and bear their ghostly children (Patai 295). These brief mentions are sprinkled throughout the ancient world with Lilith’s shape and character shifting each time. Although ancient texts are scarce, archeological digs have revealed much. From terracotta pieces that depict Lilith as a female form with owl feet to incantations of protection, Lilith’s power was keenly felt and feared. Raphael Patai describes a collection of bowls that were found in Nippur in Babylonia from an excavation conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. The bowls contain “Aramaic incantation texts” that date back to 600 A.D. (Patai 297). The magical text inscribed in these bowls was used to ward off Lilith(s). Rather than continue to belabor all the sources that include mere mentions of Lilith I will digress with this. Ancient sources depict Lilith as a deep well of dark power that was near impossible to understand, but patriarchy cannot have a powerful woman in the world without making her a source of fear, not admiration.
Barbara Black Koltuv’s book The Book of Lilith, “…is an attempt to tell her story, to evoke her presence in consciousness, and to inquire into her meaning in the modern psyche” (Koltuv Introduction xii). Madness and gender oppression have a rich history with ancient origins that continue to plague us today. The adoption by Western Judeo-Christians of Lilith’s mythic origins and powers is one of the first instances of patriarchy creating a fallen woman and then condemning her for their own gain. Lilith’s story as the Biblical Adam’s first wife was made as a teaching moment of what will befall a woman who questions the status quo, who desires better for herself. For millennia Lilith has been left behind as a villain, a source of fear, and yet she has been recaptured by modern feminists as an icon. While I would agree that she is more than a villain. I would caution against worshipping her. She is a feeling, a moment, a glimpse of the power within all of us. She does not want to be feared, she is not evil, but she is not to be followed lightly. She wants to be seen, to no longer be boxed in–to be herself. Lilith is here to be called upon for the women who are ready to brave the work, forge their own path, and revel in their own power without even a thought to what anyone else is thinking of them. She is a villain. Yes because of what society has deemed acceptable for a woman they can control, but more so because as a villain she is free to be herself. Villainy has given Lilith her power for once they made her a villain, they feared the power they had given her. She was finally recognized as someone who could touch them back.
What is a madwoman? If you ask this question to any number of people, you will get varying definitions. One thread you might find is being crazy, or an asylum. These definitions would all lack nuance. My simple definition is that it is made up of the two words “mad” and “woman”. Both terms open up a variety of meanings depending on language/culture, societal norms, and beliefs. I will attempt to give my definitions for these terms within the scope of my project in as concise terms as possible. The term “woman” to me represents any person that identifies as female, was socialized as female and/or has female characteristics. Being a “woman” has all sorts of political and biological characteristics attached to it, so I mean “woman” broadly for anyone who has felt repressed and oppressed by patriarchy.
“Enlightenment” via Lindsay Rapp
The word “mad” or “madness” has many definitions. The Oxford English dictionary has several with usage going back 1275. Some of those definitions include:
“Of a person: insane, crazy; mentally unbalanced or deranged; subject to delusions or hallucinations; (in later use esp.) psychotic”
“Of a person, action, disposition, etc.: uncontrolled by reason or judgement; foolish, unwise”
“Of an animal: abnormally aggressive…”
“beside oneself with anger; moved to uncontrollable rage; furious”
Oxford English dictionary “Mad”
These are the definitions that I am referring to when I discuss madness. Being mad is polysemous with being out of control. Looking at these definitions the meaning and usage of mad have changed some, however, the notion of madness as “abnormal” or deviating from societal expectations has not. Taking that general idea of madness and adding it to the misogynistic practices of discrediting powerful women a connection emerges. A madwoman is a woman society deems out of control, an abnormal woman who has deviated from proper tradition and expectations.
Women go mad because patriarchal society is so stifling, so controlling of all aspects of life, and it is utterly maddening trying to fit into all their boxes. The madwoman had her heyday across much of 19th-century literature, but she is very much still around.
There are two kinds of ‘mad’women that I will examine over the course of my life. The first is the most common and studied, the insane madwoman. In literature, these characters are most often villainous characters. Something snapped within her psyche that caused her to lose all grasp on societal niceties. She is now a broken, defective woman. These insane women, these madwomen are to be shut away and locked up. Being literary characters allows them to be played with and interpreted which, mostly in the postmodern period, has led these characters to be read through a feminist lens. Historically, women did go mad as well. Their stories are more unpleasant and repressive than their literary counterparts. It is difficult to get accurate statistics as there were many institutions both public and private that kept records very differently. I do want to recognize some of the most popular reasons a woman was admitted to an asylum. In a report from the Jacksonville asylum, some of the reasons women were admitted include “domestic trouble”, “religious excitement”, “disappointed love”, “over exertion”, “hard study”, and “novel reading”.
The second definition of a madwoman is the angry type of madness. The best explanation for these women is the example of a woman who loses control of her emotions and lets out an angry outburst. It does not matter the cause of her anger, but the typical response (based on Western social norms) is to deem her reaction as immature, unprofessional, or unhinged. These madwomen are shamed for their anger and aggression which in men is often seen as a characteristic of testosterone. Female anger has been in the process of being reclaimed as feminist rage used to advocate for societal shifts. In their brief analysis of the regulation of female anger, feminist theorists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that even in the wake of events like #MeToo, female anger is still being mediated by the media. They use an example of Uma Thurman’s portrayal by the media in the wake of her accusations against Harvey Weinstein; moving from her own posts to a described “zen outlook” by the New York Times. What they argue is that Thurman is clearly angry, but the media keeps playing back into the tropes of the calm and composed woman. Orgad and Gill end their article with this, “our analysis acts as an important reminder that even when unleashed, this anger continues to be carefully regulated so as not to exceed the “safe” level allowed by a patriarchal system (“Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era” 601). I believe that is the crux of male-defined femaleness: not exceeding the status quo, not being too much.
No matter which definition is used, madness is subjective and is depicted and lived in a variety of forms. One consistency, though, is the source of the madness: domineering patriarchs dictating how a woman is to exist. Whether the reaction to oppression is insanity or anger, the madwoman’s message is clear: she is tired of being held back, enclosed, and censored. Her stories deserve to be told in their entirety and we all need to listen.
The Affliction of Being Female 