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.
“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.
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 