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.
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.
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.
The Affliction of Being Female 