Feminist critique of the hegemony of the male-dominated society has generated the physique of the madwoman as a central concept of feminist theory and books. In such gynocritical model, the behavior of the madwoman stands as a subversive response up against the subjugation she faces. This subversive role of the madwoman has been centripetal to the feminine doctrine. The image of the madwoman parodies the intellectual incapacity women are associated with in the patriarchal population and is established as the initiator of level of resistance from the oppression they face in that population.
In their The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Article writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar treat the issue of the depiction of feminine characters in a global shaped by and then for men. They provide an exquisite point of view on the tasks recommended to women by the male-dominated world. Each one of these roles is ultimately directed to service of the person. Because these assignments were essentially negative, especially the role of the madwoman, they imposed limitations on the woman's behavior.
In their work, Gilbert and Gubar focus on the fact that women writers were appreciated to make their female characters symbolize the symbol of the madwoman. This trend stemmed from the dominance of the image of the rebellious madwoman perpetuated by male authors on women. Hence, the creators urge women freelance writers to "examine, assimilate, and transcend" the image of the madwoman that has been produced by the patriarchal world (qtd. in Lagland 93). This image, which is imposed by men, impedes the woman's search for self-actualization in the literary cannon.
Thus, the authors exhort women authors to "kill the cosmetic ideal by which they themselves have been "killed" into skill" (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 596). They stress the value of obliterating this shape because it is far from being an accurate representation of women or women writers. Women writers should visit a far different and more realistic image for their female characters; an image that reflects the true representation of women.
Gilbert and Gubar suggest that a woman copy writer should rejoice her own point of view of self and repudiate her image within the patriarchal construction of femininity. That is why they ask female freelance writers to resist the crushing and culturally enforced image of the madwoman, and to set a fresh form of personality which patriarchy has obligated into repression. They argue for subverting this patriarchal classification of women in favor of representations of women as fully-fledged themes.
The sexual analogy mentioned in the question posed by Gilbert and Gubar, "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?'(qtd. in Taylor 86) got a rich record and effectively talks about the lifestyle of the abundant images of the madwoman in women's literature. Since women writes lack the "organ" that endows them with the energy to create, they confront great misery in producing their literary work. Hence, female writers have a tendency to depict the plight they face in their literary experience through their female character types' madness. On this sense, the madness that descends after the female figure is a deliberate remarkable representation of the crippling stresses imposed on women authors and the anguish they withstand in their literary profession.
Gilbert and Gubar's model of the "Panic of Authorship" also accounts for the repeated images of madwomen in women's fiction. In her effort for the self-conception necessary to write successfully, the girl writer must confront not only the anxiety of effect which she stocks with the male copy writer, but also a crippling anxiety of authorship. Hence, the madwoman in these texts tasks the results of this connection with women writer's within the overbearing patriarchal contemporary society. The female character's madness articulates the writer's sense of loneliness, dread and anguish she encounters in her pernicious literary odyssey.
Since it is handed down from the literary fathers of patriarchy, the "Anxiety of Authorship" is debilitating. It causes "disaffection, a disturbance, a distrust, that spreads like a stain through the style and structure of much literature by women" (Gilbert and Gubar, Disease 25). Emily Dickinson describes this disruption as "an infection" and on her behalf "illness in the phrase breeds" (Gilbert and Gubar, Contamination 25). Because of this infection, the feminine results in women's literature suffered with physical and emotional sickness unto loss of life. Hence, the image of the insane woman may very well be mental disease that reflects this disease.
What is impressive in Gilbert and Gubar's argument is that they interpret the living of the image of the madwoman in women writer's fiction as a way for subverting the male-dominated hegemonic modern culture. The authors check out some ways that madness and silence in women's fiction have deconstructed the authoritative patriarchal paradigm. They make use of the image of Bertha Mason, gives Gilbert and Gubar their subject, to elucidate the energy of women's sexuality, rage, and revenge. They also take a look at Jane Austen's occupation of silence in her books and exactly how this silence can subvert the most regular structures. Types of other writers mentioned by the authors include Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte in addition to other women authors.
In this respect, Gilbert and Gubar's consideration of the life of the madwoman shape authenticates the synthesis of the personal and the political in the feminist doctrine. After displaying how the ramifications of socialisation create mental health problems in women, they move to show how these conditions are depicted in women's books through the madness of the female characters. Women freelance writers used to reflect their emotional misery in their mad female characters and to promulgate a inexpensive rejection of the patriarchal cannon through them.
The feminist notion that no break up can be made between the emotional and the politics is one of the major styles of Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellowish Wallpaper" and Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen. " Both testimonies stand as a full time income testimony on the employment of the image of the madwoman as a subversive amount contrary to the restraints of the andocentric hegemony. The significance of the theme of madness in both of these stories is highlighted with specific mention of the theory of the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing. Laing's illuminating bill of madness substantiates the debate that the feminine people' madness permits them to articulate, and therefore subvert, the oppression they face in the patriarchal population.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, insanity is part of Gilman's larger comment on the atrocities of the patriarchal constraints. With this account, Gilman depicts insanity among the possible settings of get away from from these constraints. Afflicted by hysteria and anxious depressive disorder, Jane in the story is confined. She actually is forbidden to work and struggling to express herself on paper. Her madness comes as a sort of a reaction to the confinements arranged against her.
In Laing's terminology, Jane suffers from "ontologically insecurity. " Inside the Divided Self, Laing defines ontological insecurity as the increased loss of "a company sense of one's own autonomous personal information" (65). Jane lacks this sense of "autonomous identification" and encounters a feeling of dichotomy between her internal personal and the outer world. She desires to resolve the divide between "being-for-oneself" and "being-for-another" also to encourage a far more authentic identity. As Laing implies, there is a strong interconnection in the real human psyche "between being-for-oneself and being-for-another, " and if there happens any distress between your two, disturbance may result (Burston 79). Jane is suffering from this "disruption. " She experience disruption in the schizophrenic relation with those who are around her and a divide within herself.
As an ontologically threatened person, Jane also is suffering from what Laing terms as the fear of "engulfment. " Laing defines engulfment as the "extreme distress of the person who finds himself under compulsion to take on the characteristics of personality alien to his own" (Laing, Divided 58). Jane really seems that society will impinge upon her an individuality that is alien to her. Her personality is framed in compliance with the targets of that population, and she wants to extricate herself out of this frame.
Suffering from ontological insecurity and engulfment, Jane acts in a strange yet important way. She evolves a microcosm within herself and recognizes with things of her own thoughts. Although often odd, her actions are in reality efforts of self-survival. As Laing observes, no matter how meaningless or peculiar the schizophrenics' behaviour may be their aim is to save what is left of their being (Evans 141).
In spite of the constraints and confinements that stand against her quest for self-definition, Jane builds up active rejection of her status quo. Her repetitive question "what is someone to do" is fraught with components of nonconformity. It packages the foundation for a rebellion up against the male-dominated contemporary society; a rebellion that would extricate her from the traditional female role enforced by the patriarchal hegemony. Slowly but surely, her desires take control and she profits strength as she pursues independence.
In The Politics of Experience, Laing argues that insanity might be viewed as a source of creativeness (62). Jane's creativity is palpable right from the start and it is set in issue with John's rationality. Jane feels her liberty in her power of thoughts which can be an natural part of her insanity. However, as a representative of the patriarchal system, John is aimed at undoing Jane's imaginative electric power and keeping his rigid rationality. By wanting to annihilate her skill of writing, John looks forward to stopping her process of self-fulfillment in order to make her embrace the masculinist shape of the perfect wife.
However, Jane never suppresses her ingenuity, and she starts to write in magic formula. Actually, the story itself is part of Jane's magic formula writings where she exercise her head in spite of her husband's functions of discouragement. Inevitably, Jane gets sick and tired of hiding her writing from everyone and declares "I did so write for some time in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal-having to be so sly about it" (Gilman, Yellow 1577). Hence she progresses to displace her creative imagination on the yellow wallpaper.
The yellow wallpaper symbolizes the imprisonment of women within the patriarchal confinements. As Paula Treichler argues "the yellowish wallpaper is variously interpreted by readers to symbolize the design which underlies intimate in-equality and Jane's situation within patriarchy" (192). It is absolutely significant that the wallpaper itself, like the patriarchal constraints, is hideous and awful and its routine is impossible to establish or trace. The link between the yellow wallpaper and the constraints imposed by patriarchy is increased by the actual fact that the more Jane becomes aware of the male pushes, the more the wallpaper begins to uncover itself on her behalf.
This website link is further enriched by virtue of the yellowish color of the wallpaper. The color yellow is symbolic of sun light, and sun light is emblematic of the rationale sphere of men. It really is during the day that John issues his orders to Jane and overwhelms her along with his annihilating prescriptive agenda. On the other hand, Jane's creativeness flourishes by the moonlight, which is associated with femininity. It is merely during the night that she actually is able to better understand the predicament of the woman behind the wallpaper and hook up it with her own imprisonment.
Jane identifies the girl stuck behind the chaotic wallpaper, and she becomes her method of self-expression. As the storyline progresses, Jane's id with that female is increased. Actually, the wallpaper girl can be regarded as a sort of doppelganger to Jane. She symbolizes Jane's break up psyche and a manifestation of her schizophrenia. The girl behind the wallpaper and Jane are both imprisoned in the hegemonic zone. That is why Jane battles to free the physique, and thus herself, from that jail.
Jane declares her noncompliance to the patriarchal system of interpersonal pubs symbolised in the wallpaper. She complains that "this thing was not assemble on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or other things that I have you ever heard of" (Gilman, Yellow 1574). This is an intentional invasion on the rational orientations in the doctrine of the phallocentric population. It indicates that this rational ideology of the male society is just a set of "unheard-of-contradictions" (1571) that have been assimilated without questioning. Here Gilman is turning the table resistant to the patriarchal society; the girl who is judged by her modern culture to be mad lambasts that contemporary society for the lack of reason in its judgement.
Jane's feelings of emancipation come when she tears the wallpaper down. In tearing the wallpaper, Jane evolves an apparent symbolic inversion of the masculine and feminine functions. As she considers her man fainting upon discovering her creep about her bedroom, she daringly addresses him stating "I've taken off the majority of the paper, which means you can't put me back again!" (Gilman, Yellow 1581). Jane is declaring her freedom from the restrictions imposed on her by society. She will no longer be the victim of these limits that have been binding her inner spirit.
Liberating herself and symbolically tearing down the rules and framework of patriarchy, Jane celebrates her success over her man as well as the patriarchal world. Even Jenny expresses this party as "she laughed and said she wouldn't head (tearing down the wallpaper) herself" (Gilman, Yellowish 1582). This shows the latent females' want to free themselves from John, the yellowish wallpaper and patriarchy.
Admittedly, the idea of madness in the storyline is embellished with new meanings. Gilman presents madness as the only option for ladies in confronting the confinements of the chauvinistic population. To the end, the doppelganger in the story presents not only the protagonist's divided do it yourself but also the misery of most women who are imprisoned and inhibited from establishing their identities. Thus, Jane's insanity makes her a spectacle for many women to understand their plight in the male-dominated population. This shows Gilman's view that the storyplot "was not designed to drive people crazy, but to save folks from being crazy" (Gilman, Why 19).
Like Gilman, Doris Lessing, in her "To Room Nineteen, " is aimed at elucidating the invisible so this means behind the behavior of the psychologically-disturbed women, and how this behaviour might be the one method of emancipation on their behalf. From the outset, Lessing proclaims her denunciation of the patriarchal view of rationality as she signifies that it's a tale about "failing in cleverness" (Lessing, Room 524). She pokes fun at the actual fact that, for the few, "everything was in order, " (527) and this their intelligence "continued to say that all was well" (528). As Janina Nordius notes, in the story, Lessing condemns "society and its party of intellect" (172).
If Jane is suffering from engulfment, Susan suffers from what Laing message or calls "implosion. " Laing implies that the individual who is suffering from implosion "feels the terror of his emptiness" (Laing, Divided 45). That is what Susan actually is suffering from. She identifies her misery as that of "irritation, restlessness, emptiness" (Lessing, Room 531). Susan's predicament goes so far that that she seems "as though there can be an enemy there hanging around to invade (her)" (532).
Laing sustains that the schizophrenic person will not experience himself "as well as others or at home in the world, " somewhat, he experiences the true home "in despairing aloneness and isolation" (Laing, Divided 39). Susan feels her real do it yourself when she is exclusively; "She needed when she was only, to be really by themselves, with no person near" (Lessing, Room 529). Susan's have to be only springs from her heart-felt desire to have emancipation and self-fulfilment. It is essentially an ontological search, and that's the reason she declares: "I must figure out how to be myself again. " (528). On this sense, Susan's solitude bespeaks much prospect of her and creates a global full of opportunities for self-actualisation.
Laing argues that we now have two modes of cognition in the real human consciousness. He telephone calls them the "egoic" form of awareness and the "non-egoic" form of awareness. The dominant setting of cognition is the egoic, which is characterized by a sense of "a constant identificationwithin a construction of certain earth constructions of space and time" (Laing, Politics 113). Susan encounters a battle between the egoic and non-egoic dimensions of identity. In other words, she experience a conflict between her mental awareness, which insists that she obeys the patriarchal objectives of her role as better half and mom, and her inner consciousness, which motivates her for emancipation from the culturally-constructed concept of womanhood.
Ultimately, Susan's will for definite freedom is victorious over. She comes to recognize that she must renounce the concepts of her mental consciousness and adopt the instincts of her interior consciousness. In other words, Susan abandons her egoic individuality and goes to the non egoic form of consciousness through which she embarks on the voyage into her own internal space and time. This is viewed by the prominent society as a symptom of madness. For the logical male-dominated contemporary society, any perspective that goes contrary to the mainstream masculine prescriptions is discarded as a kind of hysteria.
Linda H. Halisky commentary on the irony of the patriarchal common sense in the storyline. She observes that as Susan's real sense of the personal is actualized, the world around her says that she is not "herself. " In other words, contemporary society has been programmed "to label the manifestation of that do it yourself 'madness'" (51). Yet Susan's view is that it is easier to be mad if the price for not being mad is to be a victim of the male hegemony. Thus she'd rather be labeled mad than assimilate the prescriptions of any society that fixes her personal information.
Susan's madness signifies a fresh world for her; a world that is of her own making. It provides a healing process which enables her find ways for self-attainment. Her madness becomes a way to obtain liberty and emancipation from the culturally-defined image of the girl. It is a protest collection contrary to the crushing rules of the male-dominated population and a means of creating an alternative solution identity not the same as the expectations of that society.
In light of this discussion, Susan's suicide is definately not being a indication of beat. Laing argues that in our life "there are abrupt, apparently inexplicable suicides that must be known as the dawn of the expectation" (Laing, Politics 37). Susan's suicide initiates this anticipation. It is expect reaffirmation of life, a liberating form of self assertion and a restitution of id. Susan enters the world of death willingly. She prefers loss of life over conformity and over compromise with the culturally produced do it yourself that patriarchy phone calls upon women to expect.
In this sense, the storyplot proves Lessing's view that Susan's insanity "had become a valuable lesson according for other's privileges" (Lessing, Room 533). Susan's madness will be of great profit, not only for women but also for all individuals who feel persecuted by various forces. In this regard, Lessing is conveying a universal subject matter through Susan. At the end, Susan declares that whatever one loves to do, an example may be "simply not to think about the living" (549).
To recapitulate, the concept of madness deployed in Gilman's and Lessing's text messages undermine one of the focal patriarchal techniques. Ellen Friedman, in his "Doris Lessing: Fusion and Transcendence of the Female and the 'Great Tradition', " argues that "In the feminine tradition, women personas who choose typical life above the alternatives of fatality or madness must compromise their ambitions to allow themselves to be utilized into a suffocating world" (466). Jane and Susan subvert this hegemonic paradigm. They reject the "ordinary life" and refuse to "compromise" their ambition of self-attainment. They retreat to madness, and even to loss of life as regarding Susan, as an enunciation of these rejection of the "suffocating" patriarchal world.
In this sense, the argument provided in both of these stories turns the traditional notion of madness upside-down and deconstructs the patriarchal celebration of rationality. In these text messages, normality and conformity are seen to be the true forms of madness. Conformity to the rules of world is the real insane state because it suggests clinging to the dictates of an society that is itself insane. Hence, conscious condition of insanity is projected as the only way right out of the society's unconscious madness. It is presented as the only path for attaining the true self in this insane culture.
In his psychological-political research of madness, Laing argues that the term is a communal fact and the public fact a politics event. He retains that madness is not really a declare that one needs to be treated of; alternatively it is "a special strategy that a person invents to be able to stay in an unlivable situation" (qtd. in Martin 127). Jane and Susan are strong enough to reside in this "unlivable" situation. For the coffee lover, madness becomes "a way of being. " Through their madness, they have the ability to achieve a personal identity which redefines the individuality that population imposes to them. The triumph of the two characters in the two tales substantiates Laing's view that "madness need not be a malfunction; it may also be a breakthrough" (Laing, Politics 129).
