Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Literature, Women Writers, Gender, Women in 20th Century Drama, Madness

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines the role “madness” plays in the works of three contemporary female writers: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back, and Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal. I argue against reading these texts in such a way that would oversimplify portrayals of female madness as mere “metaphor” or else medicalizes them to the extent that text can be read as a symptom. I point to ways the three texts specifically address and resist such limiting readings in order to reclaim and maintain voice and control over experience. Insisting on the power of voice and memory, Wide Sargasso Sea's Antoinette resists her husband's attempts to lock her away and rename her “Bertha,” an inarticulate madwoman. Sexton experiments with the lyric “I” of poetic tradition as her speakers explore the unusual and confining space of the asylum. Weiner's poetry documents Weiner's claimed experience of “clairvoyance,” that is, seeing words/voices appear before her and upon her. Each of these texts, I argue, creates a first person subject who adopts a multifaceted approach to identity and experience that maintains the subject's voice as it is continually being defined by outside sources.

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