Breakdown or Breakthrough? : madness and selfhood in The Awakening, Tender is the Night, and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

Abstract

Female madness is a common trope in nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Readings of this trope vary in their interpretation of whether women going mad – thus being othered a second time – is empowering and subversive, or instead a state of ultimate defeat in which the madwoman cannot fight back against her oppressors. This dissertation will underline the ways in which the perception of madness is socially constructed to serve patriarchal thinking, and consequently to better understand madness as either power or powerlessness within the context of wider societal othering. The second chapter traces the connection between madness, selfhood, and motherhood, arguing that when madness is pushed upon the woman, she often loses a coherent sense of self, exacerbating madness, or else is not able to find her self until she explores those actions which society considers mad. The third chapter will bring these ideas into the context of readings of madness as either escape or defeat, in turn foregrounding how readings and theories surrounding these ideas come short in identifying with only one side of the argument. This analysis takes place in the context of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). All three texts feature a central female character who experiences some form of madness either in the context of behaving in ways which are inappropriate because she is a woman, thus earning her the label of mad, or mental illness intensified by patriarchal definitions of womanhood, which often necessitate the aforementioned fragmentation of the self. This dissertation is informed by seminal texts on madness and the female hysteric, including the works of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, and Michel Foucault, among others, to show the consequences of female oppression and the way this manifests in the texts under discussion.