Chapter 14

Mental Health from a Gender Perspective

Edited by Bhargavi V. Davar
New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001
pp 296-309

Inscribing Madness:
Another Reading of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Bell Jar1

Jayasree Kalathil

What is a paper attempting yet another reading of two western novels doing in a book on

women and mental health in India? The question has been at the forefront as this paper went

through a considerable number of revisions. The paper attempts to examine the nexus

created by three nodes: women, madness and writing. At the outset, I claim that literature

can give us useful insights into the phenomenological experience of being mad in a way that

psychiatry never can. The texts that I am concerned with are not just representations of

madness; they are works written by women who have experienced some kind of mental

illness and have written about it in an autobiographical mode. What then interests me is the

act of writing itself, what it means to write about an experience which has resounding socio-

cultural implications in the ways in which female subjectivity itself is defined. The primary

objective of this paper is to pose questions related to women and madness, to explore the

connection, or the lack of it, between femininity and insanity.

One way in which literature can provide insights into the understanding of madness

is by de-pathologising it. Literature, especially the kind of texts that I am analysing in this

paper, looks at the experience of being mad, raises questions of social and cultural

significance about the state of being ‘mad’ as defined in terms oppositional to accepted

definitions of ‘normalcy’. Apart from the male scientific discourse of normalcy and madness,

what do women have to say about the experience of being mad in a ‘normal’ society? There is

a vast body of literature written by women on the theme of madness. These works come

across as powerful readings of the creation of female madness as an institution. More than

1
I thank Bhargavi Davar and Susie Tharu for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, which was
presented at the National Seminar on Indian Women and their Mental Health, Hyderabad, 1996. I am deeply
indebted to my friends at Sihaya Samooh, Pune, for sharing their experiences with me, and for clarifying many
of my reluctant and hazy ideas.
trying to cope with the pain of being mad in a normal society, they read madness and the

process of being institutionalised in terms of violation of human rights, making a critique of

hospitals and mental asylums, the masculine character of these institutions, the role of

psychiatrists and doctors, social reception of the mentally ill persons, and so on. More

interestingly, they attempt to arrive at a way in which madness can be relieved of its relation

with femininity so that women can live in a society having complete claim over their right to

creativity and individual existence.

In contrast to the abundance of women-authored texts on madness in western and

European literature, there seems to be very little work done in the Indian context. During my

research – admittedly limited – I have not come across many works which make a critique of

madness as an institution in an autobiographical mode. There are a few works available

which deal with the theme of madness, of which the works of Telugu writer Vasudhara Devi,

Malayalam writers Sara Joseph and B. M. Zuhra, Kannada writer Triveni, and Marathi writer

Santha Gokhale are worth mentioning. I do not believe that this silence is due to Indian

women’s lack of awareness or sensitivity towards the state of being mad. Personal

experience, experiences of friends and the discussions that came up in the seminar of

Women and Mental Health held in Hyderabad – all tend to bring out the increasing interest

in women’s mental health and the issues that are involved. Then what makes our women

writers remain by and large silent about the topic? Is it something inherent in the Indian

women’s movement itself that has brought about this silence? My hunch is that the conflict

between ‘the personal’ and ‘the collective’, which marks the Indian women’s movement

would provide the answer to this. The Indian women’s movement, over the past two decades,

has dealt with a wide range of issues arising from the societal oppression of women. Literacy,

sexual and familial violence, harassment in the workplace, economic status, legal equality,

etc. are a few examples of the issues that the Indian women’s movement has taken up. These

are all of a collective nature. Mental health or issues of madness do not figure on the agenda

perhaps because they are seen as individual problems rather than collective ones. Most

women are oppressed but not all of them go mad. Moreover, the pathologising of mental
illness makes it easier to confine it to the realm of the personal rather than the collective.

Feminism, which is based on collective change, and psychology, which is aimed at individual

change, do not, at first glance, go hand in hand.

Perhaps then one must look elsewhere for ‘disclosures’ of madness. I think, apart

from the fictional works falling under what is called feminist writing, one might have to

explore diaries, journals, personal correspondence, prison accounts and so on to break the

false silence that now seems to pervade women’s accounts of madness. I was partially

successful in tracing down some such private accounts but will not be able to use them for

this paper as the writers were not comfortable with the idea of making their writings public.

Instead I shall draw from the insights that these writings have given me to read the two texts,

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1973) and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

(1963) (hereafter referred to as YWP and BJ respectively).

Both Gilman and Plath had been treated for mental illness and the novels are based

on the experiences that they had. Written from a feminist point of view, YWP, which when it

was published for the first time in 1920 was received as a story to ‘freeze our young blood,’

heralded a new way of thinking about madness (Howels, 1920: vii). Sylvia Plath has until

recently been treated as a myth, a haunting figure whose poetry was more often read,

especially by men critics, with a mixture of love and hate. BJ was first published in 1963 and

is the story of a woman caught up in what has been called ‘the feminine mystique’ of the

1950s (Friedan, 1971). Friedan, talking about the idealisation of femininity, calls it a

mystique by which American women are trapped into ‘the old image: “Occupation:

Housewife”’. According to Friedan, the feminine mystique ‘simply makes certain concrete,

finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence … into a religion, a pattern by which all women

must now live or deny their femininity’ (Friedan, 1971: 38).

The two novelists, Gilman and Plath, have one thing is common which is dealt with in

the novels in a very significant way, and that is their existence as ‘women’ writers. Writing

had always been considered a make art – the pen, a metaphoric penis, and the male author

an all-powerful patriarch. Writing, attempting the pen, is in itself seen as a deviation from
femininity, hence unnatural, abnormal. This tension was more felt for Gilman as compared

to Plath. For Plath, it was not so much her right to write that had to be asserted, but to prove

herself ‘successful’ in terms of the male standards of success. The two novels raise important

questions in connection to women, making links with the social, political and cultural worlds

within which each protagonist is placed.

Re-reading madness: An overview

The interdisciplinary scrutiny of madness has placed reason and knowledge within quotes,

that is, it has caused a questioning of these concepts which are usually taken for granted.

What does it mean to know? What is reason and what is non-reason? How does one know

where reason ends and madness begins? In Madness and Civilization (1965), Michel

Foucault contends that knowledge systems are built upon a radical misunderstanding of the

phenomenon of madness and a misapprehension, even an appropriation of its language. The

acknowledgement of a universal reason that characterized Enlightenment led to a

subjugation of certain kinds of non-reason which were then named ‘diseased’. This is where

questions pertaining to women and madness become significant. Often, women’s

understanding of values which went contrary to what was accepted as norm could be dealt

with only by terming it madness.

What would be the gender specificity of normalcy? Living under a patriarchal system

of oppressions where preconceived notions of femininity, sexuality and ‘women’s role’ rule

each of her action and behaviour, how would women experience madness defined as any

deviance from ‘normal’ ‘feminine’ behaviour? These questions are important because an

intrinsic link between femininity and madness has always been posited. The ‘hysteria’, as is

well known, was derived from the Greek word for the uterus and was understood as an

exclusively feminine disease. Even today, statistics establishes a definite relation between

women and madness. Numbers tell us that more women are involved in, to borrow a phrase

from Phyllis Chesler, ‘careers as psychiatric patients’ than men (Chesler, 1972). Even if one

does not want to question the degree of ‘fact; in these data (although Cheslter remarks

pointedly that around 1964 there were significantly more women being ‘helped’ than their
existence in the population would allow us to predict), how would one go about analysing

them? If one is to break the notion of an innate link between femininity and insanity, one

will have to look at madness as the product of the social conditions in which women live,

confined to the roles of daughters, wives and mothers, and examine the male-centredness of

the psychiatric profession as a whole. Chesler’s work Women and Madness sees the women

confined to the mental asylums who are the subjects of her study, as failed but heroic rebels,

whose insanity is a punishment for ‘being “female” as well as for desiring or daring not to be’

(Chesler, 1972: 279). The masculine ethic of mental health requires her to keep failing.

Chesler argues that it is this ‘double standard of sexual mental health, which exists side by

side with a single and masculine standard of human mental health’ that is being enforced

both by society and the clinicians (68-69).

The concept of madness as rebellion is pushed forward by the French feminists

Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1986). According to them, madness is the historical

label applied to female protests and rebellion at any given point in history. They celebrate the

‘admirable hysterics’ as champions of a plot of subverting the linear logic of male rationality,

choosing ‘to suffer spectacularly before an audience of men’ (10). But this view of seeing

madness as rebellion is considered to be dangerous by critics like Soshanna Felman and

Elaine Showalter. For madness, Felman notes, is ‘quite the opposite of rebellion. Madness is

the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of

protest or self-affirmation’ (Felman, 1975: 2). Showalter argues that such claims as Cixous

and Clément are making ‘come dangerously close to romanticizing and endorsing madness

as a desirable form of rebellion rather than seeing it as the desperate communication of the

powerless’ (Showalter, 1987: 5). Any serious study of the ‘female malady’, she argues, should,

instead of romanticizing it, investigate how in a particular context notions of gender

influence the definition and, consequently, the treatment of mental disorder.

Showalter’s critique of the concept of madness as the ‘female malady’ needs a little

attention here. In an attempt to comprehend the origin of the link between femininity and

insanity, Showalter points out that women, within our dualistic systems of language and
representation are constantly situated on the side of irrationality while men place themselves

on the side of reason. Thus, woman is madness and the female body is used to represent

irrationality in general. To quote Showalter:

[w]hile the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical

period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains

constant. Thus madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and

symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady (Showalter, 1987: 4).

Re-writing madness: From malady to therapy

As mentioned earlier, the act of writing was conceived as primarily a male privilege. For

women, then, the act of writing represented a fall from the norm of femininity, a madness. It

is in this context that writing about madness becomes interesting. Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar (1979) were among the first to explore the link between madness and women’s

writing. The fictional character of the mad woman who haunts Victorian literature is, for

Gilbert and Gubar, the symbolic representation of the female author’s anger against a

patriarchal tradition. The mad woman is the author’s double through whom ‘the female

author enacts her own raging desires to escape male houses and male texts’ (Gilbert and

Gubar, 1979: 85). For Gilbert and Gubar, every woman writer becomes the mad woman in

the attic, playing out her madness.

It is possible to see writing as therapy. It provides a textual space to confront the

experience. Writing gives language to madness. The act of writing is a public confession, an

open protest. It makes one wonder that perhaps what women could not find in the

confessional mode of psycho-analytic treatment they are trying to find in the confessional

mode of autobiographical writing. The re-inscribing of madness in the textual space of

literature would perhaps be, I want to suggest, an attempt at self-cure, for writing is also in a

sense an admission, a facing of facts, and a self-evaluation. Writing about one’s experience of

madness then is a journey from malady to cure. I shall be dealing with some of these ideas in

my analysis of the two texts.

The Yellow Wallpaper: Madness and survival

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860. By late teens, Gilman had begun to ponder upon

‘the injustices under which women suffered’ (Gilman, 1935: 61). She was aware of the

changes that were slowly becoming visible in the lives of women; she herself was beginning

to write poems and pursue her own independent thinking. The most disturbing question for

her was the one involving marriage and career. She believed and argued that a woman

‘should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also’, but

was, like many nineteenth century women, without a model to emulate (Gilman, 1935: 83).

She soon began to experience periods of depression when she felt that a ‘sort of green fog

drifted across [her] mind, a cloud that grew and darkened’ (Gilman, 1935: 87-88). She gave

birth to a daughter and within a month was, as she puts it, a mental wreck.

Gilman was sent to the most eminent ‘nerve specialist’ of her time, Dr Weir Mitchell.

It seems that what ultimately forced Gilman to write YWP is Dr Mitchell’s treatment of her.

Dr Mitchell had only one prescription for her illness and that was to devote herself

completely to her domestic life, looking after her husband and child, and confining herself to,

at the most, two hours of intellectual work. He exhorted her to ‘never touch pen, brush, or

pencil as long as you live’ (Gilman, 1935: 96). For three months, she tried to follow this

advice and came so close to complete mental ruin that she considered herself lucky to have

survived. In 1887, Gilman left her husband and fought a lonely battle to overcome periods of

severe depression and lethargy, writing, travelling and lecturing, seemingly with a full store

of energy. In 1890, she began lecturing on the status of women, struggling for economic

independence, and at the same time, fighting a society hostile to the ideas that she

propagated. It is in the midst of this difficult time that she wrote YWP.

The narrator of the story is a woman who has been brought to the country for ‘the

rest cure’ prescribed for her post-partum depression by her doctor-husband. The most

powerful critique that the novel makes is of this assumption of complete rest as remedy for

women’s distress. She is housed in a nursery and, throughout the novel, the narrator tries to
bring out the contrast between what is needed od her – being a comfort to her husband and

child – and what she thinks she needs – intellectual stimulation and the time, space and

energy to write. So here is a woman who, emblematic of the female insane character in

nineteenth century psychiatric imagination, is treated like a child, irrational, constantly

made aware of her ‘duties’ and imprisoned by a loving and caring husband in a nursery.

In a way, the novel questions the premise of madness as the other of rational

behaviour, and for a woman rational behaviour means adhering to norms of femininity and

domesticity, which do not include artistic pursuit. Hence, the protagonist of the story has to

be ‘taught’ to go back to her essential femininity. All through the narrative, there are

admissions of guilt for not being able to fulfil her duty towards her husband and child. But

this sense of guilt is interspersed with acts of rebellion.

References

Chesler, P. (1972) Women and Madness. New York: Doubleday.

Cixous, H. and Clément, C. (1986) The Newly Born Woman. (Trans.) B. Wing. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.

Felman, S. (1975) Women and madness: the critical phallacy. Diacritics, 5.

Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

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Friedan, B. (1971) The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1979) The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

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Gilman, C. P. (1935) The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York:

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Gilman, C. P. (1973) The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Feminist Press.

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