Madness: Controlling the OtherPresentation for Wide Sargasso Sea

By Candice Clark

Bertha Mason

• Was she really crazy?• Definition of hysteria in Victorian Psychiatry• Treatment of madness in women• How does the cultural attitudes pervade the

literature?• How does this connect with race?

Crazy or Just Misunderstood?• Antoinette or “Bertha” is described as sexual,

unchaste, and rebellious.• She refuses to adhere to the accepted codes

of acceptable feminine behavior.• Women were particularly vulnerable to

mental instability due to their unique reproductive makeup.

• Sexual pleasure=sign of insanity.

Insanity: Victorian Style• Women were diagnosed with “hysteria” a deviation

from standard behavior or an excess of normative levels of feeling.

• During the Victorian Era, madness became a “female malady.”

• Sexuality became the defining quality of a women’s nature. Codes of chastity, conduct book, sexual segregation, marriage, patriarchal social arrangements became ways of managing a woman’s weak character.

• Men became the strong, moral, disciplined force that must protect women (from herself apparently).

How do we fix this girl?• Treatment during the Victorian Era• Clitoridectomy pioneered by Dr. Isaac

Baker• Extreme Vigilance: Husbands and male

family members must be ever vigilant to protect women from their weak natures.

• Educate their children• Charity work

Attitudes Toward the Culture of Women

• During this era, women were considered “angels of the house.”

• Victorian medical science defined women in biological terms as naturally passive, dependent, sexually disinterested, born to be mothers and helpmeets to men.

• These attitudes seriously limited girls’ access to education, expression, employment, and ownership of property (Married Women’s Property Acts).

• Women who exhibited “deviant, unnatural, or unwomanly” behaviors would be diagnosed as mad.

Cultural Madness• Rochester sees her as foreign, alien and as someone

who he can never understand due to the wide cultural differences between them.

• Antoinette herself does not know where she belongs culturally speaking. “So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.”

• Rejected by whites and blacks, what is she?• Rejection and confusion lead to her madness.• Narration: having her voice taken away by

Rochester, a metaphor for colonialism and treatment of the natives, leads to her madness.

References• http://herstoria.com• http://www.saraharoeste.com/music• Halloran, V. (2006). Race, Creole, and National Identities in

Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillip’s Cambridge. Small Axe, 21(10) p.87-104.

• Mezei, K. (1987). “And it Kept its Secret”: Narration, Memory, and Madness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Critique, 28(4) p. 195-209.

• Schlichter, A. (2003). Critical Madness, Enunciative Excess: The Figure of the Madwoman in Postmodern Feminist Texts. Critical Methodologies, 3(3) p. 308-329.