The Madwoman in the Attic: Tracing the Feminization of Madness From Ancient Myths to Shakespeare’s Literature

In both the current social media context, where female victims of sexual assaults are often demonized as lunatic, and in literary works featuring the archetype of the “madwoman in the attic,” madness is frequently associated with femininity. It is an amplification of the traits society typically ascribes to femininity: uncontrollable emotions, irrationality, susceptibility to influence, and vengefulness when discredited. The trope of the madwoman in Victorian literature, epitomized by Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, has been extensively explored in existing literature. This paper employs an intertextual analysis to extend the temporal scope of study further back, tracing the origins of madness in ancient Greek etymology and myths to the analysis of Ophelia in the Elizabethan era work Hamlet. The aim of this paper is to examine how the literary image of the madwoman has undergone semantic changes through intertextual relationships. This paper concludes that madness is inherently feminine, both from Greek etymological and religious origins; the narrative of the madwoman as both excessively and insufficiently feminine reflects the inherent contradictions in the patriarchal definition of femininity; by the Elizabethan era, the literary trope of female madness had evolved from a tool to cast women as “the other” into an opportunity to provide them with agency and validation. This thesis not only provides the marginalized and silenced image of the madwoman in literature with the representation it deserves, but also offers readers a new perspective to view madness as a form of liberation and a means of breaking free.