Madness of identity.

Abstract

The idea of madness is a common theme in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. In The Bell Jar, a gradual insight of how Esther Greenwood falls into madness is depicted while in Girl, Interrupted Susanna shows her life in a mental institution and the people she meets inside. This essay explores how madness is blend of external and internal factors, of how madness is something that is constructed but at the same time, one cannot deny the existence of problems that the mind can have. The essay tries to make a distinction between madness and mental illness, with madness being a social construct and mental illness as seen to be an illness of the brain.