Women's writing on madness.

Abstract

This essay will focus on three female writers’ works involving madness: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Although the selected works of the above mentioned female writers are published in different years and countries, the shared experience of being disadvantaged as a result of their gender, remains unchanged. This essay examines the roles that writing plays in relation to the central characters’ madness, their struggle between the dichotomy of “angel” and “monster,” and how madness liberates the characters from conformity, as well as how it imprisons them.