The presentation of madness in the Victorian novel

Janus-Faced Madness in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

This paper is an attempt to discuss the concept of madness and its differentcauses and functions in Bessie Head’s semiautobiographical novel A Question ofPower. It aims to explore the multifaceted insanity of Elizabeth the exiled coloredprotagonist in terms of different theories. We will see how once a devastatingtrauma turns out to be a habilitating schizophrenia. Head challenges the readers’n...

“A Hideous Torture on Himself”: Madness and Self-Mutilation in Victorian Literature

This paper suggests that late nineteenth-century definitions of self-mutilation, a new category of psychiatric symptomatology, were heavily influenced by the use of self-injury as a rhetorical device in the novel, for the literary text held a high status in Victorian psychology. In exploring Dimmesdale's "self-mutilation" in The Scarlet Letter in conjunction with psychiatric case histories, the...

‘I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you’: Male Jealousy, Murder and Broadmoor in Late-Victorian Britain

This article compares the representations of jealousy in popular culture, medical and legal literature, and in the trials and diagnoses of men who murdered or attempted to murder their wives or sweethearts before being found insane and committed into Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1864 and 1900. It is shown that jealousy was entrenched in Victorian culture, but marginalised in medica...

The Place of the rubaiyat in victorian Poetry

FROM FEMALE SEXUALITY AND HYSTERIA TO FEMININE PSYCHOLOGY: THE GENDER OF INSANITY IN LITERATURE From the mad heroines of classic Victorian literature to the portrayal of insanity in modern Western texts and Middle Eastern writing, women

From the mad heroines of classic Victorian literature to the portrayal of insanity in modern Western texts and Middle Eastern writing, women suffering from mental instability have been a captivating subject. Using today’s understanding of mental illness and psychological abnormality, do we find these women to be suffering from psychological conditions, or are they suffering from a “female malad...