Date of Award
Spring 5-2019
Degree Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Emily B. Stanback
Advisor Department
English
Abstract
Literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was concerned with madness. However, relatively little research has been done to indicate how supposed “madwomen” escaped patriarchal control. This thesis will analyze madwomen from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and will argue that suicide appears in literature as the sole way that “mad” characters can resist patriarchal control. I examine the impact of self-harm and suicide in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman; John Keats’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil”; and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I connect self-harm to the desire to escape patriarchal control that is evident in literature of the Pre- Romantic, Romantic, and Victorian eras. I use social and medical contexts to consider the patriarchal biases present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society and put those biases in the context of literature.
Copyright
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Recommended Citation
Rasch, Emily V., "Madwomen and Resistance: Gender and Self-Harm in Romantic and Victorian Literature" (2019). Honors Theses. 669.
https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/669