Madwomen Agents: Common Experiences in British Imperial, Postcolonial, and Bedouin Women’s Writing

Women have long used the literary theme of women’s madness as a form of protest within patriarchal cultures. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the dissertation places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India), or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1996), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt (1996), and Miral al-Tahawy’s The Tent (1996) are placed alongside Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). I consider “other” experiences of female madness by juxtaposing the Victorian madwoman with the postcolonial and Bedouin madwoman, and attempting to displace the dichotomy that divides them. The postcolonial novels Wide Sargasso Sea and The God of Small Things highlight how colonialism and its effects have...