TREATMENT OF FEMININE MADNESS AS AN APPARATUS TO TRAIN THE OTHER IN SYLVIA PLATH‘S THE BELL JAR AND JEAN RHYS‘S WIDE SARGASSO SEA

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2022-12-23

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Uçak, Merve

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This thesis aims to discuss Female Gothic fiction in terms of its treatment of feminine madness and how Female Gothic challenges the relationship between phallogocentric discourse and its use of madness as an apparatus to train the subject. I claim that Gothic in literature is a form where fantasy dominates reality in an attempt to speak the unspeakable, voice the unreason that is silenced in the eighteenth century, with an aim to blatantly attack the logocentric structures of modernity. Female Gothic, on the other hand, is configured by women writers to explore the female experience through strategies of deconstructing and subverting the binaristic logic that is constructed by phallogocentric discourse. The study bases its discussion on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), which is considered a roman à clef and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a feminist rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The thesis argues that both The Bell Jar and Wide Sargasso Sea foreground a subversive representation of feminine madness which is deliberately used by patriarchy as an apparatus to train the female other. The novels open up another space of signification for women in order to challenge the relationship between madness and phallogocentrism in a way that both novels critique and problematize the representation of feminine madness through which the discourse and reason of male logic are deliberately deconstructed.

Subject Keywords

Female Gothic, Feminine Madness, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath, Ideological Apparatuses

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/101191

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

M. Uçak, “TREATMENT OF FEMININE MADNESS AS AN APPARATUS TO TRAIN THE OTHER IN SYLVIA PLATH‘S THE BELL JAR AND JEAN RHYS‘S WIDE SARGASSO SEA,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2022.