No one likes a mad woman (it's a shame she went mad)

Out now: Episode 23: Show & Tell - Mad Women!

Feb 16, 2024

I know we say this every week, but this week’s episode may just truly be one of our favorites so far. This week we had so much fun (and a little bit of pain) diving into the topic of “mad women.”

We bring to you three songs that represent mad women. Maansi kicks off the discussion with the scornful, vengeful mad woman in “Better Than Revenge,” Jodi walks us through the woman who’s driven to insanity in “mad woman,” and finally Jenn wraps up the discussion with an example of the mad woman who is stuck in bonus track “right where you left me.” Did we know this episode would drop on Valentine’s Day when we recorded it? No. Are we mad about it? Not at all!

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This week’s episode is a topic dove DEEP into during graduate school. And, incredible news everyone: I do indeed still have the paper I wrote on mad women! It is too long to put it all in this email, so I’ll include some snippets below, but feel free to download the PDF if you are just really excited to read 20 pages on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette!

Disability, Culture, And The Men In Lucy Snowe’s Life In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

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For this paper, I had the chance to write about Charlotte Bronte’s lesser known novel, Villette. Typically if you are talking about Charlotte Bronte, you are thinking Jane Eyre, but in Villette, our protagonist is this kind of weird, very repressed woman who travels overseas to become a teacher and really transforms. I was initially drawn to this story because all of the academic research I could find at the time was pushing the idea that our protagonist, Lucy Snowe, was either genuinely mentally ill or had been the victim of severe childhood trauma. Very few scholars were discussing her cultural context and how the transition to a completely new culture made a noticeable difference in her life, and I wanted to explore that aspect of the story.

In this week’s episode we discussed quite a bit the question, who makes a woman go mad? Is it herself? Is it a man? Is it other people? In the three songs we discussed, we got different answers. It’s a big question that obviously won’t have a simple answer, but I wanted to revisit this paper and the story of Lucy Snowe today for two reasons:

I selfishly wanted to revisit this 😊
In this paper I get into some scholarship and examples around the idea of “the female malady” (hysteria) that I think can shed light on what is going on in the broader conversation around this topic.

Coming to a Definition of Disability

One of my favorite parts of any paper was always defining the argument. If I was going to argue that Lucy Snowe’s repressed personality and internal struggles were due to her straining against the cultural expectations of women, and that society effectively “disabled” her, I had to make sure my argument had good footing. This excerpt below is part of that framing of my argument:

Before starting on an analysis of the story itself, it is important to first understand what is meant by the word “disability.” Much of my definition will be couched in Andrea Nicki’s exploration of the idea found in her article “The Abused Mind: Feminist Theory, Psychiatric Disability, and Trauma.” Nicki widens the definition of disability to look at how a culture can be constructed so as to “disable” a person.
She is concerned with “mental illnesses related not only to trauma and abuse but also, more generally, to prejudice, discrimination, sexist socialization, social inequalities, marginalization, or poverty” (Nicki 80-81). Nicki does not refute the idea that mental illnesses can and are often related to something biological in a person, but she argues that biological reasons are not always the cause for a disability. This means that along with biological causes, “social structures based on able-mindedness, which marginalize people with mental illnesses … are also disabling” (81).
She also provides a specific focus on the disablement of women in a society due to specific behaviors being deemed inappropriate for women. For example, “a woman who displays aggression and ambition, and is not feminine, risks being labeled ‘mentally ill’ or, if genuinely mentally ill, having her illness seen purely in terms of her transgression against her gender” (81). Essentially, Nicki’s definition of “disability” encompasses both biological illnesses and the phenomena of a person being “disabled” by his or her culture.

I also got into more about the Victorian sense of “insanity” from Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady. Super fascinating book, but just a quick excerpt here can summarize the point.

She claims that the Victorians “redefined madness, not as a loss of reason, but as deviance from socially accepted behavior” (Showalter 29). Not only then is insanity almost anything that as deviating from a strict norm, Showalter points out that these deviations were often considered to be the result of “moral causes.” By that, she means “strong emotions and psychological stresses” (29). This was particularly difficult for women, who were believed to be more prone to insanity and mental illness. There was a “medical belief that the instability of the female nervous and reproductive systems made women more vulnerable to derangement than men…” (73).

My less academic take on all this is….what a cop out. Instead of actually trying to help people or make a more equitable society, people have just been slapping generic labels like “insane” on people who “don’t fit in” for years.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Female Experience

Something else we talked about on this week’s episode is the cognitive dissonance of the female experience. In particular we discussed the line from “mad woman”: “She should be mad / Should be scathing like me / But no one likes a mad woman.” Being a socially acceptable woman often means denying your instincts and adjusting your behavior to align with what is “expected.”

In Villette, there is a scene where Lucy is visited by her childhood family friends who are of a significantly higher class status than herself now that she is a teacher. She struggles with her instinctive desire for closeness with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be “appropriate” to be intimate friends anymore.

When thinking about the Brettons [Lucy] writes,
…my heart softened instinctively and yearned with an importunate gratitude, which I entreated Reason betimes to check. “Do not let me think of them too often, too much, too fondly,” I implored; “let me be content with a temperate draught of this living stream … Oh! Would to God! I may be enabled to feel enough sustained by an occasional, amicable intercourse, rare, brief, unengrossing and tranquil: quite tranquil!” (Brontë 199).
This passage identifies the two parts to Lucy Snowe: her instinct and reason. She says that her “heart softened instinctively.” She instinctively has these emotions and desires. As someone who has been alone for so long, these instincts make logical sense too; however, she knows that she has fallen some in class status since she is now working as a teacher in a foreign school and that the Brettons are not truly her family. She thinks she has no viable claim over their affections, and she is concerned that her emotions are too strong and inappropriate. She begs “Reason” to help her keep her emotions under control. According to her, “Reason” knows that she should not have these desires. She should be satisfied with her station in life and not have any sort of depth of feeling. This example shows the height of her self-repression as she is fully aware that she is beginning to desire a closer relationship with the Brettons, and she proactively works to shut them down before they grow.

While the context for the situations may differ, we do see this theme (an invisible string, if you will) running through the stories of so many women. Our options are either to embrace our instincts and be labeled “mad” (“And, she thinks I'm psycho /
'Cause I like to rhyme her name with things” from “Better Than Revenge”) or navigating the cognitive dissonance of constantly reacting against your instincts.

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Let’s Reclaim Being “Mad”

I loved writing and revisiting this paper because it was the first time for me that I felt like I had really found my voice in the academic setting. It was the first time where after reading the research available about a novel, my main reaction was “I don’t agree.” That meant I was able to really piece together a whole new argument, and it was genuinely so much fun. (Should I get a PhD???) [Editor’s note: Jodi and Maansi say YES!]

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