Carmen, Madness, And Sexuality

When the people of the town try to explain away her odd behavior, they "did not say she was crazy then" (paragraph 28). This implies that although at that time she wasn't considered insane, and although the narrator never states so directly, there will come a time when she will be.

There are many different events in a person’s life that could lead them to insanity. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” you are dealing with a woman who is a victim of male over-protectiveness and isolation that eventually leads to her insanity. In William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” you are dealing with a man who has to deal with his father’s death and rejection from the love of his life that eventually leads him to a form of insanity. Each character handles their situations differently, but it could have gone the other way had they chose to make different decisions.

Since she has internalized society's expectations of women, this conflict is felt as a schizoid within herself” (Quawas, 44). This supporting evidence helps give bigger insight of a deeper meaning to the correlation of insanity and symbols in the actual text.

Until the medical breakthroughs that we have made in the modern day, psychology as a science was not fully understood. Modern technology has given us a clearer idea of psychology, but in the past there was less known about the science. This alongside a predominantly male medical discourse led to a medical diagnosis in many women called hysteria. Female hysteria was a medical diagnosis given to specifically women as far back as the ancient Greek civilization. Hysteria started as a supernatural phenomena, but as medicine evolved it would be described as a mental disorder, (Tasca). Hysteria. in actuality, is an absurd and fabricated diagnosis that institutionalized and discriminated countless women. The way it makes a women feel, and the fact that it strips a woman of any sort of free will is a sickening display of blatant misogyny. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman perfectly displays not only the misogyny, but the torture a woman must face trapped under a hysteria diagnosis. Hysteria as a diagnoses fails to effectively treat many women, instead leading to the mistreatment and wrongful institutionalization of women.

Besides, despite the validity of most people’s claims about Lizzie Borden being psychologically ill, they miss the mark when it comes to Lizzie Borden was a “normal” young woman because she did not show anything that would make her seem psychologically ill. Lizzie Borden did not have any rational problems. No one she knew ever said she had rational problems. Well, while at one time it may have been true that mentally ill people do not show any emotion, we can now state that it’s true, but later they would regret it. Lizzie Borden did not cry, nor did she regret it. She did not show any emotion to the fact her parents were just murdered, so we can now say she was not psychologically ill. Furthermore, most people make sense when they say “She loved her parents,” but if she did not show any emotion? Her facial expression was blanked. She looked as if she did not care. To emphasize, Lizzie Borden is

She constantly tried to harm her brother and showed signs of dominance when she would abuse him and hurt his genitals. Since she was so engrossed on her body and discovering herself, she became stuck in this stage and as a result of not being able to move on she became aggressive, abusive, and wanting to harm others. Since she was so fixated on harming others, it led to this sadistic behavior and she had this conflict between the drives of the Id and the drives of the Ego. She had impulses to harm others as a result of her being harmed as a child. Being as though she wasn 't cared for and nurtured, she didn 't have loving relationships. She didn 't have the ability to trust others nor did she have the ability to be caring, towards anybody. Since she dealt with a lot of traumatic experiences, she’s been having the same recurring nightmares. She said she has this nightmare where “a man is falling on her and hurting her with a part of himself.” This was a familiar story that I 've once done but on Hysteria with a girl by the name of Bertha Pappenheim. She suffered from hysteria her symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. I later wrote about her in Studies in Hysteria” (1895). Bertha’s symptoms of this surface manifestation were due to her being sexually abused.

The women she sees within the paper are a projection of her own experiences of confinement, as it symbolizes all women in the early Victorian Era.

The narrator is portraying a woman who is looked down upon because of her mental illness, but women at the time were often seen as childish or too emotional. “Then he took me in his arms called me a blessed little goose,” (Gilman 5). The narrator’s husband, John, treats her almost like a father would treat a daughter. The narrator is belittled because of her inability to act like women at the time were expected to. “Victorian values stressed that women were to behave demurely and remain with in the domestic sphere,” (Wilson 6). During the 19th century, women were expected to simply care for the children and clean the house. Most of the time, women who aspired to do more than that were not considered respectable wives. “Because the narrator is completely dependent on her husband and is allowed no other role than to be a wife and a mother, she represents the secondary status of women during the 19th century,” (Wilson 5).

She is very mean and quite a jerk most of the time, and she has a problem with jealousy, but not pure evil. This is shown on page 125 when she drinks the medicine that she knows to be poisoned in order to save Peter’s life (Barrie). This act

She expects to be able to gut these boys that she kills and perform taxidermy on them to put up on display. This is the true definition of insanity. Doing something over and over again is the true definition of insanity. The landlady does exactly this and expects to get away with it. It proves that she is insane because to think that you could kill someone and get away with murder in the first degree is insane. Someone who commits murder, especially on boys who are not yet 20, have be insane. These boys have not even lived in their golden age. Depriving these boys and killing them is a cruel thing to do, but doing it 3 different times is just insane, as well as expecting the exact same thing to keep

Lady Audley was everything but crazy. Since the beginning of the book we see a lady that is using her beauty to put herself on a better position in society. First, she abandoned she son, leaving all her pass behind, including a drunk father and a husband who was obligated to go out and looked for a way to provide a luxurious life style for her.

While the governess can be portrayed as insane, she can also be portrayed sane for the same reason that even she must “first, that the defendant engaged in proscribed conduct or committed the illegal act in question (referred to as actus reus); and second, that the defendant committed this act with criminal intent…” (Randy and Fulero 118). There are some more points that can be made that she might be insane. The audience was told know of the governess’ past. She could have just been released from a sane asylum for all we know. There are legitimate accusation that could be made with that idea.

In her book Women's Madness, Misogyny or Mental Illness, Ussher notes that in the Victorian era, hysteria was diagnosed primarily in strong, outspoken women: in other words: women who transgressed the ideal of true womanhood and thus challenged patriarchy. This is

“Madness” was the faerie word for it; it was a faerie punishment, in fact, the bringing down of madness, the shattering of someone’s mind. “Lunacy” was what shadowhunters called it. Emma had a sense there were different words for it among mundanes–a faint sense she had from bits and pieces of movies she had seen, books she had read. That there was a less cruel and absolute way to think about those whose minds ran differently than most–whose thoughts gave them pain and fear. But the Clave is cruel and absolute. It was there in the word that described the code by which they lived. The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

Not only does Lady Delacour exhibit all three of Pargeter’s proposed causes of female madness, but she also exhibits what Prageter labels as the primary symptom of madness, namely delirium. Delirium is said to occur when “the body could not distinguish the impressions of real objects from those of imagination” (Thame 276). On the night before her impending surgery, Delacour tells Belinda that figures have been appearing to her. Delacour explains, “The forms that flit before my eyes when I am between sleeping and waking,…I am willing to believe are the effects of opium, but, Belinda, it is impossible I should be convinced that my senses have deceived me with respect to what I have beheld when I have been as broad awake, and in perfect