Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2440/121729
Type: Thesis
Title: Hysteria as strategy: Exploring hysteria and madness as strategy in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Alias Grace
Author: Streeter, Sarah
Issue Date: 2008
School/Discipline: School of Humanities: English & Creative Writing
Abstract: In this thesis I will explore the literary tradition of women and hysteria as a smaller facet of the larger cultural history that associates women with madness. I will explore how women have come to embody hysteria and why, as Elaine Showalter asserts, hysteria has been labeled a 'female malady' (4).With reference to Freud's Dora and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, this thesis will establish the literary tradition that links women and madness and will map a feminist critique, from the 1970s onwards, of that tradition. It will then examine how Margaret Atwood, as a contemporary woman writer, engages with the theme of women and madness in her novels The Edible Woman and Alias Grace. Juliet Mitchell has argued that hysteria is a woman writer's 'masculine language', a strategic means through which a woman can communicate female experience from within a patriarchal discourse ('Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis' 427). This thesis will examine to what extent agency and expression can be gained through the strategic employment of hysteria and madness in Atwood's novels. In The Edible Woman Atwood enlists the Freudian model of hysteria, whereby repression is displaced into physical symptoms, to free her protagonist from a dangerous marriage. The protagonist does not actively engage with the malady, however. On the contrary, Marian, an inherently passive character, relies upon her illness to physically manifest the unspoken protests of her repressed self to ultimately free herself from the engagement. In contrast, Grace, the protagonist of Alias Grace, actively manipulates the association of women with madness to secure her agency. Relying on nineteenth-century attitudes that more readily link a woman with madness than murder, Grace manipulates the tradition that has silenced and pathologised women to provide her with expression and freedom.
Dissertation Note: Thesis (B.A. (Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008
Provenance: This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals
Appears in Collections:School of Humanities

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