Hysteria as strategy: Exploring hysteria and madness as strategy in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Alias Grace

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.