Recalcitrant Resistance in The Yellow Wallpaper and Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Female madness has often been interpreted as psychological pathology. Through a feminist reinterpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this paper studies madness as a culturally produced response that resists patriarchal confinement and epistemic silencing. Feminist theories put forward by Elaine Showalter and Luce Irigaray conceptualise the study’s interpretation of madness. It is presented as a counter-discursive mode that challenges patriarchal rationality and restores the silenced subjectivities. Gilman critiques the rest cure as a form of medical discourse that enforces domestic control by pathologising female resistance. In contrast, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea restores voice and psychological depth to the silenced madwoman in the attic. Through qualitative textual analysis and comparative interpretation, the study reveals that madness has not been a breakdown but a form of rebellion in which women’s bodies and psyche have been active challenges to the patriarchal order. The female experience of madness is thus redefined through feminist literary discourse as a space for resistance, agency, and reclaiming one’s narrative. This paper offers a comparative reading to examine how women’s mental distress is medicalised and labelled as “madness” within patriarchal social and medical discourses.