I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions centered around a theme I am working on, Women and Madness in Drama from 1640 and Before, of plays/dramas that feature women as the cause of insanity, women going insane, women questioning their sanity, and so on. I have managed to come up with a few interesting ones such as, obviously, Macbeth by Shakespeare, and Ajax by Sophocles, but am having an incredibly hard time finding much of anything relating to this theme. Any suggestions would really be helpful!
Let’s see – Ophelia in Hamlet is another famous Shakespearean madwoman, of course. Constance in King John longs for madness as a release – “For then 'tis like I should forget myself.” As far as women as the cause of insanity, there’s King Lear – “Have his daughters brought him to this pass?” For that matter, there’s plenty of material on that theme in Hamlet as well, though it’s ambiguous there at best. (Everyone assumes, for instance, that frustrated love for Ophelia is what drives Hamlet mad, although he’s not, as I read the play, really mad. And of course there are his issues with his mother, though I’d caution against getting overly Freudian there.)
The title character in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi struggles with madness, but hangs on to her sanity despite psychological torture; her brother (already Not Quite Right) goes quite insane after her death (which is, ftr, caused by him). It’s a terrific play; I highly recommend it.
I can’t remember if the title character in Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl is ever thought of as being mad (because she dresses and acts like a man). She’s patently not one, in any case.
Another of Middleton’s plays, The Changeling, has a minor character named Isabella who is married to a jealous doctor who runs an insane asylum and keeps her cooped up inside. She’s responsible for quite an epidemic of fake insanity among the local men.
You could also argue that the female lead in the same play is something of a sociopath, but I don’t know whether people back then would have considered her “mad” or just plain evil.
Oooh, thought of another one – The Two Noble Kinsmen, which (depending on whom you ask) is either by Shakespeare, or Beaumont, or Fletcher, or all of the above. IIRC, there’s a jailer’s daughter in it who goes mad.
Was Gaslight the name of the movie where Ingrid Bergman’s husband was trying to drive her insane by turning the lights down a little more each day and they saying ‘what’s wrong with you - it’s perfectly bright in here’?
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the Nurse caused a suicide and a lobotomy, if not madness.
You might try searching for movies billed as gothic romances. At least in the book form, the genre is based on some dark, buried secret. The heroine slowly unearths more and more of the secret, while being disbelieved to the point that others think her mad or she questions her own sanity. I never saw or read Rebecca, so I don’t know if it follows the basic form, but it might.
Yes and no. Gaslight was the movie all right and it was Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. She thought she was going crazy, thanks to being increasingly isolated by her husband, but he wasn’t intentionally doing the dimming-the-gaslight bit to drive her crazy, he was doing something nefarious up in the attic (Looking for something? I don’t remember the details). When he’d turn up the light up there, the other lights in the house would dim a bit.
Thank you so much all! I have been going, well, “mad” trying to come up with anything other than the standard ones. I will definitely look into these suggestions!
Thanks!
Saturn
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, maybe? The queen, in horror of what she realizes she did,
Married her son
kills herself.
Or, Medea, by Euripedes? Medea, finding out her husband Jason is cheating on her, kills the other woman, the woman’s father, and Medea and Jason’s sons.
Alternatively, the Bacchae, also by Euripedes? Dionysos, angered by the lack of respect the king of Thebes is showing him, decides to stick around, and the women of Thebes turn into maenads, who dress themselves in fawnskin and lose their reason, so esctatic with their worship of him that they run through the forest, tearing apart any animal they see with their bare hands and eating its raw flesh.