The Mad Woman in Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Abstract

This paper explores the mad woman in three novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Such study entails an analysis of this issue according to the three literary schools, the realist, the modernist and the postmodernist, to which the novels understudy belong respectively: realism in the first novel, modernism in the second, and post modernism in the third. The three novelists display the ‘mad’ woman as deviating from accepted norms of society. The portrayals of the three female characters: Bertha Mason, Antoinette Cosway and Sarah Woodruff aim at reflecting the status of the

nineteenth century woman who was supposed to be the domestic obedient angel whose sexuality must be kept at bay, lest the authoritative husband shut her up in the house or confine her to a mental asylum. The three women break the rules of their society by means of sexual expression and untamed passions.