Evenas early as in the seventeenth century it has been reported that in England the number of cases of mental disorder among women was twice that of men the public lunatic asylums were occupied by majority of women patients in the nineteenth century. Tradition and superstitions have stood in the way of getting a credible and realistic statistics relating to the occurrence of madness among women in India. A woman’s mental disorder is invariably loaded with guilt.īoth historians and psychologists have recorded an overrepresentation of women among the mentally ill in western countries. As one traces the cultural history of madness, an association of woman’s responsibility / wrongs to her state of madness is also detected. The attitude of society to madness in woman has a long history of male cruelty and woman’s humiliation. Just as hysteria is established as a woman’s disease, a woman’s proneness to hysteria is also an accepted fact. There is a mutuality of stigma attached to women and hysteria. For centuries, it was believed to be a condition of woman’s illness in which the uterus was thought to be wandering. The source word of “hysteria” is the Greek term hysteros which means womb. Morgan, Introduction to Psychology, 1986). For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears at the flesh of her neck. There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear – an amulet of madness. Keywords: deranged women, mental illness, hysteria, societal attitude, feminist perspective This article highlights some such literary representations. Some of the writers, especially those who were spokeswomen of women’s liberation, who did not suffer from any mental illness, have made mentally deranged women the central characters of their works. Some of the best expression of many women writers who have been victims of madness, has been stimulated by their condition.
With this discovery, curative efforts began to include listening to the histories of these women who were made to talk out their past. It was Sigmund Freud who redefined it as “psychic” rather than a neurological disease with sexual disturbance in its aetiology. Till late in the nineteenth century, hysteria was associated with nervous disorders in women. Both historians and psychologists have recorded an overrepresentation of women among the mentally ill in western countries. Abstract: Hysteria is deemed as a woman’s malady.
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