Madness as a Protest

International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018, p. 91-100 Received Reviewed Published Doi Number 21.05.2018 09.06.2018 30.06.2018 10.18298/ijlet.2976 Madness as a Protest Elif GÜVENDİ YALÇIN1 & Betül ÖZCAN DOST 2 & Esen GENÇ3 ABSTRACT The portrayal of a woman as ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’ in literary texts is very common. ‘Madness’ is accepted as female’s malady and the result of her femininity especially in the Victorian era although this relationship can be tracked to the medieval times. This paper examines madness as feminine quality and how it is revealed in the two literary texts which are Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Toni Morisson’s Sula (1988). Sample instances are also given of the unfairness women learn to live with from the selected literatures from the twentieth century. Historical background is also studied within the theory that loads of women are driven to the madness by the way of life imposed upon them in the form of repression and societal expectations from them. Key Words: Woman, madness, feminine malady, oppression. 1. Introduction Throughout history woman is the one who has always been labeled as a witch, hysteric, mad, neurotic and an outcast if she is not an ‘Angel in the house’. Patriarchal definition of a 19 th century perfect woman or angel in the house type of woman is very well summarized by Anne Scott as follows: “This marvelous creation was described as a submissive wife whose reason for being was to love, honor, obey, and occasionally amuse her husband, to bring up his children and manage his household. Physically weak, and formed for the less laborious occupations, she depended upon male protection. To secure this protection she was endowed with the capacity to create a magic spell over any man in her vicinity. She was timid and modest, beautiful and graceful, the most fascinating thing in creation…the delight and charm of every circle she moves in. (qtd. In Hooks,1980: 47-8). According to this definition, this woman is not just perfect in every sense because she is totally innocent, she is also “capable of acute perceptions about human relationships, and was a creature of tact, discernment, sympathy, and compassion” (qtd. In hooks, 1980: 47-8). In addition to this, she is expected to be self-sacrificing and suffer in silence so that she would be appreciated more by her man. Only after that, she is able to keep her husband’s inborn tendency into debauchery and unchastity under control. For this reason, a woman should learn to be “interested in the success of every scheme Instructor, Ondokuz Mayıs University/ , guvendielif@gmail.com. Instructor, Ondokuz Mayıs University/ , betul.ozcan@omu.edu.tr 3 Instructor, Ondokuz Mayıs University/ , esenkrc@gmail.com 1 2 92 IJLET 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2 which curbs the passions and enforces a true morality.” (qtd. In Hooks,1980: 47-8). Based on this, what man wants from a woman is very simple: obedience, innocence, natural beauty, less intelligence and motherhood. She is labeled as mad or “other” if she embodies the qualities of a strong female that takes control of her own destiny. Therefore, mad woman symbolizes a woman who behaves just the opposite of these definitions and wants to rise against oppression of patriarchal society. This madness or being “other” can be translated as a message to patriarchal societies that she will not surrender to the suffocative force of males. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the portrayal of woman as “mad” in selected examples of writings with the aim of demonstrating the fact that woman who is stigmatized as “mad” or “other” is not passive woman; on the contrary they are strong, smart and free woman. 2. Content Analysis 2.1. Women as Sorceress and Hysteric In their co-work The Guilty One (1976), Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous discuss the reasons why women are always the abnormal ones or ‘other’ in the societies they are sharing with their male counterparts. The authors try to find the answer of the question why women difference why not men. They conclude that a woman’s hysteric behavior does not mean her passivity. According to them, the place of a woman and her identity has always been problematic in the male dominated societies. Women who are not angels in the houses are branded as sorceress, outcast, abnormal, mad or neurotics in the eyes of patriarchal society. Clement states that male outlook understands hysteria as an inherent trait of women since it is caused by the female reproductive system; thus, it becomes inevitable for women to go hysteric. In actuality, the word hysteria comes from the Greek word hysterika that means uterus. It is Hippocrates who for the first time associates the term hysteria and woman. For him, a woman’s body is naturally cold, and it needs sexual intercourse in order to be warmed up. Thus, if a woman does not have intercourse in her life, she becomes ill. During the Victorian era, women with symptoms of hysteria become quite common. Headaches, nausea, dizziness are accepted as the common symptoms of this illness. Physicians try to cure their female patients by using the techniques such as manual stimulation, hydrotherapy, etc. in order to stimulate an orgasm. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries with the scientific developments, it becomes clear that hysteria is not only specific to women and the treatment cannot be the use of above mentioned techniques. Throughout the centuries, hysteria is as seen as a female malady and a mental disorder since women are accepted as more vulnerable and easily influenced by demonic creatures. Feminist thinkers like Cixous and Clement explain the reason of why women have been chosen as the victims of those maladies. Clement gives example of two of Freud’s female patients: Anna O. and Dora. Both girls are attractive, intelligent, and full of intellectual interests. They are both stuck at home while their male counterparts pursue life and career outside of home. After a certain psychoanalytic treatment of Anna O and Dora, Freud interprets their hysteria as coming from masturbatory fantasies and an incestuous desire for father. Along with the others in a very patriarchal society, Freud too dismisses their social circumstances and their oppression by the society in which they are settling. Clement and Cixous think that hysteria is a form of rebellion against the rationality of the patriarchal order. Clement states that “This feminine role, the role of sorceress, of hysteric, is ambiguous, anti-establishment and conservative at the same time. Anti-establishment because the symptoms-the attacks- revolt and shake International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 Elif GÜVENDİ YALÇIN & Betül ÖZCAN DOST & Esen GENÇ 93 up the public, the group, the men, the others to whom they are exhibited” (1976: 5). In addition to this, Clement suggests that like Dora, Anna O. too loses her voice in her hysteria. Loss of voice indicates that these silences, this gap in speech become the sign of hysteria. Feminist thinkers claim that hysterics are mainly and unconsciously rebelling against the lack of freedom and privacy in the family structure just by being silent. In other words, women whose personal freedom is oppressed by patriarchal society become abnormal or outcast as a result. On the other hand, for Lacan, it can be said that the hysteric becomes ‘other’ since it refuses Symbolic order. Lacan states that Symbolic order includes language therefore the hysteric belongs to the Imaginary order in which the language is distorted or inverted: this distortion is the discourse of the ‘Other’, and this explains both Anna O. and Dora’s way of communicating with a mixture of languages, and their irrational incoherence. That is to say, both girls try to express themselves by using the language of unconscious because their attempt to express themselves have failed in the patriarchal society they are living. 2.2. Women and Madness “Silence gives proper grace to women” Shoshana Felman (1975:7) starts her paper with this quote from Sophocles. This single quote alone is enough to explain the place of a woman and what is expected from her: muteness. It is very clear that if a woman speaks, it means she does not adjust to and accept traditional behavioral norms from her gender. In other words, a woman becomes mad if she rejects her gender role stereotype since as Felman (1975: 6-7) puts it “From her initial family upbringing throughout her subsequent development, the social role assigned to the woman is that of serving an image, authoritative and central, of a man: a woman is first and foremost a daughter/ a mother/ a wife”. Felman continues to reinterpret the text ‘Audiue” by Balzac from a very different perspective. She thinks that the actual story is about a mad woman, not about the thought and the reason of the masculine character. Felman particularly indicates that throughout the story the mad woman is muted while the male characters and war scenes become prevalent. According to Felman, women are seen as mad in the eyes of society they are living since they do not have the capacity to do reasoning as males do. She continuous to assert that mad woman is not accepted as a whole woman since "madness is the absence of womanhood," (Felman, 1975: 16). Hence, the mad woman characters in literary texts are doomed to death, which means the death of madness according to the masculine thought and reasoning. As Felman says, in this male centered patriarchal society, the woman character from the short story must disappear and “die as Other” to achieve her proper “Woman’s Duty” (1975:17). Jonathan Culler states that “woman is ignored or seen as man’s opposite” (1982:519). Since men bear all the positive subjects, women are left with all the negative ones. Cixous for example, presents this fact in her study by revealing dual, hierarchal oppositions such as activity/passivity, day/night, father/mother, some/other- phallic/lack, etc. (1986:64) Cixous observes that these binary oppositions which dominate philosophical thoughts for centuries work on the favor of men since all the positive poles represent men and woman becomes man’s opposite. To put differently, she becomes other, mad, insane, lack, nothing, etc. Furthermore, Jane Gallop emphasizes “…. every viewing of the subject will have always been according to phallomorphic standards. Hence there is no valid representation of woman: but only a lack” (1982:415). As a result, woman becomes desexualized. For Freud, woman’s sexual organ terrifies young man since he sees an absence which is the absence of the phallus (Gallop, 1982: 414). Thus, International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 94 IJLET 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2 according to Freud phallus is the measure of value since father is the possessor of phallus he becomes the representative of patriarchal order and woman submits to this patriarchal law to please him or to gain value (Gallop, 1982:423). In accordance with the information given above, two literary texts Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Sula (1988) by Toni Morrison will be analyzed in terms of the concepts of being “mad” and “other”. 2.3. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys Bertha Mason is the woman character who is absent and silenced since she is mad in the book Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is written by Jean Rhys as the untold story of Gilbert and Gubar’s classic madwoman, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason. Rhys transforms Bertha into an understandable and sympathetic character by bestowing her with a name, a history and an explanation of her mental problems, all of which are not given to Bertha by Brontë. As opposed to the Bronte’s wild haired, voiceless and crazy Bertha Mason, the woman is turned into Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She is described as a character with a complex mixture of English and Caribbean influences who is torn between two worlds yet accepted by neither. Brontë’s Bertha Mason is not the most important figure in Jane Eyre although she is a key character in the plot development. The novel itself focuses on Jane Eyre and her life as an orphan who tries to find a position as a governess in Edward Rochester’s house in Thornfield, which also includes an attic as Bertha’s prison. The rest of the story deals with the love relationship between Jane and Rochester, how they become cut off from each other and unite at the end when Rochester finally accepts Jane as his equal in their relationship. At first, Jane drives herself away from Mr. Rochester when she discovers that he is still married to Bertha whom he is hiding in the attic. However, she quickly forgives Rochester and continues to love him again soon after Bertha attempts to burn down Thornfield and injures Rochester badly and dies tragically at the end. In Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester is perceived as the victim because he is a man who suffers a lot from the burden of a mad wife, yet in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) it is Antoinette who is the real victim. Rhys reciprocates Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason with Wide Sargasso Sea’s (1966) Antoinette Cosway, daughter of Annette and Mr. Cosway, adhering to a family which is once esteemed as plantation keepers but has now found themselves reduced to a social level even below that of the former slaves on the island. In other words, Rhys’s story is Antoinette’s growing up and becoming experienced and is the story of the failure of her relationship with Rochester, which at the end results in her madness and imprisonment in Thornfield. In patriarchy, women are always perceived as what men are not. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Bertha/Antoinette is ‘other’ because she is mad, crazy, female and a mulatto colonial subject. Yet Antoinette is no longer the ‘other’ as in the book of Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre. First of all, the story is told from the Antoinette’s point of view. The one from the margins, the unvoiced, the disempowered, becomes the heroine and dies by the fire. Yet the second part of the story is mainly told by the nameless Englishman (Mr. Rochester) except for the part when she asks marriage advice from her old female nurse. What is more, she loses her name when her husband starts to call her Bertha instead of Antoniette even though she resists it since she is aware of the fact that by giving her another name, he is trying to make her into someone else. (Rhys,1966: 95). International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 Elif GÜVENDİ YALÇIN & Betül ÖZCAN DOST & Esen GENÇ 95 If Rochester finds it so hard to escape the nightmarish female world that the Caribbean is to him, it is also because he has little to oppose in terms of masculine values. Rochester cannot claim a strong and unquestionable male lineage. As Gayatri Spivak (1985) suggests, he lacks “the name of the father”: we call him Rochester because that is the name we learn from Jane Eyre, but in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the paternal ancestor is never mentioned. For him, too, the patriarchal law which he often invokes is a cause of suffering, taking the shape of an inheritance law which conveyed all the family property to his elder brother. The unexpressed rage against his father makes him an “Oedipal figure” who, abandoned by paternal dependency, directs his anger at other people while he unwittingly harms himself as well. Scared by the irrationality that emerges within himself and by the weakness of his claims on reason and European values, Rochester will, in his confrontation with Antoinette, emphasize the “Western” traits in him and, at the same time, sees her as his other, not knowing that she also belongs to both sides. In her he will embody all that he fears, the world he feels threatened by, the feelings and passions that his rational mind will not acknowledge. As a result, from the very beginning of the marriage Mr. Rochester feels uncomfortable and to cure his uneasiness he blames everyone including his wife Antoniette. He feels excessively discomfited and frustrated by the country and by the reality that the Antoniette is at her own home which is in the island and he does not belong to that place. There are many things he does not understand about the place and the culture, and day by day he lets his fears overcome his reason. As a result, all he feels is hate towards everything surrounding him including Antoinette: “… I hated the place. I hated the mountains and the hills…, I hated its beauty and its magic…. above all I hated her (Rhys, 1966: 112). That is why he accepts gossips and comes to believe that Antoinette is mad like her mother. He resembles her to a “mad girl” who does not “care who is loving. She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would…. a lunatic who always knows the time” (Rhys, 1966:107). He is also so selfish that he feels pity for himself since he feels that he is “tied to a lunatic for life- a drunken, lying lunatic-gone her mother’s way” (Rhys, 1966:107). The underlying problem is that he is afraid of Antoinette herself and her sexual desire. He thinks that she is sexually incontinent and sleeps with anybody. She believes that she “thirsts for anyone- not just for” him (Rhys, 1966:107). Antoinette’s excessive sexual desire makes her husband skeptical about her sanity since she belongs to a mixed white and black ancestry. In fact, throughout centuries the common idea that women who suffer from hysteria have actually sexual problems since the word hysteria is linked to uterus and women. In this way, femininity, emotions and sexuality were linked to each other and condemned as causes or symptoms of a disorder. Rochester’s mindset is deeply embedded in his time and culture, acting out the 19th century misogynistic theories. As Luce Irigaray (1977) explains in her study called “The Sex Which is Not One”, female sexuality has been dismissed throughout the centuries. Woman’s desire becomes something frowned upon since “she is undoubtedly a mother, but a virgin mother; the role was assigned to her by mythologies long ago” (Irigaray, 1977: 354). Yet Mr. Rochester tries to make her other by denying and even hating her sexuality. Furthermore, Rochester wants to turn her into his commodity when he says “she is mad but mine, mine… my lunatic…my mad girl” (Rhys, 1966: 108) that is why she does not have right to have that sort of insatiable hunger. Since she is the repressed one, she is expected to repress her sexual desire and become “sexually impotent” (1977:354) as Irigaray puts it. International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 96 IJLET 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2 Mr. Rochester earns his status and money through his marriage with Antoniette. At the beginning, he is nothing. On the other hand, Antoinette is described as someone who has a fortune, happiness, name and freedom. This situation is pretty weird in male dominated societies in which women lead restricted lives and their ambitions are considered ‘mad’. In her article “Women’s Time”, Julia Kristeva (1981:455) sums up how bad the situation is by quoting Lacan’s offensive phrase “There is no such thing as Woman” and continuous to say “Indeed, she does not exist with capital “W”. Yet, Antoinette is not a passive, mad or crazy woman in the novel. Still she is stigmatized as mad since she is powerful enough to own a land and buy a man for herself. As a man in a patriarchal society, he cannot stand this equality in power. First thing he does is to steal her identity by making her ‘other/Bertha’. After the marriage ceremony, she is basically at the mercy of her husband. All of her inheritance and possessions belong to her husband, and she must obey him. When he decides to go to England, she must follow. At the end, he achieves his goal: Antoinette becomes a slave of him, she loses her happiness, her husband’s love, her name, her money and her freedom. And finally, she loses her country. She becomes the victim of Mr. Rochester since he is the man and he can define the function and the social role of women, right down to the sexual identity that women are to have- or not to have. That is why he accepts Antoinette as mad since he could not accept his madness although he shows signs of madness: fractured and fragmented language. As the name Bertha is invented for her, so is the character of madness, as Christophine says, “It is in your mind to pretend she is mad” (Rhys: 1966:104). In other words, her madness is the product of a frightened male Eurocentric imagination. In her text “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother”, Luce Irigaray (1980: 10) claims that “Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.” As it is very clear from the quotation, man gets rid of all the madness and off loads it upon woman. Antoinette is not mad, but she has no choice to be called as mad since she has much better position than her male counterpart Mr. Rochester in the male dominated patriarchal society. Rochester feels alienated and unsure of himself in the island’s wilderness and he must rely on his wife and the black local people to direct him. He is painfully aware that they do not think highly of him as an authority figure, and this inability to control starts an anger which fuels his hatred of Antoinette. By placing him against the Caribbean backdrop, Rhys creates an interesting reversal by making Rochester the fictive Other in a Caribbean work. Rochester tries to seize the control over Antoinette by bringing her to England, but she sets Thornfield Hall aflame to exact her revenge and set herself free. Antoinette did not have the same literal end that Bertha had, and this changes the “role” that Spivak describes of Antoinette killing herself so that Jane cannot remain the heroine. 2.4. Sula (1988) by Toni Morrison Sula is another outcast female figure in the novel Sula (1988) by Toni Morrison. She becomes the evil character who challenges the patriarchal rules in her journey to search for her identity. She does not conform to the societal norms and challenges the society’s definitions of womanhood. According to the people of Bottom, she is a total social outcast figure, a witch because she refuses to follow the rules of her community. As a black woman, she does not have any intention to meet the societal expectations and obey the black woman’s socially-sanctioned gender roles. In fact, she reveals a free and fearless personality and raises doubts about communal conceptions. It is accepted that Sula is International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 97 Elif GÜVENDİ YALÇIN & Betül ÖZCAN DOST & Esen GENÇ nothing like other female figures around her. She has a birthmark which gets darker over years. Even that birthmark implies that she is different because she has an adventurous and wild personality. She sleeps around men, leaves them whenever she wants, the same way a man picks up a woman and abandons a woman. In that sense, Sula is promiscuous and acts like a man in her personal life and relationships. Sula’s promiscuity worries her close friend Nel who believes she “can’t act like a man. You (Sula) can’t be walking around all independent- like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t” (Morrison, 1988:142). Furthermore, one of the most important thing about her is that she is not scared of anyone and ready to try anything. Sula refuses to be passive and does not let a bunch of Irish gangs to harass her and her friend Nel. Rather, she defies them by cutting off the tip of her finger with a knife and threatens them boldly: “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” (Morrison, 1988:54-5). Obviously, she shows the character traits of a man since she does the kind of things that normally only men can do. As a result, she becomes an outlaw and labeled as witch by her own community since she rejects to abide by traditional women’s roles. People living in the Bottom consider Sula as a real witch woman who is responsible for all manner of evil doing. So as to protect themselves from a real demon, the Bottom people find many interesting ways to overcome this outcast member of their society. They think that they cannot hurt a dominant witch woman like Sula physically, so they call her names instead. Other than that, they seek spiritual protection from whatever they believe in. They “laid broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkled salt on porch steps” (Morrison, 1988:113). In addition to that, they make up many stories about her, such as how she pushes little Teapot, a five-year-old child, down the steps when as a matter of fact, he falls accidentally. Another made up story is about Mr. Finley, who chokes on a chicken bone and dies when he looks at Sula. The evidences which add up to Sula’s reputation as witchery are fact that she does not show her age; she has not afflicted with any childhood diseases and she is not vulnerable like other normal people. Furthermore, Dessie, “who was a big Daughter Elk and knew things”, reveals to her friends, “the most damning evidence” of Sula’s witchery (Morrison, 1988: 115): She had seen Shadrack, who was not civil to anyone, paying his respect to Sula, and Sula had smiled at him, when she looked hatefully at everyone else. While Sula portrays demonic character which includes being a rule breaker or and outlaw, Sula’s best friend Nel is like the different other part of Sula. Nel is the ‘angel in the house’ character. Nel does what every responsible woman do in the society she is living such as taking care of kids, and attending to church ceremonies, etc. Nel possesses all the qualities a man wants from a wife like being “… Goddess rather than sinner…. virtuous, pure, innocent, not sexual and worldly” thus; she is a creature “… worthy of love, consideration and respect” (hooks, 1981:31). While Nel fits into that definition, Sula does not fit at all. In other words; Sula is not an idealized woman in the eyes of men unlike Nel. In the societies Sula and Nel are living, women like Sula, who has “sexual feeling”, are regarded as “... degraded, immoral creatures…” (Hooks, 1981:31). Sula challenges male rule and undermines patriarchal law through her sexuality therefore she is perceived as a femme fatale, a seductress and a temptress. Man fears Sula because of her insatiable sexuality and sees her as a threat to his masculinity. Along with the other women in her family, Sula loves men: “The Peace women simply loved maleness, for its own sake” (Morrison, 1988:41). The grandmother Eva, for instance, is disabled and cannot physically perform sexual acts on men. However, she has “a regular flock of gentleman callers” (Morrison, 1988:41). Obviously, the presence of men and their company give pleasure to Eva. Sula’s mother Hannah has not been alone even after her husband leaves her. She has International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 98 IJLET 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2 many gentleman lovers in her life and has an extreme appetite for sexuality (Morrison, 1988: 43). Her mother becomes an example for Sula in determining her approach to men and sexuality. Hannah lives her sexuality quite open. Sula realizes that her mother becomes only happier after she has sexual intercourse with men. Hence; Sula discovers through her mother that sex is “pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (Morrison, 1988:41). Even though being very promiscuous in her personal life, Ajax is the only male character in the novel who stirs something in Sula that she has never felt before. She does not fall in love with him, but she wants to possess him. Ajax is aware of that situation and he refuses to being possessed by her. Through Ajax, a new side of her is revealed. Sula thinks that her relationship with Ajax is much more fulfilling than the sex it involves. Ajax looks very pleased while listening to her and he is not intimidated by her intelligence. Evidently, Ajax accepts Sula as a woman in his life and Sula is fond of this attention which goes beyond sexuality. Without doubt, she is in need of somebody who respects her wit and world view. Sula proves that she is strong enough and she is not the object to be looked at. She makes herself subject by becoming ‘other’ in the eyes of the black society she is residing. She is identified as a witch, mad, demonic and an other, outcast but not passive. Man who is described by Laura Mulvey (1975:438) as “the active controllers of the look” is willing to objectify woman “for the gaze and the enjoyment of the man (the patriarchal society). The male gaze means the act of seeing women as objects, endorsing the role of viewer, and a way of thinking about and acting within society as well. According to Mulvey (1975) woman becomes to see herself as an object through time and as a result she becomes an image whereas man becomes the bearer of the look. Sula rejects being the object of a man’s sexual desire by acting like a man. She turns man into a sexual object. Only this time Sula becomes the spectator that she is in control. As it is mentioned above, as an outcast member of her society, Sula turns down the conventional gender roles and questions social definitions of womanhood. Unlike the rest of the females in the black community, she voices her refusal to perform the traditional roles of her gender like settling down and starting her own family and having kids: “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself” (Morrison, 1988: 92). Traditionally, women are seen “... the guardians of the multiform embryo, of the growing child… This is apparently the role women must fill in the redemption of the world… women go to heaven only once the son has ascended in glory and comes back to lead his mother on high” (Irigaray, 1984:66). In order to achieve her female subjectivity, she rejects all the standards established by the society. Sula believes that she could only attain her goal by saying no to the questions such as “Are you a virgin? Are you married? Who is your husband? Do you have any children?”, which according to Irigaray (1984:72), the parameters showing the place of woman. Since she rejects all these male paradigms, she is alienated from the society she is living in. So as to be a completely independent and self-reliant woman, Sula seems to accept isolation from the community she is living in. She shows this by ignoring all the gossips about her. Thereupon, Sula’s confinement is associated with her evil nature and with her lack of ability to connect with other people except her friendship with Nel and then, for a short period, with Ajax. She does not really care for other people and that is why she can send her grandmother to a senile institution. She does not fit a conventional role. As a result, she cannot be a part of a society. She becomes ‘other’ since she defies binary oppositions in which woman becomes the passive one. Traditionally, man wants passive International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 Elif GÜVENDİ YALÇIN & Betül ÖZCAN DOST & Esen GENÇ 99 sleeping beauties. This is the man’s dream for centuries. Cixous clarifies man’s desire by describing the ideal woman: “She sleeps, she is intact, eternal, absolutely powerless. He has no doubt that she has been waiting for him forever. The secret of her beauty, kept for him; she has the perfection of something finished. Or not begun. However, she is breathing. Just enough life- and not too much. Then he will kiss her. So that when she opens her eyes she will see only him; him in place of everything, all him” (1986:66). Sula is just the opposite of this dream. She is not absent and just a shape for man. She gets close to only one man- Ajax- because there is much more than sex. Sula wants “genuine conversation” and “her real pleasure was the fact that he talked to her” (Morrison, 1988: 127). It is obvious that she does not want to be an object to be looked at and she wants to reveal her other humanly qualities as being smart and being in need of real smart conversation and interaction. 3. Conclusion In brief, it can be seen that the concept of other was introduced into the European World in terms of gender, class, and race origins. As a result of the analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea and Sula, it can be said that they are reflection of the society’s unfair attitude towards women in literature and they are also clear examples of the common practice of portraying women as “mad”. The analysis revealed that the concept of other is often given a different status: savagery, madness or transgressive sexuality by some. In other others, women’s madness does not mean they are passive and submissive creatures. Women have been stigmatized as mad or other since they do not fit into the patriarchal definition of perfect woman which associates values such as modesty, sexual purity, innocence, and submissive manners with womanhood. Madness in woman is another way of saying “I am protesting to be controlled by male gaze”. These women reject all the societal rules which make them repressed. Therefore, they are inevitably labeled as “mad” and face isolation from the society for not giving importance to the norms of the society despite the gossips about and pressures on them. References Cixous, H. and Catherine C. (1976). The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, H. and Catherine C. (1986). The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culler, J. (1982). Reading As A Woman. Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism. (Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl) New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. Felman, S. (1975). Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (6-19). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. Gallop, J. (1982). The Father’s Seduction. The Critical Phallacy. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (413-431). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018 100 IJLET 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2 Gilbert, S. M., and Gubar, S.(1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale. Hooks, B. (1981). Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women And Feminism. Boston: South End Press. Irigaray, L. (1977). The Sex which is Not One. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (350-356). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. Irigaray, L. (1980). Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother. Sexes and Genealogies, (Gillian C. Gill, Trans.) New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, L. (1984). Divine Women. Sexes and Genealogies, (Gillian C. Gill, Trans.) New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1981). Women’s Time. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: An Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (443-462). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. Morrison, T. (1988). Sula. London: Chatto & Windus. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (432-442). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Books. Spivak, G. C. (1985). Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism. In R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: an Antology of Literary Theory and Criticism (798-814). New Jersey: Rutgers’ University. International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2018