"Writing Women Into Madness: Authorship of Women's Mental Health in Victorian Literature" by Julianna Vockroth

Writing Women Into Madness: Authorship of Women's Mental Health in Victorian Literature

Julianna Vockroth, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Abstract

This thesis examines the portrayal of women’s mental health in Victorian literature through the lens of authorship, gender ideology, and evolving representations of female madness. Focusing on three nineteenth-century texts- “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane Eyre, and Madame Bovary- this study traces a literary progression from patriarchally-constrained depictions of women’s psychological distress to increasingly feminist critiques of the systems that produce it. Each text reveals a distinct relationship between authorship and the construction of women’s mental health. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë juxtaposes disciplined rationality with pathologized emotional excess through Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason, demonstrating how female-authored texts can internalize patriarchal ideals. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary moralizes female dissatisfaction, presenting Emma Bovary’s desire and ambition as moral failure through the detached lens of male authorship. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper marks the most politically radical intervention, transforming madness from a diagnosis to a feminist metaphor for resistance against patriarchal medical and domestic confinement. By examining these texts in order of increasing ideological critique, this thesis argues that Victorian literature both reflected and actively shaped cultural understandings of women’s mental health, revealing literature as both a product of gendered control and a site of critical resistance.

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Introduction 

Throughout the Victorian era, femininity was not merely a social classification, but a medical, legal, and moral construct regulated by patriarchal authority. Nineteenth-century women were expected to embody the patriarchal definition of femininity by possessing emotional restraint, moral purity, and obedience, while deviation from these behaviors was pathologized as mental instability. Emotions such as grief, anger, and desire were not seen as a rational response to their social conditions, but as symptoms of mental instability. This framework was reinforced by the ancient medical theory of hysteria, which meant women were inherently susceptible to psychological distress due to their reproductive functions. As a result, women’s interior lives were transformed into sites of surveillance, where emotions invited diagnosis, confinement, and control. Literature played an active role in reflecting, shaping, and sustaining these ideologies. Victorian texts were produced within the same patriarchal framework that governed medicine and culture, meaning that representations of women’s mental health were shaped by assumptions about gender and rationality regardless of authorial intent. While some writers reproduced these norms, others began to interrogate them, revealing the instability of the very systems that sought to define sanity. As feminist literary criticism emphasizes, analyzing these texts through gendered dynamics exposes how narratives of madness are constructed rather than inherent. This paradox is especially visible when comparing male- and female-authored texts within the Victorian age. While women writers continued to gain more access to publication during the nineteenth century, their authorship did not guarantee ideological resistance. Female authors were often constrained by prevailing ideology, whether these patriarchal logics were internalized or merely reproduced to seem acceptable for publication. Conversely, male authors depicted women’s emotions through moralizing or diagnostic lenses, framing female dissatisfaction as mental weakness. Across these texts, authors engaged with prevailing ideologies to varying degrees, with texts ranging from reinforcement to feminist critique. 

As Elaine Showalter observes in The Female Malady, “It is notable that the domestication of insanity and its assimilation by the Victorian institution coincide with its feminization” (52). Mental illness became increasingly associated with women, reinforcing the belief that instability was a natural part of femininity. Practices such as asylums and rest cures were designed to scare women into compliance, framing obedience as a sign of recovery. Literature absorbed these ideas, often presenting madness as a failing or a social consequence. An analysis of three nineteenth-century texts- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman- traces how Victorian literature shaped and reflected women’s mental health. Examined together, these works reveal shifts in perspectives that increasingly expose ideological forces behind the idea of madness and femininity. Moving from texts that remain deeply embedded in patriarchal ideals to those that directly challenge them shows how representations of femininity in literature have evolved due to an emerging feminist consciousness. 

Across Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, literary depictions of women’s mental health evolve from patriarchally constrained representations to increasingly explicit feminist critiques, revealing how cultural definitions of madness are constructed by systems of power rather than inherent female instability. Male and female authors alike were steeped in prevailing ideologies, but their narrative strategies and degrees of critique differ drastically. While all three texts remain shaped by Victorian ideologies to some degree, they diverge significantly in how they assign meaning to women’s emotions: from Brontё’s internalization of restraint, to Flaubert’s moralization of desire, to ultimately Gilman’s exposure of the structures that produce madness. By tracing this progression, literature not only reflected patriarchal control over women’s psychological lives, but also became a critical site in which those constraints were challenged, redefined, and destabilized.  

Jane Eyre 

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre thematically engages with mental health and femininity, exploring the tensions between rational self-control and emotional repression. Within the novel, the characters of Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason serve as a juxtaposition for models of womanhood. Jane embodies disciplined rationality, while Bertha represents ungoverned emotional intensity. Through this contrast, Brontë interrogates the Victorian ideals of femininity, illustrating how confinement can lead to psychological illness and how controlled emotion can function as a form of autonomy. As Elaine Showalter notes in The Female Malady, “Bertha’s violence, dangerousness, and rage, her regression into an inhumane condition and her sequestration became such a powerful model for Victorian readers, including psychiatrists, that it influenced even medical accounts of female insanity” (68). Moreover, as stated in Gendered Pathologies, literary works of this era “disconnected the concept of problematic reproduction from its larger cultural context and projected it onto the pathologized woman's body, thereby solving an insoluble dilemma, at least at the level of narrative” (12). These studies emphasize how Brontë’s novel not only reflects contemporary cultural anxieties surrounding mental health, but also participates in reinforcing them. By pathologizing Bertha and praising Jane through contrasting forms of womanhood, Brontë internalizes patriarchal ideals surrounding femininity, highlighting the way female-authored texts during this time would engage with, yet remain shaped by, patriarchal ideals. 

Bertha Mason’s confinement in the attic is dramatized through animalistic behavior, contrasting with Jane’s controlled womanhood. Jane’s first impression of the mysterious Thornfield Hall contrasts with her first encounter with Bertha, using them both to show how female restraint and instability are controlled within this patriarchal sphere. In contrast, Bertha’s first appearance is described as a grotesque, inhumane introduction: “In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backward and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.” (Brontë 278). Bertha’s animalistic description emphasizes the dangers of female emotions when uncontrolled. Her madness is symbolic of the repressed emotions that Jane must control to survive as a woman in her position. Brontë uses the character of Bertha to show the consequences of patriarchal oppression, with the madwoman being the silenced half of the female psyche. This displays the historical limitations of her authorship, representing Bertha, a mixed-race Creole woman, as being racially othered. Her blood is seen as impure due to her mother, allowing Rochester to deem her mad and steal her money. Brontë allows this treatment to continue by conveying the character as animalistic and defeminized. In contrast, Jane has a measured, rational engagement with her new surroundings: “The laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise” (Brontë 99). Despite her feeling of fear, she immediately rationalizes her thoughts. She is aware of the darkness that lurks at Thornfield, but dismisses her own alarm as foolishness. This highlights her emotional restraint and moral discipline. The duality of these forms of womanhood is studied in The Madwoman in the Attic, where it is highlighted that “images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ have been so ubiquitous throughout literature by men that they have also pervaded women’s writing to such an extent that few women have definitively ‘killed’ either figure” (Gilbert and Gubar 17). These dueling stereotypes are so deeply steeped into literature that seemingly feminist writers continued to perpetuate them during this era. 

As the novel progresses, both women challenge Rochester directly, revealing how Brontë uses their dichotomy to expose the spectrum of female resistance- from repression and rationality to violence and passion. Both Jane and Bertha defy Rochester’s control, but Brontë distinguishes Jane’s calm moral rebellion from Bertha’s physical one, examining two contrasting models of Victorian womanhood. Jane’s refusal to remain with Rochester after learning of his bigotry marks a moment of her self-actualization. She says, “‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you’” (Brontë 240). Rather than using sanity as a method of social conformity, she derives power from it by maintaining her values. Her departure from Thornfield acts as a conscious preservation of her mental health and personal beliefs. She refuses his plea, asserting her self-ownership in a time when women’s decisions were bound to men. However, her values show the Victorian ideals of the “New Woman,” where women were expected to uphold social structures and respectability. These ideals are deeply rooted in the patriarchy, with men defining socially acceptable behaviors of womanhood. Jane’s refusal to enter into a bigamous relationship implies that she subscribes to these ideas of femininity. Conversely, Bertha’s resistance is marked by physical acts of defiance, which are immediately condemned as madness. The attack on Rochester is highly violent: “The lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled. She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest—more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was” (Brontë 279). Bertha’s physical rage is condemned as insanity, despite being justified. Rochester used her resources for himself, marrying her for money and status. Upon learning of her family’s race, with her mother being Creole, he locked her up and deemed her savage. Brontë treats Bertha exactly how she is treated by the male main character, with critics saying, “Bertha is not given a chance to improve and remains a beastlike, inhuman creature. At the time, it was common to view the colonized as inferior to the colonizer” (Balaa 7). She continues to perpetuate racial stereotypes, placing Bertha’s oppression as a cross-section between race and gender. Both women reject male control, but only Jane’s method aligns with Victorian ideals of acceptable femininity. 

Through the characters of Jane and Bertha, Brontë explores the dynamics between confinement, discipline, and emotional intensity,  presenting two extremes of Victorian womanhood. Jane exemplifies controlled autonomy, where she is able to achieve empowerment through emotional constraint, whereas Bertha exemplifies the consequences of repression and denying female agency, while being a woman of color. This imagining of female psychological struggle and reclamation of power contrasts sharply with male-authored portrayals of women’s fragility in texts such as Madame Bovary, where mental instability serves to reinforce rather than resist patriarchal narratives. 

Madame Bovary 

Madame Bovary offers an examination of women’s desires, dissatisfactions, and emotional intensity within a rigid patriarchal society. Unlike female-authored texts that cautiously explore women’s interiority, Flaubert’s novel presents female emotion as morally wrong and destabilizing. Emma Bovary’s romantic relationships, domestic discontent, and pursuit of passion are not treated as reactions to her social condition, but as personal defects that culminate in her eventual psychological and physical destruction. Through Emma, Flaubert transforms female desire into a moral problem, reinforcing the patriarchal belief that women’s emotions are dangerous when they exceed proscribed domestic and social boundaries. Rather than interrogating the limited options available to a bourgeois wife, the novel repeatedly locates failure within her character, framing dissatisfaction as evidence of female instability. Set against the cultural backdrop of an era that increasingly pathologized women’s emotions, Madame Bovary presents nineteenth-century anxieties surrounding hysteria, nervous illness, and excess. Medical discourse frequently framed women’s dissatisfaction as symptomatic of biological inferiority or psychological weakness rather than evidence of social constraint. As discussed in Shattered Nerves, Victorian medical authority increasingly linked emotions to nervous pathology, interpreting desire as illness. In it, Oppenheim writes, “at the heart of virtually all medical attitudes toward women’s nerves, health, and character was the presumed weakness of the female will” (181). By framing female instability as a failure of willpower, medical discourse found fault in emotional longing itself. Flaubert’s novel echoes these beliefs by repeatedly casting Emma’s desires as harmful, aligning literary judgment with medical and social condemnation. However, the exposure to her inner thoughts is limited and does not invite empathy, as it is filtered through detachment. In this way, Madame Bovary exemplifies how male-authored literature reinforced patriarchal anxieties surrounding femininity by narratively punishing desire. While Jane Eyre exposes the psychological effects of patriarchal confinement, Madame Bovary extends this pattern by framing female longing as hysteria, dismissing Emma’s pursuit of social status as shallow, and portraying her suicide as the consequence of a culture that denies women meaningful fulfillment. 

Flaubert portrays Emma’s dissatisfaction as a psychological issue, revealing how nineteenth-century ideals of obedient womanhood deny her the agency to reshape her life. This treatment marked a shift from Brontë’s more socially rooted critique of female confinement to the bourgeois narrative that treats longing as a failure. Though he is somewhat more socially aware, Emma’s dissatisfaction is still strongly moralized. It is especially evident in Flaubert’s description of Emma’s domestic rituals: “She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris” (Flaubert 76). Flaubert frames Emma’s inner self as restless and emotionally conflicted. Her contrasting desires- to live fully and to die- reveal the way that her emotions are portrayed as dangerous. The text suggests that dissatisfaction and desire are inherently dangerous, reflecting the patriarchal ideals that female longing is irrational. The inherent politics of male authorship automatically steep judgment into women’s interiority. Emma’s thoughts are observed from a distance, presenting her psychological complexity as a spectacle rather than an empathetic portrayal. Rather than stemming from personal defect, as Flaubert suggests with Emma, this dissatisfaction was shaped by the enforced idleness of Victorian domestic culture. As critics write, “For Victorian middle-to-upper-class families, the home was often a space of solitary confinement and imposed passivity. Many women belonging to these classes were expected to sit at home and oversee domestic duties performed by servants while landed aristocratic men often found them-selves idling away time at home in the absence of any practical incentive to work” (Vialard 14). Emma’s restlessness emerges from the social condition of enforced inactivity, one that Flaubert does not interrogate. Her boredom is a result of her domestic situation, yet that system is not blamed by Flaubert, nor would he personally understand this enforced passivity. 

Emma’s longing for luxury and social status is framed as shallow by Flaubert, revealing how nineteenth-century culture confined women to the domestic sphere, exposing the male-authored anxieties surrounding female passion. Her desires are framed as confusion rather than critique of her situation: “All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment” (Flaubert 74). By conflating wealth with fulfillment, the narrative casts her aspirations as shallow and misguided, transforming her desire for self-expansion into a cautionary tale. Emma’s despair and ultimate suicide illustrate how a patriarchal society resolves the threat of women’s ambition through destruction, trapping her in the role of an adulteress, revealing the fatal consequences of limits being placed on women’s autonomy. Emma’s unhappiness is seen as an internal flaw: “She was not happy—she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant? …Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight” (Flaubert 360). This passage explains Emma’s perceptions of her environment, showing it as the root of her suffering. Flaubert presents her longing for beauty and meaning as unattainable, framing dissatisfaction as intrinsic to feminine weakness rather than a fault of society. Flaubert does not allow her to have a clear desire that she does not conflate with luxury, making her seem selfish. Female ambition becomes untrustworthy, reinforcing anxieties surrounding women who seek fulfillment beyond the domestic sphere. This logic extends into the regulation of female sexuality, where dissatisfaction is reframed as evidence of impurity. As critics of nineteenth-century sexual ideology note, “It would appear that youthfulness and gender make her particularly susceptible to cultural determination, exemplified by the gaze of the patriarchal council: the virgin as a sociopolitical and feminized object” (Davis 7). Despite the romantic entanglements, the primary desire of Emma is social elevation, showing how patriarchal norms shun women who seek more than domestic compliance. However, there is an unconscious patriarchal bias in Flaubert’s writing that disdains sexual behavior from women, showing his limitations in discussing female sexuality. 

Desire itself becomes evidence of corruption, positioning suicide as the inevitable outcome of female excess rather than a tragedy produced by social denial. Her suicide functions as both the narrative climax and a cautionary tale, demonstrating the patriarchal structures that pathologize women’s ambition. As observed in Over Her Dead Body, “For what makes the death of a woman so impressive is not just her embodiment of innocence and virtue but also her position in culture as the unfamiliar Other, like death recuperable in the form of an image” (92). In dying, Emma is stripped of agency and reduced to spectacle, allowing the novel to neutralize the threat posed by her ambition. By connecting emotional dissatisfaction, social ambition, and suicide, this section shows how Madame Bovary exemplifies the male-authored perspective of female ambition. Desire is seen as dangerous and wrong, presenting emotions through the detached lens that is seen in many male-authored texts of this time. Emma’s pathologized longing, social and sexual ambition, and ultimate death collectively illustrate how Flaubert’s male authorship enforces patriarchal norms that moralize women’s emotional complexities. Rather than recognizing Emma’s dissatisfaction as a response to constricted social conditions, Madame Bovary demonstrates how nineteenth-century biases often conflated women’s emotional unrest with moral weakness instead of acknowledging systemic limitations, an idea steeped in Flaubert’s writing. The Victorian “New Woman” was expected to be educated, but only to benefit the household. By transitioning to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the cultural narrative begins to change, as women’s suffering is increasingly portrayed as a consequence of patriarchal oppression. 

The Yellow Wallpaper 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman transforms the common Victorian trope of female madness into a feminist critique of the patriarchal structures of medicine and domesticity that governed women’s lives. Told from the perspective of a woman subjected to rest cure, the narrative draws from Gilman’s personal experiences with postpartum depression and enforced passivity. Significantly, the narrator remains unnamed, allowing her to represent not a singular individual, but the broader conditions of women who were systematically silenced through patriarchal structures. The story exposes how social control and silenced female voices operated under the guise of care, reinforcing domestic confinement as a form of institutional power. By centering the experience on a woman trapped within both marriage and medicine, Gilman shifts the narrative perspective inward, allowing readers to inhabit the psychological consequences of patriarchal authority, rather than just observe as in former male-authored texts. Through the narrator's use of the oppressive rest cure, secret writing as an attempt at resistance, and ultimate identification with the trapped woman that culminates in John’s collapse, Gilman redefines madness as rebellion, but the narrator is still ultimately stuck in the systems that confine her.  Unlike the earlier authors, whose portrayals of women’s mental health remained shaped by patriarchal conventions, Gilman writes with a fully developed feminist consciousness that exposes the structures underlying those conventions, making “The Yellow Wallpaper” one of the most politically radical nineteenth-century depictions of female madness. 

From the beginning of the story, the narrator articulates her dissatisfaction with the rest cure imposed upon her, revealing her eventual descent into madness not in confusion, but in resistance that is actively dismissed by patriarchal medical authority. Early in the narrative, she notes, “John is a physician, and perhaps…that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick,” (Gilman). An imbalance of power is immediately established, as the narrator’s illness is not defined by her own experience, but by her husband’s validation. John’s authority as both husband and doctor fuses domestic and institutional power, rendering the narrator subject to control simultaneously as a wife and patient. Drawing from her personal experience with the rest cure, Gilman weaponizes realism to critique the gendered violence of the medical system in the nineteenth century. Gilman’s critique is grounded in a lived experience, which is established in “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, an article she wrote shortly after the short story’s release. In it, she recalls, “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure…sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’as long as I lived…I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” By reproducing these conditions within the narrator’s experience, she reveals how enforced passivity generates psychological deterioration rather than preventing it. As modern scholarship observes, “the problem was not with whether the Rest Cure was seen as an acceptable treatment by the medical community; rather, the problem concerned whether the Rest Cure was fitting for the specific, intersectional patient population Gilman and the diarist occupied” (Villar 6). Within the narrative, the narrator's protest is clearly articulated and continuously minimized, demonstrating how patriarchal medicine invalidates female voices. Her attempts to understand her own condition are dismissed, making rational resistance increasingly impossible. As her emotional expression continues to be invalidated, psychological displacement continues to become more unavoidable. 

As her intellectual autonomy is continuously denied under the rest cure, the narrator turns to writing in secret as a final attempt at self-preservation. When even this act must be concealed, her creative energy is forced inward, transforming expression into obsessive fixation. She confesses, “and I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (Gilman). Even in this moment, the narrator anticipates ridicule, revealing her awareness that her thoughts are dismissed with the patriarchal logic that governs both marriage and medicine. Through her secret diary, writing becomes a subversive act, reclaiming a form of intellectual autonomy that the rest cure attempts to suppress. Yet the necessity of this secrecy fractures her identity, forcing her to become an obedient wife to John and the intellectual she struggles to preserve. Instead, the suppression of expression intensifies the narrator's psychological fragmentation. In “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper", Gilman explained the story was intended “to save people from being driven crazy”, exposing the destructive attempts at treatment for women in the nineteenth century. Within the story, the narrator’s attempts at writing only deepen her isolation, as her thoughts must remain hidden to avoid further repression. Writing therefore fails as a form of resistance within the patriarchal system as the narrator’s intellect begins to manifest as obsession, marking the point where rational protest is transformed into the madness that society has already imposed upon her.   

In the final act of the story, the narrator’s identification of the woman trapped behind the wallpaper marks the culmination of prolonged, systemic silencing. Her madness becomes a moment of authentic liberation from John but an irreversible break from the social order that confined her. She declares, “‘I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (Gilman). These lines enact a complete role reversal between the narrator and her husband. She declares her independence not just from the room, but from the structures that have kept her confined. The final image transforms domestic power completely, with the rational patriarch collapsed and the madwoman becoming dominant. Yet, the narrator’s animalistic crawling complicates this victory, recalling Victorian associations between hysteria and feminine irrationality. Her liberation therefore requires her to inhabit the very identity the patriarchy has imposed upon her: the madwoman. This tension is reflected in feminist criticism, which observes that,  “Gilman's story has been a particularly congenial medium for such a re-vision not only because the narrator herself engages in a form of feminist interpretation when she tries to read the paper on her wall but also because turn-of-the-century readers seem to have ignored or avoided the connection between the narrator's condition and patriarchal politics, instead praising the story for its keenly accurate 'case study’ of a presumably inherited insanity” (Lanser 418). This duality of political awakening and spectacle reflects Gilman’s own political contradictions. By tracing how the narrator arrives at this condition, Gilman reconstructs the trope of feminine madness not as inherent, but as the logical consequence of sustained oppression. Through this unsettling conclusion, Gilman reveals the moment when patriarchal logic collapses under its own weight and the voices it attempted to suppress finally emerge. 

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman fuses personal experience with social criticism, transforming a private psychological struggle into a public indictment of patriarchal authority. Drawing from her own encounter with the rest cure, she exposed gendered violence in the medical system, revealing how treatment functioned as a mechanism of silence and control. She treats madness as more than a diagnosis, but as a feminist metaphor for resistance. By centering the narrator’s psychological descent within a domestic space, Gilman demonstrates how medical and marital power reinforce structures that deny women emotional freedom. At the same time, Gilman’s reformist politics complicate the radicalism of her critique. Although she could not entirely escape the ideology of her era, she redirected patriarchal influence into explicit dissent. Unlike Charlotte Brontё and Gustave Flaubert, whose portrayal of female suffering remained entrenched in patriarchal frameworks, Gilman writes within feminine consciousness itself, exposing the structures that produce the madwoman. In doing so, she exposes how deeply these ideologies control even the voices that attempt to break free, while insisting these voices have the power to destabilize the systems that sought to silence them. 

Conclusion 

Moving from patriarchally constrained depictions towards feminist critiques, these works demonstrate how literature not only reflects but actively shapes ideology surrounding women’s health. Read in sequence from Charlotte Brontë to Gustave Flaubert to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the progression is apparent. Madness shifts from being an innate female defect to being exposed as a direct consequence of patriarchal systems that confine, silence, and control women. 

In Jane Eyre, Bertha embodies the most restrictive depiction of female madness. Her insanity is framed as inherited and racialized, more biologically corrupt than a valid response to intense suffering at the hands of Rochester. Brontë reinforces dominant Victorian beliefs that mentally ill women were dangerous and in need of confinement, locking Bertha away both physically and symbolically. Bertha’s Creole background is seen as something that taints her genes, rendering her madness as not only feminine, but racially othered. The novel does not generate sympathy toward her situation, with its only feminist messaging coming from moral Jane, though she is trapped in the Victorian ideal of the “New Woman”. Though female-authored, it ultimately remains steeped in patriarchal frameworks that justify female surveillance and restraint. 

With Madame Bovary, the portrayal becomes more psychologically intimate and sympathetic, but still constrained by patriarchal narration through a realist writing style. Though the reader can access Emma’s interiority, this view is filtered through a lens that subtly pathologizes her desires as corrupt and unstable. Her longing for romance and transcendence is treated as delusion rather than a response to the suffocating limitations placed on domestic bourgeois women. Her illness is aestheticized, transforming her suffering into a beautiful spectacle consistent with notions of female fragility. Madness here is not monstrous like it is in Jane Eyre, but it remains individualized and depoliticized, reinforcing the idea that excessive female desire leads to self-destruction. 

The trajectory reaches its most progressive and politically explicit look at female madness and confinement in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Drawing from her own experiences, Gilman internalizes the psychological violence of patriarchal medicine and transforms it into narrative resistance. The narrator’s descent into madness under the rest cure exposes the gendered violence of the medical system that infantilizes and silences women. Here, madness is not inherited, aestheticized, or legally imposed, but a direct result of the patriarchal medical system. Female madness becomes a political statement, revealing how deeply patriarchal roots infiltrate even the ways women describe their suffering. Gilman’s reformist politics and white feminism do not entirely escape the structures she critiques, though that is by modern standards. Unlike her predecessors, the story does not just depict confinement, but allows for active resistance and calls out the systems that impose on female mental health. 

Taken together, these texts chart a literary evolution from depictions of madness as an innate female defect to being a direct consequence of suffering under patriarchal systems. Examining the works in order of increased political progressiveness reveals how narrative authority shapes the meaning of psychological distress, examining the impact of male- or female-authored texts and the politics of the author. As authors move away from patriarchal ideologies and narrate the female experience intimately, representations of women’s minds become more liberated and focused on critique. By tracing the evolution of women’s mental health across these works, this study demonstrates that literature not only reflects cultural attitudes toward women but also exposes and challenges the ideologies that shape them. 

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