A site dedicated to exploring the correlations found between 19th and 20th century American literature, women, madness and oppression.

In seeking understanding, we stumble upon the ground of madness. How does insanity and madness fit into our understanding of truth? Specifically for women, how does the pervasive history of hysteria and madness, that so consumed our gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, shape the understanding that we have of ourselves today. It is through the literature of the era that we are better able to understand ourselves.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, and Edith Wharton are just a few of the American authors who have explored the theme of madness in the lives of women. The Yellow Wallpaper, The Awakening, The House of Mirth, and The Bell Jar provide a critique of the patriarchal system that pervades our culture and our thinking by linking the oppression of women to the madness and hysteria that was used to describe our gender. Freud and Laing attempted to explain away the hysterics of women as being an affliction of gender, while critics such as Elaine Showalter, Phyllis Chesler and Carroll Smith Rosenberg correlate the high occurrences of hysteria and madness to the evolution of the American industrial society.