Women and Madness: A Literary Perspective

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time are important literary works that deal with mental illness in women. Gilman and Plath are two of the pioneering female authors who wrote about mental illness in their works reflecting their own experience, while Piercy is one of the most influential female authors who wrote about mentally ill women of colour. Society's negative reaction to the main characters' illness was similar in all three works due to the lack of knowledge and sensitivity for mental illnesses and the women themselves. The patients from these works had different simptoms and received different treatments, but all three works point to the same important problem – the representation of women's inner lives in literature