Women & Insanity

            There are billions of people on this planet. Each person is made with specific strings of chromosomes exclusive only to them. Although everyone is unique, there are still divisions that arrange groups of people into categories that represent them. Humans are separated by terms of race, ethnicity, culture, class, and even borders. Though there is not always a guarantee for what someone might become or what they might be born into, most people fall into one of two genders. The world is made up mainly of males and females, yet society still manages to form injudicious and stereotypical assumptions about such large groups of the population. Being either gender will determine the fate of the person and how they might be treated by the society. As these assumptions for each gender increase, so do the social guidelines and expectations.

There is often no in-between when we think of the expectations of women in media and writing. They are either presented as angels or monsters. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss this exact illustration in their book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. A woman who does not play the typical role of an angel, mother, or wife is often seen playing the extreme role of a psychotic, crazy, and heartless woman instead. Fictional women are seen as crazy by the whole of society and more often due to the involvement of men. The male ego plays a major role in the way women are treated and seen. Women who act like angels cannot hurt the ego but women who are like monsters can. Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist theory over this situation, emphasizes the harm being done to the womanly image by authorial male authors.