Seminar Content
Speaker: Madhurima Sen
Throughout history, women’s mental health has been subject to medical scrutiny that often reduced psychological suffering to pathology, hysteria, or hormonal imbalance. This session explores how literature offers a powerful space for rethinking mental health and how literary texts illuminate, and often resist, this medicalization by offering nuanced representations of mental distress.
The first part introduces key theoretical frameworks for understanding how women’s mental illness has been historically constructed, pathologized, and silenced. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, we will examine how psychiatry and institutional medicine have functioned as systems of power and control. In parallel, we will engage with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which interrogates how the figure of the “madwoman” has been used to contain and distort female creativity in literature. Together, these perspectives set the stage for a deeper analysis of literary resistance to the medical gaze.
The second part will closely examine how selected works by women writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath represent the lived experience of mental distress in ways that challenge psychiatric authority. These historical and literary insights remain strikingly relevant to contemporary discussions of gender, power, and mental health. Through a study of selected excerpts, we will trace how literature critiques diagnostic labels, reclaims narrative agency, and exposes the gendered assumptions embedded in mental health discourse.
