RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Janet Frame's Fictions: Madness and the Subject of Writing in the Narration of Women's Lives
A1 Sánchez-Pardo González, Esther
AB There is a certain resistance to engage in the discourse of and aboutmadness and woman, and we have to wait until feminist criticism in thelate 1970s and 1980s opens up a space where theorization and socialand critical debate may arise. My essay is an attempt to examine inwhat way madness does account for what we call literature and what isthe relation between women and madness in our reading of contemporarytexts. This paper aims at rethinking women’s madness approachinga selection of Janet Frame’s fictions, especially her two novels, Facesin the Water (1961) and Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963). Bothnarratives pose several crucial questions such as the relationship of silenceto confinement, death and madness, the subject’s acquisition ofexistential guilt, and the characters’ interrelations within an Oedipalconfiguration. After a retreat into silence, tropes, images and symbolsall seem to contribute to Frame’s breaking through the wall of languageto finally discover that it opens into darkness. And what is the oracularmessage of woman in these narratives where madness is so poignantlythematized?
PB Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de La Laguna
SN e-2530-8335
YR 1997
FD 1997
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30584
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30584
LA en
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 02-may-2024