Stories of Immigrant Isolation and Despair: Canadian Novels and Memoirs Since the 1850s

Abstract

In The Female Malady published in 1985, Elaine Showalter notes that representations of madness in literary texts are not simply reflections of medical and scientific knowledge, but are part of the fundamental cultural framework in which ideas about insanity are constructed. Writing from a feminist perspective on women, madness and English culture, Showalter draws extensively upon women’s diaries, memoirs, and novels in order to include women’s voices as well as the male views set out in medical literature. One of her first examples is Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronté’s well-known novel, Jane Eyre. While Showalter describes Bertha’s violence, sequestration, and regression to an inhuman condition as a powerful model of female insanity for Victorian readers, she never mentions Bertha’s Jamaican immigrant background. Yet ethnic identity, or the immigrant experience, is a vital aspect of the cultural framework that literary texts both reflect and help to shape and is thus significant in an understanding of ideas about insanity.