Women made mad: the social and gendered construction of madness in four Australian women's short stories

The essay analyzes the representation of madness in four Australian short stories by Rosa Praed, Barbara Baynton, Kate Grenville and Beverly Farmer. Starting from the premises that, in Australian women’s writing, madness is largely presented as a consequence of patriarchal oppression and of the victimization of female characters, the essay investigates the narrative devices scrutinizing and denouncing the ways in which social expectations of ideal standards of femininity, decency, motherhood and wifehood are imposed on women, determining different forms of deviant or abnormal behaviour that are labelled as “mad”. Madness is examined in diverse social and historical contexts as a gendered construction determined by the diverse reactions of women to various repressive conditions: claustrophobic and exhausting confinement in the bush, male exploitation and punishment for the reversal of gender roles, prejudiced and stereotyped notions of womanhood, postpartum depression, and the castrating relationship between mother and daughter.