Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Madness And Sexual Politics In The Feminist Novel: Studies On Brontë, Woolf, Lessing, And Atwood, By Barbara Hill Rigney. The University Of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1978 (Book Review), Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph] Barbara Hill Rigney's aim in Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel is "to reconcile feminism and psychology in the areas of literary criticism" and "to find examples in the major works of four representative feminist writers of the relationship between madness and the female condition." (p. 3). Rigney analyzes four novels, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and finds that "all depict insanity in relation to sexual politics and state that madness, to a greater or lesser degree, is connected to …