The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or why Insanity is Not Subversive

Caminero-Santangelo considers such writers as Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Cristina Garcia, Kate Millett, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Shirley Jackson, locating their narratives of female madness within the context of popularized Freudianism, sociology of "the" African-American family, images in the mass media, and other elements of culture to which their writings respond. Their works, Caminero-Santangelo maintains, appropriate images linking madness to feminine aberrance, but do so to expose the regulatory functions that such images serve. These writings reveal how the silent protest emblematized by the madwoman, and celebrated in feminist critical practice, simply serves to lock women into stereotypes long used to oppress them.