Mad women of literature: gender and narrative in Mine Söğüt's writings

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1649002 (Table of Contents)

This study aims to discuss the possible meanings produced by mad women characters in Mine Söğüt’s literature, with keeping in mind the literature’s exceptional position in narrating the experiences such as madness, trauma and womanhood which are located outside language and rendered unnarratable. In the stories and novels in which madness is elaborated on structural and thematic levels, the possibilities of narrating nonlinguistic experiences which are assumed to have no means of conveyance through literature will be questioned. In this regard, after a brief summary of the relation between madness and womanhood, literature’s role in telling the stories of these experiences will be explored. When reading the perpetual repetitions and the nonlinguistic forms of communications adopted by Mine Söğüt’s mad women as literary devices for narrating madness in literature; representation of womanhood through madness will be examined with regards to gender norms.