‘A powerful thing to be seen’ : Depictions of woman’s madness in selected contemporary fiction from India, South Africa and Nigeria

Abstract

This dissertation builds on existing critical scholarship on woman and madness in postcolonial literature. According to previous studies, critics observe the space madwoman are pushed into in cultures that see them as deviant and to be dominated, as their colonial masters did. Furthermore, these studies confirm the trauma of colonisation, which continues to affect postcolonial nations’ culture and social structure. My key focus in this study is to examine madness as resistance to heteropatriarchal ideologies in three contemporary postcolonial texts: Jerry Pinto’s Em and The Big Hoom (2012), Mishka Hoosen’s Call It a Difficult Night (2015), and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) to explore how the authors rewrite madwomen as characters who resist traditional gender roles that confine women and people of queer-identities. Reading the selected texts through the framework of the postcolonial Bildungsroman, I argue that they challenge Western, heteropatriarchal, and hegemonic systems. Moreover, I propose that through a process of reflection and growth, which is crucial to the plots of all the novels selected for this study, the protagonists gain strength and confidence. Given that the Bildungsroman is typically led by a male protagonist who pushes limits and sets out on a journey to escape his society and return matured, this study looks at texts that illustrate the essence of the Bildung of postcolonial female protagonists. In essence, I pay attention to explanations of madness, that is, behaviour and attributes in defiance of traditional gender and sex roles as well as the forms in which growth narratives (through resistance) are addressed positively by the narratives’ respective resolutions. As a result, this dissertation focuses on the madwoman figure and reframes studies on the Bildungsroman and its refutation of all considered ‘irrational’.