“Let all the dukes and all the devils roar!” Mad Skills and Madwomen

The wildly popular star scene of female derangement enriched the stock of theatergrams deployed by playwrights across the map. Isabella Andreini’s triumph playing La Pazzia (“Madness”), featuring her skills in singing, impersonation, languages, and improvisation, spurred many imitations. On the English stage female madness took several forms. Bereaved madwomen leap from deep mourning to subversive songs and jokes, as with Ophelia in Hamlet and Cornelia in Webster’s The White Devil. Others express furious grief cut off by showy suicides (Isabella in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Zabina in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine). Sapho in Lyly’s Sapho and Phao and Dido in Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage suffer comic and tragic erotomania. Most distinctive are the comic virtuosas: Pandora in Lyly’s The Woman in the Moone and the Jailer’s Daughter in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amuse and astonish with multiple prolonged pazzie and prodigious displays of skill.

The Poetics of Female Resistance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

The present paper is an attempt to study the female quest for freedom in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night from a French feminist perspective. Indeed, Mary Tyrone resorts to body language as a form of resistance against gender and cultural confinement. French feminism will be deployed to understand female non-verbal subversive strategies. Luce Irigaray argues that language is male-dominated and male discourse misrepresents women. Accordingly, body language can be interpreted as a silent form of female resistance against patriarchal hegemony. It is the case of Mary who is irritated because of the male gaze and she uses madness as a silent language of resistance against female and ethnic stereotypes. Mary is a rebellious woman who defies her three men for being indifferent about her dilemma of disillusionment with the institution of marriage. She is treated as a wife, a mother or a daughter and she is often assigned the role of ‘the Angel in the House.’ French feminism will be used to understand the way O’Neill reshapes female identity and he calls for not linking female identity to the social roles. The aim is to study the non-verbal communication, the behavioural, kinetic, gestural and psychological profile of Mary. The paper will also focus on the hardships Mary faces and the ways she reconstructs female identity. The paper draws on the French feminist arguments about female madness as a form of resistance and it criticizes the conventional claim about madness as s form of weakness.

The Poetics of Female Resistance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

The present paper is an attempt to study the female quest for freedom in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night from a French feminist perspective. Indeed, Mary Tyrone resorts to body language as a form of resistance against gender and cultural confinement. French feminism will be deployed to understand female non-verbal subversive strategies. Luce Irigaray argues that language is male-dominated and male discourse misrepresents women. Accordingly, body language can be interpreted as a silent form of female resistance against patriarchal hegemony. It is the case of Mary who is irritated because of the male gaze and she uses madness as a silent language of resistance against female and ethnic stereotypes. Mary is a rebellious woman who defies her three men for being indifferent about her dilemma of disillusionment with the institution of marriage. She is treated as a wife, a mother or a daughter and she is often assigned the role of ‘the Angel in the House.’ French feminism will be used to understand the way O’Neill reshapes female identity and he calls for not linking female identity to the social roles. The aim is to study the non-verbal communication, the behavioural, kinetic, gestural and psychological profile of Mary. The paper will also focus on the hardships Mary faces and the ways she reconstructs female identity. The paper draws on the French feminist arguments about female madness as a form of resistance and it criticizes the conventional claim about madness as s form of weakness.

Strike a Pose

This article traces methods and conventions of performing women’s mental distress before the camera circa 1900. It features an analysis of gestural performances in French, US, Italian, and British films, with special attention given to two pre-1916 Gaumont films that include mad scenes. The topos of the white madwoman presents a valuable lens through which to investigate intermedial relations across performance forms and visual media as early cinema emerged, and gestures signifying madness have been particularly resilient even as approaches to film acting have evolved. Drawing on scholarship from Giorgio Agamben and Rae Beth Gordon, this article questions how techniques of performing female madness intersected with ideologies of race, class, and nationality.

Ofelia Pirandella: rozważania nad kobiecym szaleństwem

Ophelia of Pirandello: reflections around female madnessAbstractThe article is devoted to an analysis of Luigi Pirandello’s drama As You Desire Me which drawsinspiration from an actual event connected with questions on the identity of a person sufferingfrom amnesia. Unlike the real incident, the main character of Pirandello’s is a woman knownonly by her alias Stranger, as the main theme of the drama is establishing her true identity. Thepresent article aims at proving that Pirandello’s drama is not a criminal mystery, but rathera deep reflection on the notion of human personality which in the case of a woman receivesnew, interesting meanings. One of them is spotting the correspondence between Pirandelli’sStranger and Shakespeare’s Ophelia, as madness of both characters appears to have similarroots: female’s insanity seen through the prism of both dramas appears as defiance againstthe culture of patriarchy, but also stems from the conviction of one’s own emptiness andundefinedness. In this context, referring to studies on feminist criticism (E. Shawalter,K. Kłosińska, K. Woźniak), including studies on female hysteria is of relevance. Even thoughthe structure of drama appears to lead to a finale in which the truth about the character isuncovered, Pirandello does not reveal her true identity. However, questions on female identityand female madness are worth reflecting upon, even if they remain unanswered.Keywords: Luigi Pirandello, As you desire me, impersonality, Ophelia, tarantism, Jean-MartinCharcot, Aleksandra Mianowska, female madness, female identity, Elaine Showalter, feministliterary criticism