The gift of madness: Confronting past traumatic memories as a gateway to healing

The Gift of Madness: Confronting Past Traumatic Memories as a Gateway to Healing This thesis analyses the concept of madness as a transgressive and redemptive force in the postcolonial novels Property by Valerie Martin, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. The study explores madness not as a pathology but as a resisting response to historical violence, colonial oppression, and epigenetic trauma of characters labelled as 'mad'. Madness enables objectified characters to confront repressed memories of oppression and gendered subjugation, deconstructing dominant narratives of the West and reclaiming agency. This survey focuses on the idea of madness as a 'gift' that allows transcendence of time and presence to revisit fragmented memories rooted in the transatlantic Passage. The 'mad' figures emerge as morticians, agents of historical reckoning, exorcising inherited trauma to reestablish the female identity. Their defiance, conveyed as maternal abandonment, infanticide, and the flight from the master's domain, metaphorically serves to emasculate colonial autonomy, unveiling logocentric structures of hegemony. These characters engage in the recreation of a female narration to enable trauma healing and thereby imply the ongoing traits of historical violence. Ultimately, this thesis argues that madness functions as an epistemological medium, a reinvented mode of truthmaking and being, with which traumatised subjects of postcolonialism debunk their imposed identities and envision liberated futures. This thesis aims to contribute to broader discourses on trauma, female creation, and truthmaking, positioning madness as both a side of pain and a transformative gateway to healing.