Dionysian dynamics of the Victorian fiction; Mad women characters

Officially started with Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837, the Victorian Era was a long-running and sensational time period which had a great impact on the nineteenth century literature. The Era was realistically portrayed in the novels of Dickens, Collins, Thackeray, Brontë sisters, Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy. Apart from the primary subjects such as class-consciousness, industrialism, the so-called progress that shook the social dynamics, all of which were narrated in the realist novels of the time, another key aspect is surely the mad women characters. Bertha Antoinetta Mason of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) attributed a special dimension to the notion of madness with her tragic end. The Woman in White (1859) of Wilkie Collins animated an impressive character within; Anne Catherick. Her wandering in pure white represents that the male-oriented order has transformed the woman into a living ghost and the isolation of woman initially from the society and gradually from herself could only be explained by Dionysian triggers. Another unique character is Miss Havisham who succeeded to fire the highly realistic world of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861). Her Dionysian nature makes her old yellowed bridal dress even more tragic. The key word of all aforementioned works is surely woman, and the reason of her being on the margin of madness is undoubtedly the society. This study has been structured on the theories of Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche so as to discover the voice of woman echoing from the thick walls of Victorian-style cages.