Women madness and society in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Salman Rushdie's Shame

This thesis studies the representations of madwoman in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Salman Rushdie's Shame taking cue from Michael Foucault's claim that insanity is a social construct. While 'mad' is a notion referred to those who act and think irrationally and unnaturally, that a woman, who is believed to be inclined to madness due to her nature and oppressed for she is considered the inferior sex, becomes insane, as depicted in both novels, renders her an ultimate danger to the male-dominant society obsessed with moral codes and social order. These madwomen, therefore, face a fate of live burial, expelled to incarceration either at home or an asylum. By analysing the transformation the madwomen in novels into monsters, this present study quests for its causes in the oppression imposed on these women by male domination. Analysing the incarceration and reclusion of the monstrous madwomen, considered a threat to society, it strives to find an answer to the question "Is confining the madwomen a patriarchal victory?" Even though the two novels were written centuries apart, in different countries with cultures rooted in opposite belief systems, both authors, weaving the story around many Gothic tropes, depict their mad protagonists embodying the Beauty and the Beast and their monstrosity as the mere result of and the revolt against the patriarchal repression.