“The Walls of Her Prison”: Madness, Gender, and Discursive Agency in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman

Abstract

The female protagonists of Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman are located on the margins of madness, exploring the space between psychological disorder and reason. Both novels radically challenge eighteenth-century gendered discourses of madness and the accompanying institutions that sequester and silence women. However, while Fenwick and Wollstonecraft work to undermine gendered constructions of madness, they nonetheless remain bound to the discursive limits that divide madness and reason irreparably. Together, Secresy and The Wrongs of Woman indicate the pervasiveness of eighteenth-century discourses of madness, as both novels are finally unable to subvert the assumptions underlying these discourses, continuing to associate the feminine with unreason and madness with the inarticulate and incomprehensible.