Insane women in old books

Why are women portrayed as insane so often in classic novels? Even those written by women, the women can often be hysterical and irrational, a vibrant, thrashing force to be reckoned with. Is it because this was how women behaved at the time, or was this just how people perceived them? If the former, was it due to the many trappings the feminine experienced in society—the ways in which people wrote off their feelings and thoughts truly so maddening? I would imagine so. Or are women always doomed to be irrational beasts, deeply in touch with the magic of life, but at a cost? Is there truth in these stereotypes? It's hard to say. In the middle of an argument I've watched myself become the senseless woman of a Victorian novel. I was a Dostoevsky or Brontë women without choice in the matter. My emotions owned me. I understood their hysteria all too well, the strange feminine violences that unearths itself mid-argument.

Or is it the latter? Or maybe a mix? Was the loud and the hysterical the only form of sensible protest? Was expressing oneself considered to be naive, insane, and worst of all a female-laden trait, and so every novel labeled it so? I imagine the world of Madame Olenska in The Age of Innocence, trapped in a world of tradition, where you can either bend to the orthodoxy or be labeled an insanity for craving independence. A fascinating conundrum, and one so many women in the likes of Dickens and Hugo know well. 

But maybe that's why we like them so. Maybe we are unchanging, and we don't like to admit that, and many authors notice the similar pattern of women throughout time, and it's only my decision to label it as simple and stereotypical. After all, even women can be wicked, though it's often in their own unique way. Lady Macbeth, with her red hands and her heart so white, knows this. As a villain, her sex dooms her. She is not a genius plotter tainted with wickedness. She is an evil woman wrought with insanity. Are the expressions in literature of a mad woman an attempt at offering the complexity we crave in stories and art, and perhaps we just don't like the image? After all, see how good men detest the sex fiend, the aggressive sociopath, the cowardly figure who abandons his family. As a woman, I see these things and I am repulsed like the rest, but perhaps given my sex, it terrifies me less. It feels impossible to morph into. But the madness of Katerina or Nastasya in a Dostovesky novel often feels eerily close. When I read about those women, there's a tremor of my own darkness, blatantly visible when I am the worst of myself.

Maybe Catherine in Wuthering Heights is mad as a form of protest to her sex and the constraints of it in the 1800s. When she locks herself away for three nights and is called truly mad by Dr. Kenneth, part of me wondered if she was truly sick. Was she crying out for help? Had she felt the limitations of her time period? It's very likely so. But this version of female insanity is so present in other literature, and to find it captured so well by a woman herself (Emily Brontë) gives me pause. Maybe there's truth in the insanity. Is that not what Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening or "The Story of an Hour" is all about? For Brontë, the girl is lovesick, for Chopin, the girl is sick of love. And yet their most desperate moments compare too easily.

I'm not sure where this reflection leaves me. At first it's easy to write off the madwoman of a Victorian novel as an outdated misrepresentation of mental health and female rights as we know it today. But the recurring imagery throughout time by authors of both sexes makes me think it's probably something much deeper than what my surface-level instincts are.

I think that's how it usually goes.