"She felt it, creeping out of the sky"

madness and death as liberation in nineteenth-century women's fiction

Résumé

Women have been deemed mad for centuries. Such a diagnosis leads them to two paths: they either die within themselves, or, more advantageously, they ascend to a different level of freedom. In this paper, focusing on three texts produced in the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of An Hour” (1894) and The awakening (1899), we argue that, with a Gothic-like morbidity, their self-destructive protagonists, when facing restricting and limited lives, are aroused by a death instinct more satisfying than the unbearable reality they live in. Thus, it is through the annihilation of life, either via madness or death, that they reach liberation.