The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness

In this essay, I position Gilbert and Gubar's quintessential madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason, as the "maddened double" of second-wave feminist criticism. Building on the legacy of previous feminist interpretations of the madwoman, I propose a new disability studies reading attuned to the connections between physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre. By departing from the established "madness as rebellion" narrative, I seek to re-position the text and to open a theoretical space for the analysis of embodiment and mental illness using feminist science studies and theories of the body along with the insights of disability studies.