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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.
Elizabeth J. Donaldson (Tue,) studied this question.