Abstract
Madness has historically functioned as a powerful trope in postcolonial fiction, but as an aspect of characterization, it also has the potential to lead to unidimensional characters. This is a problem in a field like postcolonial studies in which identifying with characters is typically how Western readers engage the perspective of the “other.” Carine M. Mardorossian argues that one of the ways in which the issue of madness’ potential unidimensionality has been negotiated in Caribbean literature is through characters’ association with a multilayered environment and landscape. Specifically, this ecocritical reading highlights the role landscape plays in constructing a complex psychology for the characters in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996).
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- 1.
It is important to note that I am not referring here to madness in its relation to mental illness but in relation to its portrayal in hegemonic Western representations, such as the figure of the madwoman in the attic or the nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific approach to the hysterical woman, whose subjectivity was so suppressed that the medical establishment waived all need for consent in its dealings with her.
- 2.
See, for instance, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable (2006).
- 3.
As Cronon notes, the sublime is instantly recognizable through the awe and inspiration it has historically evoked in the human psyche. It is a doctrine whose genesis can be traced back to the eighteenth century’s association of nature with the divine. It is also a doctrine a tamer version of which continued to define human beings’ relationship to nature in subsequent centuries. Cronon notes, for instance, that the sublime went from evoking the sacred to a more sentimental demeanour: “By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor.…the sublime in effect became domesticated” (75).
- 4.
Edouard Glissant famously pointed out that the Caribbean “may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly” (Poetics 33). At the same time, he believed this hybrid condition or “Relation” to be a global phenomenon that was increasingly making itself visible everywhere. It is more visible in the Caribbean archipelago because of the condensed and accelerated nature of the historical processes of transplantation and creolization that derived from slavery and took place on these island spaces, but it is ultimately a universal feature of the human experience. Similarly, while the narrative work performed by nonhuman otherness in relation to madness in Caribbean fiction can ultimately be detected in any postcolonial narrative, it is more visible in Caribbean texts where the relational nature of identity is front and centre and where the trope of madness has a long cultural history.
- 5.
Note the contrast between the workings of landscape here and the ways in which the husband, in Part 2, establishes Antoinette’s alterity by overlapping her gendered and racial otherness with environmental tropes of sensory overload and excess.
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Mardorossian, C.M. (2018). What Is “Worse Besides”? An Ecocritical Reading of Madness in Caribbean Literature. In: Ledent, B., O'Callaghan, E., Tunca, D. (eds) Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98180-2_6
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