Books, like all works of art, tend to reflect the era in which they were written. One common element in some of more recent readings has been the tendency of women, especially young women, to go insane when confronted with difficult situations. I believe that this tendency is reflective of the overall tendency of literature of that time period to show women as weak or inferior.
This topic first came to mind when I was thinking about Hamlet. In Hamlet, three young men lose a father. One young woman loses her father. Hamlet goes a bit overboard in getting revenge, Fortinbras attempts to march an army across the country, Laertes wants to kill Hamlet. Only Ophelia, when confronted with this tragedy, starts singing old songs, picking flowers out of midair, followed shortly by her dramatic suicide. Furthermore, all of the characters treat her sudden and unforeshadowed decent into insanity with complete understanding. She is a woman, there was a lot of stress and tragedy surrounding her, it is understandable that she went absolutely insane, they say.
A similar tendency could be noted in Wuthering Heights. Not that only the women are insane in that book. Everyone in Wuthering Heights is insane. But only Catherine’s insanity is the only insanity that leads directly to her death via sudden emotional hysteria. Now you could take this as proof that in the Victorian era women were seen as weak and thus unstable and thus hysterical and thus crazy. That would be a logical line of thought. But putting that aside, what if Wuthering Heights were saying that everyone is crazy, but while men focus their anger outwards women focus it inwards? That interpretation would also hold true for Hamlet.
In the modern day, the new insanity, replacing the also-more-recent ‘vapors’ and fainting tendencies is depression. Depression strikes women far more often than men, perhaps this is a continuation of the trend for women to internalize their problems at the expense of their mental health. But while that sounds like a sound theory, gender studies is also supposed to tell us that men are more likely to internalize their feeling and women express those feelings to others. So is there a male counterpart to these female foibles? Back in the day, the crazy thing for men to do was to disappear off into the countryside and reappear months or years later, claiming to have no memory of the event. In the time when Hamlet was written, the thing to be, if you were going to be a bit crazy and artistic, was melancholy. It was manly, artistic and, coincidentally, inspired by the character of Hamlet and then emulated by several writers of that era.
Personally, I would chalk all of this up to different social expectations – for women and men and for people of different eras. People have always had, and probably will always have problems. Those problems will continue to present themselves in ways that society expects as long as society expects it. I don’t profess to know why 2 women have depression for every one man that does, but I’m will to bet its not because women are inherently weak minded. Their brains are built of the same stuff (or so we think?).
