Why insanity is not subversive in Hanan Al-Shaykh's short story ‘season of madness’

Abstract

Dalya Abudi maintains that in many female Arab texts ‘madness serves as a metaphor for female victimisation on the one hand and for female resistance on the other’. This paper contends that the representation of women as insane in Hanan Al-Shaykh's ‘Season of Madness’ is not subversive. I draw on Camineor-Santangelo's approach to feminist criticism, which argues that a madwoman cannot speak. Camineor-Santangelo explains that madness is complicit with de Lauretis’ technologies of gender because it gives the illusion of power but at the same time the mad (non)-subject is located outside any ‘sphere where power can be exerted’. I illustrate how in this story female madness is mainly represented as witchcraft and evil, stigma, a female malady, a denied subjectivity, social control, illusional power, self-sabotage and a final surrender.