Abstract:
Confessions of the Mad Wife deals with Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso
Sea and Assad Fouladkar's 2001 feature film Lama Hikyit Maryam. Although the two
works are different in many respects, they share a curiously similar plot: a mad woman
recounts the events of her miserable life, which caused her downfall and led to her tragic
end. Both Wide Sargasso Sea and Lama Hikyit Maryam are stories of cultural and
patriarchal conflicts conveyed through the story of the failure of love between a man and
a woman. A remarkable aspect of these works is the way complex narrative structure
develops these conflicts. In Wide Sargasso Sea the story is narrated by a number of
unreliable narrators whose accounts are very often contradictory. In Lama Hikyit Maryam
the main story is constantly interrupted and framed by a meta-narrative that is only
revealed at the end of the film. The purpose of Confessions of the Mad Wife is to
understand how the powerful and disconcerting effects of these works relate to their
complex narrative structure, which affects our interpretation of the plot. More
specifically, this study examines the role of polyphony and unreliability in Wide Sargasso
Sea, and irony and embedded narration in Lama Hikyit Maryam. It emerges that these
techniques playa significant role in the thematization of female madness in Wide
Sargasso Sea and Lama Hikyit Maryam. Thus the power of Wide Sargasso Sea and Lama
Hikyit Maryam lies not in their adherence to a classical story-line of the mad wife that
goes back at least to Euripides's Medea but in the significant way these stories are
plotted, such that the techniques themselves appear to bear a privileged relation to madness.
