Confessions of the mad wife in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea & Assad Fouladkar's Lama Hikyit Maryam. (c2006)

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.