The Lineage of Madness in Caribbean Literature

Mental distress has often been represented in fiction by writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. This is not surprising given the violent history of the region, which includes slavery, indenture and migration, all traumatic events which have deeply affected individual psyches. The focus of this lecture is on the psychological suffering experienced by Caribbean characters who move to the centre of the British Empire in the 19th and 20 th centuries and are faced there with othering and marginalization. Starting from the work of Dominican Jean Rhys and her by now classic depiction of the madwoman in the attic in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the discussion will move on to the work of Anglo-Kittitian Caryl Phillips. I will show that Phillips’s writing responds to Rhys’s in several ways, including via their common interest in the writing of the Brontë sisters, who are famous for exploring female insanity in the Victorian age. An overview of the literary lineage between Phillips and Rhys will trace how their work destabilizes traditional taxonomies of race and gender (as Carine Mardorossian has showed in relation to Jean Rhys), but also how these two writers manage to question the divide between madness and sanity.