NARRATIVE AND MEDICINE 2012

Title of the paper:

“William Shakespeare and the Representation of Female Madness”

Abstract: Starting with a quotation from a letter by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, this paper makes a comparison between his gendered conception of hysteria and the Shakespearian representation of male and female madness in two of Shakespeare’s tragedies: Hamlet and Macbeth.

The characters of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth are approached in terms of their differences and similarities, and also in contrast with their male counterparts, in plays which deal with insanity as a central topic. By means of an analysis which includes notions from Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Elaine Showalter, as well as references to visual representations of the characters, we may come to the conclusion that in these Shakespearian plays female madness tends to be expressed through “silence and poetry”.In fact, the silencing of female voices and the interiorization of their emotions are here presented by William Shakespeare as a way for self-destruction, eventually culminating in suicide, and in the supreme silence of death.

Biographical Information: Maria Isabel Barbudo is Associate Professor on Habilitation in the English Department of the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, and has been a researcher of CEAUL/ULICES since its foundation.

She has taught undergraduate courses on English literature from the 16^th to the 20^th century and English cinema, and postgraduate courses focusing mainly on British drama from the 16^th to the 20^th century. Besides some prefaces and several articles and essays on British drama, published in specialized journals, she has written a book on British comedy of manners and the intersection of ethics and comedy. As a CEAUL/ULICES researcher, she has also dedicated herself to the translation of British plays into Portuguese.