Gender and Madness in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Studies in British Literature, 90)

The 19th-century British writer can by no means said to be liberated from Victorian patriarchal ideology, admits Camus (Dijon U.), but she finds that his madwomen are different, more human somehow, than his sane heroines. That indicates to her that he had a different perception of gender, even if half-conscious, than his peers; and that imagination is one of the ways of getting closer to the truth. She looks at patterns of madness; public and private spheres; madness visible; the discourse of madwomen; and women, power, and punishment in his major novels. The text is double spaced. Only names are indexed. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)