Male Madness, Female Despair.

Being a scruffy and hastily cobbled-together thought about stuff I don't understand. 

Could it be said that men tend towards grand existential madness while women find their madness (and depression) in the social expectations placed upon them by their sex, the million tiny cuts of the quotidian? Could it possibly be the case that female psychosis tends to be less egocentric and self-regarding?

Of course, drawing a simple two-part distinction based on gender is a fairly ghastly and reductive trick. Men also suffer from OCD and depression and women no doubt go mad in ways I dread to imagine. And yet I still wonder whether men, being more confined, in my experience, to linear or singular thought processes, are effectively derailed and whirled away to god knows where by their mental illness, while women are embedded deeper into their own setting. I suppose I’m thinking of Woolf and Plath in the latter case.

Medea is the obvious contradiction to this hypothesis. Her actions constitute a spectacular and horrific repudiation of the bonds of domesticity and motherhood. Except what if her actions didn’t emancipate her, but rather tied her in more closely to the role she was condemned to live and die for? Hmm.

I don’t know.

Perhaps a better question would be whether or not female mental illness is commonly associated with the home. That is, do the house and the domestic pressure of house-holding cause the physical space to become an extension of the body, with the house becoming a living thing which breathes back and whispers new forms into the anxieties of the sufferer? There’s a clear lineage of that in literature, after all, from Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre through to The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

And, if this is the case, does it explain why the main action of King Lear must be transferred to the heath, away from the nexus of the hearth?