Living on the Borderline. Politics of Domination, States of Insanity and the Quest for Female Identity in the Work of Bessie Head.

Abstract

Both, Gilman and Head, were treated for the same "insanity" which they attributed to their ficitonal heroines. [...] In Head's case it is the socio-psychotic structure of a male-dominated, racist society in which any kind of aberration of the norm must be judged as dangerous and which therefore has created many forms of exclusion. One of these forms is emigration, again in the double sense of inner and outer emigration. An other form is the retreat into madness which then becomes a realm of being where noone else, no violator, no prosecutor, can follow.