Beyond Eros and Thanatos : When Confession Becomes Resistance Bodily Autonomy, Mental Health, and the Confessional Voice in Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath

Beyond Eros and Thanatos

When Confession Becomes Resistance

Bodily Autonomy, Mental Health, and the Confessional Voice in Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath

---

Presented by	Nidhi R. Pandya
Roll No. / Sem / Batch	19 / Semester 3 / 2025-27
Paper	Paper 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence (Paper Code 22407)
Unit	Unit 4: Three Prose Writers, The New Poets
Submitted to	Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Presentation date	October 13th, 2026

1. The Blog in One Minute

Point	Quick answer
Poets	Kamala Das (India) and Sylvia Plath (USA)
Six poems	Das: “An Introduction,” “The Old Playhouse,” “The Sunshine Cat.” Plath: “Mirror,” “In Plaster,” “Tulips.”
Big idea	Confession is not weakness. It is a way of taking back the right to speak.
Four theories	Freud (Eros and Thanatos), Foucault (confession and power), Showalter (female malady), Kristeva (Revolt)
Three themes	Bodily autonomy, mental health, and the confessional voice as agency
Final claim	Both poets move beyond the Freudian binary and turn pain into a politics of survival

2. Introduction: Two Women, One Pressure

Some poems are written to be admired. Some are written to be survived. The poems of Kamala Das (1934–2009) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) belong to the second kind.

Kamala Das came from Kerala and wrote in English and in Malayalam. She became famous for frank poems about love, the body and marriage, and for her autobiography My Story. Sylvia Plath was an American poet linked with the confessional movement, the style of poetry that turns private life, such as marriage, illness and breakdown, into public art. Their countries, languages and cultures were different. Yet both wrote about the same pressure: a world that wants to control a woman’s body and explain her mind.

My study shows how both poets turn private anguish into public testimony. Their poetry refuses the silence placed on women’s inner life and sexuality. It also challenges the habit of treating women’s desire and distress as a “problem” to be diagnosed. Using ten critical articles and four major theorists, I read six poems that show women’s struggle for self-determination.

3. Research Question and Hypothesis

Research Question

How do Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath, through their confessional poetry, move beyond the Freudian binary of Eros and Thanatos to reclaim bodily autonomy and mental health as active sites of resistance against patriarchal constructions of the female self?

Hypothesis

The confessional voices of Das and Plath disrupt patriarchal constructions of the female self and transform personal anguish into a politics of embodiment and psychic revolt. Confession works as agency rather than mere submission to power, and this reclaiming of body and mind remains urgently relevant today.

In simple words: the poets are not just crying out. They are speaking back, and the speaking itself is the resistance.

4. Theoretical Frame: Four Lenses

4.1 Freud: Eros and Thanatos

Freud sees two big drives. Eros is the drive toward life and connection. Thanatos is the drive toward dissolution and death.

“The aim of all life is death.” (Freud 38)

• Das and Plath refuse to let Thanatos have the final word. Their speakers keep struggling to stay embodied.
• The binary is too simple for women, because society already treats women’s bodies as sites of control.
• The confessional “I” becomes the place where both drives collide and are renegotiated.

4.2 Foucault: Confession, Power and the Body

Foucault argues that modern power works by making people confess.

“We have become a singularly confessing society.” (Foucault 59)

“[T]he soul is the prison of the body.” (Foucault, quoted in Stekl 24)

Stekl reads Plath’s “In Plaster” as “a struggle of the body against the ‘soul’ which power constructs in order to capture it” (24). Das’s speakers likewise refuse the fixed identities that patriarchal confession demands. So the poets turn the order to confess into counter-discourse. Bodily autonomy appears as friction against the soul that power installs.

4.3 Showalter: Gendered Madness

Showalter shows that “madness” has long been treated as a female malady. Women’s distress is often read through male medical and cultural eyes.

• Das’s speakers slide “from pegs of sanity” under male surveillance.
• Plath’s hospital poems make the medicalisation of women’s inner life visible.
• So their breakdown scenes carry a double charge: personal testimony and cultural critique.

4.4 Kristeva: Revolt and Tempestuous Interiority

Sandhya et al. say that Das’s “instinctual urge to resist definitive structuring of the inner zones of female consciousness echoes Kristeva’s concept of Revolt” (74). In simple terms, Revolt is the restless power of desire that shakes the fixed identities offered by the “Symbolic” order. In Das it breaks the hold of gendered identity and lets the self be experienced in open, unfixed ways. This psychic mobility is the ground of bodily autonomy.

Theorist	Key idea	Use in this study
Freud	Eros (life) and Thanatos (death)	The binary the poets move beyond
Foucault	Power works through confession	Confession turned into counter-discourse
Showalter	Madness as “female malady”	Pathologisation of women’s distress
Kristeva	Revolt against the Symbolic	Das’s unfixed, mobile selfhood

5. Kamala Das: Reading the Poems

Das’s three poems move from a crushed body, to a tamed wife, to a watched and half-dead woman. At each step the speaker also finds language to fight back.

Poem	Key lines	What it shows
An Introduction	“The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me. I shrank / Pitifully” “Language is mine, its distortions, its queernesses / All mine”	The female body is felt as a burden, yet the speaker claims her own language and her right to say “I.”
The Old Playhouse	“You planned to tame a swallow... so that she would forget... her nature, the urge to fly” “My mind is an old / Playhouse with all its lights put out”	Marriage tames and shrinks the woman. The mind goes dark, but the poem lights it up again by speaking.
The Sunshine Cat	“the husband who neither loved nor / Used her, but was a ruthless watcher” “a cold and / Half-dead woman”	Being watched and locked away slowly kills the woman’s spirit. The poem names the harm.

What the critics say about Das

• Meenakshi: marriage in “The Old Playhouse” is “a continuum of desire, discontent and despair,” and shows “the docility of the female body” under male power (17).
• Sophia: Das has an “anguished and assertive voice” that attacks “senseless restrictions” and the “sex-obsessed world of the domineering male” (3).
• George: Das can be read as “queer” because of her “resistance to the regimes of the normal” (731).
• Khan and Dash: the autobiographical “I” is both “sinner” and “saint” (354).

6. Sylvia Plath: Reading the Poems

Plath’s three poems follow the self through a mirror, a plaster cast and a hospital bed. The body is looked at, wrapped up and handed over, yet the speaker keeps thinking and keeps resisting.

Poem	Key lines	What it shows
Mirror	“I am silver and exact... I am not cruel, only truthful” “an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish”	The mirror judges the woman’s surface and her ageing self. Selfhood depends on being looked at.
In Plaster	“There are two of me now: / This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one” “Living with her was like living with my own coffin.”	The self splits in two. The body fights the “plaster soul” that confines it.
Tulips	“I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses / And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons” “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen”	The hospital takes name, history and body. Even so, life, colour and breath push back.

What the critics say about Plath

• Axelrod: the mirror figures express “the imaginative self-doubt that haunted her poetic career” and act as agents of “anxious narcissism” (286–87).
• Stekl: “In Plaster” shows a struggle of the body against the “soul” that power constructs (24).
• Lant: under patriarchal figurative systems the female body stays “inadequate, powerless, vulnerable” (620).
• Mozumder: hospital and marital images are a protest against “patriarchal oppression” and “marital subjugation” (124).

7. Comparative Insights

#	Theme	Insight
1	Confessional intensity	Both poets use the first-person voice to turn private pain into public testimony.
2	Body as site of power	The female body is a source of desire and also the tool through which patriarchal power works.
3	Transcending boundaries	Mehta says that despite cultural differences both poets “transcend social, cultural and literary boundaries” through confessional intensity (46).
4	Shared autobiographical subjectivity	Khan and Dash compare the autobiographical “I” in “Mirror” and “An Introduction” and show a shared experience of subjectivity under patriarchal pressure (351).
5	Symbolism of reflection and suppression	The mirror and the playhouse stand for forced reflection, limited identity and a dimmed inner light.
6	Mental health and bodily autonomy	Mental health cannot be separated from the fight for bodily autonomy. Patriarchal control leaves psychological marks.

8. The Confessional Voice as Agency

This is the heart of the argument. Confession is not just exposure. It is a strategic re-occupation of the speaking position.

• Self-definition. Das’s “I too call myself I” and Plath’s doubled selves both insist on the right to define oneself.
• Body against soul. Stekl shows that Plath’s body resists the soul that power builds (24).
• Mobile identity. Sandhya et al. show that Das’s Revolt keeps the self mobile and unfixed (74).
• Care of the self. The voice becomes a form of care under conditions of structural harm.
• Living tradition. Today’s mental-health movements still draw on this habit of speaking the unspeakable.

9. Bodily Autonomy under Patriarchy

Poet	How the body is felt
Kamala Das	A crushed weight, a tamed swallow, a half-dead object under male watching
Sylvia Plath	A plastered double, an oxygen-starved patient, a surface judged by the mirror

• Lant shows that the unclothed female body cannot work as a symbol of power the way the male body can (620).
• Meenakshi points to “the docility of the female body as an influence of societal and cultural norms” (17).
• Even so, both poets stage residual resistance: the will to shatter mirrors, to manage without the plaster soul, and to claim a hybrid language.

Remember: autonomy is never fully achieved, yet never fully surrendered.

10. Mental Health: Pathologisation and Counter-Speech

• Showalter’s “female malady” names the habit of reading women’s distress as something inside them rather than something produced by their world.
• Das’s “pegs of sanity” and Plath’s hospital purity both make this pathologisation concrete.
• Axelrod reads mirror and shadow in Plath as a “poetics of self-doubt,” a response to the failure of creative self-presence (286).
• Mozumder links marital suffering to psychic collapse and suicidal protest (124).
• The confessional voice turns diagnosed “madness” into testimony against the conditions that produce it.

Remember: mental health is inseparable from the politics of gender and power.

11. Queer and Feminist Resistance

• George argues that calling Das “queer” “enlarges (in both chronological and geographical terms) the scope of queer” and works with “what is discarded in patriarchal and feminist readings” (731, 26).
• Sophia shows Das’s “assertive voice for the rights of women” that subverts “traditional roles” (3).
• Lant shows that Plath’s attempt to bare the female body is limited by a symbolic order that makes it “inadequate, powerless, vulnerable” (620).
• Mozumder reads Plath’s marital suffering as “a tool of protest against patriarchal oppression” (124).

Both poets turn vulnerability into political speech. Their resistance stays incomplete, yet insistent.

12. Is the Hypothesis Justified?

Yes. Three pieces of evidence support it.

1. The poems. All six poems show a continuous negotiation between Eros and Thanatos. The speakers keep reaching for embodiment, voice and self-definition.
2. The critics. The scholarly sources place bodily autonomy and mental health at the centre of both poets’ work.
3. The theory. Foucault and Showalter show that confession and “madness” work as gendered technologies of power. Das and Plath challenge both.

Rather than only suffering, both poets’ speakers analyse and resist patriarchal confinement. So Das and Plath do move beyond the Freudian binary toward embodied resistance, bodily autonomy and psychic revolt.

13. Modern Relevance

• Mental-health systems must recognise social and gendered causes of distress, not only individual pathology.
• Bodily autonomy is still a live political demand across cultures.
• Confessional and autobiographical writing remains a resource for marginalised voices.
• Queer and feminist readings of Das and Plath widen the archive of resistance beyond national and disciplinary borders.
• The continuum of desire, discontent and despair mapped by both poets still shapes many women’s lives.
• Speaking the wound remains a necessary act of care and of politics.

14. Conclusion

Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath reconfigure the confessional tradition as a practice of bodily and mental self-determination. They refuse to reduce women to sexual objects or medical cases. By claiming the right to express body and mind on their own terms, they make room for later feminist and queer voices. Their work is still unfinished: today’s readers inherit both the wounds and the tools of resistance, and the poems keep asking that bodily autonomy and mental health be recognised as inseparable political rights.

15. What I Learned

• How Das and Plath turn confessional poetry into feminist resistance.
• How patriarchal power shapes women’s bodily autonomy, sexuality and mental health.
• How to apply Freud, Foucault, Showalter and Kristeva to six poems.
• How to compare two poets on gender, identity, confinement and self-determination using critical sources.
• How personal suffering becomes political resistance in poetry.

16. Limitations and Further Scope

Limitations of the study	Further scope for research
Only six poems, three by each poet	Extend to other poems, autobiographies and prose by Das and Plath
Focus on bodily autonomy, mental health and patriarchy leaves other themes aside	Read the poems through intersectional feminism, queer theory, trauma studies and other psychoanalytic approaches
A limited set of critical sources and theories	Study how Indian and Western cultures shape female embodiment and distress
Cultural differences noted but not explored in full historical, linguistic and sociopolitical depth	Compare bodily autonomy and resistance in contemporary women’s poetry and digital confessional writing

17. Quick Revision Corner

Five lines to remember

1. Eros is the life drive. Thanatos is the death drive. Das and Plath refuse to let death win.
2. Foucault: power makes us confess. The poets use confession to speak back.
3. Showalter: madness is treated as a female malady. The poets turn “madness” into testimony.
4. Kristeva: Revolt keeps the self mobile against fixed identity.
5. Body and mind are one fight: bodily autonomy and mental health are inseparable.

Keywords

Confessional poetry, Eros, Thanatos, bodily autonomy, pathologisation, female malady, Revolt, counter-discourse, psychic mobility, patriarchal control, agency, embodiment.

Possible questions

1. How do Das and Plath use confessional poetry as resistance rather than submission?
2. Discuss how marriage appears as patriarchal control in “The Old Playhouse” and Plath’s poems.
3. Explain the role of Foucault’s idea of confession in reading Plath’s “In Plaster.”
4. How does Showalter’s “female malady” help us read Das and Plath on mental health?
5. Compare the body as a site of desire and oppression in Das and Plath.

18. Multimedia

Presentation video / slides link:

Presentation slides link:

Glimpse of Presenting:

Works Cited

• Axelrod, Steven Gould. “The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath’s Poetics of Self-Doubt.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 26, no. 3, 1985, pp. 286–301. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208027.
• Das, Kamala. Selected Poems. Edited by Devindra Kohli, Penguin Modern Classics, 2014.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1961.
• George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading ‘My Story.’” Feminist Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, 2000, pp. 731–763. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178651.
• Khan, Akhtar Jamal, and Bibhudutt Dash. “The Autobiographical Voice in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’ and in the Indian Poet Kamala Das’ Poem ‘An Introduction’: A Comparative Study.” Plath Profiles, vol. 5, 2012, pp. 351–361. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4388/4009.
• Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 34, no. 4, 1993, pp. 620–669. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208804.
• Meenakshi, R. “The Muted Voice: Marriage as a Continuum of Desire, Discontent and Despair in ‘The Old Playhouse’ by Kamala Das.” Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, vol. 15, no. 4, 2024, pp. 17–21. https://doi.org/10.66121/cndmdc44.
• Mehta, Nidhi. “Similarities and Dissimilarities in the Poetry of Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath.” Plath Profiles, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 46–63. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4673/4309.
• Mozumder, Subrata Chandra. “Marital Suffering in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Feminist Reading.” American, British and Canadian Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 124–146. https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2020-0008.
• Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes, HarperPerennial, 1992.
• Sandhya, V., M. G. Hari, and Harini Jayarman. “Mapping the Contours of a Tempestuous Interiority: Reading Kamala Das through Kristeva.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, pp. 74–84. https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.09.
• Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. Pantheon Books, 1985.
• Sophia, L. Judith. “Anguished and Assertive Voice: Feminist Consciousness in Kamala Das’s Select Poems.” Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, vol. 1, no. 3, 2010, pp. 3–9. https://doi.org/10.66121/k1jrdr32.
• Stekl, Míša. “Foucault and Plath, Body and Soul.” Plath Profiles, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 24–36.

THE GENEALOGY OF THE MONSTER : From Bertha Mason to the Chudail Patriarchal Monstrosity-Making, Feminist Rage, and the Politics of Gendered Violence in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Bulbbul (2020)

THE GENEALOGY OF THE MONSTER

From Bertha Mason to the Chudail

Patriarchal Monstrosity-Making, Feminist Rage, and the Politics of Gendered Violence in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Bulbbul (2020)

Academic Details

Detail	Information
Presented by	Nidhi R. Pandya
Roll No. / Sem / Batch	19 / Semester 3 / 2025-27
Paper	Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies (Paper Code 22408)
Unit	Unit 3: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Submitted to	Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Date	October 14th, 2026 (Presentation Season 3, Afternoon Session)

Who decides who is a monster? In Jane Eyre (1847), a woman is locked in an attic and called mad. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), she gets a name, a voice and a story. In Bulbbul (2020), a woman in colonial Bengal is called a chudail (witch) and decides to answer back. Three texts, two centuries, two continents, one pattern. This blog follows that pattern step by step, in simple points that are easy to remember.

Quick Snapshot

Core idea: The female monster is never natural. She is made by patriarchy and empire to silence, confine or destroy women who refuse to obey.

Texts: Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847), Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966), Bulbbul (Anvitaa Dutt, Netflix, 2020).

Big reversal: Rhys and Dutt take the monster label and turn it into voice, rage and justice.

1. Research Question and Hypothesis

Research Question

“How do Wide Sargasso Sea and Bulbbul expose and reverse the patriarchal technology of monstrosity-making that begins with Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, and what political work does the reclaimed female monster perform across colonial and postcolonial contexts?”

Hypothesis

The three texts show how nonconforming women are turned into monsters so that their agency, sexuality and voice can be controlled. Rhys and Dutt reverse this process. They reclaim monstrosity as a site of feminist resistance, spatial rebellion and retaliatory justice. This also shows that gendered and colonial oppression have a long, continuous history.

2. Introduction and Historical-Critical Context

Spivak argues that nineteenth-century British literature cannot be read without remembering imperialism, which shaped how England imagined itself. Jane Eyre is a key example. Behind the story of an independent English heroine stands Bertha Mason, a Creole woman from the Caribbean who is locked away and described as animal-like and mad.

Jean Rhys writes back. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha begins as Antoinette Cosway, a young Creole woman. Her husband, Rochester, renames her “Bertha”, which is the first act of erasing her. Rhys also links Antoinette’s fire at Thornfield with the fire that the ex-slaves set at her family’s estate, so colonial and patriarchal oppression meet in one image (Erwin 143).

Bulbbul carries the same logic to nineteenth-century Bengal. Directed by Anvitaa Dutt and produced by Anushka Sharma, it shows a child bride who is punished, then feared as a chudail. In the film, rebellious women are labelled witches and removed through what scholars call motivated witch-hunting.

In one line: Bertha, Antoinette and Bulbbul are not three separate women. They are three stages of one story.

3. Reading the Monster: The Theory Toolkit

Four thinkers give us the tools to read the monster. Learn this table, because it is the base of the whole argument.

Thinker	Key Text	Core Idea	How We Use It
Barbara Creed	The Monstrous-Feminine (1993)	Horror shows the female body as abject and a threat to the patriarchal order. The witch is a key example.	Explains why the chudail is feared.
Gilbert and Gubar	The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)	The madwoman is the woman writer’s double, carrying her anxiety and rage.	Bertha is the prototype that Rhys and Dutt inherit and change.
Judith Butler	Gender Trouble (1990)	Gender norms are performed, not natural. Women who refuse the script expose this and are punished.	Explains why women who refuse the obedient wife or mother role are made monstrous.
Claire Johnston	“The Subject of Feminist Film Theory/Practice”	Feminist film must look at the social audience and treat recognition and identification as political strategies.	Shows that films like Bulbbul act on real gender relations.

“the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (Gilbert and Gubar, on the madwoman)

In one line: Creed explains the fear, Gilbert and Gubar the prototype, Butler the punishment, Johnston the audience.

4. Bertha Mason and the Imperial Production of Monstrosity

• Space first: Spivak notes that even Jane’s retreat to the window-seat in the opening chapter shows how domestic space is written and controlled. The same logic later imprisons Bertha (Spivak 246).
• Thornfield as archive: Hope reads Thornfield Hall as an “imperial archive” where buildings and texts shape each other (Hope 52).
• Gothic needs a monster: Khair says the Gothic needs a secret or transgression to break into a normal world (Khair 119). Bertha is that eruption.
• Her rage becomes monstrosity: In the Gilbert and Gubar model, the confined woman’s anger is projected as madness so that the “sane” heroine can emerge.
• The native female is excluded: Spivak shows that the English heroine is built through “childbearing and soul making”, while the colonial woman is pushed outside (Spivak 244).
• Result: Bertha’s body carries both patriarchal and imperial anxiety.

In one line: Bertha is locked up so that Jane can be free, and that freedom is built on someone else’s silence.

5. Spivak, Worlding, and the Exclusion of the Native Female

Spivak warns that feminist criticism can repeat the habits of imperialism when it only admires women writers of Europe and Anglo-America (Spivak 243). In other words, a feminism that forgets empire becomes part of empire.

• Feminist individualism needs a particular kind of subject, one who is shaped not only as an individual but as an individualist. The native female has no share in this norm (Spivak 245).
• Khair adds that colonial accounts reduced the non-European other to a negative image of the European self, or a childlike version of it (Khair 120).
• Worlding: Jane Eyre quietly “worlds” the Third World, meaning it draws it as a space that exists only to serve the European story. Rhys forces the reader to see this.

“childbearing and soul making” (Spivak 244)

In one line: The genealogy of the monster is also a genealogy of feminist complicity that later texts must undo.

6. Antoinette’s Voice and the Politics of Narrative Reclamation

• Writing from the edge: Poursanati and Pooyandeh say Rhys wrote from her own liminal position in the colonial order. They call the novel a Subaltern Gothic that dismantles the colonial narrative through space and voice.
• The risky choice: Erwin argues that Rhys takes the risk of writing from “the wrong side”. She even links Antoinette’s burning of Thornfield with the ex-slaves who burned her family’s estate (Erwin 143).
• Christophine and obeah: Christophine’s obeah is suggested as a force that guides the final outcome. Her words to Antoinette are: “You choose what you give, eh? Then you choose.”
• First-person power: By giving Antoinette the narration, Rhys turns the silenced monster of Jane Eyre into a speaking subject of feminist and postcolonial rage.

In one line: Reclaiming voice is the first major reversal in the genealogy of the monster.

7. Looking-Glass Identity and Racial-Class Displacement

Antoinette belongs fully to neither the white nor the black world. Erwin notes that her language keeps suggesting an “interchangeability of racial positions”, seen in phrases like “white n*****” and “black Englishman” (Erwin 144).

• Tia’s reply: Tia says that old-time white people are now no better than “white n*****”, and that a black person is better than that. This exposes how racial hierarchy depends on class and money.
• The burning house: Antoinette runs to Tia hoping to live with her and be like her, but Tia throws a jagged stone at her.
• Both doors close: The violence shuts off both the white and the black positions and leaves Antoinette in a liminal non-place.
• Hope’s reading: Such moments are part of the “decomposition” of the imperial archive that Wide Sargasso Sea carries out on Jane Eyre (Hope 52).

“It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.” (Antoinette, Wide Sargasso Sea)

In one line: The looking-glass is the symbol of a self that colonial race and class violence both creates and destroys.

8. Haunted Landscapes, Confined Bodies, and the Politics of Space

• Poursanati and Pooyandeh argue that Rhys turns both the beautiful but frightening Caribbean landscape and the oppressive English manor into charged sites where the silenced female voice finally erupts.
• Confinement in Thornfield is re-read as a form of spatial rebellion against confinement itself.
• The burning of the manor is read as a “subaltern speech act”, a way of speaking when no one will listen.
• Because buildings and texts “frame and inhabit each other” (Hope 52), burning Thornfield also breaks down the imperial textual archive.
• Bridge to Bulbbul: This spatial politics returns in the village, haveli and forest of the film.

In one line: Space is not just a setting. It is a weapon of control and a tool of resistance.

9. Postcolonial Gothic and the Reversal of the Scream

Khair defines the postcolonial moment as a new critical awareness in which speech must take colonial discourse into account, and not simply copy or oppose it (Khair 118).

• Imperial Gothic used colonial fears mostly to contain them. Postcolonial Gothic has no wish to calm the fears of European or Eurocentric readers.
• The classic Gothic moment is the self screaming at the sight of the other. The postcolonial moment begins when the non-European other confronts the European self (Khair 119).
• Wide Sargasso Sea makes the formerly monstrous other the source of narrative and moral authority.
• Bulbbul continues the same reversal inside an Indian patriarchal and colonial setting.

“when the self screams at the sight of the other” (Khair 119)

In one line: The genealogy of the monster is also the story of the redirected Gothic scream.

10. From Attic to Village: The Persistent Logic of Monstrosity-Making

The same logic that calls Bertha “mad” calls Bulbbul chudail. In both cases a woman who does not fit the rules is turned into a supernatural or pathological threat.

Mechanism	Bertha / Antoinette	Bulbbul	How the Text Reverses It
Confinement	Locked in the attic at Thornfield	Confined in the haveli, then in the forest as spectre	Space becomes a site of rebellion and haunting
Labelling	Called mad, animal-like, “Bertha”	Called chudail / witch	Label is reclaimed as power
Racial / Colonial coding	Creole otherness used to justify exclusion	Colonial modernity + indigenous patriarchy	Double violence is exposed
Voice	Silenced; spoken about by others	Story told through her actions and the village	Monster becomes speaking / acting subject
Final act	Fire at Thornfield read as madness	Retaliatory justice	Violence turned into political speech

11–14. Key Continuations: Witch-Hunting, Feminist Horror & Posthuman Becoming

Sharma and Tripathi show that colonial “civilizing” missions and indigenous patriarchy worked together to police women’s bodies and sexuality. The film stages this as double violence.

Karmakar and Pal place Bulbbul in the tradition of feminist horror that turns repression into revenge and retaliation. Old horror punished the woman; feminist horror lets her strike back.

Khobra and Gaur read the film through Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminism as a form of “wanting out” — the desire to escape patriarchal exclusion by becoming-witch. The witch moves from object of horror to subject of feminist world-building.

In one line: Old horror punished the woman. Feminist horror lets her strike back. The posthuman turn is the most radical modern extension of the genealogy that began with Bertha Mason.

15. The Three Women Side by Side

Feature	Bertha (Jane Eyre, 1847)	Antoinette (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966)	Bulbbul (Bulbbul, 2020)
Label	Mad, animal-like	Renamed “Bertha”, called mad	Chudail, witch
Setting	English manor, Thornfield Hall	Jamaica and then Thornfield	Nineteenth-century Bengal
Voice	Silenced, seen from outside	First-person narrator	Acts and haunts; the village tells her story
Space	Attic	Caribbean landscape and attic, both charged	Haveli, village and forest
Response to violence	Fire set at the end, read by others as madness	Fire as a “subaltern speech act”	Retaliatory justice
Political work	Shows the excluded colonial woman	Reclaims voice and exposes empire	Reclaims the witch label and exposes double violence

16. Hypothesis Justification

The evidence supports the hypothesis. Spivak, Khair, Erwin, Hope, Poursanati and Pooyandeh, Sharma and Tripathi, Karmakar and Pal, and Khobra and Gaur show the political meaning of the female monster. Creed, Gilbert and Gubar, Butler and Johnston explain its inner mechanisms and social effects. Rhys and Dutt both turn monstrosity into feminist rage, spatial rebellion and retaliatory justice. So the genealogy of the female monster is both a literary history and a political diagnosis.

17. Lessons for Today

• Modern witch-hunting, online harassment and labelling women as “difficult” follow the same logic that made Bertha and the chudail.
• Feminist media and speculative genres help reclaim the monster instead of running from her.
• Literal and metaphorical confinement of women is still a live political issue.
• Following Johnston, texts and films act on real gender relations, not only on literary history.
• Posthuman and speculative feminist imaginations give us ways of “wanting out” of oppressive norms.

In one line: The genealogy ends not in the past but in the urgent present.

18. Conclusion

The genealogy of the monster, from Bertha Mason to the chudail, shows how patriarchy controls female agency. Wide Sargasso Sea and Bulbbul reclaim monstrosity as resistance and retaliation. Through postcolonial Gothic and feminist film theory, the monster changes from a silenced victim into a symbol of political agency. The journey moves from imperial oppression to feminist becoming.

Final Thought

The monster is not born, but made, by empire, by patriarchy, and by the fear of women who refuse to be silent.

19. Learning Outcomes

• I understand how patriarchal systems in colonial and postcolonial contexts manufacture the female monster.
• I can trace the line from Bertha Mason to Antoinette Cosway to the chudail in Bulbbul.
• I can apply Creed’s monstrous-feminine, Gilbert and Gubar’s madwoman, and Butler’s gender performativity to literary and film texts.
• I can name the mechanisms of monstrosity-making: confinement, racialisation, labelling as mad or witch, and spatial control.
• I can show how Rhys and Dutt reverse these mechanisms into feminist rage and resistance.
• I can join close reading with postcolonial, feminist and film-theory scholarship.
• I can explain why this genealogy still matters today.

20. Limitations and Further Scope for Research

Limitations

• The study focuses on only three texts: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Bulbbul.
• It relies mainly on selected scholarly articles and does not cover the wider archive of colonial Gothic, postcolonial rewriting or Indian feminist horror.
• The analysis is mostly textual and discursive.
• It has no audience-reception data, production histories or regional case studies of witch-hunting beyond what Sharma and Tripathi cover.

Further Scope

• Place Bulbbul beside Stree, Pari and Chhorii to map a wider body of Indian feminist horror.
• Study more colonial and Indigenous archives on witch-hunting in Bengal and nearby regions.
• Build a deeper dialogue between posthuman feminism and Subaltern Studies.
• Explore the chudail as a form of subaltern speech that goes beyond both colonial and patriarchal frames.
• Use reception studies and ethnography to see how Indian audiences read the reclaimed witch.

Presentation Video

Watch the Presentation

Presentation slides:

Glimpse of Presenting:

Keywords to Remember

Keyword	One-Line Meaning
Monstrosity-making	The patriarchal process of labelling nonconforming women as monsters to control them
Monstrous-feminine (Creed)	The female body shown as abject and threatening in horror
Madwoman (Gilbert and Gubar)	The confined woman who carries the author’s anxiety and rage
Gender performativity (Butler)	Gender is repeated action, so breaking the script invites punishment
Worlding (Spivak)	Imperial texts draw the colonial world as a backdrop for European stories
Subaltern Gothic	A Gothic that uses space and voice to dismantle the colonial narrative
Imperial archive (Hope)	Buildings and texts that store and shape imperial ideas
Redirected scream (Khair)	The other no longer screams in fear; she confronts the self
Double violence	Colonial modernity and Indigenous patriarchy both policing women
Wanting out (Braidotti)	The desire to escape patriarchal exclusion

Possible Exam Questions

• Explain how Wide Sargasso Sea reverses the monster figure of Jane Eyre.
• How does Spivak’s idea of worlding help us read Bertha Mason?
• Discuss the chudail in Bulbbul as the inheritor of Bertha’s position.
• What is meant by double violence in the context of colonial India and witch-hunting?
• Show how space becomes a tool of resistance in Wide Sargasso Sea and Bulbbul.
• Write a note on postcolonial Gothic and the reversal of the scream.

Works Cited

• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder and Co., 1847.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
• Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
• Dutt, Anvitaa, director. Bulbbul. Netflix, 24 June 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12393526/.
• Erwin, Lee. “‘Like in a Looking-Glass’: History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 22, no. 2, 1989, pp. 143–58. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345800.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979.
• Hope, Trevor. “Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness.” College Literature, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012, pp. 51–73. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462449.
• Johnston, Claire. “The Subject of Feminist Film Theory/Practice.” https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/21.2.27.
• Karmakar, Goutam, and Payel Pal. “Framing the Feminist Horror: Repression, Revenge, and Retaliation in Stree (2018) and Bulbbul (2020).” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 41, no. 2, 2024, pp. 196–224, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2105623.
• Khair, Tabish. “Gothic and the Postcolonial Moment.” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108624268.007.
• Khobra, Ujjwal, and Rashmi Gaur. “It’s Witchy to Want Out! Posthuman Feminist Becoming and Speculative Liminality in Anvitaa Dutt’s Bulbbul.” Feminist Media Studies, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2026.2633541.
• Poursanati, Susan, and Parisa Pooyandeh. “Subaltern Gothic: ‘Space’, ‘Place’, and Female Voice in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Cogent Arts & Humanities, vol. 13, no. 1, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2026.2620833.
• Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966.
• Sharma, Navin, and Priyanka Tripathi. “Colonial Civilizing Mission, Indigenous Resistance, and Witch-Hunting in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul (2020).” AlterNative, vol. 19, no. 2, 2023, pp. 398–406, https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801231170270.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.