U got2 dis B4 U re/from disease to revival: Reading the themes of madness in PanAfrican women's literature (Toni Cade Bambara, Bessie Head, South Africa, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Guadeloupe)

My main objectives in this study are to examine the thematic uses of madness in imaginative literature written by women of African descent; to formulate a socio-psychological literary approach to the study of these writings based on a cultural framework; and to explicate through the use of this theory the literary presentation of madness in three novels: The Salt Eaters by African American writer, Toni Cade Bambara; Azanian author, Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Guadeloupean writer, Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane. The assessment found here will be the first comparative critical analysis of the use of this important theme in PanAfrican women's literature.; A discussion of literature by women of African descent necessitates the recognition of a literary tradition that has drawn on this particular image to highlight the relationship between social inequities and individual response. Beginning with early U.S. slave narratives, which portray many of the psychological ravages of slavery, and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, African American women writers have used their artistic endeavors to indict their social surroundings for personal hardships. For the most part, the protagonist in these texts were figured as "tragic mulattas." During the Harlem Renaissance, the figure of madness is embodied in mixed-blood female protagonists. Nineteen twenty's writers like Nella Larsen and Jesse Fausett helped to reestablish the iconography of the tragic mulatta. Contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye or Alice Walker, in Meridian continue to link the larger sociological questions of race, class and gender to personal responses of madness through their African American female protagonists--Pecola Breedlove and Meridian respectively.; I have selected three psychological novels as primary focus for the explication of authorial viewpoint and intention and their use of literary techniques in the presentations of madness. I have chosen these primary texts because of the strong link between the authors' use of madness and their characterizations of the main female protagonist. Each author uses madness in structuring the text to reflect the protagonists' state of madness, as well as in presenting the characters within the milieu of social, political, economic and personal influences.; Fictive writings by women in the African Diaspora have many striking similarities. Whether the writers are still inhabitants of the continent or displaced Africans in the United States, the Caribbean or South America, a comparison of their works reveals common structures, imagery, styles and themes. These works by Bambara, Head and Vieyra not only represent the thematic use of madness, but also the authors' attempts to structure the texts, by implementation of specific images, to reflect the state of madness. A striking similarity exists in the authors' critical view of which societal factors produce the psychological state of madness in their female protagonists. The findings will be used to align the texts for possible correlative structures and styles that will be the basis for the formulation of a new socio-psychological literary theory. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...