Mad women on stage: female insanity in euripides’ medea, henrik ibsen’s hedda gabler and eugene o’neill’s long day’s journey into night

Abstract

Throughout history, women challenging their gender roles have mostly been labelled as hysterical, mad or dangerous bythe patriarchal society. This long-seated tendency to associate women with insanity has also been echoed in drama. In thatregard, this paper will explore the representation of nonconformist women who transgress the boundaries of imposednormality in Euripides’s Medea, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Financiallydependent and restless with societal expectations, Medea, Hedda and Mary are tragic heroines of different eras resistingpatriarchy that finally brings them on the verge of madness. After having sacrificed their aspirations or relative freedom fortheir marriages, those atypical female protagonists meet on a common ground in their repudiation of the dictated genderroles and motherhood image, which leads Medea to murder her own sons and Hedda to end her life while leaving Mary nochoice than cutting off from reality through morphine.