Abstract:
Historically, women are associated with inferiority, weakness, passivity, and
emotionality, while men are linked with superiority, power, activeness, and rationality.
These binary oppositions between the two genders are reflected in the social hierarchy.
Women who have tried to reclaim authorship, feminine freedom, and control over their
own lives have been labelled as hysteric or mad. Nonetheless, from the second part of
the twentieth century, postmodern feminists set out to deconstruct these false man made conceptualizations and definitions imposed on women by embracing hysteria
and madness. Ironically, they celebrate madness and turn it against itself as a way to
agency and liberation.
This thesis will argue that the heroines in John Fowles’s The French
Lieutenant’s Woman and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone represent the postmodern
female authors who deconstruct the conventional man-made myth of the eternal
feminine, construct a new feminine self and authorial control over their life stories.
