Abstract
Inspired by the history of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” Strange Music (2008) by Laura Fish tells the story of Elizabeth and two former slave women working on her family’s plantation on Jamaica. The women suffer from two different types of madness: what might be called the madness of the metropolis and the madness of the colonies. In the case of Kaydia and Sheba, two Afro-Caribbean women, the text disputes the nineteenth-century notion that madness is inherent to black women. Their madness is instead grounded in the pain of sexual and racial exploitation. The uncontrollable sexuality is that of the white master rather than the black slave. Elizabeth’s hysteria has its roots in sexuality; centrally, through the double that appears to her in her opium hallucinations, the madness of the metropolitan woman is connected to that of the colonial women.
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Tjon-A-Meeuw, O. (2020). The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish’s Strange Music. In: Maier, S., Ayres, B. (eds) Neo-Victorian Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_4
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