Madwomen in the attic.

Vivienne Parry looks at the notion of the mad female figure as depicted in classic fiction. Featuring three cases of literary mad women, the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, Anne Catherick The Woman in White and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Parry asks psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, literary experts and medical historians to analyse whether or not these women would be diagnosed with mental illness today. Readings from the novels are given and analysed by the various experts. What emerges is a complex background to the characters based on the reality of the times of the writers, reflecting both their personal and social experiences. Charlotte Bronte, for instance, based Bertha Rochester on her brother, Branwell, who was himself kept locked up in their home following an illegitimate affair and descent into alcoholism and possibly laudanum addiction. Wilkie Collins' Anne Catherick was based upon the story of Lady Bulwer-Lytton who was sent away to an insane asylum by her husband Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Lady Bulwer-Lytton, in fact, aided Collins in his descriptions of life in an asylum. Emma Bovary is not locked away, she is more a victim of the bourgeois society which begins to stifle her. It reads more like a psychiatric case history; Flaubert was influenced enormously by Charcot's definition of hysteria and many of the scenes depicting Bovary's mental state read like a description of the 19th century hysteric. The programme ends with final diagnoses from many of the experts taking part in the programme.