Madwoman in the Attic
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Madwoman has just crawled out of the attic where she was entrapped by patriarchal oppression and has spent years and years dwelling there and yearning for her liberation. Thus by this very act, she has regained her freedom, her strength and her individual sense of identity. She is tyrannic. She is hysterical. She is hungry. She devours men, picking on their every move, every word and every tiny detail of their outwardly appearances. Each action is met with scrutiny, each word with sarcasm, each apparel with scoff. As you can see, she holds the highest contempt for her
different counterparts.
Her biting tongue hurls criticism that oozes acid. She is fully equipped with daggers, ready at any second to shoot them from her sharp eyes.
At the same time, rather contradictory in fact, she suffers extreme emotional drain and an immense lapse of memory. She has no idea who she was. Neither can she decide for herself who or what she is right now. She can only be known as the Madwoman in the attic, the female lunatic associated with the little hole with no windows that imbowered her. Some moments she laughs hysterically, other times she cries bitterly and wails loudly for all her sorrows' worth. She longs for love, care, concern, but from whom she does not know, neither does she know the fact that she pines for them. She is in denial. She pines and yet refuses to acknowledge that she does.
She unleashes her frustrations through her wild screams. She is delirious. She suffers from manic depression. She loves to plunge into the lake, letting her long long curly black hair get strewn all over the water. Then she ducks her head in, hoping that the water will wash the melancholy away from her mind. Is she in the right state of mind?
Of course not, the men say,
she is called a Madwoman for a reason.
Of course she is, the women protest indignantly,
she is just lost, her soul is twisted, just give her a little more time.
She is not named, the Madwoman of the attic. She is what he constructs, perceives and desires her to be. Yet, she struggles to be something else. Someone else. She wants to let be. She wants to remain the Madwoman of the attic, because that is the only person she can be, she thinks.
She shares a love-hate relationship with herself, also with the people close to her. She loves her identity as the Madwoman of the attic, because that is where she seeks solace and finds it. On the other hand, she hates herself for being so repellant to others. She hates others for not being able to understand her. But most importantly, she hates herself for not being able to understand herself. Like something you swallow but is unable to digest and gets choked instead,
she is that something.
It is not that she did not try to comprehend her maze of a mind, she just doesn't know how. Neither do others surrounding her. They become frustrated after a while. She too is frustrated. She is frustrated because they are frustrated with her, and she is frustrated as a whole because they don't know what to do with her and she too doesn't know what to do with herself. She is frustrated still and will always be till the day she departs from this earth.
She has lived her world in silence. Silence comforts her. Silence is the easiest solution to all her problems, she can only unleash through writing. Silence is how she gives up on others who try to comprehend her but fail and get frustrated.
Silence is how she gives up on herself.And she now wants to give up. Give up all her frustrations, her sarcasm, her hysteria, her others, her hunger and even her identity. Yes, even that which defines her.
6:05 pm
クロサギ
