Postcolonial Literature and a Feminist Approach to Mental Health

    Development often has a history with Imperial relations in the Global South; delving into postcolonial literature this semester, I discovered a work by author Jean Rhys that responds to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. This novel was written in the Twentieth Century, but takes place in Nineteenth Century Jamaica. Protagonist, Antoinette, experiences social displacement due to her half-Creole, half-white colonial parentage. Growing up, Antoinette watched her mother navigate two abusive marriages, the second, with attempt to materially raise herself and her children from poverty. Antoinette's mother is placed in an asylum after breaking with her second husband. During her mother's stay in the asylum, Antoinette is placed in a Catholic nunnery while her step-father, free from ties, returns to Europe. Guilt ridden after the death of his ex-wife, Antoinette's step father arranges a marriage for Antoinette with a white man. Now in possession of all her mother's assets and with additional funding from her guilty step-father, Antoinette is an attractive bride to a young, disabled white man with a dwindling family fortune. Antoinette's marriage at its core was a financial transaction, and when her husband tires of her in his bed, he moves on to a new mistress. Shattered, Antoinette spirals into depressive bitterness and destructive behavior that leaves her the "madwoman" confined to the attic. Unlike Jane Eyre, the institutional imprisonment deeming women as mad is inter-generational. I claim in the literary studies community that in conjunction with Rhys' text, we can predict that Jane too will become another "madwoman in the attic" if only Bronte's storyline would encompass a larger timeline. 

    Connecting the themes of Rhys and Bronte's novels, a feminist approach to mental health services has only recently emerged in the Global North.  Psychologist Phillis Chesler, from university of CUNY College of Staten Island, explains her findings as a practicing psychologist in the 1970-90s in her article "Twenty Years Since Women and Madness: Toward a Feminist Institute of Mental Health and Healing". By the 2020's it is common practice in the global North to incorporate feminist frameworks in mental health services such as psychiatry, cognitive behavioral therapy and group therapy. As the world continues to develop, it is important that development practices incorporate gender frameworks when assessing and treating mental health in developing nations as well. As we have seen from the Nineteenth Century, without a comprehensive look at gendered relations society aims to miss the experiences of the oppressed, and as Rhys and Bronte have illustrated, the recognition of the systemic violence against women, the lower working class, and the racially marginalized. Both Bronte and Rhys' respective works can inform the vital need for a feminist approach to mental healthcare providers in developing areas around the world, and those within what is often considered the "center" in dependency theory. Bronte and Rhys each claim that even from the center of the Western world, or within the margins of a passing white racial identity, discrimination and limitation existed for women in the Nineteenth Century, and endure today throughout the globe. Through the lens of Gender and Development, there is a need for development practitioners to include feminist mental health resources and support for women in need in developing countries as well as to marginalized populations in the Global North.