Isha Aamir2025-11-222025-11-222024https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/12056The research will provide a textual analysis of the selected poems of Emily Bronte and Sylvia Plath to trace perspectives on ‘Madness’ as an institutionalized mental illness theorized through Elaine Showalter’s book ‘The Female Malady’, while providing an emphasis on Gynocriticism. The selected works of Bronte and Plath provide an insight into the idea of the ‘madwoman’ and the way writing produces a discourse of resistance towards patriarchal pressures that throughout the history of medical and literary systems have produced ‘hysteria’ as a female malady. The research seeks to investigate feminine poetry as a sharp critique of androcentric discourse which dominates literary tradition. Emily Bronte’s poetry offers a gothic perspective on mental anguish and trauma, with afflicting atmospheric elements, a fantastic dystopian world, and images of prison cells. On the other hand, Sylvia Plath’s poetry, belonging to the confessional school of poetry, describes raw experiences of depression. Plath’s works dictate trauma and confront the hysteric connotations. The study will center poetic expression and female rage, in the selected works, within the context of Showalter’s ‘Gynocentricism’ theory, in contrast to androcentrism in literature, to reconstruct the narrative of female madness. The qualitative textual analysis of the selected poems provides an insight into the confessional aspect of poetry through its reflections of social oppression. The findings of the research develop around the clues of mental derailment in the selected poems, and the ability of female poets to produce counter-narratives of hysteria in their works, by writing about mental illness as subjected to them by society. This narrative associates with the selected poems which present Bronte’s gothic sense of feminist rage and Plath’s ‘psychic’ nature of poetic expression as a vital contributor to Gynocriticism and a liberator of their freedom from hysteric stereotypes.enThesis